“The Transparency of Democracy”: The Production of Washington’s Nationals Park as a Late Capitalist Space

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Government ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
The Us ◽  
Baseball Team ◽  
The City

Following the trend of cities throughout the United States subsidizing new baseball stadiums within their economic redevelopment strategies, in 2005, the city government of Washington, D.C. agreed to subsidize the construction of Nationals Park for the use of the Washington Nationals baseball team. In its design of the stadium, HOK Sport architects sought to represent the “transparency of democracy” as they were inspired by the democratic image and iconography of the US Capital city. Using a perspective based in Lefebvre’s (1991b) production of space, I explore the power relations produced and reproduced within spatial and cultural production. I argue that instead of creating an inclusive space, architects designed a space that exemplifies the late capitalist moment in its focus on consumption, social control, and aesthetic production. Nationals Park, thus, excludes people by class, privileges visitors over residents, and provides an unrealistic view of the city that marginalizes less powerful groups.

Like a Town Sacked and Burned by the Enemy

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-194
Author(s):  
Charles D. Ross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Normal State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Partner ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ardent Supporter ◽  
The Tropics ◽  
The City

This chapter narrates how Nassau resumed its normal state as a forgotten and destitute outpost. It outlines the effects of the Civil War in the United States, the cessation of blockade running, and the financial windfall of 1862–1864. The chapter then looks at the powerful hurricane that hit the city, in which hundreds of homes and businesses were completely destroyed. It recounts the center of opposition to blockade-running efforts during the war — the US consulate, and the four men who occupied that office to stop the shipping of contraband: Sam Whiting, Seth Hawley, and Vice-consul William Thompson. It also discusses the significance of Charles Jackson, John Howell, and Epes Sargent in providing aid to the consul's office during the war. The chapter argues that former US consul Timothy Darling was the only prominent merchant to be an ardent supporter of the Union cause, adding he was a true New Englander living in the tropics and was in strong opposition to the slave-holding Confederacy. The chapter also notes the contributions of Lewis Heyliger in Confederate departments, the cotton brokers, and the shipments coming in from Europe. Ultimately, it highlights how Henry Adderley, his son Augustus, and their business partner and Henry's son-in-law George David Harris epitomized the success of the opportunism surrounding the Great Carnival.

City of Inmates

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Colonial Form ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings ◽  
The City

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

scholarly journals De-centring Managua: post-earthquake reconstruction and revolution in Nicaragua

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-685
Author(s):  
DAVID JOHNSON LEE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Earthquake Reconstruction

ABSTRACT:The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.

scholarly journals Metropolitan USA: Evidence from the 2010 Census

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Rennie Short
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Suburban Areas ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Census ◽  
The City ◽  
Us Cities

I will review the major changes in the distribution of the metropolitan population of the United States (US), as revealed by the 2010 data recently released by the US Census. These data allow us to track recent changes and provide the basis for a discussion of longer-term trends identified in previous studies of US cities (Short 2006, 2007) and the city suburban nexus (Hanlon et al. 2010). In brief summary, the paper will show the continuing metropolitanization and suburbanization of the US population. A more nuanced picture will reveal evidence of stress in suburban areas and population resurgence in selected central city areas. Overall, the story is one of a profound revalorization and a major respatialization of the US metropolis.

scholarly journals The Iron Hand of Power: US Architectural Imperialism in the Philippines

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Daniel Immerwahr
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Spatial Vision ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
The Us ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Public Money ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainland US to the Philippines. In that colonial setting, Burnham was able to realise his vision far more easily, as neither he nor the officials executing his plans were ultimately accountable to Filipinos. Forced labour, confiscated land, repurposed public money, unchecked political power and wartime social disruption all aided US architectural imperialism. Rather than regretting this, Burnham and his associates celebrated the opportunities that their undemocratic setting provided. This article treats not only Burnham but also William E. Parsons (1872–1939) and Cameron Forbes (1870–1959), who extrapolated and enforced Burnham’s plans, and Juan Arellano (1888–1960), the Filipino architect who, to his later regret, helped remake Manila in the colonisers’ image.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 211-218
Author(s):  
Julia E. Rusk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gross Domestic Product ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Report Card ◽  
City Government ◽  
The People ◽  
Wellbeing Index ◽  
Santa Monica ◽  
The City

This afterword presents a vision for well-being policies and actions in the United States, focusing on the experience of the City of Santa Monica, California. The purpose of data is to put it into action. The goal in Santa Monica is to make this a reality, with benefits accruing regularly to every resident, neighborhood, business, and contributor to the community. This was the idea behind Santa Monica’s local Wellbeing Index: harnessing the power of data for the commonwealth that would reveal the story of the people and the community in new ways, and that would help to transform city government. The goal of the Wellbeing Index was to expand the measures of a community far beyond the traditional and economically-focused gross domestic product (GDP). Going forward, the Wellbeing Index will be the tool used to evaluate whether policies, programs, and other City investments are in fact improving community well-being. The chapter also looks at Santa Monica’s programs, such as the Youth Wellbeing Report Card and the Pico Wellbeing Project.

