virginity, guilt, and suburbia?

The virgin sidewalk – the physical embodiment of sprawl’s guilty conscience – reveals the true failure of suburbia, a landscape in which automobile use is a prerequisite to social viability.

Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.  Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.  New York: North Point Press, 2000.

in defense of the humanities

In the larger view we know that attitudes and beliefs cannot be excluded even from the practical approach, for it is practical to recognize human passions in any environmental calculus; they cannot be excluded from the theoretical approach because man is, in fact, the ecological dominant and his behavior needs to be understood in depth, not merely mapped.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, p. 2.

inefficiency makes people grouchy

In sum, according to these visions, water should return to the height from which it falls, motive power or force should not be wasted, machine theories should address mechanical practice, workers should do as they are told, struggle should yield better-adapted forms of life, people should control themselves, and inhumane practices should be inefficient.

Alexander, Jennifer Karns.  The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, p 164.

Jennifer Alexander - The Mantra of Efficiency

 Alexander argues that efficiency, as it has developed since industrialization, is a key concept of Modernity.  Critical to the concept of efficiency is its ability to articulate conservation with dynamism or growth, and – more importantly – its ability to articulate an intellectual/abstract normative vision of how the world should be with descriptive material practices to achieve that goal.  This is interesting to me because I like to think of technology in a very similar way: as the realization of a (rational) human idea in the material landscape, or as the material means to an abstract end.  But efficiency is a little different from technology: historically, efficiency has been an underlying principle in the development of technologies, one that advocates discipline and conservation of motion/energy/resources in pursuit of growth/progress/a vision of the world where things are orderly and nothing is wasted.  An efficient machine is an ideal machine.  She traces how efficiency has come to have these dual meanings – conservation and growth – through ancient history, but primarily in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and she uses a variety of historical examples to show how efficiency is complicated morally but strangely consistent politically b/c it’s associated with ideas of progress and a fixed social hierarchy.

Regarding the politics of efficiency, Alexander pursues a line of argument similar to Mumford’s in Technics and Civilization: efficiency (like Mumford’s technology) appears to be a neutral product of the Industrial Revolution, but a longer historical view shows that it has its roots in culture, and thus it has a politics.  But from here she diverges sharply.  In the 1930s, Mumford was optimistic about the transformative (and potentially utopian) power of technology, even despite the abuses of power was was associated with in the 19^th century – just because it had been used to create/ reinforce social hierarchies didn’t mean that it had to continue to do so.  Alexander makes some gestures in this direction regarding the moral ambiguity of efficiency, but otherwise she is much more pessimistic: efficiency as it developed under Modernism (so up to WWII) was associated with control, and thus it requires a master and a mastered in order to operate.

I’m not in love with this book (it’s a little hard to follow), but I do appreciate that she politicizes efficiency and shows how domination and progress are two sides of the Modernist coin.  This politicization of efficiency also politicizes technology – not inherently, but historically, because efficiency and rationality have developed side-by-side out of the Enlightenment.  Hence a lot of what is human (like, say, human suffering, or feelings in general) gets written out of the efficient (social) machine as unnecessary or unintelligible complications – just like the unquantifiable gets written out of the scientific/ technological worldview.  Politicizing efficiency thus brings it under the umbrella of cultural critique and calls it into question as a design philosophy.  And this questioning is important today, especially since, as she says, despite the development of PoMo since WWII, we still operate under a modernist worldview – one that emphasizes planning, human reason, and the human ability to shape our environment – and thus one in which efficiency is still central.  Her major contribution to this problem, though (aside from theorizing efficiency, which is huge), seems to be just to recognize that someone has been losing so that someone else can win; how might we change efficiency to incorporate a more egalitarian politics?

Alexander, Jennifer Karns.  The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

on sex, love, and bicycles!

Back in high school, when we were busy making fun of our English teacher’s strange fascination with sexuality in Death in Venice, I was pretty sure that that particular brand of repression would never be me.  And for the haze of bicycles, booze, boys, retail, and the occasional feminist tract that was my twenties, it definitely wasn’t.  But fast forward about ten years and swing on down to Austin (recently rated the horniest city in the US) and, with my partying years (mostly) behind me, here I am just another overworked, undersexed, highly caffeinated grad student who spends a disproportionate amount of time reading, writing, and thinking about representations of sex and sexuality.  And bicycles.  Did I mention the bicycles?

Austin is a great bike city.  Just in the three years I’ve lived here, we’ve added hundreds of miles of bike lanes, paved miles of new paths, and added on-street bike parking all over the city.  It’s gorgeous and sunny for the vast majority of the year.  We have a long history of bike-friendliness, too: the oldest bike lanes in the city date back to the 1970s, our first Critical Mass rides were in 1994, just a couple of years after the movement started in San Francisco, and the Yellow Bike Project has been going strong since 1997.  We have Lance.  We have social rides, bike polo, bike artists, and nearly fifty bike shops. 

And, most importantly, we have a shit ton of cyclists. 

In the early mornings, swarms of spandex-clad riders pedal through the streets, angry bee sounds marking their trim, fit passage to the country roads to the south.  A few hours later, UT’s five thousand bike commuters compete with rush hour traffic on their way to class and work.  By mid-afternoon, the guy with the hot gear ratio (seriously, it must be 53-13!) is holding court at the coffeeshop where he works and where I sit grading papers or reading.  And on hot summer nights, hundreds of pedicabbers troll the streets for fares, sweat pouring down their chests, their massive thighs straining against the fabri-

Oh.  Right.  Sorry.  It’s just that, well… bicycles.  The grad student in me might be overworked and undersexed, but god damn if the cyclist in me isn’t psyched every single day to be living in a city with such a thriving bike culture and so many bicycling bodies.  

Is there anything hotter than the bicycling body? 

I can’t imagine being attracted to someone who doesn’t ride at least as much as I do.  This is partly because after so many years of being car-free, I don’t like riding in cars, I don’t like having to wait at the top of every hill for some dude who purportedly “likes bikes,” and I especially don’t like having to defend my choice to ride three miles rather than stuff my pride into a hermetically-sealed, gas-guzzling steel bubble every time we go somewhere.  But the deeper reason I love being with other bike riders is that with fellow cyclists, I don’t get the uncomfortable asymmetry of a man who doesn't ride complimenting me on my body which “must be because you bike.”  Fuck you, dude.  Did you notice that I said the bicycling body, not the bicyclist’s body, or were you too busy staring at my ass?  I know bicycling means different things to different people, but to me it means a process, a way of living in the world, and an appreciation for – and dedication to – the incredible power, adaptability, and self-sufficiency of the human body, regardless of gender.  And even though there are more of us than there were when I started riding, my inner idealist likes to think that fellow cyclists, especially us old-school folks, still understand that being a bike in a car’s world is more than a little like being a woman in a man’s world.

The thighs aren’t half bad, either.

Expressways dismembered poor neighborhoods, destroying local communities; they also enabled both the dispossessed (and the wealthy who had also fled) to return to work in the inner city - to sustain, and to bleed it, respectively.

Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, New York: The New Press, 1997, p 202.

social space: modernism as circulation, postmodernism as atomization and rootedness

The central problem for [architect Leon] Krier is that modernist urban planning works mainly though mono-functional zoning.  As a result, circulation of people between zones by way of artificial arteries becomes the central preoccupation of the planner, generating an urban pattern that is, in Krier's judgement, 'anti-ecological' because it is wasteful of time, energy, and land [...]

Krier contrasts this situation with the 'good city' (by its nature ecological) in which 'the totality of urban functions' are provided within 'compatible and pleasant walking distances.'  Recognizing that such an urban form 'cannot grow by extension in width and height' but only 'through multiplication,' Krier seeks a city form made up of 'complete and finite urban communities,' each constituting an independent urban quarter within  a large family of urban quarters, that in turn make up 'cities within a city.'

From David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990, p. 67

call for papers: western history association due 9.1.12

2013 Call For Papers
53rd Annual Conference of the Western History Association
9-12 October 2013, Tucson, Arizona

VITAL SIGNS: EARTH, POWER, LIVES

No region of the world has been more important than the West of North America in encouraging historians to take an environmental perspective on the past. Today that perspective has become global in scale and significance, and it is time to bring it back home for reassessing ourselves. The 2013 program committee invites proposals on the theme of checking the “vital signs,” those indicators of health and illness that societies as well as individuals need. They include such measures of well being as energy supplies and consumption, ecological and cultural diversity, the distribution of wealth and power, the ups and downs of climate, and the resilience of ecosystems and human communities.

The vagabond's wayward travels meant that he always had traces of elsewhere about him which disturbed those who had chosen a settled and rooted existence - the vagabond threatened to undo the comforts of place and transgressed the expectations of a sedentarist metaphysics.

Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Even cars may fulfill the function of analogons [images, signs, and symbols], for they are at once extensions of the body and mobile homes, so to speak, fully equipped to receive these wandering bodies.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009, p 98.

on phallocracy and wookies

The arrogant verticality of skyscrapers, and especially of public and state buildings, introduces a phallic or more precisely a phallocratic element into the visual realm; the purpose of this display, of this need to impress, is to convey an impression of authority to each spectator.  Verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009, p 98

marilyn monroe as lillian russell

From a thread on The Chainlink: A Chicago Bicycling Online Community begun by David Travis, Richard Avedon's lovely image of Marilyn Monroe posing as Lillian Russell on a bicycle.

Labor and food historian Harvey Levenstein writes in Revolution at the Table that "Stage star Lillian Russell, 'airy, fairy, Lillian, the American beauty' - after whom America's favorite rose was named - whose hourglass (while corsetted) figure with its ample hips and very full bosom was the late nineteenth-century ideal, weighed about two hundred pounds." Even better, "her enormous appetite was almost as legendary as her beauty." (13)  She apparently also created spectacles of the two-wheeled variety.  Monroe, Some Like it Hot notwithstanding, apparently never topped 140.  She produced spectacles no less beautiful, but of a smaller, more tragic sort.

