Objectives:

• Introduce students to ProjectFive, emphasizing how they are in some ways familiar with this type of argument (cultural analysis) and its method of delivery (web presentation)
• Review instructions for ProjectFive, including the "Web Tools" section and the previous student projects
• On this day (as in other sessions on ProjectFive) leverage an inventional topoi for writing cultural analyses. Below a lesson using "place" is detailed (a few practitioners will be updating this go around by using Solnit's "Detroit Arcadia" in place of the Herron and Davis pieces)

 

Cultural Analysis:

Writing about Places

 

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Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space

 

Genre: Writing Places, Social/Cultural/Architectural Criticism

Strategies: Historical Examplar, Genealogy, Declaration, Comparison, Troping

Theses:

 

"Splash Page":

• In Los Angeles -once a paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and "cruising strips" - genuinely democratic space is virtually extinct. The pleasure domes of the elite Westside rely upon the social imprisonment of a third-world proletariat in increasingly repressive ghettos and barrios. In a city of several million aspiring immigrants (where Spanish-surname children are now almost two-thirds of the school-age population), public amenities are shrinking radically, libraries and playgrounds are closing, parks are falling derelict, and streets are growing ever more desolate and dangerous.

 

Declarative Strategy/Polemic/Antagonism:

• The celebratory language used to describe contemporary Los Angeles - "urban renaissance," "city of the future." and so on - is only a triumphal gloss laid over the brutalization of its inner-city neighborhoods and the stark divisions of class and race represented in its built environment. Urban form obediently follows repressive function. Los Angeles, as always in the vanguard, offers an especially disturbing guide to the emerging liaisons between urban architecture and the police state.

 

 

 

Forbidden City

Exemplar:

• Los Angeles's first spatial militarist was the legendary General Harrison Gray Otis, proprietor of the Times and implacable foe of organized labor. In the 1830s, after locking out his union printers and announcing a crusade for "industrial freedom," Otis retreated into a new Times building designed as a fortress with grim turrets and battlements crowned by a bellicose bronze eagle. To emphasize his truculence, he later had a small, functional cannon installed on the hood of his Packard touring car.

 

 

Comparison/Extension:

• Like similar megalomaniacal complexes tethered to fragmented and desolate downtowns- such as the Renaissance Center in Detroit and the Peachtree and Omni centers in Atlanta - Bunker Hill and the Figueroa corridor have provoked a storm of objections to their abuse of scale and composition, their denigration of street life, and their confiscation of the vital energy of the center, now sequestered within their subterranean concourses or privatized plazas.

 

 

Demarcation from Standard View:

• Sam Hall Kaplan, the former design critic of the Times, has vociferously denounced the antistreet bias of redevelopment; in his view, the superimposition of "hermetically sealed fortresses" and random "pieces of suburbia" onto Downtown has "killed the street" and "dammed the rivers of life."'Yet Kaplan's vigorous defense of pedestrian democracy remains grounded in liberal complaints about "bland design" and "elitist planning practices." Like most architectural critics, he rails against the oversights of urban design without conceding a dimension of foresight, and even of deliberate repressive intent.

 

 

Trope: Fortress Effect:

• ...the "fortress effect" emerges, not as an inadvertent failure of design, but as an explicit--and, in its own terms, successful socio-spatial strategy. The goals of this strategy may be summarized as a double repression: to obliterate all connection with Downtown's past and to prevent any dynamic association with the non-Anglo urbanism of its future.

 

Mean Streets

 

Trope: Cold War/Containment; examples

• One of the simplest but most mean-spirited of these deterrents is the Rapid Transit District's new barrel-shaped bus bench, which offers a minimal surface for uncomfortable sitting while making sleeping impossible. Such "bumproof" benches are being widely introduced on the periphery of Skid Row. Another invention is the aggressive deployment of outdoor sprinklers. ...Although no one in Los Angeles has yet proposed adding cyanide to the garbage, as was suggested in Phoenix a few years back, one popular seafood restaurant has spent $12,000 to build the ultimate bag-lady-proof trash cage: three-quarter-inch steel rod with alloy locks and vicious out-turned spikes to safeguard moldering fishheads and stale french fries.

 

 

Sequestering the Poor

 

Community Blockades / Contrast (Berlin/LA); Militarization of Urban Space

• Thus in November 1983 (as the Berlin Wall was being demolished), the Devonshire Division of the LAPD closed off a "drug-ridden" twelve-block section of the northern San Fernando Valley. To control circulation within this largely Latino neighborhood, the police convinced apartment owners to finance the construction of a permanent guard station. ...Given the popularity of these quarantines save amongst the ghetto youth against whom they are directed--it is possible that a majority of the inner city may eventually be partitioned into police-regulated "no-go" areas.

 

City of Quartz

 

 

"Fortress LA" is a chapter excerpted from City of Quartz

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Downtown Time Capsule

 

 

Genre: Writing Places

Strategies: Architecture as Metaphor, "Ghost," Detroit as examplary American city

Thesis:

 

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Detroit as Exemplar:

• Detroit is special, and always has been: the most exorbitantly representative spot in America. Take, for example, downtown’s Capitol Park. Once the center of our metropolis, site of the state Capitol. And now? It’s a place that most of the 4.5 million people the Census Bureau thinks live in greater Detroit couldn’t find if they had to.

 

• The design – only partially realized – was abandoned in 1818, but not before it had permanently fixed the collision of contradictory ideals that defines the streetscape of this most representative city.

 

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History:

• It was from here that Michigan’s boy governor, Stevens T. Mason, led out the militia in an 1835 attack on the state of Ohio over disputed territory

 

 

• Which is not to suggest that Capitol Park is unlucky. Maybe it didn’t bring good fortune to Mason. But there were others, mostly unknown, who left here a lot better off than when they arrived. They were runaway slaves, and Seymour Finney’s barn on the east side of the park was one of the last "stations" on the underground railroad before they could be smuggled across the river to Canada.

 

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Statue/Park as piece of continuity and/or a haunting

• The park is not just a piece of old Detroit, although it is that: an intimate, outside room, created by the surrounding walls of buildings. It’s one of the few such spaces left in a downtown perforated by dereliction and parking lots. It’s what the city looked like until the early ’50s, when this was a place to live in instead of move away from.

 

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Universalization:

• What to make of this place? Cities in America don’t grow historical, like the cities other people build; instead, they just get old. And like anything old, they make us want to turn away. Take the Farwell Building on the park’s west side. In the name of "safety" or "preservation," concrete blocks fill up its once grand windows and doors. Anything long abandoned is liable to be dangerous, buildings and cities both.

 

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Take-Home/Anti-Conclusion:

There’s something to be said about this shabby, affecting place. But what? Nothing, perhaps, except that the history of Detroit is a long history of forgetting.

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