"What do vacant lots signify? How should we interpret architectural relics overgrown with weeds? What social processes do street art memorials embody? The Street drills down into the intimate street photography of Camilo J. Vergara to outline a visual dictionary for urban inequality. City streets reveal much about the inequality that carves up American life and opportunity, and urban corridors harbor evidence that society has sorted people, communities, and resources unequally. In this collection, a leading cast of scholars from a variety of disciplines creatively interpret Vergara's photos of Camden, New Jersey. Field guides give readers the tools to identify phenomena quickly and accurately; this guide visualizes the elements, policies, and social exchanges that characterize and contest inequality in the United States. Drawing on Camden as a case study, each essay decodes the visuals that require scrutiny to understand the unequal landscapes of American cities and makes clear that the stereotyped analyses of urban residents and neighborhoods are insufficient. Where Camden has been popularly construed as a failed urbanity-and that failure is attached to the residents who live there-the writers in this volume illuminate the public and private policies that are responsible, offering a corrective to predictable analyses of poor cities. Tackling topics such as race and law enforcement, gentrification, food environments, childcare and schooling, urban aesthetics, credit markets, and health care, the contributors look for markers of inequality and challenge conventional thinking about what we should see when we observe troubled landscapes. A timely book that will be of interest to fans, citizens, students, and scholars of urban life, The Street is an innovative guidebook to the most urgent challenges facing American cities today"--
Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara&;s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection address everything from law enforcement to health care in order to analyze these images within the context of troubled histories and misguided policies that have exacerbated racial and economic inequalities.
Vacant lots. Historic buildings overgrown with weeds. Walls and alleyways covered with graffiti. These are sights associated with countless inner-city neighborhoods in America, and yet many viewers have trouble getting beyond the surface of such images, whether they are denigrating them as signs of a dangerous ghetto or romanticizing them as traits of a beautiful ruined landscape. The Street: A Field Guide to Inequality provides readers with the critical tools they need to go beyond such superficial interpretations of urban decay.
Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara&;s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection analyze these images within the context of troubled histories and misguided policies that have exacerbated racial and economic inequalities. Rather than blaming Camden&;s residents for the blighted urban landscape, the multidisciplinary array of scholars contributing to this guide reveal the oppressive structures and institutional failures that have led the city to this condition. Tackling topics such as race and law enforcement, gentrification, food deserts, urban aesthetics, credit markets, health care, childcare, and schooling, the contributors challenge conventional thinking about what we should observe when looking at neighborhoods.
