{"id":3630,"date":"2016-12-24T09:46:45","date_gmt":"2016-12-24T16:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3630"},"modified":"2016-12-24T11:23:08","modified_gmt":"2016-12-24T18:23:08","slug":"hitlers-urbanists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3630","title":{"rendered":"Hitler’s Urbanists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While doing some web research\u00a0the other day for stories about intercultural city building I came across a post on a website called \u201cGranite State Future(s)\u201d (hereafter, GSF) entitled Regionalists Praise Gulags, Concentration Camps for \u201cUrbanism\u201d<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 \u00a0The unnamed author criticizes an essay I wrote for this blog over a year ago<\/a> about a public lecture that the New York Times<\/em> architecture critic Michael Kimmelman gave here in Denver. Here\u2019s the full text of the GSF critique:<\/p>\n

A blog entitled \u201cIntercultural Urbanism \u2013 An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Urban Culture, Space, Architecture, and Design\u201d curated by Dean Saitta, Department of Anthropology, University of Denver, has really jumped the shark.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this article<\/a> he suggests that we recognize \u201cthe need to drive the conversation away from luxury developments and toward sustainable construction, and to shift the discipline\u2019s radar from form-based aesthetic evaluation to a broader social-based evaluation.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

He praises and suggests cities be fashioned after the ingenuity of \u201crefugee camps\u201d and gulags, because they offer a \u201cnew way of thinking\u201d about not only the pressing refugee crisis but also urbanism more broadly. He praises their collectivism and containment, citing \u201csustainability\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Oh my.<\/em><\/p>\n

As we have said all along, the irony of comparing the new forced urbanism to gulags and refugee camps is not lost on those of us who fight regionalism, as we have said this is the goal all along. You have to wonder if Saitta hasn\u2019t realized that he\u2019s inadvertently given away the store?<\/em><\/p>\n

Hitler would be proud.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>

Adolf Hitler in Paris with his architect Albert Speer (left) and the public artist Arno Breker (right), 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

The full text of the GSF post is here<\/a>. I sought to privately email the author at GSF, but the site\u2019s email system refused to accept the connection from my system. So, I\u2019m reproducing my email message below:<\/p>\n

Dear Whomever,<\/em><\/p>\n

By accident I happened to come across your post from a year ago that comments on an essay I wrote for my blog <\/em>Intercultural Urbanism:<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps you missed this sentence in my essay:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhile it\u2019s far too easy to wax romantic about today\u2019s refugee communities and slums as novel \u201cincubators\u201d of urbanism (these typically are, after all, sites of great economic deprivation and social distress), it\u2019s nonetheless remarkable what residents can create when left to their own devices.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

My essay was a summary of some themes from a talk that the <\/em>New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman gave here in Denver, not an exposition of my own ideas. But I happen to marvel, along with Kimmelman, about what ordinary people can do to build community even under conditions of forced re-settlement and political oppression.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kimmelman\u2019s talk, and my essay, offer absolutely no praise for \u201ccollectivism and containment\u201d as strategies for city-building, for \u201cgulags and concentration camps\u201d as models of urbanism, or for top-down approaches to urban planning.\u00a0 Rather, they offer praise for the people who are forced to live in such places, and for their creative interventions in the built environment. Kimmelman\u2019s point, and mine, is that the inhabitants of these places can teach the rest of us something about owning our built environments and investing in them from the bottom-up.\u00a0\u00a0 I suspect this is somewhat in keeping with your argument against \u201cregionalism\u201d\u2014if by that you mean top-down, autocratic approaches to urban planning. <\/em><\/p>\n

Thus, your reference to \u201cHitler would be proud\u201d is a very cheap shot.\u00a0 It reflects a complete misunderstanding of Kimmelman\u2019s argument and my essay.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alternatively, commentators on another version of the essay that was posted to Planetizen<\/em><\/a> got the point, and their responses are worth reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While doing some web research\u00a0the other day for stories about intercultural city building I came across a post on a website called \u201cGranite State Future(s)\u201d (hereafter, GSF) entitled Regionalists Praise Gulags, Concentration Camps for \u201cUrbanism\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0The unnamed author criticizes an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,18,20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-intercultural-city","category-placemaking","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-Wy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3630"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3639,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630\/revisions\/3639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}