Recent ucb_guh_fhl_pubs items

In Demonstration

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In Ghostly Matters, the sociologist Avery F. Gordon suggests that we “ponder the paradox of providing a hospitable memory for ghosts out of a concern for justice.” The phrase she italicizes is from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, as is the concept, though, in Derrida’s original, the paradox is so elaborately convoluted as to seem unable to extricate itself from the idea at hand. In the event, he opts to glimpse no more than a glimpse. Fair enough. Very early on, Derrida says his text will proceed “like an essay in the night.” Mine, however, like its subject, will proceed in bright daylight. This essay is about a protest march that took place on a beautiful spring day, from noon to five, though it was part of something that had already taken place, and would take place again, and, perhaps, was never not taking place, namely protestation.

A Fistful of Barley

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Forming Tibetan Taipei

On a humid afternoon about five years ago, just off a narrow alleyway bordered by homogenous rows of five-storey apartment structures that line much of the crowded1, subtropical metropole of Taipei City, inside a Tibetan restaurant that occupied the ground floor of one of those narrow buildings, I sat, ostensibly doing ethnography, but really playing with the food I had just ordered. Of course, these two specific events of doing ethnography and playing with food are not necessarily contradictory...

Diary of a Failed Pilgrim June 2014

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The roots of giant oak trees rose up to grab me, and the rocks seemed determined to block my path as I scrambled down the slippery, muddy trail to a little creek. Mosquitos bit the back of my neck. What was I doing here in the middle of the French wilderness, “walking” the Camino de Santiago from Le Puy to Conques? Why do they call it a walk? It is a strenuous hike…not just one, but day after day after day after day. On my own pilgrimage along the route, I was exhausted. My toes were crushing each other and every step was torture. Every tiny village was either at the bottom of a steep, craggy mountain or at the top of a hill. Either way, it was a daily scramble up or down. All the books, blogs, films, and friends who came before me didn’t prepare me for this. They call it “walking the Camino” but it is walking, hiking, climbing, scrambling, limping.

Losing My Religion in Oaxaca

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You never step into the same market twice, never more so than when you wade into the Mercado Abastos, the largest market in Oaxaca City, and one of the largest in Mexico. There is nothing else like it in Oaxaca, especially not the more polite and organized markets near the historic core. This makes it a site for urban pilgrimage, but definitively not a tourist site.

Concrete's Many Fair-Faces

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Concrete is ubiquitous. Its plasticity allows for nearly limitless forms. Its mutability results in numerous different appearances. Readily available and accessible, it can be found across the globe. It is, perhaps, nowhere quite as ubiquitous as in cities. In the late post-war years, after the dissolution of CIAM and the rejection of International Style Modernism, with its fey white stucco forms, Brutalism offered a new paradigm for urban reconstruction. Its forms were monumental and heroic, its materials straightforward and robust.

Nearing Nanjing, 1938

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Travel begins, despite any designs of the traveler to the contrary, with self-serving anticipation. The very act of crossing borders, of encountering linguistic foreignness, sets the individual traveler in a position of vulnerability—at the very least, within the realm of the word. One’s semiotic world becomes looser, more slippery, evasive. In this vulnerability, perhaps, it is a matter of course that the traveler resorts to whatever discourse is available to understand the new world in which travel takes place. Paradoxically, the experience of freedom from meaning often pushes the traveler—who may become the travel writer—back toward well-trod routes, time-honored conventions and cliché. Human and non-human objects observed in the land of travel, captured by the old-new words of this reactionary writer, are then entered into their particular textual economy, static prey to traveler’s representation.

De Vieux-Montréal à Kahnawa:ké

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The story of an urban pilgrimage between settler and aboriginal cultures

Terra Incognita: No way from here to there?

The official at City Hall was polite, if disinterested, up until the moment we told her where we wanted to go. Suddenly, her face took on a pinched look, the look of a bureaucrat who is hearing news that might cause a lot of extra work. “Ah non, you can’t walk from here to Kahnawake,” she said...

