Urban Activist Writing and the Transition from ‘Models of’ to ‘Models for’ Urban Developments

“Urban Activist Writing and the Transition from ‘Models of’ to ‘Models for’ Urban Developments” engages with a corpus of activist writing from anti-gentrification and ‘Right to the City’ movements and identifies aesthetic strategies of subverting commodification common in such writing. It does so in order to highlight activist writing as a text type that systematically blends the descriptive and the prescriptive characteristics of models: While critically commenting on current urban developments, activist writing clearly pursues an agenda in blueprinting desirable urban developments. The central case study here is Christoph Schäfer’s highly allusive and self-reflexive visual essay Die Stadt ist unsere Fabrik/The City is our Factory (2010c).