DIY Urban Design & the Right to the City

I'm going to be presenting a paper as part of a panel on "Rights, Space and Places" at the American Association of Geographers annual conference in Seattle in April. The panel is being organized by James DeFilippis and David Imbroscio. This is the abstract for my paper.


Do-It-Yourself Urban Design
Reimagining the Built Environment through Place-Based, Site-Specific Art and Activism

This paper presents research into practices of place-based, site-specific art and activism that question the normative uses and meanings of urban spaces. Small-scale acts of transgressive “beautification,” such as guerrilla gardening, adbusting, graffiti, yarn-bombing and other street art, assert freedom of expression and control with the built environment as canvass, while the defiant repurposing or misusing of spaces and structures through impromptu street closing, interventionist games, and guerrilla theater temporarily challenge authority and the status quo. In the context of theories of critical spatial practice and everyday resistance (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Scott and others), I argue that these phenomena constitute meaningful expressions of consciousness and critique of the neoliberal city. Rather than formal acts of “resistance” in any strong sense, however, I draw on empirical data from fieldwork in New York, London, and Los Angeles to show that the practices should be seen as individual, informal “right to the city” claims, often in direct response to specific socio-spatial conditions. These practices of place-based, site-specific art and activism suggest a new sense of the city’s “malleability” in some people’s eyes, defined by a willingness to reimagine the built environment on their own terms through a radical sort of ‘do-it-yourself’ urban design.

On the Value and Censorship of Tweetable Dissent

My pal John Wagner Givens has a great new blog post up on the Huffington Post about online censorship vis-a-vis the digitization of dissent, featuring a pointed critique of the whole concept of condensing radical thought down to 140 characters.
You should read it. And below are some comments I had, and John's response.

Re: Twitterpated: Censoring 140 Characteres

Great post John, great points. I'm glad you didn't just tweet it.

The idea of dissidents being forced (back) into self-publishing is an important one, and speaks to questions of how it's ironically often easier to control things online (and in other manufactured interfaces) than more traditional or analogue expression. That said, it would still seem an unfortunate step backward for a movement to have to abandon (lengthier) electronic communication altogether.

Also, to what degree have Chinese authorities censored that original 140-character instantaneous transmitter of protest, the text message?

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost