Upscaling Downtown

Upscaling Downtown PDF Author: Richard E. Ocejo
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176310
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Once known for slum-like conditions in its immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, New York City's downtown now features luxury housing, chic boutiques and hotels, and, most notably, a vibrant nightlife culture. While a burgeoning bar scene can be viewed as a positive sign of urban transformation, tensions lurk beneath, reflecting the social conflicts within postindustrial cities. Upscaling Downtown examines the perspectives and actions of disparate social groups who have been affected by or played a role in the nightlife of the Lower East Side, East Village, and Bowery. Using the social world of bars as windows into understanding urban development, Richard Ocejo argues that the gentrifying neighborhoods of postindustrial cities are increasingly influenced by upscale commercial projects, causing significant conflicts for the people involved. Ocejo explores what community institutions, such as neighborhood bars, gain or lose amid gentrification. He considers why residents continue unsuccessfully to protest the arrival of new bars, how new bar owners produce a nightlife culture that attracts visitors rather than locals, and how government actors, including elected officials and the police, regulate and encourage nightlife culture. By focusing on commercial newcomers and the residents who protest local changes, Ocejo illustrates the contested and dynamic process of neighborhood growth. Delving into the social ecosystem of one emblematic section of Manhattan, Upscaling Downtown sheds fresh light on the tensions and consequences of urban progress.

Upscaling Downtown

Upscaling Downtown PDF Author: Richard E. Ocejo
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176310
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Once known for slum-like conditions in its immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, New York City's downtown now features luxury housing, chic boutiques and hotels, and, most notably, a vibrant nightlife culture. While a burgeoning bar scene can be viewed as a positive sign of urban transformation, tensions lurk beneath, reflecting the social conflicts within postindustrial cities. Upscaling Downtown examines the perspectives and actions of disparate social groups who have been affected by or played a role in the nightlife of the Lower East Side, East Village, and Bowery. Using the social world of bars as windows into understanding urban development, Richard Ocejo argues that the gentrifying neighborhoods of postindustrial cities are increasingly influenced by upscale commercial projects, causing significant conflicts for the people involved. Ocejo explores what community institutions, such as neighborhood bars, gain or lose amid gentrification. He considers why residents continue unsuccessfully to protest the arrival of new bars, how new bar owners produce a nightlife culture that attracts visitors rather than locals, and how government actors, including elected officials and the police, regulate and encourage nightlife culture. By focusing on commercial newcomers and the residents who protest local changes, Ocejo illustrates the contested and dynamic process of neighborhood growth. Delving into the social ecosystem of one emblematic section of Manhattan, Upscaling Downtown sheds fresh light on the tensions and consequences of urban progress.

Upscaling Downtown

Upscaling Downtown PDF Author: Brett Williams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501711628
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In Upscaling Downtown, anthropologist Brett Williams provides an ethnography of a changing urban neighborhood that she calls "Elm Valley." Located in Washington, D.C., Elm Valley was one of the first neighborhoods to draw middle-class property owners back to the inner city, but a faltering housing industry halted what might have been the rapid displacement of the poor. As a result, Elm Valley experienced several years of stalled gentrification. It was a period when very unlikely people lived side by side: black families who had migrated to the nation's capital from the Carolinas decades earlier, newly arrived refugees from Central America and Southeast Asia, and more prosperous whites. For Williams, a ten-year resident of Elm Valley, stalled gentrification offered a rare opportunity to observe how people 'with varied cultural traditions and economic resources saw and used the neighborhood in which they lived.

Co-Creative Placekeeping in Los Angeles

Co-Creative Placekeeping in Los Angeles PDF Author: Brettany Shannon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100382076X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Co-Creative Placekeeping in Los Angeles is a novel examination of Los Angeles-based socially engaged art (SEA) practitioners’ equitable placekeeping efforts. A new concept, equitable placekeeping describes the inclination of historically marginalized community members to steward their neighborhood’s development, improve local amenities, engage in social and cultural production, and assert a mutual sense of self-definition—and the efforts of SEA artists to aid them. Emerging from in-depth interviews with eight Southern California artists and teams, Co-Creative reveals how artists engage community members, sustain relationships, and defy the presumption that residents cannot speak for themselves. Drawing on these artists and theoretical analysis of their praxes, the book explicates equitable community engagement by exploring not just the creative projects but also the underlying phenomena that inspire and sustain them: community, engagement, relationships, and defiance. What further sets this book apart is how it deviates from the conventional who and what of SEA projects to foreground the how and the why that inspire and necessitate collectively creative action. Co-Creative is for anyone studying arts-based community development and gentrification, given it complicates and enriches the current conversation about art’s undeniable and increasingly controversial role in neighborhood change. It will also be of interest to researchers and students of urban studies.

Lady Friends

Lady Friends PDF Author: Karen L. Ito
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721801
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Many indigenous Hawaiians who have moved to the islands' cities languish at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale and are thought to have lost their cultural roots. Initially apolitical urban Hawaiians were often skeptical of activists who sought to revitalize traditional ways; yet, as Karen L. Ito shows, Hawaiian women in particular continue to maintain and express crucial aspects of their cultural heritage in their lifestyle and interactions with others. Ito conducted intensive fieldwork with six Honolulu families, all of which shared the distinguishing characteristics of Hawaii's matrifocal society. In her close examination of the friendships and family relations among the women in these households, she focuses on the significance of a traditional manner of speech known as "talk story" which they use when conversing together. She describes how her subjects employ metaphoric language to address issues concerning responsibility, retribution, understandings of self and personhood, and methods for conflict resolution. For these "lady friends," Ito finds, the emotional quality and quantity of their social relationships help define personal identity while their common concepts of morality bind them together. By applying ethnopsychological strategies to the exploration of culture, Ito demonstrates cultural continuity at a level where most observers would not expect to find it. Lady Friends brings a new dimension to Hawaiian research.

