Building a Mile High City: theorizing rhetorical infrastructures in Denver's development
Date
2021
Authors
Clark, Jordin, author
Dickinson, Greg, advisor
Dunn, Tom, committee member
Gibson, Katie, committee member
Carolan, Michael, committee member
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Abstract
This dissertation utilizes multi-methodological practices to showcase rhetoric's role in directing, arranging, and negotiating urban development projects to sculpt a particular, and particularly power-laden urban identity. To this end, I theorize rhetoric as an influential urban infrastructure that guides how people construct and enact the built environment, everyday embodied practices, and community identity. Defined as the symbolic and material claims in and to urban spaces, rhetorical infrastructures, I contend, direct, arrange, and negotiate space's multiple trajectories into a practiced, everyday urban identity. Specifically, I theorize memory, imagination, and vernacular as rhetorical infrastructures through three different case studies across Denver's development. My first case study examines memory as a rhetorical infrastructure in Denver's first historic district, Larimer Square. Through spatial stories of frontier grit and exploration, I argue that Larimer Square directs Denver's trajectories toward white exceptionalism and unfettered expansion. My second case study analyzes the process of development through the rhetorical infrastructure of imagination in North Denver's ongoing project to redevelop the National Western Center and the surrounding neighborhoods of Globeville, Elyria-Swansea. Through mental mapping interviews, archival research, and spatial criticism, I analyze when and how varying spatial imaginaries collide to arrange the space's openness to multiple histories into place-making strategies that usher Denver into a global, yet homogenized, future. In the final case study, I pivot to vernacular infrastructures in a section 8 housing district in Denver, Sun Valley. Using photovoice methodology, this chapter showcases care, play, and growth as bottom-up, repair-oriented practices that (re)build community networks and relationalities during Denver's COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Examining Denver's development across space and time, I argue that, through the rhetorical infrastructures of memory, imagination, and vernacular, Denverites and city officials sculpt an urban identity of white exceptionalism and unfettered expansion. As open and multiplicitous, however, these spaces come to be negotiated through everyday practices that, if only momentarily, reroute infrastructures towards roots and community care.
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Subject
infrastructures
space/place
vernacular
memory
imagination
urban development