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• 1 media/Scalar UH background 2.jpg 2014-09-15T15:34:29-07:00 Introduction 36 plain 2016-03-06T06:25:50-08:00 Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  
  The fields of urban history and visual culture both thrive on expansive horizons. Streets and rivers, neighbourhoods and stadia, festivals and parks populate the work of urban historians, who examine these and other subjects from local, metropolitan, regional, national and transnational perspectives. Viewing these urban themes with and through visual culture increases the potential areas of analysis exponentially. Not only do photography, film, television and advertising produce countless images of urban spaces, visual culture encourages scholars to take seriously the ways of seeing and practices of looking that shape how people understand and engage with the metropolis. Visual technologies, both old and new, make places meaningful in ways that have broad cultural, political and economic consequences. As digital tools continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing and analysing these myriad urban sights.
  
  Using the Scalar online authoring platform, this online only special issue argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, painting, film, television and other visual and textual evidence, these essays explore how diverse visual forms not only shape metropolitan spaces, experiences and identities, but also shape the ways in which people imagine, remember and forget such spaces and events. Focusing on post-war urban history this issue attends to questions of community, race, class, gender, sexuality, modernity and memory. These questions, familiar to urban historians, can be seen from new angles by foregrounding the visual elements of urban political, economic, social and cultural life. By presenting this special issue through Scalar, we hope to offer both new research on urban visual history and also new models for the visual and textual presentation of such research. In contrast to a traditional print issue, Scalar affords the opportunity to present a large number of images, including colour images; present selected clips from films and television that are analysed in the essays; and create visualizations to present evidence in more dynamic ways.
  
  The authors of this special issue are trained in History, American Studies, Architecture, Art History and Communications, and this special issue builds on the work of scholars who have examined urban history and visual culture from multidisciplinary perspectives. The work of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon and Rebecca Zurier offer important insights on art and the city, while Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, Christopher Klemek and Samuel Zipp have outlined the importance of images in urban renewal. Media Studies scholars Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel Marita Sturken and Pamela Wojcik have offered important analyses of the spatial relationships in film and television, while the work of Aniko Bodroghkozy, Herman Gray, Melanie McAlister, Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau and Sasha Torres traces the importance of visual media in building, mobilizing, contesting and controlling cities and nations. Taken together, this special issue examines the inseparable relationship between what Carlo Rotella describes as 'the city of feeling (constructed in words and images) and the city of fact (made of steel and stone, inhabited by flesh-and-blood people)'.
  
  In the first essay, Laura Grantmyre examines competing visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District in the 1950s and 1960s. While the city’s redevelopment agency circulated images focused on the neighbourhood’s built environment, presenting it as desolate and in disrepair, Charles 'Teenie' Harris, a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s African American newspaper, portrayed the neighbourhood as a vibrant community. Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these residents, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, photographs highlight urban erasures and the traumatic tearing apart of communities through urban renewal, which Mindy Fullilove describes as 'root shock'. Grantmyre reminds us that these 'ghost neighbourhoods', as Phil Ethington calls them in the context of Los Angeles, remain part of the visual history and memory of cities. In this context, the photographs of the Lower Hill District taken by Teenie Harris offer an especially important visual archive of a thriving neighbourhood.
  
  Mona Damluji, like Grantmyre, explores the use of visual culture to define urban 'progress' and 'modernity'. Damluji examines how the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) documentary films and public relations materials in the 1950s presented Baghdad as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The IPC screened the films across Iraq and Damluji argues that these films and their cinematic representations of Iraq’s capital 'worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land and labour'. Similar to how Grantmyre shows the Pittsburgh Housing Authority seeking and receiving support from the African American community for redevelopment efforts, Damluji analyses how an Arabic-language IPC documentary, Assimatun Ajmel (A More Beautiful Capital), shined a favorable light on the destruction of older Baghdad neighbourhoods to make way for a 'capital fit for a modern country.' Gyan Prakash has written that 'urban dwellers experience their globally situated and connected urban space as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations and memories'. In Pittsburgh and Baghdad, Grantmyre and Damluji detail how quickly and irrevocably these urban spaces can be destroyed or remade, and how images and films are central to this process.
  
  Bridget Gilman examines representations of everyday cityscapes from another angle in her analysis of Robert Bechtle’s Photorealist paintings of San Francisco. Gilman highlights how Bechtle’s work avoids the city’s natural and architectural icons, or recognizable panoramas from atop one of the city’s many hills, in favour of the 'native vision' of residential streets with large quantities of pavement. Bechtle returned to the same source images frequently and Gilman uses overlay visualizations to show how Bechtle transformed a 'single photograph through variations in medium, colour palette, tonal range and cropping'. Bechtle’s carefully created photograph-based paintings like "Twentieth and Arkansas" and "Twentieth Street VW" speak to a dedication to ordinary scenes and objects and, viewed in the 2010s, defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps Street View has made ubiquitous.
  
  Gilman’s essay emphasizes questions of urban vision – Who can see what? From which locations? With what implications? – that figure prominently in Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964, Genovese was raped and murdered in the Kews Gardens neighbourhood in Queens, New York. The violent murder and widely reported failure of neighbours to help Genovese made the case a symbol of urban danger and public apathy. The Genovese case remains one of the most famous examples used in social science and popular texts to describe how built environment shapes human behaviour, with the failure of witnesses to call the police serving as a condemnation of apartment living and of some urban spaces as failed neighbourhoods. Rentschler examines how filmic reenactments and retellings of the Genovese murder, over the past 50 years, raise questions about what it means to be a witness in a vertical city of apartment buildings and trace the architectural and perceptual limits of urban vision. Like Damluji, Rentschler uses Scalar to present and analyse a small archive of films that are not readily available to scholars.
  
  Matt Delmont looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe in the battle over busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Fearing the image of 'failed neighbourhoods' analysed in Rentschler’s essay, anti-busing politicians and parents mobilized around the concept of 'neighbourhood schools' as sites that needed to be defended from the threat of racial integration. These efforts to protect decades of federally supported racial privilege disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favour of colour-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighbourhoods and schools. News coverage brought anti-busing protests in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation without the historical or legal context for the busing orders.
  
  By developing this special issue in Scalar we have combined our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of images, photographs, videos, maps and visualizations. Like the Hypercities platform for the layered historical mapping of cities, the Photogrammar archive and visualization platform for United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographs, and many other digital humanities platforms, tools and projects, we have used digital technology to expand and extend our historical analysis of and to bring this sustained engagement with the past to a wide audience through an open access online format. It is our hope that readers will find this special issue to be generative for thinking about urban history, visual culture and their presentation online.
  
  Table of contents:
  • Laura Grantmyre, 'Conflicting visions of renewal in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1950-1968'
  • Bridget Gilman, 'San Francisco views: Robert Bechtle and the reformulation of urban vision'
  • Mona Damluji, 'Visualizing Iraq: oil, cinema and the modern city'
  • Carrie Rentschler, 'Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder'
  • Matt Delmont, 'Buses from nowhere: television and anti-busing activism in 1970s urban America'
  You can access essays by clicking on author's names above, or use the main menu on the top left of the screen to navigate to essays.  To view detailed the table of contents with links to each page, click here.
• 1 2014-06-30T18:56:33-07:00 Beladuna 13 plain 2016-05-04T16:30:26-07:00
  Beladuna was notably the most genuine effort among contemporaries in oil company media making to engage with the complexities of modernization in an oil-producing country. Several of the short films included the company cine-magazine Beladuna provide a relatively nuanced study of the challenges of nation building, from the destruction of old Baghdad neighbourhoods to make way for modern construction projects. Although Beladuna never came close to providing an explicit critique of the power wielded by the oil industry or government, a distinction in IPC’s approach to filmmaking is obvious in the specific nature of the film subjects and input of the Iraqi production crew members. In fact, the IPC cine-magazine consistently neglected to present any reference to the oil company in its stories about modern Iraq. 
   
  Among the dozens of episodes made as part of the Beladuna series, a reoccurring theme that built on the central message in The Third River was the modernization of Baghdad. However, in these films the modernization of the city was only implicitly linked to the country’s increasing oil wealth. Oil and IPC are not mentioned. A More Beautiful Capital (Arabic: Assimatun Ajmel) is a short documentary made in 1955 as part of the tenth episode of the IPC’s Arabic-language cine-magazine. The film depicts the modernization of Baghdad's built environment in the mid-1950s, namely the destruction of older neighborhoods to make way for 'modern construction'. The documentary is constructed as a sequence of montages accompanied by an original soundtrack and scripted voiceover, narrating various scenes of the making of modern Baghdad. Visible evidence of urban change is used to illustrate and substantiate scripted commentary. The musical composition shifts in tone and level to enhance the mood of each sequence. The narration works to persuade audiences that destruction of older neighbourhoods is necessary to facilitate construction of modern buildings, which are fundamental to making Baghdad into 'a capital fit for a modern country'.

