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Universities, Cities, Design, and Development: An Anthropology of Aesthetic Expertise Author: Juris Milestone Dissertation School: Temple University Pages: 111 Publication Date: January 2007 Availability: Access Number: 10821 Abstract: In this dissertation I explore the idea of "design" as a mechanism of aesthetic classification and control - what I call aesthetic expertise. This is to understand design not solely in terms of specialized knowledge, skill, or procedures, but as constituting relationships of power through claims to aesthetic or subjective authority. For this analysis I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted among urban design faculty engaged in university-community partnerships. These designer-teachers are collaborating with urban neighborhood organizations to provide design services and unique learning experiences for their students. In addition to accounting for constructions of professionalism, urbanity, progress, and creativity in this process, I analyze the role of the university as urban developer, as well as contemporary discourses of community development and urban revitalization that promote the "arts and culture industries" as economic development engines. I contextualize these phenomena within the post-industrial American city, and also offer a cultural analysis of the idea of design in the media, as these relate to late capitalist democratic society. Appreciating design for its social and cultural effects, and for the ways it influences public policy, economies, and technologies, allows us to see how aesthetic judgments, though very much the result of the creative endeavor, deploy accompanying (and often ulterior) cultural values and notions, that are rooted in the present (and contested) social, cultural, political, and economic milieux. The work of professional designers and educators may thus be seen as sites for the production and maintenance of meaning and authority, produced through the pursuit of design excellence and its application toward social change. In a thriving and complex material economy like ours, which is increasingly dependent on the symbolic economy of consumerism, the ideas and activities associated with design have become ubiquitous, taking on an essential , but largely unquestioned role. Design has thus become a significant source of meaning and order, requiring an analysis that highlights its role in the relationships of power that form both the warp and weft of social practices, rituals, belief systems, and taxonomies of value and meaning, as these are lived in the context of everyday consumer-capitalist, liberal-democratic life. |
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