By Sharon Zukin
Fusing city political economic climate with ethnography and the research of visible shape, this ebook argues that the true urban is not just a cloth base of land, labour and capital, but additionally a projection constructed by means of social representations, together with structures and language, paintings and rot. the town, Zukin demonstrates, is kept or doomed through tradition, not less than via monetary buildings and political associations.
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Sample text
A neighborhood court, they said, would speed the disposition of cases against minor offenders accused of such crimes as prostitution, shoplifting, trespassing, and running a scam of three-card monte in the street, and enhance community control over quality oflife. The theater owner who would donate the use of the theater for a courthouse, who was also the chairman of the Schubert Organization, spoke of the "devastating" impact of crime on a long-delayed Times Square redevelopment plan. The deputy mayor for public safety admitted the proposal for a Times Square court could be criticized as "elitist," but that seemed to be less of a problem than how to finance it.
Each of these areas is governed, and largely or entirely financed, by a private organization, often working as a quasi-public authority. These private groups are much better funded than the corresponding public organization. Design in each park features a purposeful vision of urban leisure. A heightened concern for security inspires the most remarkable visible features: gates, private security guards, and eyes keeping the space under surveillance. The underlying assumption is that of a paying public, a public that values public space as an object of visual consumption.
The Basilica ofSacre Coeur was built on Montmartre, site of the slaughter of Communards in 1871 (Harvey 1985b); traffic was rerouted around Columbus Circle, in New York, to end the left-wing rallies that gathered there in the 1920s and 1930s. Whose Culture? Whose City? 45 Until1914, we are told, "Times Square was the scene ofmany outdoor forums. When the square became too crowded these activities shifted northward; now in the open space below the [Columbus] monument impromptu discussions are held and groups listen to oratory on every conceivable subject from Thomas Paine and the Age of Reason to the advantages of a vegetable diet" (Federal Writers' Project 1939b, 180).