Browsing by Author "Lockrem, Jessica"

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    Commoditizing Katrina
    (Rice University, 2010) Lockrem, Jessica
    Mere months after residents of New Orleans were left stranded on their roofs, before, even, all of the bodies were to be found within the flood wreckage, Gray Line New Orleans announced plans to begin bus tours of the wreckage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Such tours have now multiplied, almost a dozen companies offering bus or van tours of the death and destruction that so many watched unfold on network television. This essay will track the Katrina devastation tour through its various formations, noting, especially, its changing status as a commodity throughout. The commoditization of Katrina has not been a straight path towards increasing commoditization, but has been alternately contested and promoted as a commodity throughout its history.
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    Moving Ho Chi Minh City: Planning Public Transit in the Motorbike Metropolis
    (2016-04-21) Lockrem, Jessica; Boyer, Dominic
    This dissertation analyzes the role of speed in contemporary urban life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. While the modern condition often champions speed, I found residents and city planners criticizing the effects of increasingly accelerated movement on street life, safety, and the environment. I argue that trends in transportation planning are shifting from a modernist urbanist emphasis on speed to a holistic integration of mobility with daily activity. The dissertation is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with planners working on the major public transportation plans being developed in 2013 and operators of the current public transportation systems. While planners are often assumed to be concerned mainly with traffic flow, my research shows these experts recognize transport as an important aspect of the social space of the public street. Engaging with scholarly literatures on infrastructure, mobility, and Vietnam, the dissertation is divided into three parts: material infrastructures, lived experiences of transportation, and imagined futures for transport systems. Part I looks into the history of transportation infrastructure in Ho Chi Minh City by examining the material spaces these infrastructures create. Part II analyzes lived experiences of transportation infrastructure. Finally, Part III interrogates the imagined spaces of the city through the perspectives and practices of transportation planners. The research is concerned with how the science of urban planning and other technologies shape urban form and mediate individuals’ experiences of and access to the city. As the cities of Southeast Asia rapidly grow, examining the epistemologies and technologies that are guiding their shape becomes ever more important for understanding urban life.
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    Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
    (Sage, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Lockrem, Jessica; Appel, Hannah; Hackett, Edward; Boyer, Dominic; Hall, Randal; Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Pope, Albert; Gupta, Akhil; Rodwell, Elizabeth; Ballestero, Andrea; Durbin, Trevor; el-Dahdah, Farès; Long, Elizabeth; Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences
    In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.