Leslie Kanes Weisman: Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (1992)

“Discrimination by Design is a fascinating account of the complex social processes and power struggles involved in building and controlling space. Leslie Kanes Weisman offers a new framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of gender and race as well as class. She traces the social and architectural histories of the skyscraper, maternity hospital, department store, shopping mall, nuclear family dream house, and public housing high rise. Her vivid prose is based on exhaustive research and documents how each setting, along with public parks and streets, embodies and transmits the privileges and penalties of social caste.

In presenting feminist themes from a spatial perspective, Weisman raises many new and important questions. When do women feel unsafe in cities, and why? Why do so many homeless people prefer to sleep on the streets rather than in city-run shelters? Why does the current housing crisis pose a greater threat to women than to men? How would dwellings, communities, and public buildings look if they were designed to foster relationships of equality and environmental wholeness? And how can we begin to imagine such a radically different landscape?

In exploring the answers, the author introduces us to the people, policies, architectural innovations, and ideologies working today to shape a future in which all people matter. Richly illustrated with photographs and drawings, Discrimination by Design is an invaluable and pioneering contribution to our understanding of the issues of our time–health care for the elderly and people with AIDS, homelessness, racial justice, changing conditions of work and family life, affordable housing, militarism, energy conservation, and thepreservation of the environment. This thoroughly readable book provides practical guidance to policymakers, architects, planners, and housing activists. It should be read by all who are interested in understanding how the built environment shapes the experiences of their daily lives and the cultural assumptions in which they are immersed.” (from the back cover)

Publisher University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1992
ISBN 0252063996, 9780252063992
x+190 pages

Reviews: Gail Lee Dubrow (Journal of Planning Education and Research, 1993), Esther da Costa Meyer (NWSA Journal, 1993), Diane Favro (Journal of American History, 1994), Joanne K. Guilfoil (Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 1994), Irene Nierhaus (L’Homme, 1994, DE), Nancy M. Somerick (Public Relations Review, 1995).
Commentary: Spatial Agency (n.d.).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (29 MB)

If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism: A Project by Martha Rosler (1991)

“This volume documents the present crisis in American urban housing policies and portrays how artists within the context of neighborhood organizations, have fought against government neglect, shortsighted housing policies and unfettered real estate speculation. Through essays, photographs, symposiums, architectural plans and the reproduction of works from the series of exhibitions organized by Martha Rosler, the book serves a number of functions: it’s a practical manual for community organizing; a history of housing and homelessness in New York City and around the country; and an outline of what a humane housing policy might encompass for the American city.” (from the back cover)

With contributions by Christine Benglia Bevington, Marie Annick Brown, Andrew Byard, Cenén, The Chinatown History Project, Clinton Coalition of Concern, Rosalyn Deutsche, Dan Graham and Robin Hurst, Alexander Kluge, The Mad Housers, Tony Masso, The Nation, Richard Plunz, William Price, Yvonne Rainer, Mel Rosenthal, Allan Sekula, Camilo José Vergara, and Dan Wiley.

Edited by Brian Wallis
First published by Bay Press, Seattle, and Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1991
First New Press printing, 1999
Discussions in Contemporary Culture series, 6
ISBN 156584498X, 9781565844988
x+312 pages
via Dubravka

Artist’s archive project, 2009

Artist
Publisher (New Press)
Publisher (Dia)
Exhibition
WorldCat

PDF (75 MB)

Trinh T. Minh-ha: Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (2010)

“Elsewhere, Within Here is an engaging look at travel across national borders–as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee—in a pre- and post-9/11 world. Who is welcome where? What does it mean to feel out of place in the country you call home? When does the stranger appear in these times of dark metamorphoses? These are some of the issues addressed by the author as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile. The boundary, seen both as a material and immaterial event, is where endings pass into beginnings. Building upon themes present in her earlier work on hybridity and displacement in the median passage, and illuminating the ways in which ‘every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries,’ Trinh T. Minh-ha leads her readers through an investigation of what it means to be an insider and an outsider in this ‘epoch of global fear.'”

Publisher Routledge, 2010
ISBN 0415880211, 9780415880213
vii+139 pages
via Neda

Author’s talk on Said’s work (audio, 18 min)

Reviews: Shinhyung Choi (Dark Matter 2011), Delila Omerbašić (Journal of Refugee Studies 2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (21 MB, no OCR, updated on 2021-5-3)