Monday, 25 February 2008
learning from louisville
Learning from Louisville
Promise and Betrayal, by John Gilderbloom and Ron Mullins Promise and
Betrayal, by John Gilderbloom and Ron Mullins.
Last year's National Trust for Historic Preservation conference was
held in Louisville, Kentucky. I went out a couple days before the
conference and was graciously taken around a number of interesting
housing projects by Professor John Gilderbloom of the University of
Louisville. Some were projects initiated by the Sustainable Urban
Neighborhoods program of the University of Louisville (a program which
Dr. Gilderbloom started) in some of the more economically challenged
parts of the city, and others were stops on the AIA house tour, which
happened to occur the day before the conference started.
I've mentioned in the past that one of my major gleanings from poking
around Louisville for a week was that the city-county merger that
occured there, merging the City of Louisville and the County of
Jefferson into one governmental entity, is great for balancing tax
revenues and perhaps services, but has nothing to do with putting the
brakes on sprawl. Other steps are needed. (Rebalancing tax revenues
between the suburbs and the center city is a big part of the argument
by Myron Orfield's work on regional planning.)
Louisville has plenty of currently empty land in the core, yet large
subdivisions (inlcuding the new urbanist development Norton Commons)
are being built 10-20 miles from the city center.
Dr. Gilderbloom has just published a book about his experience linking
the University of Louisville to housing production and neighborhood
stabilization activities in the Russell neighborhood. It's discussed
in this article, "Book tells of U of L ties with inner city:
Co-authors analyze Russell redevelopment." When the SUN program
started, they built and sold houses for less than $70,000. Ten years
later, these houses have doubled in price, and today houses are being
built at market rates.
According to the article: "Promise and Betrayal" mainly recaps the
10-year initiative to revitalize Russell. But it is dense with
academic facts and not light reading -- 215 pages, six of them
scholarly references, in addition to name and subject indexes.
But Gilderbloom and Mullins make the case that few institutions of
higher learning apply their knowledge and resources directly to the
problems of poverty and housing in their midst. Thus, the reference to
"Betrayal" in the title. They write, "Traditionally, universities
avoid substantive involvement in inner cities because success is
difficult. Yet if universities are so knowledgeable, then one wonders
why many surrounding neighborhoods of those institutions are filled
with hopelessness and despair. In ten years of community building in
Louisville and elsewhere, we found that most academics fail to
address, much less solve, inner-city problems."
It sounds like an important book that I need to add to my reading
list.
On Dr. Gilderbloom's tour (coincidentally held in conjunction with his
graduate level planning course on housing and community development)
while we were going around the Russell neighborhood, which is typical
of urban neighborhoods in weak real estate markets--many many empty
lots (but I will say, for a "bad" neighborhood it was a lot cleaner
than the streets in a lot of neighborhoods in DC), the result of
putative attempts at urban clearance and renewal that never really got
going (Alas, I did not then have a digital camera, so I don't have any
photos)--we ran into Argie Dale, a local radio entrepreneur who took
up development, in part spurred on by the SUN efforts. He talked to us
about his development efforts, which have also spurred others. (I will
say that his very large house has some suburban elements, including a
prominent driveway and a fence. Plus the area wasn't fully
"sidewalked.")
Developer Argie Dale, Louisville, Kentucky Developer Argie Dale built
a 5,200-square-foot home in the Russell neighborhood for his family,
prompting similar requests. (Photo by David. C. Burton, Special to the
Louisville Courier-Journal)
The historic Trolley Barn Complex in the heart of the Russell
neighborhood--named for Harvey Clarence Russell, a distinguished Black
educator who lived in Louisville in the 1920's--is being converted
into the Kentucky Center for African-American Heritage. The under
construction site was the location of the African-American Heritage
Preservation reception during the conference.
This article also from the Courier-Journal, "Urban living guides
city's housing plan. Report shows needs changing; home developers to
be courted," discusses new plans for housing development in the core
of the city.
From the article:
Mayor Jerry Abramson is launching a major initiative to rebuild older
neighborhoods and steer home developers toward more condominiums,
townhouses and row houses. The reason is simple, Abramson said:
Louisville, like the rest of the nation, is undergoing a major
demographic shift. Baby boomers are retiring and no longer need large
suburban homes. Younger people -- especially those marrying later and
forgoing children -- are choosing to live in urban areas. "It's a new
day and a new way," said Bruce Traughber, secretary of the metro
government's Cabinet for Community Development. Some of the changes,
such as the city working with homebuilders to encourage them to build
in urban neighborhoods, will begin immediately.
This is the first of a series of articles in the Courier-Journal about
the city-county government's new strategy for revitalizing core city
neighborhoods. I'll have to go back and dig up these articles.
There's a lot more going on in Louisville than you may imagine.
There's quite an arts and culture scene, and amazing buildings,
although the preservation community has suffered some defeats. It's
also close to Lexington, home of the University of Kentucky, which has
a great historic preservation program, and the state capital,
Frankfort. Kentucky's State Historic Preservation program and the Main
Streets program are best practices examples.
1.velocitycover_2004.09.29 Old Louisville is an amazing neighborhood,
Sunday, 24 February 2008
2006_08_01_archive
The final session at the 2007 AAG meeting I am co-organising is on
Software and Space. This is being put together with Matt Zook and Rob
Kitchin and has already received a good amount of interest. The CFP is
available as a pdf.
