In Abstract Barrios Johana Londoño examines how Latinized urban landscapes are made palatable for white Americans. Such Latinized urban landscapes, she observes, especially appear when whites feel threatened by concentrations of Latinx populations, commonly known as barrios. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis of barrio built environments, Londoño shows how over the past seventy years urban planners, architects, designers, policy makers, business owners, and other brokers took abstracted elements from barrio design—such as spatial layouts or bright colors—to safely “Latinize” cities and manage a long-standing urban crisis of Latinx belonging. The built environments that resulted ranged from idealized notions of authentic Puerto Rican culture in the interior design of New York City’s public housing in the 1950s, which sought to diminish concerns over Puerto Rican settlement, to the Fiesta Marketplace in downtown Santa Ana, California, built to counteract white flight in the 1980s. Ultimately, Londoño demonstrates that abstracted barrio culture and aesthetics sustain the economic and cultural viability of normalized, white, and middle-class urban spaces.
For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing. Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data. This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.
The established canon of architectural pedagogy has been predominantly produced within the Northern hemisphere and transposed – or imposed – across schools within the Global South, more often, with scant regard for social, economic, political or ecological culture and context, nor regional or indigenous pedagogic principles and practices. Throughout the Global South, architecture’s academic community has been deeply affected by this regime, how it shapes and influences proto-professionals and by implication architectural processes and outcomes, too. The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South resituates and recenters an array of pedagogic approaches that are either produced or proliferate from the ‘Global South’ while antagonizing the linguistic, epistemological and disciplinary conceits that, under imperialist imperatives, ensured that these pedagogies remained maligned or marginalized. The book maintains that the exclusionary implications of architectural notions of the ‘orders’, the ‘canon’ and the ‘core’ have served to constrain and to calcify its contents and in doing so, imperiled its relevance and impact. In contrast, this companion of pedagogic approaches serves to evidence that architecture’s academic and professional advancement is wholly contingent on its ability to fully engage in an additive and inclusive process whereby the necessary disruptions that occur when marginalized knowledge confronts established knowledge result in a catalytical transformation through which new, co-created knowledge can emerge. Notions of tradition, identity, modernity, vernacularism, post-colonialism, poverty, migration, social and spatial justice, climate apartheid, globalization, ethical standards and international partnerships are key considerations in the context of the Global South. How these issues originate and evolve within architectural schools and curricula and how they act as drivers across all curricula activities are some of the important themes that the contributors interrogate and debate. With more than 30 contributions from 55 authors from diverse regional, racial, ethnic, gender and cultural backgrounds, this companion is structured in four sections that capture, critique and catalog multifarious marginalized pedagogical approaches to provide educators and students with an essential source book of navigational steers, core contestations, propositional tactics and reimagined rubrics. The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South pioneers a transposable strategy for academics from all disciplines looking to adopt a tested approach to decolonizing the curriculum. It is only through a process of destabilizing the hegemonic, epistemological and disciplinary frameworks that have long-prescribed architecture’s pedagogies that the possibility of more inclusive, representative and relevant pedagogical practices can emerge.
