Tag: alexis carrozza

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Can tweets shape the city? Seminar 4 Twitter List

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.

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Outside Resource: the art of Gordon Matta-Clark and New York in the 1970s

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-corbusier
Gordon 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.

Source: Lee, Object to be Destroyed, 11.

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Outside Resource: podcast episode “How Urban Planning Works” (30:18 min)

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.

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one urbanist you should know & links about redlining

Pete Saunders

Forbes | blog | @petesaunders3

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:

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Atlantic | @tanehisicoates

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.

General

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“The city planners are ravaging our cities!”: An intro to Jane Jacobs

The header image for our site is a reproduction of an advertisement for Jacobs’ book that was published in The New York Times in 1961:

1961 ad for Jane Jacobs’ book that ran in The New York Times

This post discusses the image used for the eportfolio header and also serves as an intro to your reading for February 16, Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Parts of this post are modified excerpts of a paper that I wrote for a graduate seminar titled “Mid-Century Narratives,” and I’m super excited to get to share some of my research. This post first addresses the advertisement’s line, “The city planners are ravaging our cities” followed by a comparison between the ideas of Jane Jacobs and her former mentor, then-architectural critic for the New Yorker, Lewis Mumford.

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