"The Public Realm in the American City: Conflict, Imagination, and Demeanor," a lecture

4:30 pm Architectural and Urban Planning (AUP) Building 170
Co-sponsored by UWM School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Department of Art History

In burgeoning antebellum American cities, noise, odors, quantities of people, and feverish activity threatened to overwhelm one’s senses. For many of these urbanites, the kaleidoscopic sight of people, things, and spaces—the forms too multitudinous to encompass except in long lists (and as aestheticized by Walt Whitman)—appeared amorphous, as shadow landscapes inhabited by inscrutable peoples. Viewed in this light, “gentility”—a standard of conduct, association, and consumption—assumes a harder edge, one that has as much to do with exclusion as with recognizing eligible social partners. The loud, stinking, filthy, disorganized antebellum American city set the conditions within which some Americans sought to imagine new ways of urban living and working, with the assistance of political and cultural ideas inherited from the revolutionary generation.

In his lecture, Professor Upton looks to use his research into the 19th century American city as a way to raise issues about the contemporary one.

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