Greetings HistArch-ers,
I am co-organizing a session on Urbanism and Infrastructure in
Archeology for the 2011 SHAs in Austin, and would like to issue a
general call for presenters. I imagine many of you have worked in urban
contexts and have encountered features-from privies and utilities to
rail lines and even power plants-- attributable to various facets of
urban growth and expansion. This session will explore how those
features embody certain values and ideologies embedded within the
process of urban growth. Papers on urban sites both in the US and
outside of it are welcome. Feel free to contribute papers derived
from recent work, or old work that you may simply wish to reinterpret.
Reply offline to me at [log in to unmask] or to
[log in to unmask] with ideas or abstracts, or just questions. Our
session abstract is included below.
Tracing the Cityscape: Archaeologies of Urban Expansion and Corporate
Power
Rachel Feit and Matthew Palus, organizers
This session focuses on one aspect of 19th and 20th-century urbanism,
the physical growth of cities and contexts of civic expansion. The
expansion of cities entails the extension and intensification of
governmental authority and power on an increasingly administrative
scale, producing the complicated infrastructural networks that urban
archaeology so frequently encounters. Privies and wells, roads, rail
lines, and networks of utilities are just a few examples of the type of
civic materialities that leave an archaeological signature. Other
processes, such as clearance or "renewal", mark the growth of cities on
their interior and are also linked to emerging discourses and complex
political economies of urban spaces. Making sense of these remains and
physical patterns of growth is critical to the ongoing narrative of
urbanism. What sorts of rationalities, values, and ideologies are
embodied in various aspects of civic expansion? How do notions of race
and class become concrete through such civic development, with profound
consequences that reverberate still? Archaeologists in this session
approach the literal and figurative intersections embedded in the fabric
of cities, which tie together and sometimes divide neighborhoods, bind
the metropole to its suburban fringe, and in many ways define urban
life.
Sincerely,
Rachel Feit
Principal Investigator, Archeology
Ecological Communications Corporation
4009 Banister Lane, Suite 300
Austin, Texas 78704
512.329.0031 Ph.
512.329.0012 F.
|