Getting to know your city
and the social movements that call it home

by Daniel Tucker

Published in In the Middle of a Whirlwind Edited by Team Colors and Published by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

Introduction

This text will outline a methodology for researching local social movements as a means to analyze their history, effectiveness, and strategic ability to participate or intervene in politics. I will use insights gained from AREA Chicago – a publication that has compiled an print/online archive based on interviews with over 100 Chicago activists, cultural producers and organizers, to offer up a proposal for a broad-based pan-leftist approach that can help avoid classic sectarianism while still asking challenging questions and producing forward moving analysis.

In the following paragraphs, I outline a method of ‘movement mapping’ that is very long-term and locally situated. Much of what you will read is situated in a particular project. That project will be explored as a possibly reproducible model. First, I explain a method for critical examination of place and context. Then, I explain an approach to under-standing the work and ideas of the currently existing left in your place or context. I conclude with some more general observations and recommendations, which should be relevant regardless of your interest in reproducing this kind of project. Finally, after the essay there is a small glossary to help understand some of the vocabulary in this piece. The text should be relevant to anyone hoping to strategically contribute to the development of a robust and critically reflexive left.

Getting to know your city

The cities we live in are always expanding, contracting and changing. People who think about these things have compared cities to living organisms (living, breathing), microcosms (reflecting and reproducing the world in which they exist), and parasites (sucking the resources of the region on their periphery), as well as to independent nations (having their own rules and identities distinct from the world around them). Others view cities simply as markets (where people are merely buyers and sellers) and command-and-control centers (where networks of people, wealth and resources are organized and manipulated from a safe and distanced vantage-point). These metaphors are frameworks for understanding what cities are, why they exist, how they work and where they are going.

AREA Chicago is a magazine and events series based in Chicago. One approach we have used to examine the city is a ‘conceptual limiting’ strategy, which is borrowed from literary traditions – if you limit and focus the framework to a specific area or topic, then you can more fully explore that area and navigate complex ideas through that lens. Some people might try to explore contemporary capitalism through the lens of culture (such as soccer), or commodities (such as tea), or possibly though a particular movement (such as socialism). The books in the cultural criticism or sociology section of many bookstores are overflowing with such analytical projects. In our work, a place – Chicago – is the lens through which we view the complexities of an increasingly mobile and always violent capitalism.
Continue reading “Getting to know your city”