Alternatives to Celebrity in the Rescue of the City, a Reply to Robert A. Beau Regard

ABSTRACT:

Books by urban academics that spark interest in the fate of cities are important but only one of the critical functions of urban scholars. Privileging the role of “public intellectual” in creating passionate popular involvement with the city is based on the assumption that the celebrity of a few academics in the 1960s/1970s was a major factor in the public urban concerns of that period. The author argues that calling for new public intellectuals to use media-driven celebrity to rekindle interest in cities does not preclude the media’s function as a filter that may distort or appropriate ideas in their own interests. He urges teaching students a critical perspective, working with people as colleagues rather than as tutors, building urban affairs as a field of study, using interactive communication channels such as the Internet, and examining the urban insights of nonacademic writers and artists.