Holding the Center

2012 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-255
Author(s):  
Michan Andrew Connor
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Central City ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The City

Early television shows that focused on Los Angeles as subject, such as The City at Night (KTLA) and Jack Linkletter's On the Go (CBS), assured white, middle-class, suburban viewers that they had a place in the larger metropolis by presenting a selective knowledge of its features and issues. On the Go surpassed the entertainment level of The City at Night to address some serious social issues. By the mid-sixties, suburbanization had been fully embraced as the "good life." Shows such as Ralph Story's Los Angeles (KNXT), instead of engaging suburban viewers in metropolitan issues, entertained them with glimpses of the city's "oddities." The change in tone marked the passing of the center of cultural identity from the central city to the suburbs.

Resisting Camelot

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-51
Author(s):  
Jean-Paul R. deGuzman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
White Flight ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Homeowner Associations ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The City

For generations white middle-class residents of the Valley, a longtime symbol of post-WWII suburbia, have attempted to break away from the City of Los Angeles. By the end of the 20th century, the secession campaign brought together homeowner associations, business leaders, and small government libertarians. During a period of massive global migration that transformed the city into an immigrant metropolis, this coalition successfully placed secession on the November 2002 municipal ballot. Critics of secession decried Valley independence as latter day white flight and a means to curtail the growing political power of Latinas/os. This article complicates previous studies that solely focus on the tactical failures of white secessionists, and rather unearths the genesis and impact of grassroots people of color organizing both in the Valley and across the rest of Los Angeles.

"A City of Picture Buyers": Art, Identity, and Aspiration in Los Angeles and Southern California, 1891-1914

2010 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-50
Author(s):  
Jasper G. Schad
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
White Middle Class

In less than twenty-five years, Los Angeles and other southern California urban centers evolved from culturally sterile communities into vibrant art centers. That remarkable transformation resulted from a combination of social, economic, and political changes that drew residents to landscape paintings. They enjoyed widespread popularity because residents invested them with meanings that transcended art. They became icons of identity, bolstered visions of an unspoiled suburban Eden, and helped southern California's white middle-class to cope with the mounting stress of modern urban life.

scholarly journals SQUATTING OUTSIDE THE WORLD: NOTES FOR AN ARCHITECTURE OF ETHICS

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-209
Author(s):  
Steven Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Mind takes place in the world, and that matters. We are bodies among bodies, and, no matter what we think, what we do is a matter of where. And thinking about where is a problem for architecture. Richard Luecke’s pithy summary of Aristotle’s Politics was that we go to the city to live but stay to live the good life. The interplay of going and staying takes up a critical theme of Aristotle’s work. To understand the world, he said, we must understand both motion and stasis – not the going alone but the staying that takes place in the middle of it. Luecke took up William James’s figure of perchings in the flight of a bird and put it to work in thinking about cities. The city is a perch for the winged thing we are. To understand our flight, we must also attend to our perching. Aristotle speaks of the city as a place to go and a place to stay, but he also speaks of it as a koinonia turned toward good. That marks it as being human. Aristotle directs our attention to the necessity of the city (we go to live) and to its good (we stay to live the good life). But the staying, the dwelling, is understood within a structure of action: the good is that toward which all things aim. Dwelling, still, we turn. Which qualifies the going, because we are political animals. Going to the city to live, we go nowhere other than where we are. The city is the form of human presence.

scholarly journals Structures, feelings and savoir faire: Ghana's middle classes in the making

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 470-488
Author(s):  
Rachel Spronk
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Raymond Williams

AbstractThe concept of ‘middle class’ in African societies has been recognized recently but at the same time it resists clear-cut definition. Rather than seeking clearer classification, I propose to embrace its contested nature as productive, seeing ‘middle class’ not as a category that we can find ‘out there’ and measure, but as a classification-in-the-making. Middle-class status, or a particular idea of the good life, is a position people strive towards, but what this entails depends on context and place. The study of the pursuit of social mobility in Ghana during colonialism, independence and the post-Cold War period – of those who have successfully improved their livelihoods – provides knowledge about the middle class in the making in different eras and under different conditions. I propose a three-pronged approach to study this processual nature: Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘structures of feeling’ helps unravel the shifting affective qualities of the changing political economy, while Sara Ahmed's focus on the ‘feelings of structure’ zooms in on agency as an important tool to analyse how middle-class trajectories unfold over time. Lastly, the availability of advantageous conditions is not enough to stimulate change; one needs the savoir faire to enact them.

scholarly journals Making a Living: How Middle-Class Couples in Warsaw Start and Practice a Household

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Marta Olcoń-Kubicka ◽  
Mateusz Halawa
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
The Third ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
At Home

