Dana Cuff - Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5

Urban Humanities

Urban and Industrial Environments

Series editor: Robert Gottlieb, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy, Occidental College

For a complete list of books published in this series, please see the back of the book.

Urban Humanities

New Practices for Reimagining the City

Dana Cuff, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner,

Maite Zubiaurre, and Jonathan Jae-an Crisman

The MIT PressCambridge, MassachusettsLondon, England

2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Sabon and Helvetica by the MIT Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cuff, Dana, 1953- author. | Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia, 1958

author. | Presner, Todd Samuel, author. | Zubiaurre, Maria Teresa,

author. | Crisman, Jonathan, Jae-an, author.

Title: Urban humanities : new practices for reimagining the city / Dana Cuff,

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner, Maite Zubiaurre, and Jonathan Jae-an

Crisman.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2020. | Series: Urban and

industrial environments | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019017368 | ISBN 9780262538220 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns. | Architecture and society. |

ArchitectureStudy and teachingCase studies.

Classification: LCC HT153 .C84 2020 | DDC 306.76dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017368

10987654321

d_r0

To Our Students

2019 marked the twenty-fifth year of the Urban and Industrial Environments (UIE) series. When I first proposed the idea to then MIT Press editor Madeline Sunley, I envisioned the series attracting manuscripts that stretched disciplinary boundaries, appealed to both academic and general-interest audiences, focused on local and global questions, and expanded the definitions of environment to encompass the issues of everyday life. I wanted the series to have a strong social and environmental justice orientation, where its authors would see themselves as participants and not just observers.

With more than seventy-five books now in the series (see the list of titles at the back of this book), the books published have accomplished much of what I had originally proposed. The success of the series is also due to the role of the two subsequent MIT Press editors, Clay Morgan and currently Beth Clevenger, who helped support and nurture it, solicit new as well as recognized contributors, and advocate within the MIT Press for the kinds of books that often do not fit neatly into traditional disciplinary silos.

It is fitting then, as we continue to expand its reach, for the UIE series to be able to include Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City. A collaborative work of people from different disciplines, the five authors see their collaboration as a means to establish what they call a new ecology of teaching and learning. The term urban humanities (first originating at UCLA where these authors formed their collaboration) emphasized the urban in a global context. These would be places, as Richard Sennett has argued, where people can turn outward, not inward... and give them the experience of otherness to be, as Sennett puts it, in the presence of difference. This concept of the urban contrasts with the neoliberal city, a place of what Saskia Sassen called expulsions, where lack of affordable housing, gentrification, financialization, displacement, and the privatization of public space all meet.

Research, in this context, is a practice rather than a set of methods; a fusion of research, representation and action, write the Urban Humanities collaborators. This type of action-oriented research agenda situates many of the books in the UIE series as well as my own work and practice as well. It is a form of engagement with communities and with universities. It starts with the classroom, breaking down barriers, creating new ways of thinking. It could be toxicology for poets or poetry for toxicologistsas one of our students characterized a multilayered collaborative course of four faculty that I participated in at UCLA twenty-five years ago; two of the first titles in the UIE series were written by former students who had been in that class. It leads to the community, or rather communities needing or seeking transformation. The action research agenda challenges the very divide between university and researcher and community and community actor. Instead of seeing and accepting universities as places of power and privilege, the urban humanities approach challenges universities to be of the community, and in that way challenges the unequal power relations and the walls that traditionally divide town and gown.

Moreover, Urban Humanities, similarly to many of the books in the UIE series, provides research and engagement at local, national, and global levels. Spaces, particularly urban spaces, are at once local, particular, and transnational, especially in an era when the itineraries of the refugees and immigrants are changing the very character of those places. Urban places can be desolate placesspaces of camps and walls, as described by the Urban Humanities authors, but also places where crossing borders elevates the importance of spatial justice and the necessity of turning global cities into places of resistance.

This book is timely and well situated historically. While the walls have not entirely come down, universities (and, I would argue, the university presses and journals that had previously sustained the divide) are seeking, albeit still tentatively, to break out of their isolation. Urban Humanities includes the search for interdisciplinarity, although the university reward system still discourages it. It includes the need to develop greater transparency and openness to the immediate and broader worlds around universities, although they all too often remain closed and self-contained places. It seeks to engage with communities, although communities require not just engagement but also action. And it searches for diversity when what is also required is social justice and transformation.

Welcome then, reader, to these contested spaces and to the emerging world of Urban Humanities.

This book embodies the core princi-ples of the Urban Humanities Initiative. This is a cross-disciplinary, project-oriented, and experimental curricular initiative at UCLA that draws from humanist practices to interpret and intervene in the city and is driven by a concern for social justice. We treat the format of this book as a generative framework for succinctly demonstrating the open-ended, transformative possibilities of urban humanities, and one possible and compelling way to present knowledge to a broader public audience. The creation of this book, like the urban humanities curricular and research initiative, was a deeply collaborative, design-oriented, experimental process involving all five authors at every step of the way. As we thought about how to articulate years of experiences in the classroom and research practices in multiple cities in a book format, we settled on several organizing ideas: first, a situated history of urban humanities as a developing concept and an intellectual framework; second, a set of emerging practices, with a wide range of research applications; third, a pedagogical component that examined how our teaching and curricula changed, especially through modes of public engagement and an emphasis on spatial justice; and, finally, a set of concrete projects about urban humanities practices in the field, composed and written by a range of collaborators.