Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2022

Altgeld Gardens is one of Chicago’s last remaining family public housing developments after the city’s large-scale conversion of public housing into mixed-income communities. Located at the far southern edge of the city, the community today is an island of poverty, disconnected from city services, jobs, amenities and even grocery stores. In this article, I draw on architectural plans and historic housing authority documents to demonstrate that Altgeld’s current condition is a far cry from how planners envisioned the community: as nothing short of a utopian housing development capable of supporting workers and their families and indeed, inculcating an ideal, modern citizen that would justify public investment in housing for the poor. Altgeld was, centrally, envisioned as a city for children, a kind of paradise where young, low-income Chicago families could overcome poverty and model respectability. Throughout, I draw upon theories of utopian communities to argue that geographic and social isolation was the precondition for planners’ utopian imaginations, but that isolation has also, ironically, only exacerbated Altgeld’s problems over the decades. Altgeld thus offers an instructive case study, illustrating both the modernist hopes embedded in early public housing plans and their limitations. Unlike its whiter, more affluent suburban counterparts, Altgeld is a case study in what happens when communities are isolated by policy, rather than by choice.

Edith Wharton consistently uses ‘metropolis’ as her crowning label of urban modernity. Throughout her body of work, she applies the word to two cities: Paris and New York, which is reflective of a broader trend in humanistic representations of the modern metropolis and urban modernity. In her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, Wharton identifies and writes New York metropolitanism, laying the foundation for the later widespread representation of New York as the capital of the twentieth century, as Paris has been the emblematic capital of the nineteenth century. Her work connects our present urban modernity to the urban modernization projects of the nineteenth century, while The Age of Innocence, in particular, narrates the myriad forms the modern metropolis has taken over the last century, ranging from metropolitan geographical expansion, to the centre of culture, the centre of fashion (commercial and artistic) and the technological metropolis. Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a compelling example of how the modern metropolis was used historically to represent the height of modern urbanity. It provides an exemplary case study of the concept as it became a part of the modern urban lexicon.

This article provides a close reading of a book entitled A Little Bit of Beijing published in 2013, which has been well received by the Chinese public. The book presents detailed and meticulous architectural style diagrams, comic strips and panoramic drawings of three urban districts in Beijing. These visualizations provide evocative depictions of the buildings along with their interior spaces in these urban areas, calling for more attention to the role of ‘ordinary’ buildings of small shops in understanding these urban neighbourhoods. In this article, I analyse this book project with a focus on its visualizations through two dimensions: understanding the urban conditions that shape and are visualized by these visualizations and understanding the visualizations as a form of mapping. For the first dimension, I argue that the urban conditions underpinning, and depicted by, A Little Bit of Beijing resonate with the notion of ‘messy urbanism’. For the second dimension, I contend that A Little Bit of Beijing constitutes a form of slow mapping. Viewed from these two dimensions, these visualizations show subversive possibilities in addressing urban transformation issues in China as well as questioning the more conventional ways of mapping urban spaces.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder during the summer of 2020, protestors painted large ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ murals on streets of the United States, forcing politicians to confront these words tattooing their cities. Each creation and reception of a Black Lives Matter (BLM) mural is entwined within the machinations of city bureaucracies whose foundations are built upon racial capitalism and is enforced by militarized police. To analyse the removal of Black Lives Matter murals is to contextualize them within this history of racialized police violence and erasure, but to do so within an environment of mundane policy-hearings. The removal of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s BLM mural by its city government will be a case study of how bureaucracy can implement ‘race neutral’ policy language that ‘leaves no choice’ but erasure. But while some conservative politicians erased BLM murals to neutralize the radical abolitionist and police reform messages, other politicians similarly embraced the creation of BLM murals as a buffer against, instead of a bridge to, making substantial structural change. Washington, DC’s famous BLM mural will be my exemplar of this type of deceptive radical performative politics. This article explores how protest movements and bureaucracies interact, focusing on how the radical demands of the BLM movement can be subsumed by ‘colour blind’ city responses and/or performative politics while pointing to larger combative histories of how race is policed within the United States.

Kerry Tribe’s recent film on the Los Angeles River, Exquisite Corpse (2016), blurs the lines between genres. With aspects of documentary and experimental filmmaking, it captures interactions among human and non-human life, ecological systems and machines along the river. This article develops a post-anthropocentric aesthetics from the film by drawing on Sianne Ngai’s book, Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) work on post-anthropocentrism. Bringing these resources together leads to three productive transformations of Ngai’s categories: the commodity aesthetic of cuteness becomes the differential aesthetic of interaction; the performative aesthetic of zaniness becomes the functional aesthetic of activity; and the discursive aesthetic of information becomes the peri-discursive aesthetic of sensation. The article concludes by arguing that these three aesthetic categories are well suited for describing how the contemporary built environment and the complexity of life within it might be perceived and assessed and, following Jacques Rancière, affirms these categories’ role in building a politics that is attuned to such complexities.

Since 2013, the cultural–historical project Rolé Carioca has encouraged residents of Rio de Janeiro to reconnect with their city. Focusing on the project’s walking tours, this article examines how Rolé Carioca navigates a neo-liberal context to encourage residents of Rio to return to the street from the fortified enclaves to which they have retreated for business, leisure and housing and to visit long-denigrated areas of the city, such as its suburbs. This article elucidates the infrastructures Rolé Carioca uses to transform areas of Rio into sites of leisure for its walking tour participants. It argues that the project pursues its aims by encouraging participants to engage with their city in ways akin to, but subtly different from the flâneurs of the nineteenth century. It also probes the history and paradoxes of the means by which Rolé Carioca seeks to reconnect those who attend its events with Rio.