Reviewed by Catherine Scheelar, University of Alberta.

In Sound, Space, and the City, anthropologist Marina Peterson explores the process of center-making in Los Angeles through multicultural performance in public space. Positing her work as an ‘anthropology of the center’, of the city rather than in the city, she traces how meaning is made in and around public performances. Based on ethnographic research from 2001 to 2003, her study observes embodied musical practices that constitute the imagining and making of a multicultural city. A free concert series, Grand Performances is situated in the contexts of historical and contemporary urban planning, artistic programming, and the city as lived and imagined.

Acknowledging that ideas of the social sciences seep into everyday life, she challenges the situatedness of disciplinary knowledge and the locations in which anthropological theory has been developed and applied. Grand Performances came into being as a multicultural arts and music project including ethnicity (but excluding class and political affiliations) for the construction of a general, neutral ‘public’, an audience as both a representation and a synecdoche of the city. She draws links between international performance and downtown development, exploring the politics of multiculturalism as part of wider social and political frameworks enacted on municipal, state, and national levels. In recounting her personal experiences of working in the organization and performing onstage with the DaKAH hip hop orchestra, she uses personal narratives and sensual descriptions of experiencing California Plaza.

The concerts are representations of a city imagined and made in practice, as Los Angeles has been perceived as a city lacking real civic life and a central space where people can come together as a public. The history of the space highlights the dynamics of gentrification; the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project removed unruly bodies, replacing particular people with a general public, both activating and cleansing the urban space. California Plaza now exists as private property on public land, the area’s former blight covered with modern sculptures. With ethnicized neighbourhoods surrounding it, the purported neutrality of downtown is brought into being through practice which supports diversity as a normative feature of city. As a civic institution, Grand Performances creates audience members as civic subjects as spaces of belonging are created through inclusion and exclusion. Peterson cites Lefebvre in discussing the urban public as both sonic and spatial processes of the city, as social and musical rhythms are heard and felt in the body.

Are the arts integral to urban growth in the twentieth century? Pederson places Grand Performances in the context of historical American debates about art as an educational medium for the public good and worthy of state support. In analyzing the practice of centre-making through the arts, she acknowledges the imagined public of the city, the interests of the corporate plaza, and the reality of government grant guidelines. Defining the free concerts as nonprofits for the education of the public good shapes meanings of art through intersections of programming, funding, and marketing. Performances are always planned, wavering between a public openness and fear of the public. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is invoked to discuss the disciplining of bodies, construction of consensus, and exclusion of class necessary for a multicultural audience watching a performance of ethnicity. Political performances are also generally excluded for divisive potentialities in the civic space of consensus.

The global city is sounded through media with translocal media spaces acting as motivators of activities, allowing ethnic media to market international programming. The city is in motion, as people and sounds circulate within and between neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood names act as code for social groups in an ethnicized geography, and the success or failure of performances is largely based on the range of ethnic diversity in the audience.

In looking at the tenents of democracy such as representation, recognition, and participation, Peterson explores the relationship between performance and politics, as the neoliberal trope of diversity shows openness to difference, helping to alleviate violence and tensions. While music is a medium for belonging, signifying race, politics, age, etc., cosmopolitanism allows for shifting affiliations in identity-in-process. Modernist notions of neutrality allow for multiple interpretations and claims to higher abstractions. Peterson devotes much space to hip hop orchestra DaKAH, which she purports exists as a musical and social mixture, embodying Los Angeles through the diversity of its members. She asserts that the musical group fosters intergenerational understanding through combining hip hop and orchestra. Civic performance aims to foster spatial and social proximity through music. Genre is negotiatied over musical and social boundaries, with identification understood as mobile processes of becoming.

In a movement from the self to the collective, an audience is constituted through an embodied experience of listening and dancing together, fulfilling urban ideals of diversity through affective, participatiory, and sensory channels. Through sound engineering, sonic and spatial intimacy and proximity are felt in the body. Durkheim’s theory of ritual designates the body as the subjective site where experience generates a collective. Peterson asserts that utopic versions of society are drawn from and necessary for the social; the ideal society is not outside of society but rather already a part of it. Foucault is mentioned in the discussion of the individual body as the locus of aspirations, through which beliefs must be continually performed in order to sustain social beliefs. At Grand Performances, a dancing audience is a sign of approval, as individuals engage in the public performance of a private, affective response.

In concise and accessible language, Peterson successfully highlights parallels between actual multicultural performances and the ideal global city. While she briefly mentions that Grand Performance’s events are outside of everyday life and time, an ideal, ephemeral state counter to the norm, she makes no mention of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s anthropological theories of liminality. Overall though, this work is beneficial to both students and scholars interested in social relations and diversity, public space, urban revitalization, civic life, privatization, suburbanization, and economic and cultural globalization.

