“Like a Cosmic, Invisible Umbilical Cord”

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 171-202
Author(s):  
Kavita Kulkarni
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Life ◽  
House Music

In summer 2002, New York City-based DJ Sadiq Bellamy and his two partners, DJs Tabu and Jeff Mendoza, organized the first Soul Summit Music Festival: a free, open-air, and open-to-the-public weekly series of house music dance parties set in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, during the summer season. The party ran every summer without incident for many years, and twenty years later, continues to receive global recognition among house heads for its success in bringing house music culture—and its legacy of liberation as a sensorial practice—to a broader and more intergenerational crowd than one would find in a club. Keeping in mind its rich genealogies, this article considers the social significance of open-air house music culture, and how various forms of participation within these house music topographies rearticulate the social in a way that refuses the spatiality of peripheralization and the temporality of extinction imposed on Black, brown, and queer of color life in New York City and beyond. In the case of Soul Summit, however, it is not just who participates, but also when and where that matter—in public space and in a historically Black neighborhood situated in a post-9/11, post-Bloomberg New York City—particularly as gentrification devastates the material and symbolic conditions that made possible house culture’s multi-faceted expression in the first place. This article proposes that in resistance to the “revanchist” urbanism of gentrification, the affects and arrangements cultivated on the open-air house music dance floor offer an alternate epistemology of, or way to re-imagine, the social. This lens of “house epistemology” illuminates how the gentrification of Fort Greene brought not only a shift in residential demographics, but also the displacement of a certain modality of public culture by foreclosing the social infrastructures that serve to remediate cultural memory and mobilize Black life.

Sex and the Revanchist City: Zoning out Pornography in New York

10.1068/d10s ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Adler Papayanis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Life Issues ◽  
Sexually Explicit

This paper is an investigation of the social, economic, legal, and cultural factors underlying the move, in New York City, to regulate the sale of pornographic materials through the promulgation of zoning laws. The campaign to zone out pornography, a point of solidarity around which a number of disparate and often hostile interest groups have rallied in order to reclaim public space in the name of community (as though the term itself were transparent and monovocal) is linked to both gentrification and the socioeconomic dynamics underlying the emergence of what Neil Smith has characterized as the revanchist city. ‘Quality of life’ issues stand euphemistically for the domestication and sanitization of an urban landscape whose perceived unruliness is emblematized not only by the presence of large numbers of homeless people, but also by the outré display of sexually explicit imagery associated with XXX-rated businesses. By focusing on the discursive strategies that seek to identify sex shops with so-called ‘secondary impacts’ such as increased crime and decreasing property values, I aim to uncover the social biases and economic motivations that work to shape the urban landscape. I argue that the move to zone out pornography in New York City is imbricated within larger spatial practices that operate both to maximize the productivity of social space and to reproduce the social values of the majority.

scholarly journals Agoraphobia: New York City Public Space in the Time of COVID-19

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Miodrag Mitrasinovic
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Community Services ◽  
The Other ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
The Social ◽  
City Agencies ◽  
Definition Of

This paper explores how the first two waves of the Covid-19 pandemic (February – May 2020) in New York City had magnified extreme polarization between two different visions of public space: one clearly represented by the Hudson Yards Plaza in Manhattan, and the other epitomized by the Corona Plaza in Queens. It argues that the phenomenon of agoraphobia, the fear of others, translates into the fear of public space and by extension the fear of democracy driven by deep anxieties surrounding the definition of “the social.” This is clearly exemplified by Hudson Yards, which closed its doors to the public in May and approached early bankruptcy. On the other hand, Corona Plaza is still a vibrant public space providing vital social and community services. The Plaza was co-produced by the local communities, city agencies, the non-profit sector and public-private partnership, and it provides a resilient model for the production of public space in NYC. The paper argues that the process of producing an infrastructure of inclusion in Corona, which had preceded the construction of Corona Plaza and was strengthen through it, has enabled the Plaza to strive even during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Urban Picturesque: Legitimizing the New York Skyscraper through Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Taylor
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
The Social

In the early twentieth century, debate concerning the social impact of skyscrapers in the modernizing city was widespread, and usually quite acrimonious. This paper will address how artists of this time-period, in their artistic representations of cities and skyscrapers created an urban metaphor of the picturesque as a means to influence a public, increasingly not in favour of the skyscraper. In effect, skyscrapers slowly crept into artistic representations, humbly appearing in late-nineteenth century architectural magazine illustrations or as accents in the skyline of American impressionist paintings. The prolific growth of the twentieth century brought the public debate over skyscrapers into the spotlight and artists took this as an opportunity to promote their views. Some artists, such as the Pictorialists took the opportunity to aestheticize their pictures of the buildings in a fashion that might convey a sense of sublime in the city. Much of the scholarship on the depiction of the skyscraper in the arts has been limited to the Pictorialist photographer’s advancement of modern art in New York City; however, these studies neglect the social significance of the Pictorialist’s use of nature metaphors to create an urban sublime reminiscent of the romantic, picturesque landscapes of the previous century. My paper examines the effect of this aestheticization and the significant promotion and support of the skyscraper from the visual arts, specifically from the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and his circle. I will investigate the development of this aesthetic and how familiarity with this style strengthened support for the skyscraper in the metropolis of New York City. I will further explore these ideas by examining the treatment paintings and photography, in the construction of a familiar sense of awe and, in other words, conjuring the picturesque as a device.

Co-production of public space: policy translations from New York City to the Netherlands

2016 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rianne van Melik ◽  
Erwin van der Krabben
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Public Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Space Policy

scholarly journals A long way from New York City: Socially stratified contact-induced phonological convergence in Ganluo Ersu (Sichuan, China)

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia Chirkova ◽  
James N. Stanford ◽  
Dehe Wang
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
York City ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Field Recordings ◽  
Endangered Language ◽  
World Languages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phonological Change

AbstractLabov's classic study,The Social Stratification of English in New York City(1966), paved the way for generations of researchers to examine sociolinguistic patterns in many different communities (Bell, Sharma, & Britain, 2016). This research paradigm has traditionally tended to focus on Western industrialized communities and large world languages and dialects, leaving many unanswered questions about lesser-studied indigenous minority communities. In this study, we examine whether Labovian models for age, sex, and social stratification (Labov, 1966, 2001; Trudgill, 1972, 1974) may be effectively applied to a small, endangered Tibeto-Burman language in southwestern China: Ganluo Ersu. Using new field recordings with 97 speakers, we find evidence of phonological change in progress as Ganluo Ersu consonants are converging toward Chinese phonology. The results suggest that when an endangered language undergoes convergence toward a majority language due to intense contact, this convergence is manifested in a socially stratified way that is consistent with many of the predictions of the classic Labovian sociolinguistic principles.

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