A discursive analysis of cultural images, social practices, and space adds a new level of social critique to the usual explanations of urban growth and decline. Instead of focusing on either "objective" or "subjective" factors, a discursive analysis assumes a coherence between social and spatial arrangements that is derived in and through cultural meanings attached to specific places and has a material effect on their growth and decline. Both the conscious manipulation and slow accretion of images are important, as they are diffused by mass media and interpreted by ordinary men and women. Taking the decline of Coney Island and growth of Las Vegas as examples, a discursive analysis emphasizes how these public spaces of amusement represent low-class and high-class spaces, racialized spaces, and different eras of capitalism-culminating in a national rejection of urban populism for freewheeling speculation and privatization.
Drawing on a multiyear local research project on the affordable housing crisis, this article outlines a pedagogical approach we call Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research, or CISER. The CISER model brings together three key groups of actors—undergraduate students, university researchers, and community organizations—drawing on and extending the powers of cooperative “dyads” between them. This model aims to improve pedagogical and sociological practice by constituting undergraduate students as both knowledge producers and an active public while at the same time creating meaningful partnerships between university researchers and community-based organizations. Based on assessments of the program from the vantage points of all three groups, our findings indicate that CISER is a powerful pedagogical tool and mode of community-engaged scholarship and that it offers both challenges and rewards to the involved students, faculty, and community organizations.
This article examines the process of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding in New York City since 9/11 and in New Orleans since the Hurricane Katrina disaster (8/29). As destabilizing events, 9/11 and 8/29 forced a rethinking of the major categories, concepts and theories that long dominated disaster research. We analyze the form, trajectory and problems of reconstruction in the two cities with special emphasis on the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant program, the Liberty Zone and the Gulf Opportunity Zone, and tax-exempt private activity bonds to finance and promote reinvestment. Drawing on a variety of data sources, we show that New York and New Orleans have become important laboratories for entrepreneurial city and state governments seeking to use post-disaster rebuilding as an opportunity to push through far-reaching neoliberal policy reforms. The emphasis on using market-centered approaches for urban recovery and rebuilding in New York and New Orleans should be seen not as coherent or sustainable responses to urban disaster but rather as deeply contradictory restructuring strategies that are intensifying the problems they seek to remedy.
We examine the post disaster history of a proposed resilience infrastructure capital project, the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, part of a larger proposed resilience infrastructure design called BThe Big U.^This proposed ring of bermed parkland around the waterfront of Lower Manhattan won $335 million in the Housing and Urban Development Rebuild by Design competition. The purpose of the Big U was to make the Lower Manhattan coastline resilient against storms and provide green space amenities to neighborhood residents. The Bjarke Ingels Group proposal created the East Side Coastal Resiliency section of the Big U design through an inclusive process with local residents. Yet, 6 years since Sandy and 4 years since the HUD award, the project had not yet broken ground and the final design had not yet been approved. We look at this resilience project to ask the question: does this project reflect the right to the resilient city, that is, is it being designed in the interests of low-income neighborhood residents adjoining the project, creating a more resilient city for everyone? Or, will the final design of the project repeat the problems of unequal post-disaster redevelopment?
KeywordsUrban resilience . Climate change . Rebuild by design . Disaster redevelopment . Inequality . Community organizing . Green infrastructure . Green growth machine . Lefebvre . Right to the city * E. Melanie DuPuis
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.