Browsing by Subject "Urban studies"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

A view from Oregon Street : an analysis of ethnic sport and social clubs in Rochester, NY, 1880-1915
(2022-08-11) Hurley, Alec Sebastian; Hunt, Thomas M.; Todd, Jan; Hofmann, Annette R; Heffernan, Conor; Karner, Alex
This dissertation provides original contributions to the field of sport history at the nexus of place, space, and cultural identity. It brings together urban history, migration studies, and local community histories to understand cultural relationships in a dynamic and understudied city. Two questions underpin this initial foray. The first asks how the existing geography and urban layout framed the emergence of sport and physical culture clubs? That inquiry naturally facilitates a follow-up question, namely: how, then, did the presence of ethnic sport and social clubs shape the physical and cultural evolution of the city? The development of sport and urban centers in major urban centers in the United States, such as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, have been afforded substantial reams within sport literature. Literature on smaller industrial areas, which emerged concurrent with the advent of increased transportation networks across the Great Lakes in the forms of canals and railways, has been comparatively light. Roy Rosenzweig addressed that concern in his work on the labor history of immigrants in Worchester, Massachusetts, when he claimed, “the evidence from one medium-sized city can only resolve these questions in tentative ways.” He did, however, provide a caveat that if reliable data could be elicited from comparative cities, scholars could draw grander conclusions. Rochester fits the requirements for Rosenzweig’s comparative city.
Distances and proximities : Havana and San Juan from the point of view of literature and oral histories
(2015-05) Mercado Diaz, Mario Edgardo; Salgado, César Augusto; Merabet, Sofian, 1972-
Cuba y Puerto Rico have for long been considered sister islands, fighting together against the influences of the Spanish Empire and the United States. The decade of the 1950s, however, proved to be the splitting point for both islands, sending them into very different trajectories of development. In their shared experience of Spanish colonization and USA interventions, how do San Juan and Havana residents perceive and use space today in their particular socio-political contexts and how does this affect the resident's sense of citizenship? I closely engage with the different urban spaces using ethnographic data and photographs taken during my recent fieldwork, creative texts describing said spaces and case studies examining the formation of racial, gender and class identities. Focusing on a specific place on the Malecón, Havana's iconic esplanade, I examine how practices of leisure, intimacy (e.g. erotic homosexual and heterosexual encounters), and self-expression challenge the revolutionary rhetoric of "sameness" (i.e. absence of race, class, crime or gender violence). As for San Juan, I dissect the layers of significance in public visual representation, as exemplified in the artwork painted over an abandoned house in Santurce, the site for queer, artistic and marginal expression. The scene, two black women drinking on the porch, rescues a sense of citizenship lost to the class and racial polarization, fragmentation, and the "ruination" of San Juan. Finally, I argue that an archipelagic city, composed of the descriptions of specific places in different cities, has been created in the sea, a space of crossing, endurance and death, within these inter-capillary exchanges of people, cultures and habits. This archipelagic city, not spoken about directly but referenced semantically, aids in the construction of trans-national identities and perspectives, specific perceptions on time and space, and the production of media and cultural forms of expression. My goal is to tie together these narrative strands linking trans-oceanic places into an urban map surpassing its own geographical context.
“Let us forge one path together” : gender, class, and political subjectivities in a Haitian popular neighborhood
(2015-05) Selby, Lynn Marie; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Strong, Pauline` T`; Costa Vargas, João H; Wilks, Jennifer M; Arroyo Martínez, Jossianna
Over sixty years after the introduction of women’s suffrage and nearly forty years after the uneven institutionalization of representative democracy, the majority of Haitian women face mounting challenges to maintaining their livelihoods and playing more prominent roles in politics. This dissertation advances an understanding of poor urban women’s collective potential and the challenges to their self-making as agents of change. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted from 2008 to 2010 in the popular neighborhood of Matisan, Port-au-Prince, I argue how middle-aged and elder women activists are a crucial and overlooked source of hope for Haiti: they have insights, skills, and experience acquired through the political upheavals, environmental crises, and macro-economic developments of the last decades that could inform strategies for social and structural change. After providing a popular history of a prominent women's organization, I use the lives of three individual community organizers as case studies to explore the hierarchies that shape their community and activist roles and detail how their positioning within a micro-social layer also entails negotiations within networks of support and influence. Tumultuous events during my research brought to light the constraints women experience in how social responses and movements develop in spite of their significant involvement and sacrifices. Confounded by class and gender hierarchies and the stigma of residency in a popular neighborhood, these women’s political utterances are selected and filtered by middle-class women advocates and male peers. Finally, I examine how neoliberal policies and foreign intervention in Haiti have privatized the public interest and the postcolonial State and promoted the role of intermediaries in development and politics for women and the poor majority. I describe how interventions carried out in Matisan—ranging from small food donations from wealthier residents to internationally-funded disaster relief—rely on women's passive rather than active participation, exacerbate competition among them as prospective beneficiaries, and provide temporary help at best. Through my research, I aim to make legible the everyday forms of communitarianism and sociality among these women that foster community and animate grassroots politics, and further propose that these practices could be constitutive of a political platform in and of itself.
Modern displacements : urban injustice affecting working class communities of color in East Austin
(2012-05) Gray, Amanda Elaine; Cordova, Cary, 1970-
In this report I analyze both historical and contemporary urban planning policies enacted by the City of Austin, TX, through which I establish patterns of structural inequality affecting working class communities of color residing in East Austin. I examine early 20th-century urban beautification initiatives, along with the Progressive era segregationist project of the modern city. Austin city planners solidified segregation along racial lines with the 1928 Master Plan, which mandated the systematic displacement and relocation of African American and Mexican American communities to Austin’s Eastside, along with all “objectionable industries.” Today, East Austin working class communities of color continue to experience unequal burdens of environmentally hazardous industry in their neighborhoods. I examine initiatives implemented by the local grassroots environmental justice organization PODER and their fight for the health and safety of East Austin residents of color in combination with their protest against gentrifying urban planning policies and practices. Through an analysis of the PODER Young Scholars for Justice documentary, Gentrification: An Eastside Story, I look at the ways in which gentrification has changed the East Austin urban cultural landscape. This report aims to shed light upon spatial and racial social geographies that have contributed to the nearly century long battle East Austin residents have waged against discriminatory urban planning policies resulting in educational segregation, environmentally racist industrial zoning, and contemporary displacement of working class communities of color for city profit.
Ride to live, live to ride : motorcycle dispatches from Maceió
(2015-05) Layton, Katherine Alice; Leu, Lorraine; Ali, Kamran A
Traffic codes and highways exist as powerful tools of measurement and coding by the State that attempt to regulate and control the mobility of bodies through space. In Brazil, these measures and codes function according to capitalist hierarchies of commodities, social practices of exclusion that severely debilitate the mobility of all but a few, and the colonial histories upon which these were constructed. This thesis examines such processes at work in the use of motorcycles as a form of transport for low and low-middle income social groups in an urban setting in the Northeast of Brazil. The simplistic categorization of motorcycles as dangerous, a hackneyed explanation for the high number of accidents and fatalities involving motorcycles in Brazil, reveals exclusion and colonial power at work. This thesis aims to explore the presumption and inscription of motorcycles and their riders as inherently dangerous or threatening actors in order to answer the deceptively simple question: why are motorcycles considered hazardous?
Turning the city inside out : shifting demographics in American cities
(2013-05) Swartsell, Nikolas R.; Minutaglio, Bill; Jensen, Robert
Narratives around many of America's inner-city neighborhoods have changed significantly in the past decade. Once portrayed by the media and pop-culture as blighted, dangerous areas to be avoided, these neighborhoods have become hip epicenters of a new philosophy in urban planning-- "place-making," a concept popularized by economist and urbanist Richard Florida. Place-making claims to be a kinder, friendlier kind of urban renewal emphasizing tolerance and diversity-- but is this the case? Through both physical changes and city-lead branding efforts, place-making seeks to draw young professionals, specifically those in the rising "creative class," to inner city areas in hopes these young workers will in turn draw employers. Unlike past gentrification, which often happened through the actions of private developers, these redevelopment efforts often entail municipal or quasi-municipal and corporate intervention in the guise of non-profit redevelopment companies, whose mission is not just to build a few profitable buildings, but to change the entire face and meaning of a neighborhood. More than a decade into the place-making project, planners and developers have successfully shifted narratives surrounding neighborhoods as different as Austin's east side and Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine and drawn a new population of mostly young, highly educated, and upper middle class residents. But in doing so, these efforts have created huge economic divides and displaced long term residents. Using Cincinnati and Austin as case studies, this report tells the story of this shift from these residents' point of view, as well as gain insight from the young professionals moving in to the area. While doing so, I will also delve into the blight narratives that lead to place-making in the first place-- charting the change in news media and pop culture from the "urban blight" era to today, comparing residents' perceptions with news coverage to uncover the long-term, hidden vibrancy in neighborhood ignored by both the media and contemporary developers engaging in place-making projects.