Ziyaretler

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Stories about historic architectural sites of religious function, and the contemporary communities of practicing Muslims who use them, flow through the city of Istanbul. The oral histories I have collected reveal aspects of the use of architecture in the expression of belief and identity amongst “mainstream” Sunnis, minority Islamic traditions of various Sufi orders, and the spiritual lineages of Aleviism. These narratives work together with the sites themselves to build a picture of religious life.

Urban Place Making/ Performing Rural Memories

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Folk Memory Project at Caochangdi WorkstationIn the summer of 2014, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I gave a paper to my Chinese language classmates and instructors introducing Caochangdi Workstation and its Folk Memory Project. It was an act of translation, both from one language into another and of experience into discourse.

Temporary Flows & Ephemeral Cities

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, the physical structure of cities has evolved, morphing, mutating and becoming more malleable, fluid, and more open to change than the technology and social institutions that generate them. Today, urban settlements globally face increasing flows of human movement, acceleration in the amount and periodicity of natural disasters, and iterative economic crises that modify streams of capital and their allocation to physical components of cities. As a consequence, urban settings are required to be more flexible in order to better organize and resist outside and inside pressures. In this context, there is a lot we can learn from “ephemeral cities,” the outcomes of massive contemporary pilgrimages, when rethinking the forms future cities should take and the strategies to intervene in them.

Review of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The fictional works of Haruki Murakami have always been structured according to a quest narrative, but Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage explicitly prioritizes this trajectory. The novel deviates from the author’s publications since Norwegian Wood in its confinement to the mundane, chronological sphere, rather than alternating between mimetic reality and “the other world,” or the supernatural, temporally suspended state where the Murakami protagonist negotiates his or her ontological split within a reified terrain of the subconscious. The author’s predilection for metatextual cartography can be traced to the literalization of the psyche into a mind-map, the most facile identification being the subterranean well—ido in Japanese—with the Freudian id. With the exception of a few comparatively realistic prose works, Boku, the omnipresent and interchangeable Murakami (male) hero, is unfailingly propelled on a quest that culminates in a katabasis (surpassing traditional...

Sites of Representation

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Since its conception, the United Nations (UN) has often convened in spaces that possess extraordinarily rich performance histories. Examples range from the signing of the UN Charter in the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House to the appropriation of former sites of World Fairs for meetings of the General Assembly and more recent ad hoc conventions held within performing arts centers. These theatres do more than solve the logistics of how to assemble a large number of bodies; these spaces perform and they create the conditions for performative action to occur. This photo essay collects a series of images from the UN Online News and Media Photo Archive which document the history of the organization and its work.

From the Fields to the City Gates

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Evocative of cloak swaddled figures crossing windswept moorlands, mountain passes and barren deserts to fall prostrate before some bejewelled splendour in a foreign land, pilgrimage remains one of the most documented and well known phenomena of human history, particularly in Medieval Europe. It also offers an as yet poorly tapped well for research into Medieval sensory history. As an experience both accessible to all, although hyper-personal, and as a window into one of the deepest human yearnings (to access a touchstone with the divine), pilgrimage is a well from whose waters scholars are beginning to drink more deeply.

Dense Ecologies/City and Bay Student Projects

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

From the effects of hydraulic mining in the 19th century, through the combined effects of bay fill in the 20th, to the de-industrialized (and often demilitarized) brownfields of the early 21st, the San Francisco Bay is an exemplary crucible of the often-fraught relationship between cities and the larger ecology that support them. And as the margin’s of today’s bay begin to be returned to a “natural” state through extensive man-made remediation, we seek to question whether the bay can also be a new vessel, of a new kind of relationship between cities and ecologies; one that emphasizes the reciprocal nature of the relationship between urban civilization and natural wild, and avoids oversimplification and image-making in favor of the real complexities of cities and landscapes developing together. As noted by William Cronon, a skeptical attitude about “Nature” is not at all a rejection of the ideals of sustainability and ecological survival; rather, it might be vital to them.

