Customer Reviews

The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History

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Dolores Hayden's book, The Power of Place, is a comprehensive guide for anyone whose goal is to engage in an examination of spaces and places. It retains a historical perspective that allows the reader to apply the places focused upon by Hayden to his or her own specific spatial examination. While she focuses specific attention on the Los Angeles area, I found her work compatible with any examination of spatial use or spatial history and contextualization. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the power of place.

I admire Hayden's book, "Building Suburbia" so I anticipated this volume with great pleasure. Unfortunately, "The Power of Place" lacks the insight and observation of Hayden's later book. That is forgivable; I expect authors to develop their skills, and Hayden is an astute writer.

She wasn't particularly astute, however, when she wrote "The Power of Place". I don't want to offend anyone, but the idea of white liberals going in to disenfranchised "ethnic" neighborhoods, to give those poor deprived people some art--well, that is patronizing and rather pathetic. Who asked them?

Every community has art, and I hope Hayden has learned from the mistakes she made in "The Power of Place". Bringing art to the poor ignored masses (as she sees them) merely replicates and reinforces minority and ethnic groups as "marginalized" and "needy". It never occurred to Hayden that there are artforms that are inaccessible to her; she is not the target audience for this art, and may not be able to perceive or understand it. She readily assumes that her understanding of art and her access to it is superior to that of various cultural and ethnic minorities, so she's going to help the poor, culturallly-starved plebes. She delivers her own clumsy aesthetics to "underrepresented" groups and assumes that if she can't see or understand an art force or cultural form, it must not be there. So, a Euro-American process of art is the only legitimate one for her, and she didn't see that in these poor, isolated, marginalized, disenfranchised, communities, the members of which were probably too polite to tell Hayden and her do-gooder, well-meaning buddies to "Hit the road. Who asked you? We got this." If only Hayden had the same courtesy. Assume that art is everywhere, Hayden, and learn to understand forms and expressions that might be unfamiliar to you. The author wrote this book in the mid-1990s, I hope by now she has grown at least as sophisticated as the patient recipients of her imposed "community artwork".