Culture : Space

Catcalling video: public response

 

I agree with Hanna Rosin's critique of "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman".  The video effectively makes the point that women are routinely harassed by men on the street.  However, because of poor editing choices harassment is framed as a racial issue as the majority of men featured in the video are black or Latino.  And after reading some of the YouTube comments (63K to date), some men self-identifying as white don't believe harassment on the street is a problem, because *they* don't do that!  As one commenter argued:

"Did U notice that those who "harassed" her were mostly black low-life people? I mean U should be aware that there are many different people with different cultural or other differences in attitude or manners. U can't blame all men for that. P.S. I think they were "harassing" that girl because she has a fat ass which is considered as a beauty nowadays among this group of people."

Like Rosin, I remembered the earlier video by Jessica Williams on the Daily Show, which does a great job of illustrating the extent of the problem (using a map with pins!) by featuring men, both black and white and across various socioeconomic occupations harassing a diverse group of women.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

 

On the Radar: Upcoming Documentary on Gentrification in Atlantic

Atlanta native and filmmaker King Williams is producing a documentary on gentrification in Atlanta, GA.  His kickstarter campaign was successful so keep an eye out for the upcoming film.

Desciption from the film's website:

"The Atlanta Way is an in-depth analysis of how Atlanta’s relationship with gentrification has been a byproduct of decades of clandestine backroom dealings, oblique public relations campaigns & the treatment of its growing underclass.

Focusing on investment and profit over outright defiant opposition, Atlanta positioned itself to be an outlier amongst other southern cities. This would be no more evident in its development of public housing, airport, highways, suburbs and the centennial Olympic games.

Atlanta is the first city in the US to open its doors to public housing and the first to successfully close all of its public housing as well. The Atlanta Housing Authority, utilizing a series of revolutionary as well as controversial programs aimed at curbing an even more controversial system of public housing projects."

 

 

 

The Future of Housing, Inequality and Wealth

Richard Florida's examination of a recent report by the Demand Institute highlights the geographic impact of the projected housing market and inequality. 

An excerpt:

"The ten percent of communities at the very top of the spectrum account for more than half (52 percent) of the nation's housing value – nearly $4.4 trillion in real estate assets. Despite the recession, these communities have experienced a 73 percent growth in housing value since 2000. Between 2000 and 2012, the group of cities in the top 10 percent also experienced 51 percent of the increase in income and 49 percent of the employment opportunities.

At the other end of the spectrum are the cities and towns where housing is worth far less and continues to be a far weaker investment. The bottom 40 percent of the report's sample accounted for a mere 8 percent of the total housing wealth. The bottom 40 percent of communities have seen just 9 percent of the increase in income and 9 percent of the growth in employment opportunities from 2000 to 2012."

You can read his entire post on the Atlantic Cities website here.

Iconic TV Homes

Photo: "Brady Bunch" Interior

Photo:  "Full House" Exterior

Photo: "Cosby Show" Exterior

Marketplace.org published an online quiz to test your knowledge of houses in pop culture.  The quiz features memorable homes from TV shows such as the "Brady Bunch" and "Full House."  I scored 9 out of 9 (although I guessed for the last two!). 

Zillow also published a bird's eye view of famous TV homes. 

What does it mean that I can easily recognize these homes? Does it matter?  How have these images shaped my beliefs about what is means to own a home?

I am thinking about the housing crisis and homeownership as one of the central features of the American Dream. One promising research direction is the construction of the American Dream through representations of the domestic sphere and the “good life” on TV. I want to explore the ways cultural and social differences (e.g., class, race and ethnicity, sexualty, gender) are communicated and negotiated in TV representations of spatial domesticity. 

 

The Racial Dot Map

Source: Dustin Cable/Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia

 

Dustin Cable, a demographic researcher at the University of Virginia, created another interesting mapping project based on the 2010 Census data.  The blog and interactive map can be found here.

 

Maps: Poverty and Race in the US

 

 

 

The Urban Institute created a mapping tool that tracks poverty and racial segregation using detailed Census data for every metro area in the US from 1980-2010.  The above maps represent Washington, DC in 1980 and 2010.  The maps provide visual evidence of the effects of gentrification in the metro area, especially comparing the urban center versus the suburbs.

Geography, Hate and Technology

Image from Atlantic Cities: "Where Americans Tweet Messages of Hate"

 

Atlantic Cities posted an interesting article on a research project from Humboldt State mapping hateful tweets.  The interactive map can be found here. The maps illustrate the persistance of prejudice and hate in the US.

Downtown Brooklyn

Great new documentary:  "My Brooklyn" by Kelly Anderson with the support of historian Craig S. Wilder at MIT. 

 

 

The first time I visited the Fulton Mall was as a teenager in the 1990s.  I was so excited to hang out with my friends and go shopping without adults.  Fast forward to 2008, I moved to Northern Park Slope as an adult joining the later gentrifiers.  I always felt like I had one foot in the Fulton Mall and the other in Gorilla Coffee!  I was surprised (I really shouldn't be) to recently learn about the plans to demolish/redevelop the Fulton Mall (see National Retailers Discover a Brooklyn Mall in the NYT). 

Black Gentrification

 

As an African-American woman that has lived in gentrifying neighborhoods in Philly, NYC and DC I am particularly interested in the topic of black gentrifiers.  I found the following interesting articles:  "Black professionals leading the charge of gentrification across Anacostia," "The perceived gentrifier: How I was driven from the U Street neighborhood," and "How Black Gentrifiers Have Affected the Perception of Chicago's Changing Neighborhoods."  

In "How Black Gentrifiers Have Affected the Perception of Chicago's Changing Neighborhoods," the author questions why Bronzeville in Chicago does not attract as many white middle-class residents and still has a bad reputation associated with crime and housing projects compared to other gentrifying neighborhoods despite the fact that black middle-class residents are moving into the neighborhood. Apparently, the process of gentrification can only be successful with an influx of white residents in Chicago, compared to places such as Atlanta that have a critical mass of middle-class black gentrifiers to change a neighborhood from working class to predominantly middle class. Can a neighborhood be successfully gentrified with only black middle-class residents?

In Washington, DC there are many black professionals and neighborhoods such as Shaw and LeDroit Park have attracted black professionals to move back into neighborhoods that their families abandoned between the 1970s and 1990s to move to the Maryland suburbs.  However, there is also a critical mass of white gentrifiers that have moved into these neighborhoods.  Does LeDroit Park and Shaw benefit from their proximity and historical relationship to Howard University and history of elite African-American residents in the first half of the 20th century compared to places such as Bronzeville in Chicago? 

 

 

Film and Urbanism

Two documentaries available on Netflix worth watching:  The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011) and DETROPIA (2012).

 

Detropia

 

 

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth