Sociology 2202: Cities and Society
Fall 2019
Midterm Essay Questions

Answer one of the following questions in approximately 4 (minimum) – 6 (maximum) double-spaced pages.  Papers should use 12-point Times New Roman or similar typeface, with one-inch margins on all sides.  Answers should be well organized, well written, and thoroughly proofed.  Citations should be either MLA or Chicago Style format.  Use telling (but not too lengthy) quotes.   A bibliography is not necessary for this paper, as your answers should draw on the course readings and the provided materials.  The essay should address the main question (the question in boldface) and any of the smaller questions that will allow you to build your case.  Your paper must have a clear, focused argument that unambiguously answers the question.

You should upload your paper to your OneDrive folder by 5 pm on Wednesday, November 27.  Failure to do so may result in penalties for lateness.  Submitting your paper as a PDF may also result in lateness penalties if I open and download after the deadline.  Late papers (papers submitted after 5 pm) will result in a one-step deduction for each hour late.  Except for documented emergencies, I will not accept papers submitted after 11:59 pm on Wednesday, November 27.

QUESTION ONE: In Race and Politics in the Cappuccino City, sociologist Derek Hyra discusses how Washington’s African American history and culture become amenities for attracting members of the creative class to neighborhoods like Shaw/U Street. The phenomena of “black branding” and “living on the wire” keep Washington’s black presence alive, while at the same time displacing the very community responsible for the area’s reputation.  Read the following articles: Don’t Mute DC: Bill Aims to Protect Go-Go as the District’s Official Music; Where’s my Go-Go Music? Residents Say Turn Up the Funk after a Complaint Silenced a D.C. Intersection; The Music Will Go on’: Go-Go Returns Days After a Complaint Silenced a D.C. Store; How Two Distinct Go-Go Movements Are Changing D.C. Culture; and The DontMuteDC Go-Go Protests Aren’t Done. They’re Expanding and consider how the movement around preserving Go-Go challenges Hyra’s notion of D.C. as “Cappuccino City.” To what extent is this movement to preserve Go-Go representative of postmodern urbanism?  Is it possible to imagine DC as a “Chocolate City” if black residents do not live within the community?   To answer the question, you need to draw on Hyra and at least one additional reading from our discussion on growth politics (Loughran, Logan and Molotch), postmodern urbanism (Centner, Kidder), on the creative class (Ocejo, Wynn) and on alternative urban citizenships (Stuart, Vargas, or Greene’s article “Gay Neighborhoods and the Rights of the Vicarious Citizen”).

QUESTION TWO: Responding to the threats of displacement produced by gentrification in Boyle Heights, a historically Chicano/Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles, old-timer residents have waged an aggressive campaign against their white newcomers. These protests manifest in aggressive, sometimes violent acts of intimidation, including vandalism and the destruction of new businesses.  However, recently, anti-gentrification groups have found an unconventional ally with white artists (hipsters), whose participation in these forms of protest threaten to co-opt a movement that is largely divided on the basis of race.  Read the articles in the Boyle Heights Reading Packet (available on our course website) and consider whether (and how) the participation of white hipsters in anti-gentrification efforts in Boyle Heights elaborates the search for cultural authenticity associated with the creative class in the postmodern city.  To what extent might this align with and/or depart from “social preservation” or “Black Branding”? What forms of authenticity are these hipsters chasing through their participation?   What are the potential benefits/drawbacks of white alliances with local residents in Boyle Heights?  To answer this question, you will need to draw how course readings (Hyra, Centner, Wynn, Loughran, Ocejo, and/or Japonica Brown-Saracino’s article on Social Preservation to consider how the participation of white activists in this movement might reflect another form of cosmopolitan consumption in the postmodern city.

QUESTION THREE: A major critique shared by both the Political Economic and Postmodern Urbanism (“The L.A. School) paradigms centers on their inattention to questions of community. Drawing on at least two of the empirical studies introduced in this class (Vargas, Andrews, Stuart, Lung-Amam, Kidder, Loughran, Centner, Hyra, Wynn, and Orne), consider whether and how either paradigm (choose only one!) reconfigures our understanding of community within urban (and suburban) spaces.  In other words, how is community enabled or constrained under the selected paradigm?  Do the forms of community present in your selected paradigm conform to the various theses of The Community Question?  Or should we consider a new paradigm (and what would that paradigm look like)?  How does the inclusion of community transform your selected paradigm?  To answer this question successfully, you must be able to link your examples explicitly to the tenets of the paradigm you have selected.

QUESTION FOUR:  In recent years, a growing body of sociological literature on the postindustrial city focuses on the deployment of a neighborhood’s history and culture as strategies for urban revitalization. Scholars, such as Derek Hyra, Richard Florida (i.e. the creative class), Japonica Brown-Saracino Social Preservation, and Richard Ocejo, have examined the ways in which Millennials and urban cosmopolitans not only desire to live in and around authentic cultural communities, but many also actively participate in preserving the people, institutions, and places they often associate with a neighborhood’s authentic community.  In recent years, however, we are seeing gentrification based not on the preservation of a place’s indigenous culture, but rather around the importation of another iconic city’s culture.  Read the articles in Brooklynization Reading Packet, and the drawing on our readings on gentrification and/or culture in cities (including the Brown-Saracino article available on our course website) or from theories on the postmodern city (or the political-economic model), consider the following question: How do we make sense of the cultural and spatial reproduction of Brooklyn in other U.S. cities?  What economic, political, and sociocultural trends does this strategy of urban renewal represent?  What is gained and lost in these practices?

QUESTION FIVE: Imagine that President Rose has invited you to discuss what prevents Bowdoin from developing and sustaining cosmopolitan canopies on campus. Drawing on Anderson’s article The Cosmopolitan Canopy, you decided to take a postmodern urbanist approach, basing your conclusion on six cognitive maps you have collected from students about the spaces that matter to them and the spaces they find themselves the least comfortable occupying.  What do these cognitive maps tell us about how students imagine Bowdoin?  How do these cognitive maps differ from how Bowdoin administrators imagine/market the college (say, in their admissions brochure)?  To answer this question, you will need to also convince President Rose why pursing a postmodern approach offers the best means to answer this question.  You will also need to provide an appendix with the six cognitive maps you collect from students at Bowdoin.