Wanderings

Wanderings PDF Author: Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720406
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In one of the first books devoted to the experience of Sudanese immigrants and exiles in the United States, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf places her community into context, showing its increasing historical and political significance. Abusharaf herself participates in many aspects of life in the migrant community and in the Sudan in ways that a non-Sudanese could not. Attending religious events, social gatherings, and meetings, Abusharaf discovers that a national sense of common Sudanese identity emerges more strongly among immigrants in North America than it does at home. Sudanese immigrants use informal transatlantic networks to ease the immigration process, and act on the local level to help others find housing and employment. They gather for political activism, to share feasts, and to celebrate marriages, always negotiating between tradition and the challenges of their new surroundings.Abusharaf uses a combination of conversations with Sudanese friends, interviews, and life histories to portray several groups among the Sudanese immigrant population: Southern war refugees, including the "Lost Boys of Sudan," spent years in camps in Kenya or Uganda; professionals were expelled from the Gulf because their country's rulers backed Iraq in the Gulf War; Christian Copts suffered from religious persecution in Sudan; and women migrated alone.

Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture

Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture PDF Author: Laurie Hanquinet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135008884
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Arts and Culture offers a comprehensive overview of sociology of art and culture, focusing especially – though not exclusively – on the visual arts, literature, music, and digital culture. Extending, and critiquing, Bourdieu’s influential analysis of cultural capital, the distinguished international contributors explore the extent to which cultural omnivorousness has eclipsed highbrow culture, the role of age, gender and class on cultural practices, the character of aesthetic preferences, the contemporary significance of screen culture, and the restructuring of popular culture. The Handbook critiques modes of sociological determinism in which cultural engagement is seen as the simple product of the educated middle classes. The contributions explore the critique of Eurocentrism and the global and cosmopolitan dimensions of cultural life. The book focuses particularly on bringing cutting edge ‘relational’ research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to bear on these debates. This handbook not only describes the field, but also proposes an agenda for its development which will command major international interest.

The New Urban Frontier

The New Urban Frontier PDF Author: Neil Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134787464
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness. The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.

American Odyssey

American Odyssey PDF Author: Michel Laguerre
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727494
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Caribbean immigrants have now become part of the social landscape of many American cities. Few studies, however, have treated in detail the process of their integration in American society. American Odyssey assesses the development and adaptation, in both human and socio-economic terms, of the Haitian immigrant community in three boroughs of New York City. An informed and well-rounded portrayal of a Caribbean community in New York, this book offers a fresh theoretical view of the structuring of urban ethnicity and provides the ethnographic background essential to understanding the problems of the Haitian population in the United States.

"Getting Paid"

Author: Mercer L. Sullivan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717693
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The working class in New York City was remade in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1820s a substantial majority of city artisans were native-born; by the 1850s three-quarters of the city's laboring men and women were immigrants. How did the influx of this large group of young adults affect the city's working class? What determined the texture of working-class life during the antebellum period? Richard Stott addresses these questions as he explores the social and economic dimensions of working-class culture. Working-class culture, Stott maintains, is grounded in the material environment, and when work, population, consumption, and the uses of urban space change as rapidly as they did in the mid-nineteenth century, culture will be transformed. Using workers' first-person accounts—letters, diaries, and reminiscences—as evidence, and focusing on such diverse topics as neighborhoods, diet, saloons, and dialect, he traces the rise of a new, youth-oriented working-class culture. By illuminating the everyday experiences of city workers, he shows that the culture emerging in the 1850s was a culture clearly different from that of native-born artisans of an earlier period and from that of the middle class as well.

The Magic City

The Magic City PDF Author: Gregory Pappas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150172469X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Thirty-two million Americans have lost jobs because of permanent factory closings since 1970. Gregory Pappas here provides an intimate account of the economic, social, psychological, and medical consequences of one such closing. Once known as "the magic city" of economic opportunity, Barberton, Ohio, is an industrial working-class town of second- and third-generation factory workers. When the Seiberling tire plant in Barberton was closed in 1980, over 1200 jobs were eliminated. Drawing on extensive research, including surveys and interviews with workers laid off by the closing, Pappas offers an incisive analysis of their responses to unemployment. Pappas first details the ways in which the unemployed rubber workers have met their economic needs in the face of declining income. He next evaluates their success in reentering the labor market, as he examines the job-hunting process, the unemployment insurance system, and workers' initiatives toward retraining and relocation. Turning to the psychological effects of the shutdown on workers and their families, Pappas describes unemployed workers' responses to the loss of status, identity, participation in the community, and sense of time. He next considers central historical questions, offering an explanation of the contemporary rise in unemployment and analyzing the prior development of this community that must now bear the burden of change. Two detailed portraits document the adaptations of individuals to the shutdown and explore the complex relationship between social change and personality.