From Eyeteeth.

Waiters in the audience listen to President Barack Obama’s speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 32nd Annual Awards Gala dinner in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 16, 2009.

“In other words, does the image confirm that Obama (like a giant projection) is primarily noteworthy for being engaging? Or, does the criticism of Obama for lacking quick fixes actually obscure what has been a fabulously unique and profound (if radically underestimated) accomplishment, which was to arrest the country’s incompetent and bellicose downward spiral (as well as the poisoning of global coexistence) and relatively quickly implement a new and evolving atmosphere of engagement, deliberation, possibility and sanity?”

From BAGnewsNotes, “But He Really Hasn’t Done Anything Yet — Right?”

Tom Tomorrow’s “Awesome Post-Racial America” - Salon.com.

A nice graphic from GOOD, showing the locations of all Olympic games. The only three in the Southern hemisphere: two in Australia, and now one in Brazil. No commentary needed.

ourtropes:

“If you watch HBO’s police drama “The Wire,” you might think that Baltimore is filled with drug dealers and crime ringleaders. But in truth, the city has attracted a different breed of misfits: artists.”

NYT pretty psyched about Baltimore’s white neighborhoods and social spaces.

What’s not to like about white neighborhoods? I mean, especially the ones that draw white artists into their creative, affordable housing. Because they’re tired of relying on their middle class parents for help. And I don’t care whose toes I’m steppin’ on by saying so.

Here’s a partial list of what I’ll be going through this month - some items will drop off, other as-yet-unidentified items will join the group. This is the first and largest section of my Urban Studies comprehensive exam reading list, which is the second of my three fields: I spent the last two months dashing through a long and invigorating Critical Race Theory list; November holds the joys of Visual Culture Theory. If you have suggestions, let me know…

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The Public Environment of Cities in the Neo-Liberal Age

Benjamin Barber, “An Architecture of Liberty? The City as Democracy’s Forge,” in Out of Ground Zero: Case Studies in Urban Reinvention, ed. Joan Ockman (New York, N.Y.: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, 2002): 184-205.

Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of
Citizenship,” Political Theory (28) No. 3, 2000: 355-376.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978-79, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56-80.

Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963).

Jürgen Habermas, “Social Structures Of the Public Sphere,” in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989), 27-56.

Jason R Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca [N.Y.]: Cornell University Press, 2007).

David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995).

Bill Hillier, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Jane Jacobs, “Uses of Sidewalks: Contact,” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996).

Setha Low and Neil Smith, The Politics of Public Space (Routledge, 2005).

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation Over Public Space (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009).

Doreen B Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005).

Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Hill and Wang, 1992).

Michael Walzer, “The Pleasures and Costs of Urbanity,” in Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times (New York: New York University Press,1995): 320-330.

Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

Sam Bass Warner, “The Management of Multiple Urban Images,” in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (London: E. Arnold, 1983).

Suggestions?

Please Don’t Tear Down the Dancehall, 2009

abbyjean posted another of Devin Troy Strother’s paintings, but I prefer this one for my mood today.

But after a lunchtime yoga class I can’t seem to get it together. I’m just sitting here staring out the window at a very gray day. I need something nice to look at. Post something pretty, folks. Too much depressing news today.