Diefendorf, Jeffry “I Love That City, But Which City?”
"Project Culture: The Popular Arts of Public Housing"
ABSTRACT: In this paper I offer a starkly revisionist survey of what kinds of culture have emerged from New York and Chicago housing projects in the past fifty years. In this project, my intent is not to argue with the many critics of public housing who have focused on the social problems of the "projects" and the deleterious effects of what is usually called "urban renewal." Urban historians, architecture critics, sociologists, political activists and public policy makers have certainly been correct to find the massive housing project to be a failed social experiment on many levels. But construing public housing only as a problem ignores the fact that the projects have also been a major site of youth cultural production--particularly on the part of African Americans and Latinos--over the past half-century. This paper offers an introduction to those productions.
Session II: Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment