My parents, my two older sisters and I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, between 1960-1963. I was in third to fifth grades. During our years there, we marched in protest of segregated restaurants, movie theatres, and drugstores, boycotted segregated businesses, did voter registration drives, staged sit-ins, and were threatened by gun-wielding white men. The […]
Walking Down a Black-and-White Road
Countering Pusillanimosity
I’m reading Ali Smith’s Autumn: a novel (Pantheon Books, 2016). The main character is an art historian (and she’s employed!) But it is really about deep relationships among a few people across a number of decades. This excerpt made me sad, angry, sympathetic, and distressed, because it captures my swath feelings as we start 2018: […]
Fixin’ It Ourselves
I spent most of the spring in Bristol, UK, as a Colston Fellow, thanks to the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol. I worked with an amazing group of people involved with the Productive Margins research programme. Here’s a link to my blog post on the IAS site, about the work I […]
“All the animals and birds around Taksim Square are dying”
Architectural historian HEGHNAR WATENPAUGH wrote a very useful post for the Society of Architectural Historians on the urban planning aspects of the unrest in Taksim Square and its broader implications. Thanks to her, I also read Orhan Pamuk‘s reflections in the New Yorker on some of the history and his memories of Taksim Square. Amnesty […]
Cass Gilbert’s Buildings (among others) in Newark, NJ
A couple of blocks of buildings along Broad Street, facing Military Park in Newark, are being demolished in 2013. These blocks included stores where many people once shopped, but have been vacant for quite a while. Apparently, the Prudential Company plans to build more office space once the […]
Newark, New Jersey, on Lunaape Land
I am in the New York City area this week to celebrate the centennial of the Woolworth Building, a skyscraper designed by the architect Cass. Gilbert. A group of folks, including especially Helen Post Curry and Chuck Post, along with Barbara Christen, have been key organizers of this ambitious week of activities. On April 24, […]
Bondville Stop of the “Inter-Urban” Project
What do a panel truck, a jib crane and the remains of a wooden grain elevator have in common? All are being repurposed by an energetic, volunteer team of sculptors and designers for Urbana Land Arts Inter-Urban project. When it is all finished (soon–in August 2012!), it will be a mobile exhibition space, with the […]
In Need of Some Sociological Imagination
I spent much of my week distracted and distraught by the demonstrations and confrontations in London, Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool, to name some of the locations of unrest this August. Perhaps I was particularly tuned in to that part of the world because in June I was working in London and Bristol, and in […]
Engaged vs. Entrepreneurial Universities
One keynote address at the recent Erasing Boundaries symposium was by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., from the University of Buffalo Center for Urban Studies; it was entitled “The Engaged versus the Entrepreneurial University: How Neighborhoods Matter.” (See earlier posts for descriptions of the symposium.) Taylor posited these types of universities as two distinct, indeed opposing, […]
