Gallatin Road: A sketch of a low income commercial strip

Gallatin Road: A sketch of a low income commercial strip

Shaw, S.

2009-03-19

Workshop 1. Public space and neighbourhood quality Abstract Sprawling commercial strips receive very little attention among urban scholars. When they do they are represented either as anathema to intelligent urban design, as asocial spaces given over to the automobile and American consumerism, or they are lamented as representing the loss of community. But these vernacular spaces are far more common than Chicago’s South Side, New York’s Greenwich Village, or any other ‘vital’ urban spaces that ethnographers overwhelmingly focus on. Gallatin Road, in relatively poor East Nashville, Tennessee provides an opportunity to take seriously the lived experience of this very common type of twenty-first century urban environment. This paper explores several themes related to issues of public space, and that lay the groundwork for an innovative urban ethnography of the automobile-centric, vernacular commercial strip, including: a) issues of automobility and immobility, b) the spatial organization of low-income and auto-centric amenities and commercial uses, c) and the commercial strip as a ‘fluid’ spatial boundary that separates East Nashville’s residents along racial and class lines.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:aeb2ce1f-d77f-4cad-8852-dfa5f67a3253

Conference proceedings

conference paper

(c) 2009 Shaw, S.