Cities do not grow organically. Rather, they are physical manifestations of creativity, conflict, community collaboration, and people's competing ideologies, use-values, expressions, and desires. The urban environment is the product of technical, legal, and logistical expertise wielded from the top-down by planners, politicians, engineers, investors and developers, as well as an amalgam of lived spaces produced by members of subcultures and subgroups that make place from the bottom-up.
In our focus on bottom-up urbanism, we moved through the material coming out of the disciplines of geography, urban studies, sociology, and cultural criminology that call attention to do-it-yourself, creative, guerilla, vernacular, and tactical urbanism. We discussed topics including spatial justice, the “right to the city,” gentrification, neighborhood change, anarchism, subcultural practice, contestation and transgression, Latino/a urbanism and the “black spatial imaginary,” racial and class segregation as an outcome of white power, and various incarnations of social, symbolic, economic, and cultural capital at the scale of the neighborhood.
This site serves as a curated space and on-line repository for work by members of this advanced seminar who researched and presented on some form of bottom-up urbanism—from the production of graffiti and street art, to illegal forms of habitation and localized manifestations of cultural insurgency—during the spring 2015 semester at Brown University.
— Dr. Stefano Bloch, Urban Studies, Brown University
[email protected]
In our focus on bottom-up urbanism, we moved through the material coming out of the disciplines of geography, urban studies, sociology, and cultural criminology that call attention to do-it-yourself, creative, guerilla, vernacular, and tactical urbanism. We discussed topics including spatial justice, the “right to the city,” gentrification, neighborhood change, anarchism, subcultural practice, contestation and transgression, Latino/a urbanism and the “black spatial imaginary,” racial and class segregation as an outcome of white power, and various incarnations of social, symbolic, economic, and cultural capital at the scale of the neighborhood.
This site serves as a curated space and on-line repository for work by members of this advanced seminar who researched and presented on some form of bottom-up urbanism—from the production of graffiti and street art, to illegal forms of habitation and localized manifestations of cultural insurgency—during the spring 2015 semester at Brown University.
— Dr. Stefano Bloch, Urban Studies, Brown University
[email protected]
Seminar Reading List
(in order of completion)
Soja, E. W. (2010). “On the Production of Unjust Geographies” and “Building a Spatial Theory of
Justice” from Seeking Spatial Justice.
Harvey, D. (1973). “Social Processes and Spatial Form” from Social Justice and the City.
Logan, J. and Molotch, H. (1987/2007). “Places as Commodities” from Urban Fortunes: The Political
Economy of Place.
Lipsitz, G. (2011). How Racism Takes Place. Temple University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1968). “La Droit de la Ville” (“The Right to the City”).
Harvey, D. (2008). “The Right to the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Iveson, K. (2013) “Cities within the City: Do-It-Yourself urbanism and the right to the city.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(3).
Marcuse, P. (2009). “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City.” City, 13.
Talen, E. (2014). "Do-it-Yourself Urbanism: A history." Journal of Planning History.
Finn, D. (2014). “DIY Urbanism: Implications for cities.” Journal of Urbanism: International Research
on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability.
Mould, O. (2014). “Tactical Urbanism: The New Vernacular of the Creative City.” Geography Compass,
8(8).
Douglas, G.C.C. (2014). “Do-It-Yourself Urban Design : The social practice of informal improvement’
through unauthorized alteration.” City & Community 13(1).
Merker, B. (2009). “Taking Place: Rebar’s absurd tactics in generous urbanism” from Hou, J. (ed.).
Insurgent Public Apace: Guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of contemporary cities.
Karsten, L. (2009). From a Top-down to a Bottom-up Urban Discourse: (Re)constructing the city in a
family-inclusive way. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 24(3).
Deslandes, A. (2013) “Exemplary Amateurism: Thoughts on DIY urbanism.” Cultural Studies 19(1).
Bloch. S. (2012). “The Illicit Face of Wall Space: Graffiti-murals in Los Angeles.” Radical History
Review, 113.
Mould, O. (2015). “The Creative Class(ification) of Cities” from Urban Subversion and the Creative
City. Routledge.
Dovey, K., Wollan, S., and Woodcock, I. (2012). Placing Graffiti: Creating and contesting character in
inner-city Melbourne. Journal of Urban Design, 17(1).
Ley, D. (2003) “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification.” Urban studies, 40(12).
Bourdieu, P. (1986). “The Forms of Capital.”
Harvey, D. (1990). Flexible Accumulation Through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘post-modernism’ in
the American city. Perspecta.
Fischer, C. S. (1995). “The Subcultural Theory of Urbanism: A twentieth-year assessment.” American
Journal of Sociology.
Williams, J. P. (2007). Youth‐Subcultural Studies: Sociological traditions and core concepts.
Sociology Compass, 1(2).
Daskalaki, M., and Mould, O. (2013). Beyond Urban Subcultures: Urban subversions as rhizomatic
social formations. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(1).
Morgan, G. (2012). Urban Renewal and the Creative Underclass: Aboriginal youth subcultures in
Sydney’s Redfern-Waterloo. Journal of Urban Affairs, 34(2).
Morgan, G. and Ren, X. (2012). “The Creative Underclass: Culture, subculture, and urban
renewal.” Journal of Urban Affairs, 34(2).
From Hou, (ed.). Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla urbanism and remaking of contemporary cities:
Rios, M. (2010). “Claiming Latino Space: Cultural insurgency in the public realm.”
Villagomez, E. (2010). “Claiming Residual Space in the Heterogeneous City.”
Rojas, J. (2010). “Latino Urbanism is Los Angeles: A model for urban improvisation and
Reinvention.”
Sassen, S. 2014. “Complex and Incomplete: Spaces for tactical urbanism” from Gadanho, P., Burdett,
R., Cruz, T., Harvey, D., Sassen, S., and Tehrani, N. Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for
Expanding Megacities.
Sennett, R. (1970). The Uses of Disorder.
Springer, S. (2013). Anarchism and Geography: A brief genealogy of anarchist geographies.
Geography Compass, 7(1).
Ferrell, J. (2001). Remapping the City: Public identity, cultural space, and social justice.
Contemporary Justice Review, 4(2).
Halsey, M., and Young, A. (2006). ‘Our Desires are Ungovernable’: Writing graffiti in urban space.
Theoretical criminology, 10(3).
McAuliffe, C. (2012) “Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the moral geographies of the creative city.”
Journal of Urban Affairs, 34(2).
Ferrell, J. (1996). “Crimes of Style” from Crimes of style: Urban graffiti and the politics of criminality.
Ferrell, J. (2009). “Against Method, Against Authority… for Anarchy” from Amster, R., DeLeon, A.,
Fernandez, L., Nocella, A. J., & Shannon, D. (eds.). Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An
introductory anthology of anarchy in the academy.
Cresswell, T. (1996). In Place/Out of Place. Graffiti, Ideology, and Transgression. University of
Minnesota Press.
Young, A. (2013). Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. Routledge.
Tonkiss, F. (2014). Cities by Design: the Social Life of Urban Form. Wiley & Sons.