Episode 17 with guest Sarah Gelbard
In conversation with Synapcity Board Member, Susan Johnston. Recorded April 2023. Posted June 21, 2023.
Tag: place-making
Radical Solidarities in Punk and Queer Refusals of Safety and Inclusion Narratives in Planning
Urban Planning Vol 8, No 2 (2023): Queer(ing) Urban Planning and Municipal Governance
Abstract: Recent call-outs against Ottawa punk venues have fueled public debates about safe space and the inclusivity of local music scenes. The Ottawa Music Strategy released in 2018 translated these debates into cultural development policy that links creative placemaking and safe space discourse. This article examines the civic response to activist call-outs by analyzing how the Ottawa Music Strategy integrates diversity and inclusion strategies into cultural policy, and how cultural policy and safe space policies intersect with cultural revitalization and economic development priorities in the Ottawa Official Plan. Punk counter-narratives developed through grounded ethnographic research in the Ottawa punk scene unsettle normative public safety narratives that frame punk spaces as unsafe. Place-based histories of anti-oppression tactics, logics, and traditions of punk space and activism contextualize alternative responses by local punk venues and promoters. Drawing upon literature in queer planning and queer geography and literature on intersections between radical queer and punk politics, spatialities, and identities, this article discusses punking planning in solidarity with queering planning through alternative community-based responses to issues of safety, inclusion, and participation.
Keywords: creative placemaking; cultural planning; punk; queer planning; spatial justice
Published: 22 May 2023
“Did You Hear? Mavericks Is Closing!” Punk Refusal of Gentrified Endings
GeoHumanities Volume 9, 2023 – Issue 1
Abstract: Decades of experience with closed, relocated, and renamed venues, make punks very familiar with cycles of gentrification. Often established in edge neighborhoods, punk venues participate in reproducing the “grit” of urban decline and subculture. Urban revitalization plans that promise community, livability, and culture, rarely leave spaces for established punk community and subculture. The newly branded Retail, Arts, and Theatre District in Ottawa, Canada is a case study in cultural urban development that operationalizes creative placemaking and its future-oriented visions of urban revitalization through cultural spaces and activities. Although the city’s Official Plan celebrates that existing cultural venues add diversity to the district, the pressure placed on punk venues by surrounding development reveal that not all venues are to be recognized by the city as legitimate or desirable forms of either diversity or culture. Close readings of official city planning documents, urban histories, development proposals, and marketing literature are juxtaposed with auto-ethnographic, storytelling, punk histories, and song writing. I argue that punk counter-cultural placemaking practices provide counter-information, counter-environments, and counter-temporalities to space in the city to resist gentrification and refuse displacement as endings. Gentrification kills punk. But punk always comes back, finds new places, haunts old sites, and remembers its past.
Key Words: creative placemaking, gentrification, punk, revitalization, urban planning
Published: 14 Apr 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2023.2180418
Urban equity and diversity: radical theories and deradicalized practices
October 2018
Presented at: Philosophy of the City, La Universidad de La Salle, Bogotá
In the spatialized struggle for social justice, the feminist banner is increasingly raised and foregrounded by urban activists, scholars, and policy-makers. If we asked today’s urban feminists to respond to Dolores Hayden’s question “what would a non-sexist city look like?” we might overwhelmingly hear that cities ought to be safe, inclusive, and accessible. To meet this tall but important order, they might say we ought to listen to those whose safety is at risk, those who are excluded, and those who are denied access. Today’s urban feminists tell us it is time to privilege and bring forward the voices not only of women but of the many other and multiply marginalized people whose interests have been and continue to be left out of city-building and planning. I position myself among these radical urban feminists. My doctoral fieldwork on public placemaking and alternative scenes in Ottawa (Canada) begins to point towards ways in which radical positions and theories are translated and appropriated into mainstream actions that risk reproduction of dominant normative approaches that depoliticize space; that let some people in only to reinforce the boundaries of who is to be left out. Continue reading “Urban equity and diversity: radical theories and deradicalized practices”
Sacred Zoning: Spatial Demarcations in Jewish Thought
Presented at: CSJS annual conference, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2016. Calgary AB.