Water's Pilgrimage in Rome

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Rome is one of the world’s most hallowed pilgrimage destinations. Each year, the Eternal City’s numinous qualities draw millions of devout Christians to undertake a pilgrimage there just as they have for nearly two millennia. Visiting the most venerable sites, culminating with St. Peter’s, the Mother Church of Catholicism, the processional journey often reinvigorates faith among believers. It is a cleansing experience for them, a reflective pause in their daily lives and yearly routines. Millions more arrive in Rome with more secular agendas. With equal zeal they set out on touristic, educational, gastronomic, and retail pilgrimages. Indeed, when in Rome, I dedicate at least a full and fervent day to “La Sacra Giornata di Acquistare le Scarpe,” the holy day of shoe shopping, when I visit each of my favorite stores like so many shrines along a sacred way.

GeoGuessr's Digital Pilgrimages

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2012, the BBC posted an article about a thirty-year-old man who found his childhood home using Google Maps. As a child, Saroo Brierley was separated from his brother and could not find his way back to their village. He was taken into an orphanage and eventually adopted by a couple with whom he moved to Tasmania. Twenty-five years later, he was able to locate his original home by looking at street views of roads and settlements around Calcutta. This rediscovery seemed little short of miraculous, given both the size of the country and the haziness of his memory. What led him back to his village was Google Earth’s photographic precision: it captured a familiar landscape in a way that came close to his lost experience of it.

Journey to Juazeiro

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the Brazilian interior’s fastest growing consumer meccas, Juazeiro do Norte also remains the center of a seemingly traditional religious pilgrimage that draws several million visitors to the city each year. The pilgrims—who have become a national media icon for an older Brazil—pay homage to the priest Father Cicero Romão Batista (1844-1934) in a journey initially triggered by his role in a reputed miracle in 1889.

Art, Cinema, and Life Outside the Imperial Ring

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The moving image that confronts a viewer in Kurt Kren and Otto Mühl’s Mama und Papa (1964) is a raucous flurry of flickering parts—mostly body parts—that, more often than not, are almost unrecognizable outside of their gritty yet seductively glistening surface textures. The bodies that appear in the film, including both Mühl’s and Brus’s, are captured from multiple and continually shifting angles as the two engage in various erotic(ized) gestures, from a dry session of coitus more ferarum, to nipple suckling, to indiscernible scenes of fleshiness. These gestures, though, are never shown in their entirety. Instead, they reemerge over and over again, as fragmented, interrupted, and obsessively repetitive image sequences.

The Rhetoric of Return

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Diasporic Homecoming and the New Indian City

“We set out, [my father] and my mother and I, for Karol Bagh. ‘15/64 Western Extension Area, Ajmal Khan Road,’ he chanted momentously in the back of the car. We drove through the wide, fluid streets of the bureaucratic area…the entire area was bursting at the seams: shops and warehouses extended out onto the streets, apartments had grown upwards and outwards into every possible gap, and parked cars filled in the rest. We missed our turn and had to do a U-turn, a mistake that cost us half an hour…My father became increasingly upset as we penetrated deeper and deeper into the end-of-day clamour. ‘Karol Bagh used to be a bagh,’ he said, ‘a garden. I used to ride my bike on these streets. What happened?’”—Rana Dasgupta1

Kingship, Buddhism and the Forging of a Region

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

West Nepal provides a unique space to think about pilgrimage in the past. For many centuries, this central Himalayan region lay at the fringes of neighboring states. During the 13th century CE, the Khasa Malla dynasty established a kingdom here with seasonal capitals at Sinja and Dullu, which soon grew to encompass the entire region as well as parts of India and Tibet (Adhikary 1997; Pandey 1997) (Figure 1). With these developments, the region became a key zone of interaction. Capitalizing on pre-existing routes and connections, it connected India to the Silk Road.

City of One Thousand Temples

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Although the South Indian city of Kanchipuram is popularly known as the City of One Thousand Temples, there is no existing prescribed circuit, and no comprehensive temple listing or map to guide visitors.* Rather, the thousands of pilgrims who flood the city daily usually only know about the five most famous temples. Scattered street signs throughout the busy city point the way to these sprawling monuments, which are always crowded and especially thronged at festival times (Figure 1). However, other pilgrims arrive seeking particular temples.

Blacksmith Caravans on the Move

Fri, 8 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The gaduliya lohar are the traditional travelling blacksmiths of southeastern Rajasthan, who identify their ancestry as weapon makers of the Rajput rulers of Mewad at Chittorgarh. When Mogul king Akbar invaded the fort, they escaped, and ashamed at the failure of their weapons, vowed never to return to Chittorgarh until Mewad was restored. This identity has carried forward to the present, and still defines them as a community. Throughout their history, they have travelled from village to village, repairing and selling farm and household tools. As cities have expanded and industrialized implements have taken the market, the competition is stiff and work has dwindled. But the draw of the city remains, and many lohar have set up camp in the city, for longer periods and with fewer caravan accoutrements, because ox carts are bulky and urban oxen are expensive to maintain. Yet they remain squatters, treated as outsiders wherever they are, because they are permanently camping,...

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta

Fri, 1 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta is a publication produced by the Global Urban Humanities Research Studio, University of California, Berkeley.

Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at University of California, Berkeley.

This exhibition is the product of a research studio focusing on the interactions between art, villages and cities in China’s Pearl River Delta. It is the second in a series of three research studios sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project is a collaboration between the College of Environmental Design and the Arts & Humanities division of the College of Letters and Sciences. Initiated and co-taught by Margaret Crawford (Architecture) and Winnie Wong (Rhetoric) during the spring semester of 2015, the studio critically investigated a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River...

P[art]icipatory Urbanisms- Interviews with Urban Practioners, University of California, Berkeley (2015)

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This publication has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley.

part-urbs.com

P[art]icipatory Urbanisms has been built on the generous contributions of a wide network of scholars, activists, artists, urban organizations, and professionals. We extend special thanks to our collaborators in New Delhi and São Paulo. Research for and production of this publication was made possible through a generous grant from the University of California, Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative (GloUH), which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Special thanks to the principal investigators of GloUH, Jennifer Wolch and Anthony J. Cascardi; GloUH project director Susan Moffat and project assistant Genise Choy; UC Berkeley Professors SanSan Kwan and Rudabeh Pakravan; researchers, editorial assistants, and translators Utsa M. Hazarika, Annie Malcolm, Laura Senteno, Ricardo Vagnotti...

Embodying Peripheries, Firenze University Press (2022)

Tue, 9 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Embodying the Periphery is an interdisciplinary publication sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiatives at the University of California Berkeley.

This book combines approaches from the design disciplines, humanities, and social sciences to foster interdisciplinary engagement across geographies around the identities embodied in and of peripheries. Peripheral communities bear human faces and names, necessitating specific modes of inquiry and commitments that prioritize lived human experience and cultural expression. Hence, the peripheries of this book are a question, not a given, the answers to which are contingent forms assembled around embodied identities. Peripheries are urban fringes, periphery countries in the modern world-system, Indigenous lands, occupied territories, or the peripheries of authoritative knowledge, among others.

Borderwall Urbanisms: Dispatches from the US/Mexico Border, University of California, Berkeley (2018)

Tue, 9 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Borderwall Urbanisms: Dispatches from the US/Mexico Border is a publication produced by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative as part of the Global Urban Humanities Advanced Resaerch Studio, at the University of California, Berkeley, and supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the GUH, or of the board of the foundation.

There are fourteen major sister cities along the United States - Mexico border whose urban, cultural, and ecological networks have been bifurcated by a borderwall. With 650 miles of wall already constructed, and the population in these urban areas expected to grow to over 20 million inhabitants over the next decade, the long-term effects of the wall’s construction must be carefully considered now in order to anticipate the consequences of its incision into a context of rapid growth...

“For the Love of People” Berkeley's Rainbow Sign and the Secret History of the Black Arts Movement in Current Research in Digital History (2019)

Tue, 9 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With its all-female leadership and its balance of black nationalism, experimental art, and the politics of respectability, the Berkeley cultural center Rainbow Sign suggests some of the hidden complexities of the Black Arts Movement as it translated itself into the 1970s. Reflecting on their digital curation of the Rainbow Sign archive, the authors suggest that, while a computation-driven strain of digital history has broken much new methodological ground, another strain of digital history-oriented to a larger public and interested in dramatizing the complexities of primary sources through the affordances of digital media-can also yield fresh arguments through the pressure it puts on primary sources to speak to one another. We suggest that the work of digital curation is especially suited for dramatizing the often invisible curatorial work performed by black women such as Mary Ann Pollar, the founder of Rainbow Sign.

Spatial Scale and the Urban Everyday: The Physiology as a Traveling Genre (Paris: St. Petersburg, Tiflis)- in The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021)

Tue, 9 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Many current paradigms of world literature, aligned to world-systems theory or Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” assume a diffusionist model of literature that situates the origins of literary modernity in the West. This model has found particular favour in the privileged case of the novel, but how do things stand with other genres? This essay examines the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types. Popularly associated with the figure of the urban flaneur and subsequently critiqued by Walter Benjamin, the physiology peaked under the July Monarchy in France and gained unprecedented success in Russian letters where it served to generate the basis of a non-bourgeois public sphere, after which it was also adapted to the circumstances of Russia’s own imperial borderlands. This paper outlines the essential contours of the physiology as it arose in France, in terms of its internal poetics as well as...

Art+Village+City in the Pearl River Delta | Spring 2015 Studio course

Thu, 4 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Instructors: Margaret Crawford (Architecture) and Winnie Wong (Rhetoric)

GSI: Abingo Wu

Term: Spring 2015

Course #: Architecture 209 / Rhetoric 250

Why Read This Case Study?

South China’s Pearl River Delta has long been home to thriving ‘art villages’ – quasi-autonomous local jurisdictions that control their own land – whose economies are anchored by practicing artists producing replica oil paintings for sale around the world. Although the expanding metropolitan Shanghai has enveloped these villages over time, they have maintained their identities and economies based on art reproduction and global markets sales.

The graduate research studio, Art+Village+City, was led by Professor of Architecture Margaret Crawford and Professor of Rhetoric and History of Art Winnie Wong. The studio included students from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, Asian and East Asian studies, art history, art practice, architecture, city planning...

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta (2015)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta is a publication produced by the Global Urban Humanities Research Studio, University of California, Berkeley.

Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at University of California, Berkeley.

P[art]icipatory Urbanisms- an anthology, University of California, Berkeley (2015)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This publication has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley.

part-urbs.com

P[art]icipatory Urbanisms is a compilation of interviews with urban practitioners and a critical anthology of peer-reviewed articles, examining the triangulation of urban participation, aesthetics, and politics. It interrogates the “participatory turn” in contemporary urban studies, performance studies, and art practice. The current revival in participatory, collaborative, relational, and democratic practices in the realms of urban art and planning is, in some ways, a harkening back to participatory ideas of the 1960s. However, given the diverse arenas in which participatory urban activity has been proliferating in the past two decades—including within a range of public, private, civil society, and hybrid formations—participation itself as mode of engagement must be examined as a critical terrain of...

Mexico City: Materiality, Performance and Power- in Thesis Report from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa (2016)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A report of an interdisciplinary collaborative experience between the University of California, Berkeley and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa, exploring characterization of materiality in Mexico City.

Urban Pilgrimage- in Room One Thousand (2015)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A list of city names is enough to evoke the wonder of travel. “Trieste, Zurich, Paris.”—the closing line of James Joyce’s classic Ulysses—provides, as Alain de Botton writes, a record of the book’s production and the cosmopolitanism it grew out of. “Cairo, Bombay, Shanghai” traces other passages, trade routes perhaps or the wandering imagination of oriental fantasies similar to those that run through “Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca.” Thus listed, cities act like nodes along longer lines of travel. While some networks forge the outlines of territory, others trace less grounded modes of connection. The itineraries of travel, scribbled on parchment, etched in stone, or uploaded online, simply serve to recall journeys between places and the connections made and then subsumed within them.

https://www.roomonethousand.com/3-urban-pilgrimage/

Designing by Radical Indigenism- in Landscape Architecture Frontiers (2020)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Looking to Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) sites and traditional ecological knowledge-based infrastructures (Lo–TEK), we find nature-based systems that symbiotically work with the environment. This article suggests that by hybridizing Lo–TEK with high-tech systems, the GIAHS sites could offer designers a toolkit towards economically, ecologically, culturally, and technologically innovative systems that can improve productivity and resilience. Whereas urban development results in the erasure of history, identity, culture and nature, this idea explores how urbanization can be an agent for the migration and reapplication of agricultural heritage systems, rather than their greatest threat. Cities can leap-frog the typical Western model of displacing indigenous diversity for homogenous high-tech. Instead, catalyzing localized, agricultural heritage landscapes like those designated as globally important agricultural heritage systems, as scalable, productive...