- Catherine Scheelar

Reviewed by Andrew Karvonen, Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester (UK)

In past three decades, actor-network theory (ANT) has infiltrated a wide range of theories, methods, and empirical studies throughout the social sciences and humanities by rejecting conventional ontological and epistemological assumptions in exchange for a relational perspective. And at long last, a compendium has arrived that is solely devoted to ANT and the study of cities. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, edited by Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, includes twelve chapters by scholars in geography, sociology, anthropology, and science & technology studies, as well as brief interviews with three noted urban theorists. The book’s strong theoretical emphasis is underpinned by empirical findings from cities and regions throughout the world to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges of supplementing urban studies methodologies and approaches with key insights from ANT. Reflecting on the changes that ANT presents, Farías (pg. 1) writes, ‘The city and the urban do indeed look quite different when explored with symmetrical and radically relational eyes.’

[cc photo credit: Darcy Zhou]

The first section of the book (‘Towards a Flat Ontology’) critiques conventional spatial and scalar interpretations of cities. Manuel Tironi uses the avant-garde music scene in Santiago, Chile to reveal a ‘liquid spatiality’ that is performed rather than pre-given, consisting of decentred and multiple configurations. Likewise, Alan Latham and Derek McCormack study internationally renowned marathons that define unconventional spatial morphologies based on connections rather than scale. Richard Smith critiques the conventional containerized notions of space by describing the actor-networks of legal services in Singapore that transcend a priori categories of local, national, and international. And Don Slater and Tomas Artztía examine the spatial achievements of a virtual cultural centre in northern Spain, arguing that it functions as a ‘scaling device’ to subvert global knowledges and ideas to suit the needs of local actors. The section concludes with an interview with Nigel Thrift who urges urban researchers to follow currents rather than scalar, territorial, and bounded categories to reveal the lived conditions of cities.

Contributors to the second section (‘A Non-Human Human Ecology’) focus on notions of hybridity and the role of materiality in the co-production of cities. Andrés Valderrama Pineda analyses Bogota’s mass transit system to demonstrate how politics are inscribed in the materiality of the city. Anique Hommels uses a contested Dutch highway proposal in Maastricht to compare and contrast three dominant traditions from science & technology studies – ANT, the social construction of technology, and the large technical systems approach. Michael Guggenheim considers buildings as quasi-technologies and argues that from this perspective, they are ‘mutable mobiles’ because they occupy a fixed location that exposes them to many user groups and they are singular in that they cannot be standardised. Israel Rodríguez Giralt, Daniel López Gómez, and Noel García López highlight an aspect of cities that is often overlooked – sound landscapes – and use a Barcelona blackout incident to examine sonorous practices of protest that shape urban relations in indelible ways. The section concludes with an interview with Stephen Graham in which he emphasizes the importance of materiality to ongoing processes of urban development.

In the third section (‘The Multiple City’), Ignacio Farías examines tourist buses in Berlin to argue for an increased emphasis on the virtual, an element of cities that he argues is neglected in ANT approaches. Michael Schillmeier presents Georg Simmel’s work on urban modernity as an early form of ANT and examines the intermediation of money practices to understand how bodies, senses, and things connect or resist connection. Caitlin Zaloom also focuses on monetary flows but in the form of financial markets and the architecture of the trading floor in Chicago that links the virtual and the real. And Rosalind Williams demonstrates the plurality of cities by comparing the nineteenth century writings of Charles Baudelaire and Jules Verne in Paris and their creation of a second world through language. The final section concludes with an interview with Rob Shields who argues that the virtual is as important to cities as the physical.

As a whole, the collection engages with an enormous breadth of urban research traditions and topics, demonstrating the multiple ways that ANT is influencing the study of cities. It is doubtful that the collection will convince newcomers or critics of ANT to embrace a flat, relational ontology; instead, the book serves as a useful stopping point to reflect on some of the ways that ANT is currently being applied in urban studies. As Thomas Bender (p. 317) summarises in the postscript, ‘Perhaps what ANT offers is an unusually rich heuristic device rather than a formal method for studying cities….It is a sensibility that encourages one to think past the outer surface of the urban world.’ It is this sensibility that connects the contributions to this compendium, revealing the promise for richer approaches to urban research that can embrace the multifaceted, messy character of cities.

