This Wall Wasn’t Dead: Public Art in Atlanta

From New York's graffiti wars of the 1980s to the political street art of Banksy in the 2000s, the role of art in public space continues to stir controversy and debate.  Under the divine tutelage of Mayor Ed Koch (such a singular historical figure that NYC lamely attempted to rebrand the great Queensboro Bridge in his honor), New York spent millions trying to eradicate the menace of spraypainted tags and murals from subway cars, adding to the myriad ways that young people, mostly of color, were criminalized amid the urban crisis of deindustrialization, unemployment, and drug addiction.  (See Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop for more on this history.) Due in part to the pioneering …

Blurring Boundaries: A Conversation About Urban Nature with Jennifer Renteria

For Activate Vacant, SEMAP invited artists to transgress space by creating installations in abandoned, un-used, and, often, fenced-in lots. Jennifer Renteria, a recent graduate of USC’s School of Architecture, is our third artist. In anticipating her project, we thought we’d let you know a little more about her. Renteria grew up in the city of Commerce, studied history and fine arts at Bowdoin College and recently received her Master’s in Landspace Architecture. Her research, writing, and projects, which often utilize photography and multimedia, center around informal/alternative economies and the relationship between the urban environment and nature. This past year, she visited …

State Space and Victor Serge: Midnight in the Century

Continuing my series of posts on the novels of Victor Serge at my personal blog site For the Desk Drawer, I focus now on what Richard Greeman has recognized as the "cycle of resistance" in the second informal trilogy comprising Midnight in the Century [1939], The Case of Comrade Tulayev [1942], and The Long Dusk [1946]. If earlier novels in the "cycle of revolution" capture the conquest of space, notably Conquered City, then the later novels in the "cycle of resistance" convey the statification of space. This refers to the production of political space through meaningful architectural forms; symbolic representations of state power; the organisation of territory and geography; and …

On Victor Serge and Red Petrograd: Conquered City

Following on from my previous posts, one of the most striking features of Victor Serge’s writings has to be the way he captures spatial arbiters that shape the practices of empowerment and containment within the territorial form of the city. Flowing across his documentary or witness novels, his political writings, his poetry, or his memoirs as a revolutionary is a sense of the political processes shaping urban society, the space of the city, and the possibilities of revolution rising up from the streets. Nowhere is this more evident that in his novel Conquered City [1932] set in the years of the Russian Civil War (1919-1921) in the frontline city of Red Petrograd. Written just prior to …

Spaces of Revolution

Recently, in a blog post entitled "Monumentalising Revolution," my commentary argued that the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City stands as an ambiguous carrier of utopian promise, which links past and present generations of struggle. Specifically, my concluding point was that this architectural space stands as a possible symbol of "the effective participation of the present generation in shaping the utopian desires of the oppressed, linked to ongoing past and present social struggles." Written in April, there was no anticipation in this piece of the events to come that have swirled around the student movement #YoSoy132 in contesting the presidential election process in Mexico. …

Richmond City Nights: Part I of the 2012 Policy History Conference

What is a conference without a solid discussion of the future prospects of the robot rights movement?  Every two years, scholars gather in burgeoning metropolises like Richmond, VA and Columbus, OH to debate the sources, implications, and meanings of public policies and the movements and people who craft them at the Policy History Conference. At June’s 2012 four day event, attendees traversed a variety of topics and issues.  In Part I, ToM looks at the impact of the New Right on gun ownership, taxes and Richard Nixon and the results and conflicts of 1970s regional developmental efforts in Denver, Detroit, and the Bay area. Guns, Taxes and the Rise of the Right Jeffrey Marlin, …

The Municipal Military: The Impact of the Armed Services on Urban America

I gave my heart to the Army/ The only sentimental thing I could think of/ With cousins and colors and somewhere overseas/ But it'll take a better war to kill a college man like me -- “Lemonworld” from Boxer by the National Since transitioning to an all volunteer force, America’s relationship to the military hasn’t been the same. The change brought greater gender and racial diversity as African Americans poured into the services at rates that far exceeded their presence in the larger population. For example, by 1979, only six years after the transformation, the percentage of Black enlisted personal climbed to 28%, nearly three times the proportion of their demographics in the …

Where Did Parks and Recreation Go Wrong?

I wrote a piece almost a year and a half ago about the politics of Parks and Recreation, but we never ran the post because we were not quite sure it properly captured the essence of the show’s unabashedly liberal, pro-public message.  In retrospect, I’m glad we didn’t—because subsequent seasons have cast the sitcom in a rather different light.  The idealism of civil servant Leslie Knope is as sincere and refreshing as ever in an era when “government” is still used as a bad word without need of explanation, but her ambitions to do good for the community have been subordinated to a series of personal and managerial plots that have little to do with her vision of using the public …

“When She Talks, I Hear the Revolution”: Looking Back at the Riot Grrrl Revolt

Anyone whose has a cable subscription to IFC probably recognizes Carrie Brownstein from her comedic stylings on the channel’s popular show Portlandia.  Yet, fewer may know that Brownstein currently plays guitar for Wild Flag or along with Corin Tucker founded seminal Pac NW rock group Sleater Kinney.  Formed in 1994, Sleater Kinney (the band functioned as a three piece and had three different drummers over the course of its existence) has often been pegged as part of the Riot Grrrl Movement.  However, if one reads Sara Marcus’s engaging Girls to the Front:  The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, Sleater Kinney appears to be the belated second wave of the movement, a culmination …

The Food Truck Conundrum: Urban Politics and Mobile Eats

When local DC cultural website DCist tweeted a celebratory announcement of the arrival of Chic-fil-A’s new roaming food truck in the nation’s capital, one might have thought the tweet rather ho-hum. At most, cries of corporate infringement on a burgeoning subculture might have been expected to ring out. However, within minutes several prominent DC restaurant proprietors responded with harsh admonishments, but not about aesthetics or subcultures. Perhaps most notably, Dean Gold owner of Cleveland Park’s popular Dino restaurant, rebuked DCist for publicizing the food truck of a company known to support anti-gay causes and legislation tweeting: ChickFilA_Fuckers hate gays and we need to …