Practicing Geohumanities- in GeoHumanities (2015)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The age-old confrontation between two cultures—humanities and science—obscures the fact that their traditions are fundamentally similar in several respects. A primary source of the continuing fracture between the two cultures might simply be practitioners’ preference for exclusionary ontological or epistemological worldviews, expressed most directly through the differing discipline-based standards of evidence that practitioners deploy or are willing to accept. In this article, I consider the nature of practice in the nascent geohumanities by uncovering the tracks of recent convergences in geography and the humanities, and by reflecting on case studies from my own recent work. Three aspects of transdisciplinary scholarly dialogue are highlighted: the standards of practice, the quality of work produced, and the ensuing pedagogy. I suggest ways of replacing the opacities of intellectual difference with the transparencies of recognition; how the outcomes of transdisciplinary practice...

The Neighborhood in the Morro: Heterogeneity, Difference, and Emergence in a Periphery of the Global South- in Lo Squaderno (2019)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Read through its most visible characteristics, the neighborhood in the morro (hill) can be anywhere in the peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, and cities of the global South. Its specificities might disappear within general frameworks used to study urban peripheries, including center-periphery dichotomies, informal urbanism, and the essentialized identity of the poor. This portrait, instead, is about the neighborhood as a landscape of multiple histories, where heterogeneity and difference have produced specific spaces, rhythms, and their sensory emanations. Such an ethnographic approach provides a deeper understanding of emergent forms of the periphery assembled around certain visibilities, practices, and subjectivities, and engaged in uneven patterns of democratic city-making.

Urban Humanities and the Creative Practitioner- in Boom California (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The flow of the Los Angeles River, ever precarious and never navigable, attracted settlement along its shifting course for centuries. When the cataclysmic 1938 flood followed on the heels of lesser, recurrent flooding, the straightening and channeling of fifty-one miles of the river began in earnest, until engineers had riven the city with a concrete conduit from the Chatsworth hills to the South Bay. The channel was built to contain the water, measured in cubic feet per second, predicted to flow during a 100-year flood event. This technocratic solution precluded other forms of the Los Angeles River from emerging. Once channelized, only those alternatives in keeping with its infrastructural identity were conceivable. Therefore, when freight traffic congestion at the Los Angeles–Long Beach Port grew intolerable in the 1980s, the new vision promoted for the river was to pave over it to form a truck freeway. A new river wasn’t inscribed in the public imagination until a motley crew...

The Inside-Out Museum/The Inside-Out University- in Boom California (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 1873 when California’s flagship public university moved to its present location, then part of Oakland Township, the edges of its campus were open to the ranchland surrounding it. The university profoundly shaped the city that incorporated as the Town of Berkeley five years after the campus arrived.

By contrast, the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) was established in a dense urban neighborhood at a time of political turmoil and violence in 1969. The windowless facades of the museum complex appear designed for defensibility, facing downtown Oakland streets and Lake Merritt with walls of raw concrete.

It would be too simple to describe one campus as open and the other as closed. While urban form influences dynamics among institutions and their cities, it does not determine them, and both the university and the museum have a complex history of interactions with their settings. Now, both institutions are examining their connections to their publics and the relationships...

What Are the Urban Humanities?- in Boom California (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The efforts in research and teaching that fly under the flag of the “urban humanities” represent one example of a much larger set of phenomena that have emerged across humanistic disciplines for the past two decades. That hybrid initiatives like this have appeared alongside many more broad-based interdisciplinary efforts is telling of the challenges involved in attempting to transform the knowledge and practices that had settled into more or less stable institutional configurations. The existing configurations have proven difficult to change because our institutions are less malleable than we might wish, and because they provide a sense of permanence—some would say a false sense of permanence—in the face of broad shifts in the external conditions surrounding the academic enterprise such as the withdrawal of public support for state institutions and the privatization of higher education across all sectors. But the naturalization of disciplines cannot be a good thing because it...

