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Posts Tagged ‘Harvey Molotch’

Harvey Molotch’s “The City as Growth Machine”

Thursday, November 12th, 2015

Sociologist Harvey Molotch
“A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite.”

Harvey Molotch‘s seminal 1976 article “The City as Growth Machine”—which is just as fresh today—just happened to be published the same year of the UN Habitat Conference on Settlements that took place in Vancouver (and is the subject of my upcoming book).

Vancouver Ltd. by Don Gutstein

Monday, May 7th, 2012

What follows is the Preface of Don Gutstein’s 1975 book Vancouver Ltd., a thorough—and, as it turns out, prescient—analysis of the way in which Vancouver fell into the hands of real estate developers and realtors. I know Don from my postgraduate days at Simon Fraser University. He’s one of very few who has really taken a magnifiying glass to the way money moves in this city, and I think it’s time the book is reissued.

This Blog

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest.

As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board."

As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more

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Book in progress: Habitat

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

Posts Tagged ‘Harvey Molotch’

Harvey Molotch’s “The City as Growth Machine”

Vancouver Ltd. by Don Gutstein

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