"Aesthetics of Equality is a theoretical and compositional intervention into the problem of equality. While some of the analysis is concerned with contemporary issues, the book is a primarily a work of political theory and a guide to aesthetic methods, focused on how one can conceive equality issues critically through conceptual engagements with diverse artistic genres: literature, film, music, photography, and architecture. Beginning with the question, "what one can contribute to equality issues by being attentive to aesthetic form in a variety of artistic genres that challenge institutionalized accounts of history," the book proceeds to implement answer by extracting political problematics with analyses of the compositional structures of the textual objects of analysis in the chapter's diverse inquiries. While aesthetic strategies are a main concern in the investigation, it is also shaped by commitments to some substantive political concerns, particularly an attentiveness to persons and voices that tend to be civically invisible The assembled chapters demonstrate the way critical approaches to a variety of media genres make visible and audible the persons and groups that are excluded or disqualified from access to livable domestic space and civic participation. The subject matter is temporally extensive, ranging from ancient Israel and Egypt in the Old Testament's Genesis chapter through the early and later ethno-histories of California and Texas and geographically broad, with chapters on diverse cities: New York, Paris, Istanbul, Los Angeles, and fictional Texas and Mexican border cities"--
Introduces new approaches, theoretical trends, and understudied topics in Latinx Studies This groundbreaking work offers a multidisciplinary, social-science oriented perspective on Latinx studies, including the social histories and contemporary lives of a diverse range of Latina and Latino populations. Editors Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa have crafted an anthology that is unique in both form and content. The book combines previously published canonical pieces with original, cutting-edge works created for this volume. The sections of the text are arranged thematically as critical dialogues, each with a brief preface that provides context and a conceptual direction for the scholarly conversation that ensues. The editors frame the volume around the “humanistic social sciences,” using the term to highlight the historical and social contexts under which expressive cultural forms and archival records are created. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies masterfully sheds light on the diversity and complexity of the everyday lives of Latinx populations, the political economic structures that shape enduring racialization and cultural stereotyping, and the continuing efforts to carve out new lives as diasporic, transnational, global, and colonial subjects.
How did American cities change throughout the 20th and early 21st century? This timely publication integrates research from American Literary and Cultural Studies, Urban Studies and History. The essays range from negotiations of the »ethnic city« in US literature and media, to studies of recent urban phenomena and their representations: gentrification, re-appropriation and conversion of urban spaces in the USA. These interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives on American cities provide unique points of access for studying the complex narratives of urban transformation.
Justice and the Interstates, edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff, examines the toll that the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System has taken on vulnerable communities over the past seven decades, details efforts to restore the same, often segregated communities, and makes recommendations for moving forward. Justice and the Interstates provides community advocates, transportation planners, engineers, historians, and policymakers with a concise but in-depth examination of the damages wrought by highway construction on the nation's communities of color--from West Baltimore to Birmingham to the San Gabriel Valley. The authors provide a way forward to both address this history and reconcile it with current practices.
This book focuses our attention on yet another community that has been scantily represented in Latino/a/x studies scholarship. US Colombians are no longer content to be characterized as “the other Latinos,” and the editors of this special issue make the case that study of US Colombianidades enhances and productively troubles Latino/a/x studies. This engaging set of essays highlights the rich diversity of US Colombianidades as well as the group’s similarities and differences with other Latino/a/x groups. With its innovative cultural studies and social sciences perspectives and interpretive theories, this volume offers a deep dive into issues such as how racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic realities shape US Colombian experience; the representation of US Colombians in popular culture; interethnic relations between Colombians and other Latina/o/xs; the political participation of Colombians in US electoral politics; Colombian transnational understandings of identity; and much more. I want to thank the editors of this special issue—Lina Rincón, Johana Londoño, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and María Elena Cepeda—for curating a set of articles that will most certainly inspire Latino/a/x studies scholars to expand our notions of Latinidades and be attentive to the ways in which a focus on US Colombianidades complicates and enriches our field. Previously published in Latino Studies Volume 18, issue 3, September 2020
Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious demonstrates that psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disenfranchised Latino populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy. As opposed to most Latin American countries, where psychoanalysis is seen as a practice tied to the promotion of social justice, in the United States psychoanalysis has been viewed as reserved for the well-to-do, assuming that poor people lack the "sophistication" that psychoanalysis requires, thus heeding invisible but no less rigid class boundaries. Challenging such discrimination, the authors testify to the efficacy of psychoanalysis in the barrios, upending the unfounded widespread belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday survival that they only benefit from symptom-focused interventions. Sharing vivid vignettes of psychoanalytic treatments, this collection sheds light on the psychological complexities of life in the barrio that is often marked by poverty, migration, marginalization, and barriers of language, class, and race. This interdisciplinary collection features essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians. It represents a unique crossover that will appeal to readers in clinical practice, social work, counselling, anthropology, psychology, cultural and Latino studies, queer studies, urban studies, and sociology.