We learn to ride a bicycle without a manual of physics; formal knowledge of the balance of forces may even be a handicap.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977, p 200.

There are illegibilities of the layered depths in a single place, of ruses in action and of historical accidents.  The writing of these evocations is sketched out, ironically and fleetingly, in graffiti, as if the bicycle painted on a wall, the insignia of a common transit, detached itself and made itself available for indeterminate tours.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p 200

freeways and racism in washington, dc

Once the holiday festivities, post-Christmas sale shopping, family fun and new year’s shenanigans quieted down, I snuck off to the MLK library down in Gallery Place in Washington, DC, to spend a few days digging around in their voluminous community archives collection.  It was awesome.  I’m working on a piece on DC’s anti-freeway movement, and hoo boy does the DC Public Library have a lot of great stuff!  Not only do they have an incredible collection of photographs, DC City Council records, and DC-area newspapers large and small – they also have 42.5 linear feet worth of clippings, flyers, hearing transcripts, correspondence, maps, picket signs and all manner of other goodies donated by the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), an interracial anti-freeway group that leveraged the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight freeways in DC and to rewrite eminent domain legislation in the process.  Needless to say, I was psyched.

The ECTC formed in the mid-1960s, when DC and Maryland attempted to build the ten-lane North Central Freeway right through the heart of DC’s Northeast quadrant.  The Freeway was purportedly part of a much larger interstate project.  Back in the mid-1950s, fueled by some alchemical combination of increased economic prosperity, a WWII-era “mega-project” mindset, and various automobile-oriented advocacy groups, Eisenhower’s “highwaymen” had begun to draw up and build what we know today as the National Interstate System - that vast network of highways that connects the nation and allows high-speed traffic to flow seamlessly from one city to the next nation-wide.  By the early 1960s, many of the rural stretches had been completed, and some cities – like Austin – even featured highways cutting right through the center of town.

Not so in DC.  By 1964, I-95, the major highway that runs the length of the East Coast, approached DC from both Virginia and Maryland, but on both sides it stopped abruptly ten miles outside of town at the newly completed Capital Beltway.  Drivers wanting to enter the city itself had to leave the highway and navigate its surface streets, which, as DC’s burgeoning population began to spill out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs and long-distance road travel to and from the city became more common, was causing more than a little congestion.  And nothing makes a highway engineer more frustrated than congestion.  So the District Highway Department began to plan a network of intra-city freeways.  And, when the wealthy, white, well-connected residents of DC’s Northwest quadrant flat-out rejected any proposals to put freeways in their neck of the woods, highway planners slyly relocated freeway plans to Northeast, where the population was poorer, more diverse, less-connected to the usual channels, and thus supposedly less able to resist the overtures of the highwaymen.  In late 1964, expecting an open-and-shut case, the Maryland and DC highway departments drew up plans for a ten-lane North Central Freeway through Northeast and hid a small announcement about a public hearing in the back pages of the Washington Post.

Thank god for all those crazy old people with nothing to do but sit around and read back pages of the Washington Post!  That first public hearing drew more than 700 furious residents, nearly all of whom were vehemently opposed to the freeway – or any freeway, for that matter.  As it turned out, it also kicked off a ten year long struggle to keep the freeway out and bring rapid transit in instead.

This is where the ECTC comes in.  Building on pre-existing neighborhood organizations and leveraging national movements like black power and environmentalism, they mobilized DC residents to protest the freeway, to fight the highwaymen, to testify before congress and to harass the crap out of DC’s Mayor and City Council.  They also had some pretty amazing graphic designers on their side.  Check this out:

Pigs eating at a trough of highway-related exploitation!  Downtown Progress was a business organization that supported building freeways in DC in hopes of bringing suburban dollars back to the city’s central business district:

Those same exploiters doing a number on “This Land is Your Land!”  This one vents their frustration at the collusion between big business and politics and the expense of the lives of the people in the path of the highway.  And yes, they had lyrics for the entire song.

And this one is one of the ECTC’s more famous posters, at least locally, featuring their slogan:

What’s particularly interesting about this last one is that the ECTC quickly grasped the racial implications of moving a freeway from Northwest to Northeast and made race a central part of its campaign against the freeway from the get-go, but it wasn’t until the 1968 riots that the Federal government was willing to admit that a) the ECTC was right and b) in the late 1960s, DC’s integrated neighborhoods had at least as much political clout as its white ones because they had the weight of the entire Civil Rights movement behind them.  Really, a genius move on the part of the ECTC.

And, together with all of their other mobilization and communication tactics, an effective one: the North Central Freeway was never built, the Metro’s Red Line runs along the CSX tracks near where the freeway would have been, and the Federal government has long since stopped trying to build highways anywhere near our fine nation’s capital – or in any other major city, for that matter.

These days, it’s better to put those highway funds to good use in building a bicycle network, anyway.