CITIES AND URBAN KNOWLEDGES

The Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges has helped create an international community of scholars devoted to the interdisciplinary study of the city in a pluralized world. It brought together in New York urban scholars and artists and urban professionals from the United States and abroad to explore the condition of modern city life and our means of understanding it.

By bringing together urban inquirers from various fields and national intellectual and urban traditions, the Project contributed to an international conversation on cities that respects the particularities of different local configurations of everyday life, city consciousness, and politics. The contemporary situation of the world's large cities defined the focus of the project with historical and comparative study of cities complementing that focus.

In nourishing an intellectual and comparative perspective, the Project incorporated "cases" from North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia; brought together scholars from all continents to widen the frame of urban analysis and to enrich the language of urban studies. This reflexive examination of urban knowledges not only advanced scholarship, but also contributed to clarifying the possibilities of urban interventions through the political process, and toward that end the community will be a place where activists and scholars may meet and interact.

The community of urbanists at the Center consisted of fellows from the United States and abroad, NYU Faculty Fellows, and NYU Doctoral Dissertation Fellows. The Project sponsored a regular seminar on cities as well as occasional lectures, workshops, symposia, and conferences.

The work of the Project was organized by annual themes, around which each year's community of fellows are formed.

The Rockefeller Foundation designated the Center's Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges a residential site for the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships for the period 1997-2000.

The Cities and Urban Knowledges Project was directed by Thomas Bender. For the names of the Fellows, Project Advisory Committee and Funders click on the previous links.

Annual Themes

Metropolitan Life and Contemporary Culture (2000-2001)

The theme for the final year of the Project was Metropolitan Life and Contemporary Culture. How does the physical form and social life of the metropolis work as a habitat of creativity? Put differently, by means of comparative study the Project sought to better understand the relation of everyday life in historical and present-day metropolises to the content and forms of cultural expression identified with them. Although the Project was concerned with the contemporaneity of the metropolitan experience and cultural artifacts in various historical moments, the role of the metropolis as a repository of history was also examined for its contribution to contemporary innovation. A variety of possible foci were considered, ranging from issues of representation, to the process of creativity in cities, the relation of urban experience (everyday life) to cultural production and expression, the role of technology, economic structures, and institutions, patterns of inclusions and exclusions, the extension of metropolitan culture beyond the metropolis, and how local urban specificity is created and sustained.

Political Obligation and Citizenship (1999-2000)

To a considerable extent the sense of civic obligation depends upon the character of urban knowledges: the ways in which the collectivity of city life is represented, not only in academic scholarship, but also in popular culture and social practices of modern citizens, the bundle of conventions and habitual ways and perceptions that order lives in particular times and places. Perceptual boundaries, class structures, and physical forms seem to mark the limits of civic life and collective responsibility, and the exploration of urban representation provides a fruitful focal point for inquiry into the nature and extent of citizenship and political obligation in modern, dispersed, and divided cities localized in regional, national, and global contexts.

Cities and Nations (1998-1999)

The relation of cities and nations has been historically variable; today, there is a realignment of them, with implications for urban and national life. Cities and regions may be gaining in relation to nations. These changes are difficult to appraise, but it is clear that they are destabilizing not only social and political life, but also the interpretive power of existing urban knowledges. To begin to address the practical problems, urban knowledge must be reconstructed on this issue and our knowledge of the boundaries of the urban, of the relation of the local to the national and the global must be reformulated in light of both history and contemporary experience.

Divided Cities (1997-1998)

Urban division represents at once the most general and the most urgent issue confronted by urban thought and practice today. The Project seeks to rethink the bases of division and their relation to urban unities, seeking to identify different orders of differentiation and unity, largely through comparative analysis.

