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Urban Reader


          



    
Almost every week in urban classrooms at The New School,
two or more of us teach the same text. Some of these texts already have
canonical status. Others are texts which a particular generation of teachers
and scholars has come to appreciate for their insights within and across the
disciplines. 




The New
 School Urban Reader aims to provide a series of
analytic and interpretive dialogues between scholars from different
disciplines. The ultimate purpose is the creative juxtaposition of texts, their interpretations and uses in
disciplinary contexts in which the texts might not have originated. The Urban Reader will be used as a teaching tool
and as creative communication with prospective students and colleagues in the
broader field of urban studies.





The criteria for contributions are:





  1. The text is understood broadly—to include everything from an academic
     article, a novel, a public sculpture, film...
  2. The
     text need not—in fact preferably would not—belong to the academic
     discipline of the writer who chooses it.  What is important is the
     generativity of the text, and the thinking it inspires, not the disciplinary claim.
  3. The
     length of the interpretation/analysis should not exceed 700 words.
  4. An
     author may choose the partner in this dialogue—coming from a field
     different than the author and The New School instructor. Otherwise, the
     Editorial Collective will match the contributors. 





 





TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City - Jurgen Von Mahs 
A. Maucert, Exhibition of Paintings at the Place Dauphine (Paris 1784) - Laura Auricchio 


 
Georg Simmel "The Metropolis and Mental Life" - Joseph Salvatore
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York - Shannon Mattern
West Side Story (musical 1957; movie 1961) - Julia Foulkes
Simmel in Bangkok: The Mega-city and Mental Life - Brian McGrath 
Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities - Miodrag Mitrasinovic (upcoming)
James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century - Georgia Traganou (upcoming)
Jacques Derrida, “Generations of a City: Memory, Prophecy, Responsibilities”/concept of incompletion - Aleksandra Wagner (upcoming)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus/concept of density - Vyjayanthi Rao (upcoming)
 
THE URBAN READER 2008-2009
Aleksandra Wagner, Editor
WagnerA1@newschool.edu

Joseph Salvatore, Copy Editor
Salvatoj@newschool.edu
 
 
    

    Urban Reading
    Simmel in Bangkok: The Mega-city and Mental Life
    
    
    simmel_1.jpg
    Brian McGrath
    Georg Simmel defined metropolitan life as in tension between the
exertion of psychological individuality and intellectual independence
and rapid change, conflict and the "violent stimuli," characteristic of
the modern European city. 
     


      
    

    Urban Reading
    Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, 1993. Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco.
    
    
    malign_cover.jpg
    Jürgen von Mahs
    Considered one of the most comprehensive and clearly written analyses of urban homelessness of its time, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City
continues to be as relevant and persuasive today as it was back in the
early nineties. 
     


      
    

    Urban Reading
    Exhibition of Paintings at the Place Dauphine (Paris, 1784)
    
    
    dauphine_small.jpg
    Laura Auricchio 
    Although this 1784 watercolor by A. Maucert nominally depicts the art
exhibition held annually at the Place Dauphine (a triangular courtyard
on the tip of Paris’s Île de la Cité), the work offers less information
about the show or its site than about the diversity of the urban
experience. 
     


      
    

    Urban Reading
    Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
    
    
    deliriousrk.jpg
    Shannon Mattern
    “How to write a manifesto … in an age disgusted with them?” Rem Koolhaas thus begins Delirious New York, acknowledging that this publication – and, as he argues, the City of New York – are both conscious of their mediation, their representation in text and blueprints, photographs and films. 
     


      
    

    Urban Reading
    Georg Simmel “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
    
    
    simmel.jpg
    Joseph Salvatore
    In
a semester that takes us from Bartleby to Bateman and beyond, my
students see all kinds of dramatizations of the blasé attitude. Whether
it's Ellen Thatcher in Manhattan Transfer or Tom and Daisy Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby or the maniacal Patrick Bateman of American Psycho,
all of these metropolitan types exhibit this intellectual
characteristic of the urban psyche attributed by Georg Simmel in his
essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life."
     


      
    

    Urban Reading
    West Side Story (musical, 1957; movie, 1961)
    
    
    west_side_story.jpg
    Julia L. Foulkes
    West Side Story is
a cautionary tale of urban life in mid-century U.S. It falls to neither side of
the urban renewal debate, not the grandiose panorama of a metropolitan region
or the kinship of a city block; instead, the story displays the bubbling
tensions between government and residents, poor and middle classes, racial and
ethnic groups, modernists and the emerging postmodernists that would erupt in
the 1960s.