March 2022

Maria Sulimma is reading the collection The City in American Literature and Culture(Cambridge UP, 2021) edited by Kevin R. McNamara. With sections on diverse city spaces (intersections, urban publics, “the ghetto,” “the barrio,” the neighborhood, suburban space, intersections, coastal rims, transnational spaces), forces and dynamics impacting city lives of urban dwellers (vertigo, labor, immigration, crime and violence, disaster and apocalypse, bohemia and avant-garde art), as well as urban theories (on critical race studies, trauma theory and resilience, security and surveillance, posthumanism, critical regionalism, democracy) this excellent volume collects a variety of literary, cultural, theoretical reflections on the US-American city across a variety of epochs, genres, and media texts. Most interesting in the context of city scripts might be Douglas Reichert Powells argument toward a dialog between critical regionalism and urban studies as exemplified by readings of cultural narratives (in journalism, activism, and film) that construct the postindustrial landscape of Appalachia (or protest previous characterizations).

February 2022

Elisabeth Haefs is reading The Green City and Social Injustice: 21 Tales from North America and Europe (2021) by Isabelle Anguelovski and James J. T. Connolly. The potential social costs of urban greening are at the center of this collection, which traces this often overlooked conflict in cities across Europe and North America. With sharp observations concerning Portland, Oregon, and other cities important to our research group, the essays collected here are a valuable and very timely source of information. For instance, the question of greening and gentrification, and how to 'improve' urban districts without subsequent displacement of vulnerable residents is approached from a variety of directions and locations.

January 2022

Maria Sulimma is reading the collection A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban (Wiley, 2021).  In urban studies and urban activism social reproduction has been (mis)understood in a binary with economic reproduction. The collection's eleven contributions cover a multiplicity of topics and urban spaces – ranging from cities in Argentina, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, to Zimbabwe – but share their understanding of social reproduction as not a unitary theory but a methodological entrypoint to cities and their dwellers: "the urban is increasingly the site and urbanization is increasingly the process through which social reproduction takes place" (10).

December 2021

Johannes Maria Krickl is reading Keller Easterling’s American Town Plans: A Comparative Time Line. Published in 1993, the book in many respects still serves as an eye opener to a host of issues that have been shaping US anti-urban discourse and the practice of sprawl and core-city neglect. The undercurrent logic of land development in America, and land acquisition for that matter, has ever been the securing of private property, although the building of cities and towns could in their beginnings be likened to a “public activity” (5) – granted the religious, civic, and economic motivations that drove and unified settlement efforts. However, identifying “another almost exclusively commercial version of homesteading” over the past 180 years, leads Easterling to propose that “suburbia now makes America.” (5) This observation is as permeatingly true today, as acknowledging suburbanization as a determinant force in shaping US life was well overdue in the 1990s. Self-enforcing in shape and conception, suburbia perpetuates a “somewhat fictitious story concerning life outside the big city” that not only sells well, but with its uniformity is predictable, projectable, and reproducible. Suburbia has become a “currency,” (8) so Easterling, and although its value has been decreasing slightly with the rediscovery of the inner city in recent years, it still holds too tight a grip on cities, draining them incessantly in their coping with the long-term consequences of deindustrialization. Easterling’s goal is to disclose what she describes as an obscure, “amnesic” history of suburbanization with this time line, and manages to redirect our view on what essentially has been a forming principle of US cities and their contrived counterparts.

November 2021

Chris Katzenberg is currently reading Jennifer Jellison Holme and Kara S. Finnigans' Striving in Common: A Regional Equity Framework for Urban Schools (2018). The education scholars provide a rare perspective that thinks urban reform and education reform together: they argue that the causes behind so-called "failing schools" in American cities are often diagnosed too narrowly. In education policy, there has long been a focus on technical fixes within the education system. At the same time, urban studies work on inequality and segregation has rarely considered the role of urban schooling in any detail. Striving in Common grew out of the authors' Ford Foundation-funded research project on "Interdistrict School Integration" programs in American cities since the 1970s. Yet, the work ties this issue to deeper questions regarding the sources of urban (education) inequality and in how far interventions at the level of whole metropolitan regions may alleviate them. See Kara Finnigan present part of the work here.

Maria Sulimma is reading the collection Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives (Bloomsbury 2021) edited by Heike Steinhoff. From different disciplinary perspectives and with a wide array of case studies, the contributions explore the hipster as a changing cultural figure and hipster culture as a simultaneously global but also localized phenomenon with specific ties to the gentrified city. Oscillating between irony, self-deprecation, and cultural appropriation, hipster cultures are taken into focus in different sections (on spatiality, body politics, literary production, cultural politics, and intersectionality). The links between the cultural figure of the hipster and that of the gentrifier have inspired the joint lecture series organized by Heike and Maria (see events).

October 2021

Florian Deckers is reading Janet Braun-Reinitz and Jane Weissman’s On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City (2009, University Press of Mississippi https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/O/On-the-Wall) which is one of the most complete collections of this short-lived art form in the metropolis. Thus, the authors provide an overview of the artworks and their makers from the beginning in the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century. Braun-Reinitz and Weissman not only illuminate the role of those involved, their modes of operation, as well as the development process of this primarily politically influenced wall art. With their work, including an impressive collection of photographs of murals that has not been done in this form before, they also immensely contribute to the preservation of this ephemeral art.

September 2021

Juliane Borosch is reading an article by Joel Brammeier on CityLab titled “The Great Lakes Region Is Not a ‘Climate Haven’” (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-16/the-great-lakes-region-is-not-a-climate-refuge). In this commentary/call to action the author provides an important perspective and interesting reminder, that, while the Great Lakes region was not ravaged by uncontrollable fires this summer like many other parts of the US, it still has a lot of problems of its own to tackle. The proclaimed savior water also brings floods and pollution with it, that need to be addressed. Yet, there is hope, as the region does harbor lots of environmental and economic potential – if only it is paired with equity in the process. Something to think about for sure….

Maria Sulimma is reading Stefan Höhne’s Riding the New York Subway: The Invention of the Modern Passenger (2021, MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/riding-new-york-subway). The much-awaited English translation of our collaborator Stefan’s history of New York subway passengers and the ways that the then-new urban infrastructure of the subway changed not only mobility patterns but urban relationships, perceptions, and interactions from the twentieth century onward is a must-read for people working in Urban Studies, American Studies, and Cultural History

August 2021

Elisabeth Haefs is reading A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City, edited by Alison Hope Alkon, Yuki Kato, and Joshua Sbicca (NYU Press 2020). This topical collection provides insights into the mechanisms of how urban food practices and their respective places – from grocery stores to hip restaurants, all the way to community gardens – can influence processes of gentrification. The authors also shed light on how activists try to push back against such developments. One specific contribution to this volume should be highlighted: In “The Cost of Low-Hanging Fruit? An Orchard, a Nonprofit, and Changing Community in Portland”, Emily Becker and Nathan McClintock offer a highly nuanced analysis of a community orchard in North Portland, Oregon, exploring the complicated relationship between gentrification, the ideal of community-building, and community gardening.

July 2021

Maria Sulimma is reading Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s−1860s  (2019) edited by Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele. Following the unprecedented success of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, serialized in the newspaper Le Journal des Débats between 1842 and 1843, newspapers across Europe and the United States started publishing city mysteries. These serial fictions rightfully carry the city in their name: they utilize their various urban settings to sensationalize urban life in all its facets. The contributions to this collection explore some of the most popular city mysteries, their production and reception contexts. This reading helps me reconsider the ways that seriality is relevant for urban scripts and scripting, especially in the context of popular culture.

Chris Katzenberg is reading Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization (2017) by the dance scholar Judith Hamera. Her award-winning book explores the connections between postindustrial change and race, dance performance and political economy. She considers the artistic work and public image of Michael Jackson alongside the fate and representations of (post-)industrial Detroit. Hamera treats both as deindustrial icons, indicative of wider trends in the political economy and affective climate of the United States in the transitional period from an industrial to a finacialized economy. To this end, she coins the concept of the "deindustrial, " which thinks together this ongoing "transitional period" and the "'historical sensorium,' representational repertoires and affects" its stark changes have brought with them (4). I find inspiring how Hamera manages to connect cultural representations and affects with (post-)industrial socioeconomic changes, exploring their shared "figural economies" (5).

Juliane Borosch is reading American Odyssey, a history of Detroit from colonial settlement in 1701 up to 1970 by journalist and historian Robert Conot. While already published in 1974, this study offers a detailed and especially for the time critical and progressive contextualization of the history and struggles of Detroit, and by proxy urban America. Coming out of the work on the Kerner Commission, that was meant to get to the roots of the racial uprisings and protests of the 1960s, was one of the first to diagnose white racism as the root of continued urban unrest, but was cut short for political reasons, Conot extended upon that research to write this history. It embeds the lives of individuals of different origin and standing into the history of their city and contextualizes it with national and global developments so far making for an interesting in-depth analysis from the perspective of pre-/mid-crisis Detroit and up to the 1970s.

June 2021

Elisabeth Haefs is reading Greening Cities, Growing Communities by Jeffrey Hou, Julie M. Johnson, and Laura J. Lawson. Originally an overview of Seattle's urban community gardens, this book provides valuable general insights concerning the functioning of community gardens in urban surroundings. The question of permanence in the form of sustaining urban community gardens is of central importance in the authors' approach, as is the web of relationships that influence a gardening community – from planning and design entities to the neighbourhood communities that carry out the physical part of gardening. This contribution to the vast amount of research on community gardens is slightly unusual in its delicately balanced approach: The authors neither praise community gardens as a universal remedy for urban ills, nor do they cynically denounce the very real potential of gardening together and creating new communities in the city – the "potential to promote individual and community activity, connection, expression, and health in the urban environment" (5).

Florian Deckers is currently reading Street Art – Legenden zur Strasse (2009) edited by Katrin Klitzke and Christian Schmidt. In this volume, that is beautifully supplemented with numerous pictures of street art in Berlin, scholars and authors from various fields such as art history, sociology, geography, or anthropology offer their perspectives on the urban phenomenon of street art. Annika Lorenz, for example, in her contribution traces the history of street art back to prior art forms on the basis of, on the one hand, methods and medium and, on the other hand, what could be described as intertextual references or “aesthetic quotes” (34) she identified in works of street artists. She thus creates a strong argument that street art is not only entering a reciprocal relationship with its space, but that it also needs to be understood historically.

May 2021

Maria Sulimma is reading Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (2016) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. Whereas the first part of the monograph focuses on space in narrative (different functions, emotional or strategic relations, universal and particular features in plot), the second part develops analytical tools to explore how texts in “real-world” environments may tell stories. Among the case studies discussed are street names, historical and heritage sites, or museum displays and exhibitions. The authors argue that “organizing stories in such places involves issues of spatial form that are different from those involved in using books, e-books, or even computer screens for storytelling” (5). For instance, they highlight the need to distinguish spatial texts that possess narrativity but should not be understood as narratives. Their approach is particularly helpful to specify the notion of narrative (and scripts), especially since the much-proclaimed “narrative turn” has led to the widespread use of the term across a variety of disciplines.

Hanna Rodewald is reading an article by Kurt Wettengl, the former director and curator of Dortmund’s Museum Ostwall and honorary professor of Art History at TU Dortmund University, titled “Das Museum Ostwall als Kraftwerk” (2010). It is an essay which, along the ideas of Alexander Dorner, re-positions the function of the museum from a rather passive collector and conserver of cultural artifacts to an active institution within the cityscape. Wettengl critically argues that the museum should be understood as a “Kraftwerk” (powerhouse). This analogy aims to express the social and creative energies that are generated by the museum space through the multifaceted interaction with art. The article seeks the museum to be understood as a place of exchange of ideas which are created on a daily basis by all members of society. The Museum Ostwall therefore aims to be an institution which is highly participatory, educational and essentially democratic. Besides its traditional duties it works towards becoming a space of future-oriented negotiation between its visitors, artworks and society at large.

Chris Katzenberg is watching talks on "Pursuing Educational Equity in Uncertain Times" delivered at the Fall 2020 conference of the Race, Inequality and Language in Education program (RILE) at Stanford University. The five-day event brought together important scholars from education, sociology, critical race studies and beyond to discuss connections between COVID and many of the most pressing diversity and equity issues in US education today. Themes ranged from indigenous perspectives on COVID to this moment of crisis as a long-overdue opportunity to fundamentally re-imagine American education. You can find the conference program and recordings of the talks here. I recommend Friday's program in particular, with papers by the anthropologists Savannah Shange (see also: March readings) and Gloria Ladson-Billings.

April 2021

Elisabeth Haefs is reading selected chapters from Damien M. Sojoyner's First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (2016). Rather than depicting the trope of the "school-to-prison pipeline", which he critiques, Sojoyner's differentiated analysis shows how the U.S. educational system - in this case, public schools in California - creates "enclosures" that heavily influence and fatally limit male African American youth. Although his topic is fairly removed from my own research, Sojoyner's approach to the concept of "enclosure" offers a very important perspective regarding my spatial and metaphorical take on the same word in relation to the social implications connected to community gardening in urban planning.

Florian Deckers is reading “‘Slangin’ Rocks . . . Palestinian Style’ Dispatches from the Occupied Zones of North America” by Robin D.G. Kelley, which was published in 2000 in an anthology by Jill Nelson titled Police Brutality. In his insightful essay, Kelley shares some of his own experiences with violent policing in California. In accordance with his discipline, the historian goes on and traces systematic violence of the state back to the colonial era. In the context of working on an article about the Black Lives Matter movement and some of the creative forms of dissent applied by its supporters, I re-read this article. It appears to have lost none of its relevance more than twenty years after it was written and urgently shows how violence towards people of color has been a fundamental problem of the on-going project that is the United States of America since its beginning. 

March 2021

February 2021

January 2021

Maria Sulimma is reading the science fiction novel Black Sun (2020) by Rebecca Roanhorse. Science fiction and fantasy are genres that have much to offer for urban scholars and planners. Roanhourse's compelling novel is inspired by the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas, and, it is about three cities: the commercial capital Cuecola, the military city Huecha, and the religious city Tova. Even though I am aware of criticism of Roanhorse (also worth reading), I very much enjoy her urban worldbuilding, inclusion of native themes, and queer characters.

Chris Katzenberg is reading Manufacturing Decline (2019) by the urban geographer Jason Hackworth. The book proposes that the downfall of Rust Belt cities like Detroit since the 1970s was not just the effect of global economic shifts, but has in fact been a process of "managed decline" driven by the American conservative movement that strategically harnessed anti-Black "racial resentment." Hackworth demonstrates how this politics has made urban decline a process of uneven development in the Rust Belt, disproportionately affecting the ability of Black-majority neighborhoods, cities and Black city governments to achieve a positive postindustrial transformation. Hear him discuss his book here.

Juliane Borosch is reading the short feature "Folgeschäden des Bergbaus – O Ewigkeit du Donnerwort!" (translated from German: follow up costs of coal mining – eternity, you thunderous word!") about the environmental legacy of coal mining. Next to a concise integration of the end of German hard coal mining into the sustainability context, it presents an almost philosophical pondering on the durability of this process and thus the classification 'eternal'. It is a seasonal reminder of the consequences of human activity that in topic and detailed attention to wording speaks to my study of sustainability in the Ruhr area and beyond.

December 2020

Elisabeth Haefs is reading Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017) by Zeynep Tufekci. This book offers the interesting perspective of a computer programmer who is also a sociologist. Tufekci’s analysis of modern protest is an enlightening read which assesses the influence of social media on social movements. It serves as a valuable background to better understand the dynamics of, for instance, the ongoing protests that are taking place in Portland, Oregon.

Florian Deckers is currently reading Abstract Barrios: The Crisis of Latinx Visibility in Cities (2020) by Johana Londoño. Her insightful exploration of the aesthetics of the barrio and the way in which they are brokered to mainstream America from coast to coast, inspires me in my work on East Harlem's Latinx murals and their evolving functions. Londoño illuminates how, for example, brightly colored buildings not only created a sense of belonging in the Latinx community, but also fulfilled an important function in the recuperation of the inner city.

Katharina Wood is reading the article “Expand the Frontiers of Urban Sustainability” by David Wachsmuth, Daniel A. Cohen and Hillary Angelo published in Nature. The article explores how in urban sustainability plans there is often a lack of effort to include social equity into the equation. Urban sustainability should amount to more than solely environmental measures and promote social concerns as well through a more holistic systems approach to sustainability that focuses on urban regions and global networks.

Johannes Maria Krickl is reading Stadt der Städte: Das Ruhrgebiet und seine Umbrüche, edited by M. Farrenkopf et al. (2019) and Zeit-Räume Ruhr: Erinnerungsorte des Ruhrgebiets, edited by S. Berger et al. (2019) to investigate topoi of the Ruhrgebiet, which find ambivalent application in both narrative practices of mnemonic glorification and unseaming renunciation for the imagination of a post-industrial future. 

November 2020

Juliane Borosch is reading the article “In Detroit, a Hallowed Ground for Auto Workers Finally Gets Its Due” by Namrata Kolachalam on CityLab. The article sheds light on a forgotten labor protest by Ford workers of the River Rouge factory that is being memorialized in a new city park. The article relates past struggles to current topics of sustainability and social justice. It is not only relevant for the topics we study, but offers some historical depth to workers’ and civil rights efforts during this pandemic and protest movements.

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​Chris Katzenberg

​is reading the fascinating work of the Detroit poet Jamaal May for an upcoming article. May’s recent collections Hum (2013) and The Big Book of Exit Strategies (2016) inspire my thinking about the possibilities of identity construction in present-day, postindustrial Detroit. You can learn more about Jamaal May and sample some of his wonderful poetry at the Poetry Foundation, and I recommend the poem “Shift” (2015).

Maria Sulimma is reading Coffeeland: A History (2020) by Augustine Sedgewick. For my project on literary representations of coffee drinking and cafés, I have already read several international histories of coffee (coffee drinking, coffee growing, coffee trade). This may be my favorite one. Historian Sedgewick expands from the coffee production in El-Salvador, includes a decolonial perspective, and is interested in discourses surrounding energy and coffee as a ‘work drug’ that are very compatible with my research on coffee drinking and industrialism in the 19th century.