Racialized urban life is understood only by triangulating elite and vernacular sources

Evidence

To get under the skin of the city is partly a task that demands an unpacking of the forms of collective memory that structure our ways of thinking (Boyer, 1994) but is also about a constant iteration between the concepts and vocabularies that are being used in academic analysis and the hidden racialized genealogies of precisely these same concepts. To accept the significance of technologies of representation of the urban is to point to a reconsideration of the valorization of alternative forms of academic labor. The oral history and the graffiti tag generate an urbanism that is related to, but distinct from, the architectural plan and the urban futures envisioned by city hall. To investigate either is insufficient; the myth in the mirage of the racialized city comes into focus only when the two are triangulated through a sustained labor that does not return us to Chicago but does place gossip, interview, and memory alongside the more rarefied theoretical considerations of commodification and governance. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2308

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage models a method: reading the racialized city by holding academic-architectural representations against oral history, graffiti, and memory, neither alone being sufficient.
• XREF: The demand to surface ‘hidden racialized genealogies of the concepts’ used in analysis speaks directly to the knowledge-politics thread running through the entire Solomos/Goldberg volume.