Urban Politics in the United States since 1945

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Geismer
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
American Cities

Urban politics provides a means to understand the major political and economic trends and transformations of the last seventy years in American cities. The growth of the federal government; the emergence of new powerful identity- and neighborhood-based social movements; and large-scale economic restructuring have characterized American cities since 1945. The postwar era witnessed the expansion of scope and scale of the federal government, which had a direct impact on urban space and governance, particularly as urban renewal fundamentally reshaped the urban landscape and power configurations. Urban renewal and liberal governance, nevertheless, spawned new and often violent tensions and powerful opposition movements among old and new residents. These movements engendered a generation of city politicians who assumed power in the 1970s. Yet all of these figures were forced to grapple with the larger forces of capital flight, privatization, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, immigration, and gentrification. This confluence of factors meant that as many American cities and their political representatives became demographically more diverse by the 1980s and 1990s, they also became increasingly separated by neighborhood boundaries and divided by the forces of class and economic inequality.

Uncle Sam’s Efforts

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-86
Author(s):  
Lisa Lindquist Dorr
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Eighteenth Amendment ◽  
Local Law ◽  
State And Local ◽  
American Cities ◽  
The U.S

With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, the federal government developed and enforcement strategy that charged the U.S. Coast Guard with preventing the illegal importation of liquor on the high seas surrounding the United States. The U.S. Customs Bureau guarded the nation's ports and borders, and the Prohibition Bureau working with state and local law enforcement patrolled the nation's interior. Congress, however, failed to appropriate the resources needed to enforce the law. The Coast Guard lacked enough ships to patrol U.S. waters, and faced uncertainty over the extent to which American authority extended out from shore. The Coast Guard picketed, tracked and trailed suspected rum runners, and disrupted the Rum Rows that developed off the coasts of American cities, but could not fully stop liquor smuggling.

Time, Uranium and the Legislative Process

1978 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-426
Author(s):  
Laurence W. Maher
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
National Interest ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legislative Process ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Parliamentary Debate ◽  
The Government

On the evening of 18 November 1976 the Foreign Proceedings (Prohibition of Certain Evidence) Act 1976 passed through both Houses of Federal Parliament in less than three hours. The Federal Government claimed that the Act was urgently needed to protect the Australian national interest, which was said generally to be threatened by attempts being made to gather evidence in Australia for use in large-scale litigation in the United States of America arising put of an international uranium cartel The Parliamentary debate did little credit either to the Government or the Opposition. It is necessary to go beyond the Parliamentary Debates to make an informed assessment of the Act. When the facts are examined it becomes clear that the Government's claim that the situation was urgent was unfounded, that the appeal to the national interest was at best highly questionable and that, because of the availability of appropriate judicial process, legislative action was unnecessary. The Act is alarmingly vague and reposes wide discretionary powers in the Attorney-General. Its passage and operation have quite disturbing implications for parliamentary democracy and the principle of open government. Where uranium is concerned the Federal Government is showing an increasing tendency to use the Parliament as a cipher.

scholarly journals The Optimism of Absence: An Archaeology of Displacement, Effacement, and Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Mullins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Projects ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University ◽  
American Cities

In the 1960s Edward J. Zebrowski turned the razing of Indianapolis, Indiana into a compelling show of forward-looking community optimism illuminating the power of displacement. When Zebrowski’s company toppled the Knights of Pythias Hall in 1967, for instance, he installed bleachers and hired an organist to play from the back of a truck as the twelve-storey Romanesque Revival structure was reduced to rubble. Two years later, the ‘Big Z’ hosted a party in the Claypool Hotel and ushered guests outside at midnight to watch as the floodlit building met its end at the wrecking ball (Figure 12.1). Zebrowski’s theatricality perhaps distinguished him from the scores of wrecking balls dismantling American cities, but his celebration of the city’s material transformation mirrored the sentiments of many urbanites in the wake of World War II. The post-war period was punctuated by a flurry of destruction and idealistic redevelopment in American cities like Indianapolis just as the international landscape was being rebuilt from the ruins of the war. In 1959 the New York Times’ Austin Wehrwein (1959: 61) assessed the University of Chicago’s massive displacement in Hyde Park and drew a prescient parallel to post-war Europe when he indicated that ‘wrecking crews have cleared large tracts, so that areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II’. Indeed, much of Europe was distinguished less by ruins and redevelopment than demolition and emptied landscapes removing the traces of warfare that states wished to reclaim or efface; in the United States, urban renewal likewise took aim on impractical, unappealing, or otherwise unpleasant urban fabric and the people who called such places home (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10, for this process associated with the policies of apartheid in Cape Town). These global projects removed wartime debris and razed deteriorating prewar landscapes, extending interwar urban renewal projects that embraced the fantasy of a ‘blank slate’ as they built various unevenly executed imaginations of modernity. However, many optimistic development plans in Europe and the United States alike were abandoned or disintegrated into ruins themselves, simply leaving blank spaces on the landscape. Consequently, the legacy of urban renewal and post-war reconstruction is not simply modernist architecture; instead, post-war landscape transformation is signalled by distinctive absences dispersed amidst post-war architectural space and traces of earlier built environments.

scholarly journals From socialist icons to post-socialist attractions: oconicity of socialist heritage in central and eastern Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikola Naumov ◽  
Adi Weidenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Western Market ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Political Realities

The 1989 fall of the Iron Curtain marked the beginning of new economic, socio-cultural and political realities for the former socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe. Along with the economic restructuring from statecentralised to market economy, democratisation and liberalisation initiated a transformation of the socialist urban space, which was characterised by the changing role of its iconic landmarks. This conceptual paper examines these post-1989 changes, which range between the removal of these landmarks and their transition into market led iconic and flagship attractions. The paper identifies the changing role of tourism from a topbottom orchestrated to a market led activity, which explains the transformation of some of these landmarks. It introduces a new framework for studying this process by suggesting that iconisation, de-iconisation and re-iconisation processes are interrelated to other strategies and approaches to the transition of the socialist urban landscape into a western market economy. The paper identifies avenues for further research and provides some recommendations for improving the management of similar processes.

Experiments in Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Shatkin
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Gain Control ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
State Planning ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Government

India’s postliberalization urban politics is captured well by Solomon Benjamin’s concept of ‘occupancy urbanism’, a dynamic in which varied groups deploy their power of the vote and other forms of social power to solidify claims to urban space in contravention of state planning and corporate interest. This dynamic helps to explain why few large scale planned urban developments have come to fruition, despite ambitious plans. This chapter examines the very mixed record of urban real estate megaproject development in Kolkata, paying particular attention to the strategies that the Government of West Bengal has deployed to gain control of land and push through large developments in the face of grassroots political opposition. It documents a case study of Calcutta Riverside, a project that has made some progress due in large part to the developer’s effort to allay concerns of local communities by integrating social and ecological concerns into the design of the project.

scholarly journals The Imaginable City

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Yunyun Tian
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Central Area ◽  
Urban System ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Designed Environment

<p><b>The latter half of the 20th century saw rapid urban development, implemented to meet rapid growth and changing infrastructural needs. Cities around the world became designed homogeneously. In the early decades of the 21st century, the re-inhabitation of the post-industrial city has brought opportunities to bring new ideas to this homogeneity; yet templates and formulas still seem to gain ground: cities are losing their identity, as well as their imaginability. Within this problematic context, New Plymouth Central Area is a representative urban space. New Plymouth District Council has proposed a banally universal design framework, that promises only to continue burying the unique identity of its urban space, rather than liberating it to the imagination. The contemporary discipline still tends to design directly for universal human needs; an approach that ends up suggesting a city’s identity to its citizens, rather than empowering citizens to imagine, and then create, that identity.</b></p> <p>This design-led research proposes that landscape design and urban planning can recover the identity of the New Plymouth Central Area by enhancing its legibility and imaginability. It explores techniques for coordinating mental recognition with visual perceptions, to evoke human imagination of a large-scale urban landscape. It argues that imaginable space can be achieved by creating a mentally identifiable system, with urban patterns, for human physical experimentation and mental recognition to navigate; through agency of this urban system to allow those same dynamics to permeate the history and cultural value of the site; to strengthen the citizen’s recognition of self-identity, which always relates to, and measures itself by, the identity of the land. </p> <p>The outcomes of this research are: an abstract design method that communicates the mental recognition of landscape and its relation to the designed environment; and a physical design solution, testing the abstract method, for a legible and imaginable New Plymouth City.</p>

