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Nervous Ecologies: Late Modernist Architecture, the Whole Earth Network, and the Postwar Overpopulation Discourse.
Abstract
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, pundits were increasingly interpreting superficially unrelated phenomena, such as pollution, the deterioration of nature, rundown inner cities, sprawling suburbanization, brittle infrastructure, escalating crime, uprisings of racial minorities, and student unrest in the United States—as well as hunger, poverty, and Communist insurgencies in the Global South—as dissimilar expressions of one underlying cause: “too many people.”
This dissertation examines the American overpopulation discourse at the intersection of late modernist architecture and countercultural ecological activism under the nimbus of the famed Whole Earth Catalog. Through a close reading of a series of protests, happenings, media environments, professional design conferences, and architectural workshops, it excavates the crucial transformations of the overpopulation discourse, its diverse origins, its unstable iconographies, and its spatial manifestation. Starting from the position that discourses are shaped by specific times and spaces, imprinting these conditions within them, it probes the social, (geo)political, scientific, and architectural frameworks in which designers and activists “discovered” the “population crisis.” The analysis scrutinizes the contribution of these self-proclaimed “experts” of growth to the pathologizing of communities with higher reproduction rates, particularly in minority neighborhoods in the United States and vast areas of the Global South. It questions their role in the configuration of the “population anxiety” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which served as a key legitimation for architectural, political, and institutional interventions in the life of communities of color.
The study suggests a reading of the psychology of the late mid-century “population anxieties,” to use the time’s terminology, as a symptom of dominant Cold War epistemologies explaining social and physical relations increasingly through statistics. It reads the overpopulation discourse as a rationalization that explains the period’s seemingly ubiquitous domestic and international crises not qualitatively, through race, class, gender, and their historic convolutions, but quantitatively, through numbers, densities, and distributions. Show more
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03588 - Ursprung, Philip / Ursprung, Philip
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