OPEN STACKS | #53: Shifting the City - Ben Austen, LaDale C. Winling, & Gordon Douglas
This week on the program, cities shifting and shifted, and the people, institutions, and social structures that make it so. Ben Austen recounts the dissolution of Cabrini Green, America’s most iconic public housing project, on Chicago’s west side and tells a story of America’s public housing experiments and failures; LaDale C. Winling examines the role of universities on the shape of their neighborhoods and towns; and Gordon Douglas considers how DIY planning takes place, and who participates, within urban contexts.
The conversation with Gordon Douglas was presented as part of the Urban Readers Series. Sign up to learn more about upcoming programming, here. The conversation with Ben Austen was presented in partnership with the Program on the Global Environment. Thank you to our partners for their support!
Voices of Cabrini: Remaking Chicago's Public Housing from Ronit Bezalel on Vimeo.
Filmmaker Ronit Bezalel documented residents of Cabrini-Green in this 1999 clip. In 2016, a follow-up film was released, 70 Acres in Chicago: Cabrini Green.
Gordon Douglas, via Spontaneous Interventions:
It’s not surprising then that the informal alteration of urban space is as old as cities themselves, nor that even in the face of considerable centralization of control everyday folks and professional designers alike are today making alterations outside the system. If capitalism’s reaction to the formalized city is the freedom of unregulated neoliberalism, perhaps spontaneous interventions are the unregulated freedom of the everyday urbanite. One man’s telephone booth, another’s book exchange. A signpost, the support for a chair; a billboard, a canvas. Streets and underpasses, civic plazas and undeveloped lots – opportunities all. As the media and popular culture scholar John Fiske so poignantly quipped, “People can, and do, tear their jeans.”[vii]In some sense, in a bold, unabashed, and perhaps surprisingly un-revolutionary way, it begins to sound a lot like Lefebvre’s “Right to the City,” his “autogestion,” his “moments.”
But then, if spontaneous interventions are reactions to these spatial conditions of the contemporary city, are they not in some ways contributors to them too?
Below, some select images from his March conversation here at the store.
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Today, universities serve as the economic engines and cultural centers of many U.S. cities, but how did this come to be? In Building the Ivory Tower, LaDale Winling traces the history of universities' relationship to the American city, illuminating how they embraced their role as urban...