scholarly journals Graffiti

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Zieleniec
Keyword(s):  
Antisocial Behavior ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The United States ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Urban Art ◽  
Urban Decay ◽  
Youth Subculture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Graffiti has a long history. There are many examples from the history of human cultures of signs and symbols left on walls as remnants of human presence. However, the origins of modern graffiti reside in the explosion of creative activity associated with the development of urban cultural expression among marginalized individuals, groups, and communities in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Graffiti has expanded in form and content as well as geography to become an almost universal urban phenomenon. It is a ubiquitous feature of cities and an adornment of the modern urban landscape. It has developed beyond its original expression and identification with lettering and spray paint to now encompass a range of media and practices that are associated with street art. Graffiti in particular, but also street art, has engendered contrasting opinions and reactions about its effect, meaning, and value. It elicits a variety of responses both positive and negative. Is it art or is it crime? Is it a creative expression or resistance to dominant urban design discourses and management? Is it vandalism? Is it the result of deviant youthful and antisocial behavior? It has been linked to urban decay and community decline as well as regeneration and gentrification. Graffiti writers and street artists have been criminalized, while others have been lauded and promoted within the commodified world of the art market. The popularity and spread of graffiti as a global phenomenon have led to an increasing academic, artistic, and practitioner literature on graffiti that covers a range of issues, perspectives, and approaches (identity, youth, subculture, gender, antisocial behavior, vandalism, gangs, territoriality, policing and crime, urban art, aesthetics, commodification, etc.). The worlds of graffiti and street art are therefore complex and have provoked debate, conflict and response from those who view them as forms of urban blight as well as from those who perceive them as an expression of (sub)cultural creativity and representative of urban vibrancy and dynamism. The study of who does graffiti and street art, as well as why, where, and when they do graffiti and street art, can help develop our understanding of the competing and contrasting experiences and uses of the city, of urban space, of culture, of design, and of governance. Graffiti is therefore also the focus for social policy initiatives aimed at youth and urban/community regeneration as well as the development and exercise of criminal justice strategies.

Making space for resistance: the spatiality of popular protest in the late medieval Southern Low Countries

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Hannah Serneels
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Common People ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Scale Resistance ◽  
Wide Range

Abstract Using several cities in the late medieval Southern Low Countries as a case-study, this article deals with the relation between urban space and different forms of political protest. Urban commoners were aware of the powerful symbolism of certain places in the late medieval city and used that to their advantage during large-scale revolts. Yet the use of space was not limited to the dramatic occupations during these revolts. This article uncovers a wide range of strategies and tactics that common people used to act within given spaces to make their resistance possible. A spatial analysis of several instances of large- and smaller-scale resistance shows that space was intrinsically connected with how and when any form of resistance developed in late medieval cities. As such, the article aims to contribute to the literature on the importance of space in late medieval urban politics, in which attention to smaller-scale practices has been very limited.

Enterprising Art, Aestheticizing Business

2021 ◽  
pp. 182-208
Author(s):  
Banu Karaca
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
The Political ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Artistic Interventions ◽  
Economic Expediency

Chapter 6 explores the political economy of art in urban spaces marked by waves of dispossession and social segmentation. Formerly inhabited by minorities, the physical “voids” of Istanbul and Berlin have become nexuses for the enterprising art and aestheticizing business in contexts of urban and national governance that identify art primarily as an economic expediency and tool for urban renewal. Gentrification is just one—but perhaps the most visible—component of this dynamic in which artists are both complicit and resistant. The chapter anchors this discussion in the biennials that both cities host. It shows how these events as proclaimed realms of artistic experimentation have been increasingly streamlined to accommodate normative frames of for-profit enterprise that in turn likens it workings to that of creative labor. I argue that the spectacularization of art in urban space through the format of large-scale arts event has been vital in disavowing the violence of the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey and the specter of Nazism that haunted the lead-up to and aftermath of Germany’s reunification. Finally, the chapter takes a look at the counterstrategies that artists develop to (re)claim urban spaces for artistic interventions as well as for engagements with their difficult pasts.

Landscape, Labor, and the Lonchera

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Robert Lemon
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Day Laborers ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Way Of Life

The taco truck is a prominent feature of Sacramento’s cultural landscape that symbolizes the livelihoods of its Mexican workforce. Eating tacos at a truck may seem a prosaic practice, but for many day laborers it is a form of sustenance that also affirms their cultural identity. As urban renewal and gentrification threaten the presence of taco trucks in Sacramento, so too is the Mexican workforces’ cultural way of life imperiled. This chapter evaluates the taco truck through the philosophy of landscape as well as how taco truck owners use their trucks’ mobility to circumvent stringent policies that govern urban space. It takes an in-depth look at how urban politics affect Mexican communities and the livelihoods of taco truck owners.

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