Introduction

Critical Urban Theory (and its Limitations)

Earlier in this section, I invoked the writings of De Certeau on walking in the city, using it as a metaphor for the community radio sphere. I have found his work and other works in the realm of critical urban theory useful in understanding the flexible production of space through practice. It is important to clarify, though, that community radio is not an inherently urban phenomenon, and in fact has potentials to counter imagined divides and hierarchies between the categories of urban and rural. Many community radio stations are, in fact, important specifically because they serve underserved rural areas, while others are important because they serve underserved populations within cities. Critical urban theory includes lines of inquiry and analytical tools that are useful for environs of many varieties. Neil Brenner has written that urban space “can no longer be viewed as a distinct, relatively bounded site; it has instead become a generalized, planetary condition in and through which the accumulation of capital, the continuous enclosure of ‘common’ spaces and realms, the regulation of political economic life, the reproduction of everyday social relations, and the contestation of the earth and humanity’s possible futures are simultaneously organized and fought out” (2012, 21). Fitting well alongside this explanation is Peter Marcuse’s remark that within critical urban theory, he uses the term ‘urban’ “to denote the point at which the rubber of the personal hits the ground of the societal, the intersection of everyday life with the socially created systemic world about us” (2012, 25). Urbanness is not then a stable identity but is a quality contingent on practices and relations increasingly dispersed across broad geographic spaces. Indeed, “critical urban theory emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space—that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium, and outcome of historically specific relations of social power” (Brenner 2012, 11). Similar processes of spatial (re)construction are constantly at work in the community radio sphere, involving not just individual stations but the conceptions and formations in and for which they operate. However, WFHB and many other community radio stations are involved in social, personal, and economic processes of spatial production that emphasize the interconnectedness of spaces categorized as rural and those categorized as urban and the politically motivated artificiality of such divides.

Critical urban theory takes its cues from mid-20^th century leftist urban scholars with a particular emphasis on those working amid the many countercultural movements enacting protests in 1968. Henri Lefebvre’s advocacy for accessible participation in the urban setting, a call for “the right to the city,” has been particularly influential in informing theories of the politics of spatial appropriation that are applicable beyond the bounded city, including Abe’s aforementioned work in performance geography. By foregrounding questions of who has the power to access and utilize urban settings, and to what ends—revolution? Nostalgia?—Lefebvre suggests alternatives to the contained city of the past that are not beholden to prevailing frameworks and which do not shy away from utopian imagination, “not the imaginary of escape and evasion which conveys ideologies, but the imaginary which invests itself in appropriation (of time, space, physiolocal life and desire)” (1996 [1968], 155). Lefebvre is interested in creative spatial possibilities. Writing decades later, Christian Schmid writes of Lefebvre’s ‘new’ understanding of the city that it “creates a condition in which heterogeneous elements no longer exist in isolation. As a place of encounter, communication, and information, the city is also a place in which constraints and normality are dissolved, and are joined by the elements of the playful and unpredictable” (2011, 47). These works are premised on problematic notions of the urban that do not hold up well against more recent investigations of the rural/urban divide and how it has been mobilized to divide and polarize social groups, especially in the United States. Interrogating these sources, though, offers means to untangle the power structures shaping placemaking practices. In the context of this dissertation, I find theories of spatial production useful in exploring experimentation from the ground up as a means of unlocking the potential inherent in space.

The more critical approaches in this list are important because they balance out the distancing and “big picture” tendencies of systems theories, geographies, and urban studies. Along the same lines, I have relied primarily on ethnographic methods in my fieldwork.