FELLOWS

2000-2001: Metropolitan Culture

Ammiel Alcalay, United States
"After Words & Places: Study in Local & Global Poetics"

Michael Cohen, United States, Visiting Scholar

Khaled Fahmy, NYU Faculty Fellow
"For Cavafy with Love and Squalor: Some Critical Notces on the Discourse of Cosmopolitanism in Modern Alexandria"

Margarita Gutman, Visiting Scholar, Argentina

Mark Healey, United States
"The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism, Architecture and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake"

Beatriz Jaguaribe, Brazil
"Tropical Modernities: Cultural Modernity and Urban Experience"

Joan Kee, Seoul Korea
"Global Pressures/Local Traditions: Assessing the Impact of New Legislation on the Visual Culture of Seoul"

Ionna Laliotou, Greece
"In Deep Mediterraneity, Becoming Metropolitan: Migrants, Films, and Moving Cultures in Contemporary Athens, Rome, Barcelona"

Annette Michelson, NYU Faculty Fellow
"Film Practice and Urban Theory"

Thuy Ling Nguyen, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Immigration and the Emergence of an Asian American Popular Culture"

Sukhdev Sandhu, Great Britain
"The Uses of Metropolitan History by Black and South Asian People in Contemporary London"

Daniel Widener, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Something Else: Creative Community and Black Liberation in Postwar Black Los Angeles"

Jessica Winegar, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Cultural Politics and the Contemporary Egyptian Art World"

Peter Zabielskis, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"House, Self, and Society: The Cultural Space of Identity in a Multi- ethnic Southeast Asian City"

Zhang Zhen, NYU Faculty Fellow
"An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Film Culture, Urban Modernity, and the Vernacular Experience in Shanghai, 1896-1937"

1999-2000: Citizenship and Political Obligation

Ethel Brooks, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Transnational Production, Protes and Women's Labor: A Study of the garment industry in Bangladesh, El Salvador and New York City"

Margaret Cohen, NYU Faculty Fellow
"Sentinental Communities"

Michael Cohen, Visiting Scholar, United States

Katherine Fleming, NYU Faculty Fellow
"Athens, Constantinople, and the Gospel Riots of 1901: Urban Paradigms and Greek NationalIdentity"

Marco Aurelio A. de Filgueiras Gomes, Visiting Scholar, Brazil

Manu Goswami, India/United States
"The Production of 'India':Colonialism, Nationalism, and Territorial Nativism, 1890-1948"

Margarita Gutman, Visiting Scholar, Argentina

Jyoti Hosagrahar, Visiting Scholar, United States

Thomas Jackson, United States
"Welfare as We Know It:" Idelogy and Politics in Welfare Reform, 1950-1996

Mary Dewhurst Lewis, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Irregular Situation, Irregular Lives? Immigrants and Institutions in Interwar France"

Andrew Light, United States
"The Urban Blindspot in Environmental Thought: Environmental Philosophy and Urban Stewardship"

Joseph Mungioli, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Somos Muy Rebeldes": Cultural Movements and Popular Culture in Urban Mexico

Srirupa Roy, India/United States, Rockefeller Fellow
"Locating Cultural Diversity, Creating Political Unity": Representations of Urban Cultural Diversity, State Legitimation and Popular Cultural Challenges in India, 1947-1997

Leo Rubinfien, Visiting Scholar, United States

AbdouMaliq Simone, South Africa, Rockefeller Fellow
"The Informal City in Africa: On the making of urban knowledge and citizenship"

Rebeccah F. Welch, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Eye of the Hurricane": Black Art and Activism in Postwar New York, 1950-1965

Cynthia A.Young, United States
"SOUL POWER: Cultural Radicalism and the Formation of U.S. Third World Left

1998-1999: Cities and Nations

Peter Carroll, United States
"Ancient City/Modern Urbanism: the (Re) Construction of Urban Space in late Qing and Early Republic Suzhou"

Alev Cinar, Turkey/United States, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
"Visual Constructions of the Public Sphere in Istanbul: Islamic Contestations of of Secular Modernity"

Jordana Dym, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"City, Province and Nation: Political Identity and Nation-State Formatic"

Camilla Fojas, NYU Mellon Dissertation Fellow
"Cosmopolitanism and National Aesthetic Culture"

