Twitter is a great way to see the conversations taking place between city planners, urbanists, and historians! View the list: NYC Urbanism
Curated specifically for Seminar 4, NYC Urbanism shows tweets from over 100 accounts related to New York City, urban planning, policy, and history.
The list includes official city accounts like @NYCPlanning and @NYC_DOT, authors from the course reading list including Brian Tochterman (@btochterman) and Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida), as well as accounts chosen to help with the research project such as digitized archival collections (NYPL Archives) in addition to tweets from accounts related to social science methods, GIS, and mapping like @SocialExplorer, and @pewmethods.
In the 1970s the artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) entered condemned buildings in the Bronx and, using a chainsaw, cut out parts of the architectural support. Matta-Clark considered the transitory, fugitive acts of (illegally) entering and cutting as the work of art so he documented his process with photographs that were then exhibited in galleries:
Gordon Matta-Clark, Threshole, 1972-73. Image Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/07/towards-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusierGordon Matta Clark, Bronx Floors (1972-73). MOMA. Image source: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81396
His work doesn’t aim to create “beautiful” art but explore the politics of place and space. In her book about Matta-Clark, Object to be Destroyed, Pamela M. Lee describes the relationship between artist, artistic practice, and space:
Matta-Clark reflected critically on the temporality of the build environment, a materialist recoding of an “architecture of time.” For the presence of his work within both the urban and suburban sphere emanded that it be encountered as a socialized thing; and its imminent demolition ensured that it not be elevated to the rank of transcendent art objects.
Website description: “In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the origins, philosophies and practices of urban planning.”
Part of the podcast series “Stuff You Should Know” hosts Josh and Chuck explain in this episode how urban planning “works.” I chose this episode because this past week’s discussion focused on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, planner and anti-planner, and the history of urban planning provided in this podcast puts both figures into a broader historical context.
Pete Saunders writes for Forbes in addition to running his own blog and working as an urban planner. While much of his work focuses on the Rust Belt, by writing about race and gentrification, he inevitably addresses issues of redlining. As an introduction to his work, here are some links to pieces at Saunders’ blog as well as one of his columns for Forbes:
MacArthur Genius Fellow, writer for The Atlantic and currently one of the most important public intellectuals, Coates’ book Between the World and Me won a National Book Award for nonfiction. In my opinion, his article “The Case for Reparations” serves as one of the best introductions to an intersectional approach to urban policy and U.S. history.
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