[ecrea] CFP: PUBLIC 43 / Suburbs...

>CFP: "Suburbs: Contemporary Dwelling in Transition"
>
>PUBLIC: Art / Culture / Ideas // No. 43
>Publication: March 2011
>Abstracts due: July 30th, 2010
>
>The journal PUBLIC: Art / Culture / Ideas is devoting an issue to the theme
>of "Suburbs: Contemporary Dwelling in Transition." Writing in 1961, in 'The
>City in History', the critic Lewis Mumford wrote about the utopian
>aspirations of the modern suburbs. Drawing on the Garden City movement,
>Mumford envisioned suburbs as an alternative dwelling model to the
>megalopolis; the suburbs would be self-sustaining communities, the scale of
>which would be kept in check by their distance to the streetcar stop. With
>the advent of mass automobile ownership and the reduced cost of house
>ownership, Mumford lost hope in the suburb's utopian ideals of harmony and
>exclusivity. In place of the mass-produced houses of the post-war period, we
>are now seeing the proliferation of "monster" homes, condominiums, and "new
>urbanist" villages.
>In the 21st century, the suburban model remains both valorized and
>disparaged. The utopian and dystopian articulations of the suburb in
>post-war media culture have produced powerful cultural imaginaries that have
>conflated 'Suburbia' with generic corollaries like Disneyland, industrial
>parks, apartment complexes, gated communities, shopping malls, car culture,
>sprawl and so on. The suburbs are seen as deserts devoid of culture but full
>of consumption, privatized repressive containers of middle class life.
>Suburbs and urban sprawl are often used as a shorthand for the erosion of
>public urban culture and the civitas enabled by face to face encounters in
>the city.
>
>While there has been work on the demystification of suburbs almost since
>their inception, we believe that there is a strong need to develop nuanced
>and grounded understandings of the cultures that grow out of and are
>embedded in suburban spaces. Urban and place-based cultural researchers need
>a new vocabulary to describe these complex and differentiated spaces, given
>that suburbs are at the forefront of urbanization and are highly contested
>spaces for developers, politicians and environmentalists. Given the gaps,
>omissions and assumptions about suburban culture in work on the culture of
>cities, "Suburbs" is an initial foray into new methodologies, artist
>practices, spatial narratives and research questions for studying these
>metropolitan spaces: how best could current urban and cultural theory be
>re-directed to include analyses of suburban cultural communities? What kinds
>of new research tools, images, aesthetic and political strategies could we
>develop to engage with place-based cultural phenomena in suburban spaces?
>
>Papers are invited that investigate the current state of suburbs throughout
>the world. As enclaves that have become crucial to processes of
>urbanization, this call seeks critical and artistic contributions that
>consider the state of suburbs, both past and present.
>Please send  300 word abstracts to (public /at/ yorku.ca) by July 30th, 2010. If
>accepted, final essays will be due October 30th, 2010
>
>PUBLIC, is a peer-reviewed journal based in Toronto, Canada. We welcome a
>variety of formats, from scholarly essays to more experimental forms of
>writing and artist projects.
>www.publicjournal.ca
>
>Editors for this issue:
>Steven Logan
>Graduate Program in Communication and Culture
>York University
>
>Janine Marchessault
>Canada Research Chair in Art,
>Digital Media and Globalization
>York University
>
>Michael Prokopow
>Associate Professor
>Ontario College of Art and Design
>-
>PUBLIC Art Culture Ideas
>www.publicjournal.ca
>(public /at/ yorku.ca)

----------------
ECREA-Mailing list
----------------
This mailing list is a free service from ECREA.
---
To unsubscribe, please visit http://www.ecrea.eu/mailinglist
---
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Postal address:
ECREA
Université Libre de Bruxelles
c/o Dept. of Information and Communication Sciences
CP123, avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50, b-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
----------------