September 21, 2015 The City and Citizenship1

 Cities not things or spaces, but the results of processes  City plans an obvious example  Harvey more concerned with struggle  Cities (as “things”) not merely the sites of contestation (or neutral containers), but the results of past struggles  This is “dialectical” – processes constitute things and things shape/reinforce processes  It’s also “multiple”- different struggles (e.g. regarding race or gender) constitute different aspects of the city’s form over time  The city’s form is a “palimpsest”: “a series of layers constituted and constructed at different historical moments all superimposed upon each other” (p. 228) September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship2

September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship3 Building a High Rise behind the old façade (Wabash east of Marshall Field’s, 2002)

September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship4 Haymarket Square area

September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship5 Chicago’s East Side (Under the Skyway)

 Designing community is problematic  Trying to build “community” by shaping public space is a “thing”-based approach to solving urban problems, e.g. crime  In practice, communities practice exclusion  “Militant particularism” is rooted in process and can more concretely shape urban space  Urban problems often addressed instead by the emergence of struggles based in very local spaces, i.e. these militant movements are “particular”  These are multiple and occur over time and shape how cities exist as things – e.g. they can influence what gets built (and what doesn’t)  A process of generalizing from these particularisms is the only likely road to revolution (p. 232)  Is this different from NIMBY?  Are such localized militancies ever very effective?  Consider resistance to “big plans”  E.g. in Chicago (building UIC in the middle of Little Italy, uprooting the Maxwell street market, tearing down public housing) September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship6

 Cities typically seen as un-natural things, anti- ecological, in opposition to nature  Better to see the framing of cities as a process of environmental modification  E.g. Chicago as “urbs in horto”  Obvious in things like parks, lawns, forest preserves  What about “overgrown” lots, community gardens, green roofs, farmers’ markets?  Consider the ecological critique of sprawl  Seen as destructive of natural spaces (and wasteful of energy)  Urban growth at margins typically consumes farmland, not wilderness September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship7

 Focus on public image, not individual images  Focus on what’s physical and perceptible, not on social meaning, function, etc.  Five key elements which combine to give a city a physical identity, its “public image”  paths  edges  districts  nodes  landmarks September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship8

 Paths  “the channels along which the observer … moves. People observe the city while moving through it” (p. 439)  E.g. streets, sidewalks, footpaths  Often more important to occasional visitor  Defined by characteristic activities, facades, origins and destinations  Edges  Lines that constitute boundaries rather than lines of motion  May be barriers (literally or socially), e.g. “on the other side of the tracks”  Chicago examples:  Lake Michigan, Chicago River, streets dividing one neighborhood from another September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship9

 Districts  “relatively large city areas which the observer can mentally go inside of, and which have some common character” (p. 442)  may be too “general” for those really familiar (they notice the fine- grained differences)  E.g. neighborhoods in Chicagoneighborhoods in Chicago  Northwest suburbs? Northwest suburbs  Nodes  “the strategic foci into which the observer can enter, typically either junctions of paths, or concentrations of some characteristic”  E.g. Union Station, airports, Irving Park stop on Blue Line  Landmarks  Distinctive physical element, often large or unique  E.g. Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Statue of Liberty in New York  Those familiar may with a city may “navigate” by landmark, not so much by formal paths September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship10

September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship11

September 21, 2015The City and Citizenship12