Browsing by Subject "Middle Class"

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Open Access
Stuyvesant Town: Evaluating the Beneficiaries and Victims of an Act of Urban Renewal for the Middle Class
(2018-04-19) Speed, Elizabeth
My thesis offers a critical analysis of Stuyvesant Town, a housing development built in New York City in 1947. At this time, Stuyvesant Town was the largest redevelopment housing project ever built in the United States and remains the largest housing development in New York City. Stuyvesant Town is comprised of 8,755 apartments that are distributed throughout 35 13-story red brick cruciform buildings. The development is bound by 20th Street to the north, 14th street to the south, Avenue C to the east, and 1st Avenue to the west. Although Robert Moses planned Stuyvesant Town for white middle-income residents, primarily veterans and their families, affordability protections have gradually been dismantled and Stuyvesant Town now offers over half of its units at market-rate rents to the relatively wealthy. While scholars often regard Stuyvesant Town as a harmful failure by criticizing its design and how it was developed, I investigate their views by examining the complex’s evolution over the 70 years since its conception. My thesis employs Moses’ writings and speeches, contemporaneous articles, scholarly literature, author interviews, and close on-site observation to analyze Stuyvesant Town’s goals, design, development, and impact on New York City. I conclude that while Stuyvesant Town’s layout and amenities separate it from New York City and make the development spatially disorienting, this separation is to the detriment of the city in which it resides, rather than to Stuyvesant Town’s residents. My research indicates that the development’s desirable location and its security and amenities, made possible by its residents’ socioeconomic status, have prevented its insular qualities from being harmful to its residents in the way that some other tower in the park style developments have been to their own and even make residents appreciate Stuyvesant Town’s containment. I also conclude that Stuyvesant Town is problematic for New York City as a whole because its affordability has devolved, while its lack of racial diversity has remained fairly consistent. It is no longer a middle-class bastion, contradicting its intended purpose, but it has maintained its predominantly white racial makeup. Government intervention is needed if Stuyvesant Town is ever to regain its capacity to fulfill Moses’ promise of middle-class affordability within New York City.
Open Access
The People's Republic of Capitalism: The Making of the New Middle Class in Post-Socialist China, 1978-Present
(2013) Hui, Ka Man Calvin
My dissertation, "The People's Republic of Capitalism: The Making of the New Middle Class in Post-Socialist China, 1978-Present" draws on a range of visual cultural forms - cinema, documentary, and fashion - to track the cultural dimension of the emergence of the new middle class subject in China's encounter with global capitalism. Through cultural studies methodologies and critical theoretical practices, I explore the massive reorganization of national subjectivity that has accompanied the economic reforms since 1978. How, I ask, has the middle class replaced the proletariat as the dominant subject of Chinese history? What are the competing social forces that contribute to the making of the new middle class subject, and how do they operate? By considering these questions in terms of the cultural cultivation of new sensibilities as much as identities, I trace China's changing social formations through the realm of cultural productions. This project is organized into three parts, each of which attends to a particular constellation of middle class subjectivities and ideologies. In Part I (Introduction and Chapter 1), I explore how the Chinese middle class subject is shaped by historical, political-economic, and cultural forces. I show that the new social actor is structurally dependent on the national and transnational bourgeoisie and the post-socialist party-state. In Part II (Chapters 2-5), I focus on the relationship among fashion, media, and Chinese consumer culture in the socialist and post-socialist eras. By engaging with films such as Xie Tieli's Never Forget (1964), Huang Zumo's Romance on Lushan (1980), Qi Xingjia's Red Dress is in Fashion (1984), and Jia Zhangke's The World (2004) and Useless (2007), I suggest that the representation of fashion and consumption in Chinese cinema, documentary, and new media is a privileged site for deciphering otherwise imperceptible meanings of class, ideology, and history in the formation of the Chinese middle class subject. In Part III (Chapter 6), I attend to the repressed underside of Chinese consumer culture: rubbish. This project reorients our understanding of socialist and post-socialist China, seeing them as underpinned by the contradictions emblematized in the Chinese middle class.