The Battle of the Bulb: Nature, Culture and Art at a San Francisco Bay Landfill- in Boom California (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On a misty afternoon in early 2014, you sail into San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge, threading the passage between San Francisco’s steep urban slopes on your right and the green hills of Marin County on your left. Gliding between two of the wealthiest peninsulas in the world, you continue past Alcatraz Island on the diminishing swell until the Bay opens up to the north and south. Silicon Valley is a hazy presence on the horizon off to the south, and the peak of Angel Island pokes up to the north.

You spot the industrial shores of the East Bay. The four-legged, skyscraper-sized gantries of the Port of Oakland loom to the right, and the remains of the Richmond shipyards are off to the left.

Relocating Romare Bearden’s Berkeley: Capturing Berkeley’s Colorful Diversity- in Boom California (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 1972, the black artist and writer Romare Bearden traveled from his home in New York to spend ten days in the capital of counterculture—Berkeley, California. He visited on an official commission from the city of Berkeley to create a new artwork for its City Council Chambers. The result was the monumental work Berkeley—The City and its People, which hung for decades until the extensive seismic trouble that plagues City Hall forced its removal to a storage facility. Painted in bright colors, featuring a rainbow and a series of Berkeley’s best-known sites, the complete mural is often read as a celebration of urban harmony.

Monumental Hydraulics: Diego Rivera’s Lerma Waterworks and the Water Temples of San Francisco- in Boom California (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Monumental Hydraulics: Diego Rivera’s Lerma Waterworks and the Water Temples of San Francisco- in Boom California (2016)

Art+Village+City- in Thresholds (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The following materials are the product of a studio, sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley, which critically investigated a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta, exploring their historical development, current state, and future potential. These sites ranged from Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, which exports hundreds of thousands of trade paintings around the world, to Xiaozhou Village in Guangzhou, where local artists and art teachers transformed village houses into studios and galleries, and to the collaborative architectural project of Japanese architect Fujimoto and Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. The studio aimed to analyze the ways in which villagers, artists, officials, migrants, developers, entrepreneurs leverage art practices in order to reimagine urban life and urban citizenship. Texts by Winnie Wong and Margaret Crawford, designed by Ettore Santi with artworks by José Figueroa, images and research by Story...

Waves of Data: Illuminating Pathways with San Leandro Lights- in Boom California (2016)

Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On 20 May 2014, Brittney Silva, a student nearing graduation from San Leandro High School, was walking along the train tracks to her home and talking on the phone. She was using her earbuds and did not hear an Amtrak train approach. She was fatally struck, and her body was retrieved fifty yards from the impact site.

That same week, I met with San Leandro’s Chief Innovation Officer, Debbie Acosta, to discuss opportunities for collaboration between the city and University of California, Berkeley. With the tragedy of Brittney Silva’s death fresh in everyone’s memory, Acosta urged me to do something to make the city safer for pedestrians. When I asked, “How many people walk in San Leandro?” Acosta replied, “We can tell you how much water we use, we can tell you how many cars are waiting at red lights, we can tell you how many streetlights are on, but we have no idea how many people walk where or when.”

That conversation inspired a course I developed with my UC Berkeley...

Populism, art and the city: An interdisciplinary pedagogy for our time- in Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (2018)

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Populism on the far left and the far right is reshaping the contemporary city and the urban condition. In this special short-form section, we put forward populism, art and the city as a linked theoretical and methodological framework through the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Our conversations brought together new research in urban studies, art, architecture, public policy, and performance studies into what many people described as a decidedly populist age. Following a short introduction, we share a collection of four papers from such conversations that offer ‘focus sites’ from San Francisco to Palm Springs, Hong Kong to Mexico City, with a diverse set of theoretical proposals that branch from our discussions and shared readings in art, populism, and the city.

Student Articles include-• “Demanding the city: Traces of the UN 50 protests in San Francisco” by Jeff Garnard• “Is forensic architecture the new muralism of the Mexican state? A reflection on racialized...