Urban Ecology and Intervention in the 21st Century Americas: Verticality, Catastrophe, and the Mediated City

Description

This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of figures Acknowledgments Chapter 1: The weather of catastrophe and the vertical field On methodology Verticality and catastrophe in the archive Urban experiments, urban fantasies City speculations Urban (media) ecologies Demonstration in the city (or, why city space still matters) Buenos Aires/Miami/Los Angeles Urban landscapes and escapes Notes Chapter 2: Alternative sprawls, junk cities: Buenos Aires Libre and horizontal urban knowledges Horizontalidad: Sprawling as praxis Remapping space, teaching sprawl Junk network, junk city Junk, trash, and trouble in Buenos Aires Junkworld Sprawl ends, junk beginnings Notes Interlude 1: Urban/sprawl Urban context and contestation The city as/and technology Sprawl in peril Capitalism and the right to the city Notes Chapter 3: Your Million Dollar Houses Will Soon Be Underwater: Coming catastrophe in Miami and the plastic city Miami: Hemispheric city, informational city, transient city Climate projections Resilience and flexibility Fantasy land, plastic city Proximity and vulnerability: Little Haiti and disastrous discourse Interlude 2: Plastic/city Notes Chapter 4: From the ground up: Aerial tactics and top-down strategies in Los Angeles Infrastructures: Mobility and modulation/fixity and precision Pathology: Alterity, toxicity, precarity Ecology: Life and lively spaces In the air in L.A. Notes Interlude 3: Messy/terrain Messy urban technologies Dreamworld and catastrophe Notes Chapter 5: Conclusion (or, how i learned to stop worrying and love the city) Back to Benjamin: Urban art, technology, and reproducible reimaginings Toward urban ecosophy and new cognitive maps Where do we go from here? Notes Index