Contested Landscapes of "Reimagined" Civic Commons.
Kahn, Emma J.
2018
- In September of 2016, The J.P.B, John S. and James L. Knight, Kresge and Rockefeller Foundations announced a combined $20 million investment in civic infrastructure (re)development across Detroit, Chicago, Memphis and Akron— after first piloting the collaboration and investment model in Philadelphia. This funding initiative, named “Reimagining the Civic Commons” (R.C.C.), assumes recent trends of ... read moresocial and physical “fragmentation and isolation” in American urban space. R.C.C. then posits social and physical reparation through “(re)activating and connecting” civic assets to yield increased, more equitably shared prosperity. Yet, a myriad of relationships to and imaginations of place undulate within each target community and among those with Civic Commons decision-making power. This heterogeneity is also sedimented in the already-existing “assets” that R.C.C. seeks to repurpose, materially troubling the initiative’s assumption of universal and “authentic” relationships to the physical and social landscape. This thesis illustrates how Reimagining the Civic Commons’ landscape-reshapings activate frictions between territorily-preserved legacies of ontological struggle and neoliberal visions of “civic” futures. Such frictions are necessarily localized, emerging from particular contexts and becoming both remade and subject to erasure as those contexts become abstracted.read less
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