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Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning
The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar
The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
With reduced hours, decaying infrastructure, and precariously positioned staff, local public libraries provide much needed services in cities devastated by inequality and slashed safety nets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research of a small public library in a diverse, mostly working class neighborhood in Queens, New York. I show that in addition to providing an alternative to the capitalist market by distributing resources according to people’s needs, the library serves as a moral underground space, where middle class people bend rules to help struggling city residents. Although the library occasionally replicates hegemonic ideologies about immigrant assimilation, it provides …
Understanding The Dynamics Of Public Space: Zoning, Urban Design, And Use Value. A Case Study Of Downtown San Francisco, Joaquin Cabello Silva
Understanding The Dynamics Of Public Space: Zoning, Urban Design, And Use Value. A Case Study Of Downtown San Francisco, Joaquin Cabello Silva
Master's Projects and Capstones
This paper seeks to understand how zoning, urban design, and use value control the dynamics of a city and the public space, from the way they are shaped, to the way they are built, and finally to the way they are used. In this research the first step is to recognize that the strategies of zoning in a city are a way of governing and guiding the development of the space, followed by the urban design—which is a more tangible way of interpreting the different rules because it is the actual form zoning takes—to then see how they generate an …
The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar
The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
This article provides a critique of work on urban public space that touts its potential as a haven from racial and class conflicts and inequalities. I argue that social structures and hierarchies embedded in the capitalist system and the state’s social control over the racialized poor are not suspended even in places that appear governed by civility and tolerance, such as those under Anderson’s “cosmopolitan canopy”. Durable inequality, residential segregation, nativism, and racism inevitably shape what happens in diverse public spaces. Using an ethnographic study of an urban farmers’ market in New York City, I show that appearances of everyday …