   

  IPC promoted its Beladuna series as an effort 'to project modern Iraq' to ordinary Iraqis. The decision to make the national population of an oil-producing country the primary audience for corporate films was until then unprecedented in the Middle East. IPC screened the films in theatres of every major Iraqi city prior to feature films, as well as in mobile units that would travel to audiences of oil workers in remote oil fields, pump stations and refineries. During the summer special screening would be held outdoors. Documentation of the distribution and reception of these films from the Iraqi perspective has not been recorded or is no longer available. What is clear from the films as well as interviews with filmmakers related to the production of Beladuna is that the company used the company cine-magazine as an attempt to establish a coherent national imaginary of progress in Iraq that was implicitly tied to the story of oil.
• 1 2014-09-15T16:14:48-07:00 [TEST] Introduction 7 plain 2014-09-17T10:46:36-07:00 Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  In April 2014, Google publicized a new feature to its Google Maps application. “If you’ve ever dreamt of being a time traveler like Doc Brown, now’s your chance,” the blog post announced. “Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop. We’ve gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world.” While Google Maps is among the most popular and sophisticated digital tools, this announcement highlights that dynamic technologies do not necessarily provide historical depth or historical imagination. The Street View historical imagery is a neat feature if you are interested in how place images have changed over the past seven years, but if, as the blog post suggests, you want to travel back to 1955 like Doc Brown (a fictional character in the 1980s Back to the Future films) you will have to look elsewhere. As digital tools like Google Maps continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing, and analyzing these myriad urban sights. Using the Scalar online authoring platform, this online only special issue argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, painting, film, television, and other visual and textual evidence, these essays explore how diverse visual forms not only shape metropolitan spaces, experiences, and identities, but also shape the ways in which people imagine, remember, and forget such spaces and events. Focusing on postwar urban history this issue attends to questions of community, race, class, gender, sexuality, modernity, and memory. These questions, familiar to urban historians, can be seen from new angles by foregrounding the visual elements of urban political, economic, social, and cultural life. By presenting this special issue through Scalar, we hope to offer both new research on urban visual history and also new models for the visual and textual presentation of such research. In contrast to a traditional print issue, Scalar affords the opportunity to present a large number of images, including color images; present selected clips from films and television that are analyzed in the essays; and create visualizations to present evidence in more dynamic ways. The authors of this special issue are trained in History, American Studies, Architecture, Art History, and Communications, and this the special issue builds on the work of scholars who have examined urban history and visual culture from multidisciplinary perspectives. The work of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon, Rebecca Zurier offer important insights on art and the city, while Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, Christopher Klemek, and Samuel Zipp have outlined the importance of images in urban renewal. Media Studies scholars Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel Marita Sturken, Pamela Wojcik have offered important analyses of the spatial relationships in film and television, while the work of Aniko Bodrokozy, Herman Gray, Melanie McAlister, Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, and Sasha Torres traces the importance of visual media in building, mobilizing, contesting, and controlling cities and nations. Taken together, this special issue examines the inseparable relationship between what Carlo Rotella describes as “the city of feeling (constructed in words and images) and the city of fact (made of steel and stone, inhabited by flesh-and-blood people).” In the first essay, Laura Grantmyre examines competing visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District in the 1950s and 1960s. While the city’s redevelopment agency circulated images focused on the neighborhood’s built environment, presenting it as desolate and in disrepair, Charles “Teenie” Harris, a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s African American newspaper, portrayed the neighborhood as a vibrant community. Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African-American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these residents, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, photographs highlight urban erasures and the traumatic tearing apart of communities through urban renewal, which Mindy Fullilove describes as “root shock.” Grantmyre reminds us that these “ghost neighborhoods,” as Phil Ethington calls them in the context of Los Angeles, remain part of the visual history and memory of cities. In this context, the photographs of the Lower Hill District taken by Teenie Harris offer an especially important visual archive of a thriving neighborhood. Mona Damluji, like Grantmyre, explores the use of visual culture to define urban “progress” and “modernity.” Damluji examines how the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) documentary films and public relations materials in the 1950s presented Baghdad as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The IPC screened the films across Iraq and Damluji argues that these films and their cinematic representations of Iraq’s capital “worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land, and labor.” Similar to how Grantmyre shows the Pittsburgh Housing Authority seeking and receiving support from the African-American community for redevelopment efforts, Damluji analyzes how an Arabic-language IPC documentary, Assimatun Ajmel (A More Beautiful Capital), shined a favorable light on the destruction of older Baghdad neighborhoods to make way for a “capital fit for a modern country.” Gyan Prakash has written that “urban dwellers experience their globally situated and connected urban space as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations, and memories.” In Pittsburgh and Baghdad, Grantmyre and Damluji detail how quickly and irrevocably these urban spaces can be destroyed or remade, and how images and films are central to this process. Bridget Gilman examines representations of everyday cityscapes from another angle in her analysis of Robert Bechtle’s Photorealist paintings of San Francisco. Gilman highlights how Bechtle’s work avoids the city’s natural and architectural icons, or recognizable panoramas from atop one of the city’s many hills, in favor of the “native vision” of residential streets with large quantities of pavement. Bechtle returned to the same source images frequently and Gilman uses overlay visualizations to show how Bechtle transformed a “single photograph through variations in medium, color palette, tonal range and cropping.” Bechtle’s carefully created photograph-based paintings like Twentieth and Arkansas and Twentieth Street VW speak to a dedication to ordinary scenes and objects and, viewed in the 2010s, defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps Street View has made ubiquitous. Gilman’s essay emphasizes questions of urban vision—Who can see what? From which locations? With what implications?—that figure prominently in Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964 Genovese was raped and murdered in the Kews Garden neighborhood in Queens, New York. The violent murder and widely reported failure of neighbors to help Genovese made the case a symbol of urban danger and public apathy. The Genovese case remains one of the most famous examples used in social science and popular texts to describe how built environment shapes human behavior, with the failure of witnesses to call the police serving as a condemnation of apartment living and of some urban spaces as failed neighborhoods. Rentschler examines how filmic reenactments and retellings of the Genovese murder, over the past fifty years, raise questions about what it means to be a witness in a vertical city of apartment buildings and trace the architectural and perceptual limits of urban vision. Like Damluji, Rentschler uses Scalar to present and analyze a small archive of films that are not readily available to scholars. Matt Delmont looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe in the battle over busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Fearing the image of “failed neighborhoods” analyzed in Rentschler’s essay, anti-busing politicians and parents mobilized around the concept of “neighborhood schools” as sites that needed to be defended from the threat of racial integration. These efforts to protect decades of federally supported racial privilege disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favor of color-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighborhoods and schools. News coverage brought anti-busing protests in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation without the historical or legal context for the busing orders. By developing this special issue in Scalar we have combined our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of images, photographs, videos, maps and visualizations. Like the Hypercities platform for the layered historical mapping of cities, the Curatescape Omeka application for public history storytelling, the Photogrammar archive and visualization platform for United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographs, and many other digital humanities platforms, tools, and projects, we have used digital technology to expand and extend our historical analysis of and to bring this sustained engagement with the past to a wide audience through an open access online format. It is our hope that readers will find this special issue to be generative for thinking about urban history, visual culture, and their presentation online. Table of Contents:
  • Laura Grantmyre, "Conflicting Representational Discourses of Urban 'Renewal' in Pittsburgh’s Hill District: Was a vibrant community supplanted by a symbol of racial injustice or was a desolate slum replaced by a marvel of urban modernism?"
  • Bridget Gilman, "San Francisco Views: Robert Bechtle and the Reformulation of Urban Vision"
  • Mona Damluji, "Visualizing Iraq: Oil, Cinema, and the Modern City"
  • Carrie Rentschler, "The Archive as Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder"
  • Matt Delmont, "Buses from Nowhere: Television and Anti-busing Activism in 1970s Urban America"
  You can access essays by clicking on author's names above, or use main menu on top left of screen to navigate to essays.