The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is participating in the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, which aims to bring the humanities into closer connection with disciplines that study the built environment to help address the complex problems facing today's urban areas. To jump-start conversation for an upcoming working session, participants have been asked to "reflect upon a keyword that provokes, confuses, inspires, and/or annoys you in current thinking about urban and/or urban arts engagement." This posting is by Margaret Crawford, Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley.
Keyword: Everyday Urbanism
In the early 1990s,
I started working with scholars, urban designers, photographers, and writers on
a project exploring everyday urban life in Los Angeles. In 1999, we published Everyday Urbanism
as a guide to investigating the “as-found” character of the city. We identified
everyday urban space as a rich and complex public realm created by the
multiplicities of daily experience– trips to supermarkets, the commute to work,
journeys that included wide
boulevards and mini-malls, luxurious stores and street vendors, manicured lawns
and dilapidated public parks.
Drawing on both
social and urban theory and highly specific local fieldwork, we portrayed such
everyday spaces as a product of the intricate social, political, economic, and
aesthetic forces operating in
the city. By emphasizing the
primacy of human experience and close-up observation of lived realities, we
wanted to challenge the formalism of architecture and the abstractions of urban
theory and planning.
Instead, we defined
the city as a social product and a social geography, naming and drawing attention to a type of urban space that was pervasive
but unknown; ignored by city planners, disregarded by scholars, and scorned by
architects, but fundamental to the city’s residents. To mirror the multiples
spaces of everyday life, we assembled essays, both scholarly and personal,
photographs, drawings, and design proposals.
The concept continued to develop.
In 1994, John Chase published Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving, a deeply
personal depiction of Los Angeles as the product of an ad hoc but
democratic urbanism in which developers, homeowners, renters, retailers,
pedestrians and the homeless all assert their own place in the city. In 2008, Everyday Urbanism Expanded Version
appeared, allowing us to acknowledge the numerous attacks on our ideas as well
as including new contributions from around the world, a demonstration of the
concept’s worldwide influence.
I see the Mellon
Grant as a new project that has the potential to be as intellectually exciting
and personally satisfying as Everyday Urbanism. In many ways, humanities based
urbanism represents a continuation and expansion of the same concepts and
methods; collaboration, a focus on the human subject, the inclusion of multiple
voices, the creative use of a broad range of theories, and the intention to
create new forms of critique, interpretation and representation. Bringing these together, we can create a new
urban discipline that will make the concepts, methods and insights of the
humanities operative in urban space.
