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doi: 10.1068/d020003pmid: N/A
The current crisis in architecture's effectual and significative power is the result of historical processes which have boon analyzed (by the Left) as the development of industrial capitalism and (by Foucault) as the development of technical-instrumental power. These processes have led to the loss of the authority of the divine referential, of the authenticity of the object, and of our sense of historicity. To recover the power of meaning (beyond mere instrumentality, nostalgic sentimentality, and power emblems), the communicative relations between spatial structure and human life-praxis must be investigated critically. Only then will architecture and urban space contribute their hermencutic power to the retrieval of the human potential to appropriate the world, The powers of architecture consist in (a) its ability to influence the spatiotemporal articulation of life-praxis and thus to condition one's fundamental relations to the world and to oneself, and (b) its ability to communicate to us about this world and ourselves, In a period of retrenchment and loss of nerve, the relative functional indifference of architecture can become an opening through which one may glimpse more humanizing relations with others and with nature, More specifically, the powers of architecture can be deployed to implant counterpractices resisting depowerment in the societal context, As part of economic praxis, architecture and urban structure can make possible and can communicate self-determined multiple uses and the life-values involved in them; as part of politics, architecture can encourage direct communication and local action and negotiation; as part of culture, architectural and urban space can open paths to reconstruct and reexperience the fundamental qualities of nature and the societal other, and it can allow us to reappropriate the world by enabling us to open up a horizon for new values and corresponding new forms of praxis; and finally, against the city conceived as an abstract network of instrumentalized powers, architecture could pose the open and articulated city, in which proximity with relatedness safeguards what cities historically have contributed to life-praxis and in which space is a liberative significant component.
doi: 10.1068/d020023pmid: N/A
Turner's frontier thesis and Mackinder's heartland thesis are examples of closed-space thinking, Closed-space theories were current at the beginning of this century when public debate was penetrated both by biology and by geography. This conjuncture allowed spatial concepts to form the basis for the theoretical arguments advanced for political positions. The internal structure of closed-space theories allowed them to promote political conclusions, because the three central terms of those theories (environment, history, recent fundamental changes) were ‘essentially contestable1 and capable of interpretations which supported particular political arguments. The specific political arguments promoted by Turner and Mackinder dictated the interpretations they chose and thus the internal structure of their theories. The political significance of their work was tied to the existence of two inherently unstable political alliances riven with economic contradictions, This emphasis on the internal structure of these theories enables one to appreciate how they could convince, and both the content and the logic of these approaches are amenable to contextual interpretation.
doi: 10.1068/d020035pmid: N/A
A distinction between people prosperity and place prosperity is common in the regional economics and urban policy literatures. In this paper, I criticize the distinction on the grounds that a radical distinction between people and place can only be made if one adopts an economic ideology that ‘commodifics' people and places. Government policies that rest on the distinction are presented from England, Canada, and the United States of America to illustrate the consequences of this type of thinking and the justification it provides for antisocial private and governmental investment decisions.
doi: 10.1068/d020047pmid: N/A
In this paper, I make a critical assessment of the ways that issues relating to the ‘gentrification’ of inner-city neighbourhoods have been conceptualised, especially in North America, in both positivist and extant marxist work, I aim to rethink the processes generating ‘gentrification’ and ‘gentrifiers' and our ‘ways of seeing’ the results of these processes, First, I address epistemological problems of neoclassical and marxist approaches to this subject. Second, I critically appraise the problématique of marxist work on gentrification, emphasising its lack of attention to the interrelationships of employment restructuring and changes in the reproduction of labour power. From this, I argue that gentrification is a ‘chaotic concept’ and that the processes and elements it comprises need to be thought through again. I begin tills task by attempting to disaggregate the concept with empirical reference to North American metropolitan inner cities, I hypothesise that the upsurge of renovation activity by and for moderate-income households and those with so-called alternative life-styles is produced by the interaction of changes in production and reproduction. Further research is needed in this area. Finally, I explore the possibility that such ‘marginal gentrifiers' and those they now displace may have similar needs that could be met by different kinds of neighbourhood revitalisation.
doi: 10.1068/d020075pmid: N/A
This paper examines those public-housing, suburbanization, and urban renewal policies in the United States of America that have evolved as a consequence of intraclass struggle. It is argued that the powerful constituency of organized labor was able, in the 1950s, to impose suburbanization as a valid answer to the housing question of the unions, while subsuming the housing demands, needs, and wants of less-powerful women and blacks. By the 1960s, the growing movements of women and blacks were able to challenge the dominance of the labor-liberal coalition and to successfully oppose the union-advocated policies of urban renewal and suburbanization.
doi: 10.1068/d020087pmid: N/A
In Israel, government and polities reflect a highly centralized system of operation, This situation, in combination with existing ethnic conflicts between European and Oriental Jews, has contributed to an increased consciousness of the asymmetry of core-periphery relations, thus precipitating a growth in political regionalism, The emergence of regionalism is viewed as a form of protest and rebellion within Israeli society. In this study, regional development policies in Israel arc examined, and a new approach to such activity is proposed—a synthesis between the centralized top-down system and the complementary system of participation from below. It is argued that bottom-up and territorially integrated policies can case the regional crisis in Israel.
doi: 10.1068/d020101pmid: N/A
Two ways of defining the urban question are possible, the social and the spatial. The former has received considerable attention and has been widely discredited. The latter has rarely been defined with clarity and has been inadequately treated in recent reviews. The spatial approach rests upon a view of cities as places where proximity offers uniquely urban opportunities and problems. Such a definition is inadequate, not because space is unimportant but because urban and nonurban space do not differ in kind.
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