The Louisiana Purchase: Liberty, Slavery, and the Incorporation of the Territory of Orleans

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Spear
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
African Descent ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Center ◽  
The Us ◽  
Louisiana Purchase ◽  
Free People ◽  
The City

On December 20, 1803, residents of New Orleans gathered at the Place d’Armes in the city center to watch as the French flag was lowered and the flag of the United States was raised in its place. Toasts were made to the US president, the French First Consul, and the Spanish king (whose flag had been lowered in a similar ceremony just twenty days earlier), and the celebrations continued throughout the night. The following day, however, began the process of determining just what it meant now that Louisiana was a part of the United States, initiating the first great test for the United States of its ability to expand its borders, incorporating both territories and peoples. The treaty ratifying the transfer, signed in Paris the previous April 30th, promised that “the inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States” where they would experience “the enjoyment of all these rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States.” These inhabitants included thousands of people of French and Spanish descent, several thousand slaves of African descent, and about fifteen hundred free people of at least partial African ancestry; most of these inhabitants spoke French or (far fewer) Spanish and practiced Catholicism. In addition, the territory was home to tens of thousands of indigenous peoples, many of whom still lived on traditional territories and under their own sovereignty. For a few inhabitants of what would become the Territory of Orleans and later the state of Louisiana, incorporation did lead to “the enjoyment of all these rights” and gave some small grain of truth to Thomas Jefferson’s hope that the trans-Mississippi region would undergird the United States as an “empire of liberty,” although even for Europeans of French and Spanish ancestry, the process was neither easy nor uncontested. For most, however, incorporation led to the expansion of the United States as an empire of slavery, one built upon the often violent dispossession of native peoples of their lands and the expropriated labor of enslaved peoples of African descent.

The two worlds of elected mayors in the US: what type of mayor should cities choose?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Svara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
The Us ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
American Cities ◽  
The City

This chapter explores two different kinds of elected mayors in cities in the United States, and the debate about which form should be used. The two types of mayor are the executive mayor in mayor-council cities and what I have called the facilitative mayor in council-manager cities. Traditionally, the mayor in council-manager cities was chosen by the city council from its members. Now two-thirds of the council-manager cities have directly elected mayors. The chapter examines the dynamics of change in American cities regarding the role of the mayor as part of the larger debate about the use of the mayor-council and council-manager form and compares the competing arguments for executive and facilitative mayors and their corresponding forms of government. The analysis draws on the arguments used on each side in 15 large cities that held referenda to change their form of government and determine what kind of mayor the city will have.

scholarly journals The Boundaries of Jerusalem

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Gideon Biger ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Palestinian Authority ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Independent States ◽  
The City ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Boundary Lines

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump presented his Peace Plan for Israel and the Palestinians. The plan also dealt with the future boundaries of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the only city ruled by a sovereign regime, the State of Israel, which declared Jerusalem as its Capital city and draw its boundary lines. Except for the US, the status and boundaries of Jerusalem are not accepted by any other international or national entity. Only the United States, which accepts Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel, agreed to accept its Israeli declared boundaries. Jerusalem’s status and boundaries stand at the core of the dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which wishes to restore the pre-1967 line. The city of Jerusalem was divided during the years 1948-1967 between Israel and Jordan. The Palestinian Authority thus calls for a separation of Jerusalem between two independent states. Today, Jerusalem has an urban boundary that serves partly as a separating line between Israel and the Palestinian Autonomy, but most countries do not accept the present boundaries, and its future permanent line and status are far from establishing. Jerusalem is a unique city. This article presents a brief history that should help understanding its uniqueness.

scholarly journals "Leave the Fads to the Yankees"

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-84
Author(s):  
Patricia Petersen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Government ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
City Manager ◽  
Legislative Authority ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

Does the border between the United States and Canada make a difference? To a political scientist it does for the obvious reason: the border defines two different political entities with different forms of government, different political customs and conventions. Two attempts in the first thirty years of the twentieth century to change the structure of the government of the City of Toronto illustrate the difference the border can make. The two proposals, commission government and city manager government, had originated with municipal reformers in the United States during the Progressive Era. The main idea behind both plans was to concentrate the executive and legislative authority in one governing unit. Commission and city manager government, however, attracted only a few supporters in the City despite their extreme popularity in the United States. City government in Toronto was not considered as bad as the government in those cities in the United States that had changed to new forms. Moreover, the proposals were American innovations and Toronto politicians were wary of American fads, especially ones like these which were drawn "from the uncertain spheres of political theory."

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document