No abstract

This article examines the stages by which Harland Bartholomew, one of the leading planners of the twentieth century, consolidated a professional identity by producing a corpus of specialized knowledge about the city. Between 1915, when he arrived in St. Louis, and 1950, when he retired from civil service to run his private firm, Bartholomew cultivated a professional practice through activities of widely varied scope. He grounded these activities in an urban knowledge system that disciplined the ways in which planning interventions were imagined, organized, and implemented. At the core of this system was a conception of the city as an amalgam of parts, the functions of which could be studied through the derivation of land use ratios. Using St. Louis as a laboratory, Bartholomew assembled a vision of the city and a planning methodology that paved the way for dramatic urban reconstruction after World War II.

This study presents a series of everyday spaces in Swahili cities in order to problematize current urban heritage practices and to call for a more critical approach to conservation. Efforts to save elements of the Swahili built environment are hampered by colonial legacies that frame conservation in terms of pure archetypes, static taxonomies, and racially distinct building cultures. Conservationists draw on these legacies in defining particular architectural and landscape forms as ‘traditional’, and therefore worthy of protection. Ironically, these ‘traditional’ forms emerged within the crucible of an ever‐changing urban condition where the ‘tradition’ was innovation. The question thus arises as to the ultimate object of conservation practice: select buildings or the cultural processes that produced them? Through a careful reading of the Swahili built environment, this article examines key locations where urban spaces are formed, contested, and remade. The study concludes that to reflect the dynamic, multifaceted and cosmopolitan character of Swahili cities, conservationists must pay close attention to the ill‐fitting spaces where landscape innovations arise. Not only will this approach augur a more socially just organization of urban cultural resources, it will more accurately reflect the lived realities of Swahili cities in a global age. Résumé À travers plusieurs espaces du quotidien dans des villes swahilies, cette étude met en question les pratiques actuelles liées au patrimoine urbain et appelle à une approche plus critique de la préservation. Les démarches de sauvegarde d'éléments de l'environnement bâti swahili sont entravées par des héritages coloniaux qui enferment la conservation dans des archétypes purs, des taxonomies statiques et des cultures de construction racialisées. Les défenseurs de l'environnement utilisent ces héritages pour qualifier certaines formes d'architecture et de paysage de ‘traditionnelles’, donc dignes d'être protégées. Paradoxalement, ces formes sont apparues dans un cadre urbain en constante évolution où la ‘tradition’était une innovation. Ce qui pose la question du but ultime de la sauvegarde pratiquée: des bâtiments privilégiés ou les processus culturels qui les produisent? Tout en déchiffrant l'environnement bâti swahili, l'article examine les lieux prépondérants où les espaces urbains sont façonnés, contestés et remaniés. D'après les conclusions, s'ils veulent traduire le caractère dynamique et cosmopolite des villes swahilies aux multiples facettes, les défenseurs de cet environnement doivent prêter une attention particulière aux espaces mal adaptés où naissent des paysages innovants. Non seulement cette approche annoncera une meilleure justice sociale dans l'organisation des ressources culturelles urbaines, mais elle offrira aussi une image plus exacte des réalités vécues dans les villes swahilies à l'ère de la mondialisation.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider Mexico City’s street markets as temporary and modular architectural products that emerge out of intensive, routine and repeated negotiations over urban spatial affordances in a crowded metropolitan environment. Particular attention is given to the polychromatic visual form, not as some detached work of art, but as a collection of tiny signals of the labor, commerce and social relations unfolding below. Design/methodology/approach For this paper, the author has deployed a methodological approach that blends scholarship and creative practice. From 2016 to 2018, the author conducted fieldwork during three trips to Mexico City, making site visits, undertaking structured observation and engaging in conversations with vendors and customers. The author also collected data available from various municipal agencies, and reportage from newspaper articles, blogs and magazines. Meanwhile, the author developed a creative practice method grounded in the production of rendered aerial views, which allowed for the identification of typologies based on the organizational logics of the street markets. Findings The paper identifies five typologies of street market, including: the linear, the circuit, the cluster, the contour and the hybrid. The application of these typologies by street market vendors allows for the optimal exploitation of spatial allotments for buying and selling goods. In the end, the paper reveals the polychromatic markets as expressions of an assemblage aesthetic, each a variation on a theme grounded in the cumulative daily choices, desires, routines and thickly woven collaborations of working-class people in one of the world’s great conurbations. Research limitations/implications The study is based on a limited number of cases. There are currently 1,400 street markets regularly operating in Mexico City, 200 of which set up on any given day. In order to provide some depth and texture to the study, this paper only examines 15 markets falling into the five typologies identified above. Further research would help to refine these typologies, quantify the daily and quarterly transactions that take place in the markets and assess the impacts of street vending on their surroundings. Social implications Mexico City’s street markets provide employment for some 800,000 vendors, suppliers, transporters and laborers. They also provide one-fifth of all household goods purchased in the city and 40 percent of all fresh produce. And despite the conflicts that arise, they offer an associational approach to the labor of street vending, as well as crucial economic opportunities for women with children. However, it is apparent that street markets face a range of challenges that could be mitigated with supportive policies. Originality/value While there is a small and growing literature on Mexico City’s street markets, there is no work to date that examines the assemblage aesthetic that comprises their daily emergence on the landscape. Nor do any extant studies situate the aesthetic composition within the varied urban forms, social relations and labor practices that undergird the street markets.

In this article, I examine the origins and development of the National Training and Information Center (NTIC) in Chicago as part of a broader neighborhood organizing movement. I am particularly interested in the development of a philosophy and strategy of civic action in a postindustrial era. One of the most influential forms of grassroots urban activism in the 20th century was Saul Alinsky's community organizing movement. This movement, I argue, relied upon a relatively stable cadre of mass institutions including unions, the New Deal Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church. However, by the 1960s, these institutions fell into decline alongside the changing political, economic, and social conditions of the city wrought by deindustrialization. Neighborhood organizing arose in the late 1960s as one response to these changing conditions, and its emergence reflects an important shift in the methodologies of urban social action. Yet I conclude that the lack of a broad agenda for social change is a weakness of neighborhood organizing inherited from Alinsky, and that this weakness constitutes a major challenge for NTIC and like groups.