This article is a study of the domestic monetary and financial life of young middle-class couples in Warsaw, Poland, and its suburbs. We use ethnographic evidence presented as case studies to illuminate the practices in which our interlocutors actively appropriate, mobilize, and transform money and finance to pursue moral visions of the good life. The article focuses on the household understood in processual terms of ongoing negotiations between moral and market dimensions. The first section is focused on the ways in which young couples perform relational work aimed at achieving or maintaining moral order. Couples match the diverse possible uses of money at home to their changing notions of the kind of couple they are or wish to become. The second section proceeds from the observation of a widening gap between rising middle-class aspirations and economic possibilities in contemporary Poland and explores the practices of negotiating various forms of assistance from parental households. The third and final section argues that the incursion of technologies into domestic life means that artifacts like software or digital banking increasingly materialize and mediate morality and thus actively contribute to the shaping of the household as a project of a good life.

Back to Bed

Coming Home ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 9-33
Author(s):  
Wendy Kline
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Home Birth ◽  
The Other ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
La Leche League ◽  
Hospital To Home ◽  
The City

Chapter 1, “Back to Bed: From Hospital to Home Obstetrics in the City of Chicago” analyzes the home obstetrics training practiced at the Chicago Maternity Center alongside the emergence of what would become an international breastfeeding organization, La Leche League. One focused on the inner-city’s working-class population, while the other catered more to the suburban white middle-class. Both the Chicago Maternity Center and the La Leche League relied on the promotion of home birth, but for very different reasons. Under the CMC, home birth provided essential training for obstetrical students, while under the LLL, it enabled mothers to breastfeed and bond with their babies. The different rationales underscored the extent to which race, class, and context shaped ideas about home birth. Taken together, these two examples reveal the complex origins of what would become a contested yet increasingly popular practice by the 1970s.

More and More Enlightened Citizens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Busch
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Business Community ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Public Open Space ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

This chapter looks at the nascent environmental movement in Austin in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that, while early environmentalists achieved many victories and set the tone for later environmental issues in Austin, they also demonstrated a lack of understanding of minority issues and sometimes directly undermined minority communities. Environmentalists fought the business community and worked to maintain public open space, beautify the city, and stave off undesirable development. They sponsored a public planning initiative, Austin Tomorrow, which gave citizens a greater voice in planning Austin’s growth. But their plans often imagined minority places as sites of white middle class leisure. They also failed to incorporate minorities into Austin Tomorrow.

Remaking inequalities in the neoliberal institution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christy Kulz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
White Subject ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Neoliberal Governance ◽  
Education Market ◽  
Recent Policy

Firstly this chapter discusses how Dreamfields’ 'oasis in the desert' allegedly built to transform urban children is changing urban culture in unanticipated ways. Besides grafting cultural capital onto students, it actively seeks out those who already have the capitals it requires to excel in the education market. Secondly, it explores how race and class are lived out in Dreamfields’ neoliberal regime. Whiteness does not rely on the white subject to be materialised, while the racialised subject is conceptualised through the lens of class. Both pathological blackness and dirty whiteness can be 'lost' through the application of middle-class behaviours, yet this shift requires labour, loss and conformity. Thirdly, the allure of the ‘good life’ acts a powerful tool of neoliberal governance that motivates many parents, students and teachers to willingly embrace Dreamfields’ demands. Finally, the chapter reviews how recent policy developments further centralize education and curtail participation, yet suggests there are cracks appearing in this consensus.

scholarly journals Diversity and Opportunity in a Good City Making, Learning from Informal Settlement in Yogyakarta-Indonesia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Nelza Mulki Iqbal
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Informal Settlement ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Current Perspective ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The Greek thinker Aristotle ever tried to explain cities phenomenon by mentioning that a good life can be founded in the togetherness of city living. Nevertheless, today’s fact there is no city has ever meant the good life for all its inhabitants. It becomes harder and harder to define a good life inside the city, as well as looking what makes a good city in current perspective. Cities are now seen at best as a great social problem and at worst as utopian city solution that yet never come. That makes sense that the concept of making good city is debatable, and somehow it is very subjective. Starting with an explanation of the period when a good city notion emerged, this essay will try to analyze in a very brief manner the discourses between physical and non-physical strategies to develop a good city notion. Afterwards, it will be extended to the role of opportunity to build a future good city. The opportunity will be in line with the concept of the right to the city, which originally based on Henri Lefebvre’s Theory (Lefebvre, 1996). Staying back to the musing between what is good and what is bad, this essay is trying to investigate what is reasoning behind good or bad and how to solve it. Then, it will be navigated to how people can deal with the bad condition of the city and solving their problem as a part of their right. The notions of a good city, however, belong to the residents. What city needs the most was a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual supports (Jacobs, 1961). The cases of Kampung Code in Yogyakarta, which was the winner of Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1992 will be highlighted to be an example of how people are dealing with their bad condition, struggling on their right and taking the opportunity given.

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