The Breakdown of Conversation: Historical Building Records as Forms of Speech
Mentor 1
Arijit Sen
Location
Union 344
Start Date
28-4-2017 12:00 PM
Description
On August 14th, 1978, a rear porch collapsed at 1304-1306 North 37th Place, injuring three people. While the documentation of this event tells a narrative of legal exchanges between involved parties and the city government of Milwaukee, what these records constitute is a form of discourse that structures the homeowner-city relationship and the relationships between homeowners and their neighbors. A cycle of code violations and the permits to rectify those issues stretches back to the 1910s, when buildings in the 1300 block of North 37th Place were first built. For some buildings, the violations and penalties outweigh the incentives to maintain these properties, and several buildings have been demolished as a response to pressures from the city. In this paper, I use city documentation as a form of speech, one that can be impersonal, emotional, subversive, resistant, or wholly compliant. Though primarily a back-and-forth responsive conversation of violations and permits, the conversation also extends to lawyers, tenants, and neighbors of the homeowners. Taken as a case study for a wider urban discourse analysis, the six addresses I use here reveal that, contrary to popular themes of disinvestment, poverty, and crime, demolished or poorly maintained buildings function as breakdowns in the conversation between property-owners and the city government. I utilize permit applications, inspection logs, orders to correct conditions of premises, and other city-maintained historical records to chart the conversations that property-owners and the city of Milwaukee have with each other. In having this form of conversation, property-owners and the city government are engaging in a legal discourse that sometimes fails to accommodate the very homeowners that it claims to work for; reading historical records as a form of speech allows for a retelling of urban neighborhood depreciation and recasts the physical decline as a complex response to institutional legal discourse.
The Breakdown of Conversation: Historical Building Records as Forms of Speech
Union 344
On August 14th, 1978, a rear porch collapsed at 1304-1306 North 37th Place, injuring three people. While the documentation of this event tells a narrative of legal exchanges between involved parties and the city government of Milwaukee, what these records constitute is a form of discourse that structures the homeowner-city relationship and the relationships between homeowners and their neighbors. A cycle of code violations and the permits to rectify those issues stretches back to the 1910s, when buildings in the 1300 block of North 37th Place were first built. For some buildings, the violations and penalties outweigh the incentives to maintain these properties, and several buildings have been demolished as a response to pressures from the city. In this paper, I use city documentation as a form of speech, one that can be impersonal, emotional, subversive, resistant, or wholly compliant. Though primarily a back-and-forth responsive conversation of violations and permits, the conversation also extends to lawyers, tenants, and neighbors of the homeowners. Taken as a case study for a wider urban discourse analysis, the six addresses I use here reveal that, contrary to popular themes of disinvestment, poverty, and crime, demolished or poorly maintained buildings function as breakdowns in the conversation between property-owners and the city government. I utilize permit applications, inspection logs, orders to correct conditions of premises, and other city-maintained historical records to chart the conversations that property-owners and the city of Milwaukee have with each other. In having this form of conversation, property-owners and the city government are engaging in a legal discourse that sometimes fails to accommodate the very homeowners that it claims to work for; reading historical records as a form of speech allows for a retelling of urban neighborhood depreciation and recasts the physical decline as a complex response to institutional legal discourse.