Abstract: The stereotypical landscape of human settlement in North America is that of an endless grid which was laid down by surveyors and turned land into a commodity that can be traded. On this seemingly neutral pattern, places emerge in which people endow space with meaning: the “other side of the tracks,” the elite suburb, the civic centre, the green oasis. This spatial differentiation is in part governed by public land-use regulations, most often known as zoning. In the process of managing the development and shape of urban environments, zoning imposes structure and limits on the form and function of cities, and by extension on people. Marginalized groups are especially subject to exclusion from the Master Plan. Continue reading “Sacred Zoning: Spatial Demarcations in Jewish Thought”
SK8: Urban innovation and governance in the spatial and social design of skateparks
Presented at: Association of American Geographers Annual Conference 2016. San Francisco CA.
Abstract: April 2015: In Montreal, Mayor Denis Coderre legalizes skateboarding in Peace Park. In Ottawa, construction is finally underway on McNabb skatepark. As a means of transportation, recreation, athletic endeavour, and alternative community, skateboarding has a conflictual but undeniable relationship to the city. Though the current trend in city-sanctioned skateparks is often initiated through community grassroots organization, there is a strong reliance on city governance. Whether cities authorize skateparks through deregulation or funding purpose-built construction, the conventionally radical and outsider skate community becomes participant in official processes and control. Continue reading “SK8: Urban innovation and governance in the spatial and social design of skateparks”
Marginal Vernaculars and Place-Making Tactics
Presented at: Unsettling Heritage: Critical/Creative Conservation, Carleton Heritage Conservation Symposium 2015. Ottawa ON.
Abstract: In recent years, tactical urbanism has captured popular imagination. Its hands-on and bottom-up alternative practice of urban place-making encourages citizens to respond to their environment directly with ad hoc and relatively minimal or temporary transformations—often as a form of protest to the expected function or design of public space. This approach is set in direct contrast to the formally-driven design and future-oriented methodologies of the planning profession. Though framed as a form of ‘participatory urbanism’, it is important to note that tactical urbanism often operates around, rather than in direct collaboration with, official and authoritative professional structures of urban planning. Continue reading “Marginal Vernaculars and Place-Making Tactics”
Wandering dwellings: Diasporic architectures
Presented at: Diasporas: Exploring Critical Issues. 5th Global Conference 2012. Oxford UK.
Abstract: Historically, the Wandering Jew is perceived of as dehumanized and rendered eternally homeless through the Euro-Christian construction of the his self and his home as Other. Rather than a representation of the intrinsic existential condition of the Diaspora, the tragic homelessness experienced by the Wandering Jew is, I argue, a hegemonic construct of Euro-Christian ideology. According to what Daniel Boyarin calls “diasporic consciousness”, the Jewish people identify with a multiplicity of places simultaneously, carrying a sense of the familiar into the foreign. Continue reading “Wandering dwellings: Diasporic architectures”
Return to a Foreign Home
Presented at: Homelands: Diasporas Return. Kultrans 2010, University of Oslo. Oslo, Norway.
Abstract: Historically, the Jewish People identified with a multiplicity of places simultaneously, carrying a sense of the familiar into the foreign, and navigating between seemingly contradictory states – interior/exterior, permanent/transient, mind/body, local/foreign. This is what Daniel Boyarin has called the Diasporic consciousness of the Jewish People. In this context home is understood as a mediator in a nuanced existence between the perceived and constructed dualities of life, and facilitator of transition – a journey rather than a rooted existence. Continue reading “Return to a Foreign Home”
Wandering Dwellings: the Diasporic Home
Presented at: A Celebration of Jewish Studies in Ottawa 2007. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa ON.
Abstract: Deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, the “Home” becomes the intersection of the transient self and the stationary architecture where the self is free to recollect in its interiority and simultaneously position itself in relationship with the exterior elements. Both the function and form of the architecture of “Home” are understood as a (1) mnemonic device to evoke recollection and (2) facilitator of physical relationship with the other through its openings and transitional spaces. The re-construction of a Jewish home is therefore intrinsically tied to a re-collection of the fragmented cultural and tectonic memories of house images carried by the Diaspora, specifically the importance attributed to the mezuzah, talit, tefilin, the sukkah and eruvim. The Wandering Jew suggests a framework for reinterpreting the relationship between the heimliche (literally the home, rootedness, hidden, or burried), the unheimliche.
Sarah B. Gelbard 