Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social and Cultural Effects of Remaking Urban Environments

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The Cultural Anthropology Program supports research on the socio-cultural drivers and consequences of changing patterns and processes of urbanization. Urban blight, which frequently follows deindustrialization, is one such process. Some United States cities, such as those in the rust belt, have experienced urban blight as a follow-up to factory closings, unemployment, and population decline. Similar problems are being faced by post-industrial cities elsewhere in the world, too. Thus the world can be our laboratory for evaluating potential solutions to the problems posed by urban decay. Germany's approach to its post-industrial cities is particularly interesting, possibly even unique among Western nations. Their plans combine new nationwide energy policies with residential consolidation, demolition, and renewal in blighted cities. To understand the new programs and how they affect residents, Columbia University doctoral student Samantha M. Fox, advised by Dr. Catherine Fennell, will undertake research in one such city, Eisenhüttenstadt, located near the border between eastern Germany and Poland. This is an especially apt site because this city was founded in 1950 as a worker's utopia and steel manufacturing hub. Today, the city's population is much reduced and its obsolete urban infrastructure is being transformed and pushed towards green energy. The researcher will collect data with multiple social science research methods including archival research in city and national archives, interviews and focus groups with residents and planners, attendance at meetings in planned neighborhoods, and participant observation in people's daily lives. The researcher will focus on how changes in infrastructure and the built environment affect residents' lives and their imaginations of future possibilities, and how those understandings may or may not diverge from what planners past and present intended.