The production of cultural perceptions in mass media is linked to the project of urban renewal and institutionalized racism. Popular television shows like Good Times, so infused with progressive ideals and issues of social relevance, were able to convey a normative view of “the projects” as an inherently failed space. This article presents a history of cultural translation and racial relations against a backdrop of American housing policy in the post-war era.

This dissertation is a historical investigation of the urban politics and mythic spaces produced in southeastern Nigeria, particularly in the port city of Old Calabar. As a city with a distinctive, and what some call “decentralized” and fragmented urban geography, this project draws connections between contemporary zoning strategies and these historical socio-spatial constructs, or “protozones”. These protozones, which were loosely tied together by secretive juridical systems and cultural codes, can be seen as a precursors and potential anticipatory diagrams for the splintering forms of urbanism emerging globally today. Borrowing the concept of “paradigmatic spaces”, this dissertation is organized around a series of spatial designations, or diagrams of spatial relationships that were exemplary during a given time period in Old Calabar’s urban history. This dissertation employs four spaces as representative of particular socio-historical relationships in Old Calabar—the compound, the masquerade, the offshore, and the zone. The historical imbrication of these four models combined with a flexible application of their spatio-temporal boundaries, provide a useful matrix for understanding the architectural and urban history of Old Calabar and challenging the novelty attributed to contemporary neoliberal free trade zones. The dissertation provides a productive case study for theorizing architecture and urbanism from the historicized periphery.