The Politics of Black Self-Determination and Neighborhood Preservation in Lincoln Park

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-185
Author(s):  
Courtney Elizabeth Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historically Black ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Advocacy Group ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Lincoln Park ◽  
Neighborhood Level

Chapter 9 discusses the politics of public space and neighborhood self-determination in the historically Black, working class neighborhood of Lincoln Park. The work describes a thirty-year history of neighborhood-level community building and planning, including the present struggles of the Coalition to Save Lincoln Park, an advocacy group that emerged in 2013 after the city announced its plans to extend Central Avenue through the historic park space and neighborhood.

“You Have Living Legends among You”

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Awartani
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Multiple Generations ◽  
Young Lords ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Park

In late September 2018, multiple generations of Chicago’s storied social movements marched through Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood as part of the sold-out, three-day Young Lords Fiftieth Anniversary Symposium hosted by DePaul University—an institution that, alongside Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration, had played a sizeable role in transforming Lincoln Park into a neighborhood “primed for development.” Students, activists, and community members—from throughout Chicago, the Midwest, the East Coast, and even as far as Texas—converged to celebrate the history of Puerto Ricans in Chicago, the legacies of the Young Lords, and the promises and possibilities of resistance. As Elaine Brown, former chairwoman and minister of information for the Black Panther Party, told participants in the second day’s opening plenary, the struggle against racism, poverty, and gentrification and for self-determination and the general empowerment of marginalized people is a protracted one. “You have living legends among you,” Brown insisted, inviting us to associate as equals with the Young Lords members in our midst. Her plea encapsulated the ethos of that weekend’s celebrations: “If we want to be free, let us live the light of the Lords.”

Reconceptualizing the Public Spaces of New Urban Areas in Hanoi: The End or the New of Public-Making?

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Minh-Tung Tran ◽  
◽  
Tien-Hau Phan ◽  
Ngoc-Huyen Chu ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Doi Moi ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Neighborhood Level

Public spaces are designed and managed in many different ways. In Hanoi, after the Doi moi policy in 1986, the transfer of the public spaces creation at the neighborhood-level to the private sector has prospered na-ture of public and added a large amount of public space for the city, directly impacting on citizen's daily life, creating a new trend, new concept of public spaces. This article looks forward to understanding the public spaces-making and operating in KDTMs (Khu Do Thi Moi - new urban areas) in Hanoi to answer the question of whether ‘socialization’/privatization of these public spaces will put an end to the urban public or the new means of public-making trend. Based on the comparison and literature review of studies in the world on public spaces privatization with domestic studies to see the differences in the Vietnamese context leading to differences in definitions and roles and the concept of public spaces in KDTMs of Hanoi. Through adducing and analyzing practical cases, the article also mentions the trends, the issues, the ways and the technologies of public-making and public-spaces-making in KDTMs of Hanoi. Win/loss and the relationship of the three most important influential actors in this process (municipality, KDTM owners, inhabitants/citizens) is also considered to reconceptualize the public spaces of KDTMs in Hanoi.

“Tangled Passions”: Realism and Lyricism in the Plays of Peter Gill

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-457
Author(s):  
William McEvoy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
History Of ◽  
Class Representation ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This article argues that the work of Welsh theatre director and playwright Peter Gill occupies a unique place in post-1960s’ British playwriting. It explores Gill’s plays as – using theatre critic Susannah Clapp’s phrase – the “missing link” between kitchen-sink realism and more self-consciously poetic forms of theatre text. Gill’s plays make an important contribution to the history of working-class representation in UK theatre for three main reasons: first, the centrality he gives to Wales, Welsh working-class characters, and the city of Cardiff; second, his emphasis on the experience of women, especially mothers; and third, his focus on young male characters expressing and exploring the complexities of same-sex desire. The plays make advances in terms of realist dialogue and structure while also experimenting with layout, repetition, fragmentation, poetic description, and monologue narration. Gill’s work realistically documents the impact of poverty, cramped housing conditions, and social deprivation on his characters as part of a political project to show the lives of Welsh working-class people on stage. While doing so, Gill innovates in his handling of time, perspective, viewpoint, and genre. His plays occupy a distinctive place in the history of British, working-class, gay theatre, helping us to rethink what each of these three key terms means.

Representing the Worker in Postsocialist Public Space: Art and Politics under Neoliberalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 43-76
Author(s):  
Raino Isto
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Construction Projects ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
New Public ◽  
History Of

AbstractAcross former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism has been accompanied by a marked reduction in emphasis on working-class identities. Because of the centrality of class to socialist-era identity-construction projects, the recent and relatively sudden ascendancy of various forms of individualist, consumption-oriented subjectivity in postrevolutionary societies has produced conflicts that are often more visible than in societies where capitalism has been the accepted economic paradigm for much longer. This shift can be seen in the realm of art and visual culture: Images of the worker once dominated public spaces under state socialism, competing in number with representations of leaders and communist ideologues, but since 1989 they have often been vandalized, dismantled, or else relocated to decay in relative obscurity. Where new public images of the worker do appear in postsocialist neoliberal conditions, they frequently serve as nexuses of controversy, where generational and ideological conflicts regarding current labor conditions and the legacy of worker solidarity play out. The debates surrounding representations of workers in postsocialism are both part of a global history of postsocialist art and part of the history of labor and its relation to contemporary urban space. This article examines artistic representations of the worker sited in public space in postsocialist Albania, in order to map the political and artistic discourses that animate engagements with working-class identity in conditions of neoliberal social transformation.

