Reading Questions:bell hooks, "Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice," in Art on My Mind; Jane Jacbos, "The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety"; Chapter 5, The Urban Experience: Social Groups in the City, Primary Groups

AudioVisual Resources: "Sweet Home Chicago: The Chicago Bungalow"

  bell hooks, "Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice," in Art on My Mind

• bell hooks also considers the idea of vernacular architecture. We have considered the politics of architecture (architecture as ideology) in our discussion of the 1893 World's Fair. Hooks wants to consider the politics of black vernacular architecture. Before continuing your analysis, be sure to clarify this term as discussed in Sciorra's essay.
• hooks begins by recalling that when designing the house of her dreams in high school, she "did not think that any of the decisions [she] made were political." (145) Why not? How are they political? How could imagining the "house of your dreams" be an ideological practice?
• The author wishes she had "learned to think about space politically, about who controls and shapes environments." (146) She continues, "Many narratives of resistance struggle from slavery to the present share an obsession with the politics of space, particularly the need to construct and build houses." (147) What does it mean to think about space politically? Hooks adds that she "learned to see freedom as always and intimately linked to the issue of transforming space." (147)
• The focus of the essay is 1) "to acknowledge the oppositional modes of psychic decolonization that marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black folks envisioned;" and 2) "to document a cultural genealogy of resistance." Reflect on these two purposes. Explain each. What would it mean to de-colonize oneself psychically? What is a cultural genealogy of resistance? What does the work genealogy signify? Why is it chosen here? Why would it be necessary or important to perform these two intellectual tasks? How do these two tasks of acknowledgment and documentation help us learn to think about space politically, about who controls and shapes environments?" (146-7)
• Why does hooks see "Freedom as always and intimately linked to the issue of transforming space?" (147)
• How does a "genealogy of resistance" help us learn from and build "on strategies of opposition and resistance that were effective in the past and are empowering in the present"? (148)
• As hooks reflects on her favorite house, she discovers that "the absence of material privilege did not mean that poor and working-class black folks [such as her grandparents] did not think creatively about space." (148) Explain her insight.
• In thinking about the creative making of homespace amongst migrants, immigrants, and the poor, hooks examines the talents of people who were not schooled in the profession or even in the arts of building. Instead she examines vernacular architecture as a language of cultural expression. Explain. (149)
• Hooks notes the importance of adjacent outdoor space for poor folks. (149) Compare this value to that expressed by the outdoor space of casitas.
• The essay discusses the necessity of preserving the cultural memory of ordinary folks.  Hooks adds that "in today's world we are led to believe that lack of material privilege means that one can have no meaningful constructive engagement with one's living space and certainly no relationship to aesthetics." Eager to critique this presumption, the author notes, "I am often disturbed when folks equate a concern with beauty, the design and arrangement of space, with class privilege." (149) Why is hooks disturbed? How does she challenge the assumptions we may have about beauty and design?
• Continuing her argument about class bias, the author notes that poor people have been "socialized by the mass media and the politics of consumerism to see themselves as lacking 'taste and style' when it comes to issues of architecture and aesthetics that they have surrendered their capacity to imagine and create." (150) How have you been socialized to presume a certain relationship between class and taste? How can you challenge those ideas? As hooks adds, "Lack of material privilege need not be synonymous with poverty of spirit or imagination." (150)
• Hooks essay while by no means celebrating the poverty that necessitated black life in rural shacks, does see one aspect of such housing as superior to the urban projects of the 20th century. She notes that the such projects [state-owned and -designed dwellings for the economically disadvantaged] "brought an end to the dwelling in shacks that allowed for individual creativity and an assertion of aesthetic engagement with space and one's environment. The state-built dwellings erase all chances for unique perspectives to shape living space and replace them with a blueprint of sameness...Clearly, these structures inform the ways poor folk are allowed to see themselves in relationship to space." (150) Explain this critique.
• Many urban studies have examined the multiple ways in which urban projects failed. hooks' analysis is unique in its emphasis on the psychological and sociological effects of the aesthetics of public housing. She asserts that Standardized housing brought with it a sense that to be poor meant that one was powerless, unable to intervene in or transform, in any way, one's relationship to space." (150) Explain the effects of this "lesson" of powerlessness.
• hooks concludes her essay by renaming the methodology used in it.  She calls such writing subversive historiography. Explain this term. She adds that "Subversive historiography connects oppositional practice from the pat with forms of resistance in the present, thus creating spaces of possibility where the future can be imagined differently." (151) How does this method apply to our studies in this unit of immigrant and migrant communities?

Jane Jacobs, "The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety" QUESTIONS FORTHCOMING