Gazette
“Over a period of six weeks 128 students from the Academy for Urban Planning in Bushwick, Brooklyn took an in-depth look at media, geography, war, love, and architecture. The Alternative Urban Perspectives zine (9MB pdf) is the result of their visual and textual explorations” - From The Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York City, who “make educational projects about places and how they change.” Tagging the Social Contract had students out looking for evidence of the social contract in their neighbourhoods, and Just In/Justice had them investigating “the infrastructure of criminal justice in New York City.” Garbage Problems and The Water Underground took a look at waste management.
In class we’ve been reading Jeff Ferrell’s interesting book Empire of Scrounge, where urban dumpster-diving is liberating and people create their own sense of “scrapped together” beauty. Hints of Lefebvre’s radical potentiality, and one way of doing radical research.
Spotted at antropologi.info, A Modern Marketplace for Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox: “A whole economic system has evolved to meet their needs, as Tamar El-Or, an anthropologist at Hebrew University explains. She has studied ultra-Orthodox shopping patterns. ‘There are lines of cellphones and credit cards and Internet suppliers and software and DVDs and clothes and so many things produced or altered or koshered for them, because they have a certain organized power to get the producers to make what they want’.”
What Makes Justice Spatial? What Makes Spaces Just? Three Interviews on the Concept of Spatial Justice (pdf) by Critical Spatial Practice Reading Group (Nicholas Brown, Ryan Griffis, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, Sarah Kanouse). More here.
An Atlas of Radical Cartography - exploring “the map’s role as political agent.” In Other Worlds, Other Maps: Mapping the Unintended City, Jai Sen explores how maps serve as “ways to help people make themselves visible - to each other and to those who made them invisible - and thereby to gain some degree of control and power-to over their lives, celebrate their existence and contributions to the world around them, and - crucially - also to challenge the power of those who made them invisible and unintended.”
Material World: Plan B for a Nuclear Reactor: After Production Comes Preservation. On the preservation of architectural and social history. And aggregät 4/5/6 offers much more in the way of military-industrial spaces. Also: magical urbanism on Factory 798 and China’s Burgeoning Art Scene.
Subversive Cartography:challenging the accuracy of the official map and Subversive Souvenirs:questioning the institutional view in the imagery of tourism and surveillance. Part of Dubious Views. And there is no end to strange maps, it seems.
Pruned features some seriously graceful building. Almost as impressive as Inka stonemasonry. And because I enjoy eccentric homes, this piece on The Broken Column House is totally fascinating.
89-91, Sites of Technology “traces Lewis Baltz’s journey through the workplaces of information technologies in Europe and Japan in the early 1990’s. Baltz’s concern is not with technology, per se, but with the epiphenomena of technology: the places and non-places shared by persons and machines.” Images here.
The Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms. Small is big. Also: Visualising Invisibility. On “the conflicts between illegal migrants’ need to remain invisible and art’s necessity to reveal what is hidden.”
Following up on an earlier post, Subtopia published the second half of an interview with Stephen Graham, The City in the Crosshairs (pt. 2). Also: “Fenceland” (The Greatest Show On Earth!).
Vilém Flusser: space, culture and virtuality on the borderline of literature, science and philosophy. “Flusser concludes that the immaterial is precisely form, that which allows the unformed stuff of the world - material - to appear. Flusser archives.
Sebastian Olma for Mute Magazine, On the Creativity of the Creative Industries: Some Reflections.
City of Sound on The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown. Dan also points to Urban Research on Film, “With the increased dynamic of urban development, more artists are concerned with urban space as a theme and issue. This selection shows a range of new short experimental and documentary work by international artists.”
Cultures of Consumption: five years, 26 projects, and dozens of publications. Wow.
BLDGBLOG: still keepin’ it up.
Images via FFFFOUND!
- Anne
November 23rd, 2007 at 7:45 am
Looks good!
(And there are no apparent problems. Comments are working!)
November 24th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Thanks!