Zukin, Mumford, Bitzer

Zukin, Mumford, Bitzer


The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations. Lewis Mumford, “What’s a City?”


The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations. Lewis Mumford, “What’s a City?”


For Zukin, the city is an aesthetic symbol of collective unity and an aesthetic symbol of collective division, difference, ambiguity, conflict.


Cultural activities are supposed to lift [city dwellers] out of the mire of our everyday lives and into the sacred spaces of ritualized pleasures. Yet culture is also a powerful means of controlling cities. As a source of images and memories, it symbolizes “who belongs” in specific places. Sharon Zukin, “What City? Whose City?”


In recent years, culture has also become a more explicit site of conflicts over social differences and urban fears. Large numbers of new immigrants and ethnic minories have put pressure on public institutions . . . to deal with their individual demands. . . . By creating policies and ideologies of “multiculturalism,” they have forced public institutions to change. Sharon Zukin, “What City? Whose City?”

Exigence


[C]ity boosters increasingly compete for tourist dollars and financial investments by bolstering the city’s image as a center of cultural innovation, including restaurants, avant garde performances, and architectural design. These cultural strategies of redevelopment. . . . often pit the self-interest of real estate developers, politicians, and expansion-minded cultural institutions against grassroots pressure from local communities. Sharon Zukin, “What City? Whose City?”

One agenda


If one way of dealing with the material inequalities of city life has been to aestheticize diversity, another way has been to aestheticize fear. Sharon Zukin, “What City? Whose City?”

Another agenda


Building a city depends on how people combine the traditional economic factors of land, labor, and capital. But it also depends on how they manipulate symbolic languages of exclusion and entitlement. The look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what – and who – should be visible and what should not, on concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power. Sharon Zukin, “What City? Whose City?”

The Symbolic Economy of the City






• What exigence – or exigences – are represented in/by this object or space?

Questions to Ask



• What purposes or agendas does it embody? I.e., what change or changes does it seek to make to the exigence(s)?

Questions to Ask




• Who are the most important rhetorical audiences for the object/space? I.e., the stakeholders capable of taking or impeding action?

Questions to Ask





• Who is included and who excluded by the rhetoric of the object/space?

Questions to Ask





• Who is included and who excluded by the rhetoric of the object/space?

• In sum, what “Denver” (or “Denvers”) does it define? And whose?

Questions to Ask

Education

Zukin, Mumford, Bitzer