----
Call for papers - 2007 Association of American Geographers Annual
Conference.
17-21 April 2007, San Francisco, California, USA.
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/SF2007/
Software and Space
Session organisers
Martin Dodge, Geography, University of Manchester
Rob Kitchin, NIRSA, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Matthew Zook, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
Unpacking the automatic production of spaces
Over the past thirty years, the practices of everyday life have become
increasingly infused with and mediated by software. Whatever the task
- domestic living, working, consuming, travelling or communicating -
software increasingly makes a difference to how everyday life takes
place. Software is embedded into objects and systems as a means to
enhance and manage usage and is pivotal in linking together disparate
and distributed infrastructures. It also enables new and refined
processes through the generation, storage, profiling, screening and
communication of data about individuals, objects, and transactions.
Importantly, software has profound spatial effects, both through the
automatic production of space that generates new spatialities (Thrift
and French, 2002; Dodge and Kitchin, 2005a) and the creation of
software-sorted (Graham, 2005) or machine readable (Dodge and Kitchin,
2005b) geographies that alter the nature of access and
governmentality.
Given that the AAG meeting in 2007 will take place in the San
Francisco Bay the central node in the design and promulgation of
software it seems an apposite place to initiate a wider ranging
discussion on the role of software in the production of space.
Building on previous research concerned primarily with the
disciplinary effects of software-enabled technologies in the
govermentality of spaces of transportation, communication and
consumption, these sessions aim to move beyond seeing code solely as a
force of control. Consequently, we seek papers examining the
productive capability of software to reformulate collective life and
enhance individual's spatiality in creative, playful, empowering ways.
We seek papers that report empirically-informed analysis that unpack
the `automatic production of space' (Thrift and French, 2002) in terms
of people's daily experience living within (and increasing living
though) coded environments. It is hoped that the sessions will draw
together researchers from Geography, Sociology, Anthropology,
Communications, Media Studies and allied disciplines.
The goal of the sessions is, therefore, to conceptualize software
through its effects on space and social life at an individual level
rather than technical papers on particular software applications
(e.g., work in applied GIS) or economic geography analysis of the
software industry.
Some possible themes:
We seek theoretically informed papers that can report empirical
research within the following broad themes:
# Code and Creativity: Software's ability to manipulate digital media
is crucial to the emergence of `mash-ups' (ad-hoc combination and
hybrid re-use), `modding' (informal user modifications to improve
performance) and `remixability' (Manovich, 2005) that some herald as a
new wave of popular entertainment and decentred knowledge production.
How and in what ways does software enable new forms of individual
creativity? How is software making new spaces of play possible, new
means of human expression and facilitating new places for artistic and
craft practices?
# Code and Memories: People are generally only vaguely aware of the
extent to which coded objects, systems and environments are becoming
aware of them, and increasingly capturing routine interactions and
activity. What might the folding together of biological memory, shared
social memories and externalised digital memories mean for day to day
life? What benefits might such augmented memory bring, would never
forgetting events and details be a welcome improvement to individual's
lives?
# Code and Well-being: In what ways and to what degree might
software-enabled practices and spaces influence our well-being? Will
more continuous monitoring of health status via personalised software
systems be advantageous to well-being? Does the automation,
flexibility and the sense of a speeded-up world create new feelings of
empowerment or fears of powerlessness? How does software relate to the
mind, body and spirit of individuals in the so-called digital age?
# Code and Risks: The services and spaces of everyday living
increasingly depend on software to work. Most of the time software
`just works', yet this dependency is creating many new risks for
individuals, particularly in terms of complexity, and the impact of
unforeseen and hard to diagnose and fix problems with software. This
code complexity is also opening up new means for criminal activity and
malicious damage that can directly impact individuals (such as
computer viruses, phishing and identity theft). How do people manage
such risks, threats and fears?
# Code and Resistance: Much of the application of software by state
and corporate actors is about enhancing the effectiveness of existing
surveillance and automating the regulation of access. In what ways is
software enabling new capabilities for spatial governmentality? Also,
it is apparent that software intended to discipline also opens up many
novel types of resistance and new sites for subversive activities that
can disrupt the power relationships in quite surprising ways. We
invite contributions which explore the scope and spatiality of
alternative, subversive and underground hacking of code that
challenges established power relations and jump-scales to effect
political change.
# Code and Histories: Can our understanding of the contemporary
effects of the automation of spaces and activities by software be
improved by looking back into the past? Does an understanding of the
histories of code, by untangling how people have lived with
information processing technologies (including the pre-digital era of
analogue machinery), give useful insights into the future?
# Code Fieldwork: In terms of research methodologies, what ways can
software's effects be best studied, given that they are hidden in
arcane algorithms, and are often locked into privatised micro-spaces
and commercially-secret applications. In particular, how can software
be studied empirically as forms of individual practice that bring
spaces into being in contingent ways, rather than being analysed
through its representation form (written text - the source code - or
screen interfaces)?
----
Proposed papers in the form of a title and short abstract (250 words
maximum) should be submitted to Martin Dodge
(m.dodge@manchester.ac.uk) by 15th September 2006.
Further details on the paper requirements and registration for the AAG
meeting are at
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/SF2007/call4papers.cfm
We are also planning to organise a special issue in a leading human
geography journal on these themes and authors of full papers from the
session will be invited to participate.
posted by martin at 11:06 AM 0 comments
Posting a book chapter on Virtual Places to be published in the
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