Ben Lan Goh, Malaysia
"Modern Dreams: An enquiry into Power, Cultural Production and the Cityscape in Contemporary Urban Penang, Malaysia"

Ulf Hannerz, Visiting Scholar, Sweden

Najib Hourani, NYU Mellon Dissertation Fellow
"Reconstruction the Nation: Urbanism and Identity in Post-War Beirut"

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Visiting Scholar, France/Morocco

Abidin Kusno, Indonesia/United States
"Nation, Captial City and Political Cultures in Indonesia"

Timothy Mitchell, NYU Faculty Fellow
"Nation and Economy in Twentieth - Century Cairo"

Karl Hagstrom Miller, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"From Neighborhood to Nation's Ear: Music, Folklore, and Records in the Southern City"

Leo Rubinfien, United States
"In The World City"

Michael Peter Smith, Visiting Scholar, United States

Maha Yahya, Lebanon, Rockefeller Fellow
Unnamed Modernisms: "Oriental" Filiation and "Meditteranean" Affiliation in Beirut's Urban Architecture

Marilyn Young, NYU Faculty Fellow
"Our Country, Our Culture, Our War"

Xudong Zhang, China/United States, Rockefeller Fellow
"The City and the National Imagination in Post-Tiananmen China: Mass Culture and Intellectual Politics"

1997-1998: Divided Cities

Arjun Appardurai, United States
"Space, Identity and Uncertainty: Ethnic Violence In The Era Of Globalization"

Meron Benvenisti, Israel

Meskerem Bhrane, United States
"Beyond the Squatter's Camp: Social Networks and the Formation of Urban Identities in Mauritania"

Ian Blair, Great Britain

Teresa Caldeira, Visiting Scholar, United States

Christine Choy, NYU Faculty Fellow

John Czaplicka, United States
"Divided Cities, Divided Histories: The Heritage of Eurpoe Cities in the Eastern Borderlands"

Farha Ghannam, Jordan, Rockefeller Fellow
"Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo"

Steven Gregory, NYU Faculty Fellow

James Holston, Visiting Scholar, United States

Mark LeVine, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Re-imagining Communities: A Social & Spatial History of Jaffa & Tel Aviv, 1909-36"

S. E. Pasqual Maragall, Spain

Louise Maxwell, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Waging War Against Jim Crow: Segregation and Urbanization in Birmingham, Alabama 1938-1963"

Thierry Mayamba Nlandu, Congo

John Rajchman, Visiting Scholar, United States/France

Nichole Rustin, NYU Graduate Research Fellow

Nayan Shah, United States
Epidemics and the Crisis of Race in San Francisco's "Chinatown," 1854-1952

Smriti Srinivas, India, Rockefeller Fellow
"Cities of the Past and Cities of the Future: Modelling Community and Space in the Metropolis of Bangalore, India"

Salim Tamari, Palestine

Tracy Tullis, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"A Vietnam at Home": Policing the Inner City, 1963-1974"

PROJECT ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Thomas Bender,
NYU History, United States

Jean-Louis Cohen,
NYU Architectural History, Europe

Manthia Diawara,
NYU Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies, Africa

Ada Ferrer,
NYU History, Latin America

Michael Gilsenan,
NYU Anthropology, Middle East

Faye Ginsburg,
NYU Anthropology

Todd Gitlin,
NYU Sociology, Culture and Communication, United States

Steven Gregory,
NYU Anthropology, United States

Harry Harootunian,
NYU History, Japan

Robin D.G. Kelley,
NYU History, United States and Africa

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
NYU Folklore, United States and Europe

Ellen Lagemann,
NYU History and Education, United Staes

Timothy Mitchell,
NYU Politics, Middle East

Mitchell Moss,
NYU Public Administration, United States

Richard Sennett,
NYU Sociology and History, United Staes and Europe

FUNDERS

This Project has received generous funding from New York University. In addition it had recieved substantial support from The Rockefeller Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

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