Rethinking the Twentieth-Century History of Mumbai

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1449 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

AbstractThis review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.

scholarly journals Mapping the History of a Territory: Bon Pastor (Barcelona) – Social Remembrance and Heritage Project

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
Salvador Angosto
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
City Council ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Development Plans ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The City

The topic of the article are the complex stages of the formation of the Bon Pastor neighbourhood in Barcelona, and contemporary efforts to create the remembrance space system that would preserve the social memory and historical identity of the place. The author presents how the urban development plans for the district were transformed as a result of major changes in national politics, economy, and social policy, since the 1930s, through 60s and 70s, till today. The article describes the Bon Pastor Civic Memory project as an interesting example of a participatory action aimed at the preservation of local heritage. The implementation of the Civic Memory project was possible due to the neighbours’ initiative and their cooperation with cultural and academic institutions. The aim of this project is to mark certain points of the territory which possess historically and socially significant value, and to enhance them through public art, urban design and other implementations envisaged. The Association of residents of Bon Pastor (Barcelona) has been characterized, since 1974, for its combative and vindictive nature, at the same time as for its great capacity to launch solidarity initiatives and manage complicated processes to improve the living conditions of residents of the neighbourhood. After the struggles to obtain a health centre, the improvement of communications by metro and bus, and the constant improvement of public space, in recent years, the Association is co-managing with the Barcelona City Council, the radical transformation of the neighbourhood. The different phases for the remodelling of the neighbourhood, by replacing the so-called “cheap houses” with new buildings, with more spacious apartments and with better material conditions, is coming to an end and now, the possibility opens up, driven by the neighbours and the Museum of the History of the City (MUHBA) to have a metropolitan museographic space devoted to the presentation and study of the evolution of workers’ and popular housing in Barcelona.

Labouring for Kashmir’s azadi: Ongoing violence and resistance in Maisuma, Srinagar

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
Sarbani Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Central Area ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

While much has been said about the historicity of the Kashmir conflict or about how individuals and communities have resisted occupation and demanded the right to self-determination, much less has been said about nature of everyday life under these conditions. This article offers a glimpse of life in the working-class neighbourhood of Maisuma, located in the central area of the city of Srinagar, and its engagement with the political movement for azadi (freedom). I argue that the predicament of ‘double interminability’ characterises life in Maisuma—the interminable violence by the state on the one hand and simultaneously the constant call of labouring for azadi by the movement on the other, since the terms of peace are unacceptable.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashad Shabazz
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Agriculture ◽  
Stress Reduction ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Fruits And Vegetables ◽  
White Neighborhoods ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City ◽  
Retail Access

This epilogue focuses on Chicago's changing racial geography, arguing that this change is creating not only gentrification in parts of the city, but also openings for Black Chicagoans to augment their geography. Since the mid-1990s abandoned lots all over Chicago have been turned into spaces of agricultural production. Not limited to middle-class white neighborhoods, urban gardens have sprung up in poor and working-class communities on the South and West Sides of the city. This is not the first time Chicagoans have performed agriculture in the city. The city has a long history of urban agriculture. This epilogue shows that green spaces can undo the consequences of carceral space by enabling Black Chicagoans to eat fresh fruits and vegetables in places with little retail access to them and creating environments of stress reduction for the entire community. It also demonstrates that the poor and the working class can be architects and planners, that they can augment their geographies in ways that produce healthy people and vital, vibrant communities—on their own terms.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Joe William Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Social Service ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Urban League ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Poor ◽  
The City

This history of the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) examines the organization’s century of social service and activism in the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area. It complements existing studies of the Urban League movement and deepens our understanding of the Urban League as a national phenomenon. Most important, this book addresses the debate over the Urban League movement’s impact on the lives of poor and working-class blacks as they made the transition from farm to city. Some scholars and popular writers argue that the Urban League movement was largely a conservative force that rarely improved the lives of the black poor. Others defend the Urban League as a progressive interracial social movement that eased the painful impact of migration, labor exploitation, and poor living conditions on thousands of southern black newcomers to the city....

Morgantina's Agora—Design and Drains

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora P. Crouch
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
City Gates ◽  
Broad Strip ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stoic Philosophy ◽  
Locally Grown ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town

The agora fulfilled a complex role in the life of Greek cities. In Greek agoras, nearly the whole range of public activities was accommodated: governmental, religious, commercial, military, and social. The market function of the agora was essential to the survival of the city, with the availabilty of everything from imported grain to locally grown lettuce. Services, from haircutting to the teaching of Stoic philosophy, were available. Government offices and officers were readily at hand. Temples, shrines, and monuments to heroes iterated religious, cultural, and moral values from every corner. The agora at Athens is probably the most thoroughly studied of the early ones. In shape it is an irregular quadrilateral, eventually monumentalized with stoas and other public buildings along all four sides. The buildings were placed at the edges of the large open space which therefore was available for many activities. Cisterns and wells of the pre- and postclassical periods were scattered over the surface. Only one well is known, however, from the classical period, that in the shrine in the northwest corner (Athenian Agora Guide,3) suggesting that the sixth century aqueduct was supplying enough water for the population during the fifth and early fourth centuries. Fountains marked important points of entry, and drains led the excess water northwestward toward the city gates (Figs. 16.15, 17.11). As the agora changed over time, being filled in with additional structures, the sources of water and the drains were continually adapted to the new demands. The organic form at Athens contrasts with the more regular but even earlier surviving form—eighth or seventh century B.C.—at Posidonia (Paestum), where a broad strip of public space for temples and agora was set aside at the center of the town (Fig. 5.1B). On this flat site, two sacred precincts flanked the agora (later Forum). The long and varied history of the site precludes our easy understanding of the design of the Greek agora here. Regularity at Posidonia is a function of its status as a colonial city—a city that was planned and laid out all at one time. Careful attention was given to the provision and use of water.

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