Reviewed by Melanie Lombard, Global Urban Research Centre, University of Manchester (UK)

[cc image credit: eflon]

The authors of this edited volume make a worthwhile and timely contribution to the field of Latin American urban studies, which will help to fill the current gap in literature on the Latin American city. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to “reimagining the informal in Latin America,” with an emphasis on architectural and urban design perspectives, but also incorporating themes from cultural studies, human geography and anthropology. Interrogating the contemporary conditions of informality in Latin American cities, the authors present ‘the informal’ as a complex set of processes embracing spatial, social, cultural, political and economic aspects. The contributions suggest that we need to rethink our understandings of informality if we are to deal with the informal and particularly “with an urban informality that has become constitutive of the urban condition itself” (Hernandez et al. 2010: 184).

Eleven chapters are organised into two sections, Critical Perspectives and Critical Practices, according to whether contributions are theoretical-historical, or more practical and intervention-based. In fact, both sections present current work by scholars, practitioners, and government institutions, meaning both will have a broad appeal to theorists and practitioners alike. The collection will also hold more a general attraction for those interested in urban issues in the global South, as it provides a useful introduction to some of the key debates in this area, particularly relating to urban informal settlements and housing. Most notably, Chapter 1 takes readers on a whirlwind tour of developments in approaches to urban informal settlements from the 1960s to the present day. Starting with the widespread policies of eradication that characterised responses in the 1950s and 60s, it then touches on the Habitat I conference that took place in Vancouver in 1976 and the self-help debate that precipitated this, discusses the shift in the role of the state from housing provider to enabler, and ends with the ‘return of the slum’ (Gilbert 2007). This chapter will be of particular use to those unfamiliar with these debates, while other chapters discuss specific approaches in more detail, depending on their particular focus.

Despite the proclaimed theoretical bent of the first section, illustrative case studies are employed throughout. The first three chapters discuss Brazilian cities, and are united by a concern with the relationship between informality and modernism. Chapter 2 argues that the influence of modernist architecture can be seen throughout Brazilian favelas, based on Le Corbusier’s Domino template. Chapter 3 explores the informal within the formal, through the activities of urban social movements in Sao Paulo’s public spaces. Chapter 4 offers an interesting exploration of the encroachment of informality in Brasilia, an “exceptional” modernist city. The focus of the next two chapters is on Chile. Chapter 5 explores issues around quality of life in low-income settlements, showing how formal housing policies do not necessarily offer a comprehensive solution. Chapter 6 discusses showing how good design, participation and government subsidies can mitigate the effects of gentrification, using the case of Santiago.

In the book’s second section, contributions focus more heavily on the material outcomes of practice. Using case studies from Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Argentina, the authors explore some of the successes and failures of upgrading, urban design and architecture in this context. Chapter 7 offers an excellent discussion of the pragmatic realities of working with informality, based on the experiences of the Urban Think Tank in Caracas. Chapter 8 takes a similarly grounded view on informality as a means of survival in a socialist society. Chapters 9, 10 and 11 return to the Brazilian example, offering diverse reflections on the Favela Bairro upgrading programme. In particular, Chapter 10 makes a convincing and highly engaging case for incorporating both spatial and social elements into planning for informality, arguing that the social emphasis which has dominated upgrading programmes would benefit from a stronger urban design element, enabling the connection of informal areas with the rest of the city – for example through walkways and multi-level platforms – rather than seeking to ‘resolve’ informality.

The authors’ central argument is that the informal and the formal have become entrenched categories within the urban setting, but that these categories must be rethought if policymakers and researchers are to succeed in understanding and addressing informality. They call for an understanding that goes beyond reductive categories of formal and informal to engage with the multitude of factors that shape Latin American cities, emphasising in particular the agency of settlement dwellers as city builders. The introductory chapter posits an innovative postcolonial theoretical framework as an alternative means of understanding informality, which is implicitly rather than explicitly engaged with by most of the book’s contributors. Despite calls for a ‘postcolonial urban studies’ (Robinson 2006), such a perspective is as yet under-utilised in the Latin American context. Here, the postcolonial approach encompasses both a historical dimension – based on the parallels that exist between today’s urban informality and precolonial urban forms – and a conceptual one, inverting entrenched categories and narrow understandings equating informality with poverty and marginalisation, to celebrate the urban informal.

Indeed, the celebration of the informal is one of the book’s main themes, and this is something it does extremely convincingly. In the most part, the authors avoid ‘favela chic’ stereotyping – in other words, the romanticisation of life in urban informal settlements – as ‘the daily violence of economic exclusion’ (Davis 2006: 202) is always present as context. Indeed, as this book suggests, such places cannot be reduced to symbols of either urban crisis or heroism; they contain everyday struggles, but also complexity, and immense creativity on the part of their residents who construct them in extremely constrained circumstances. The holistic treatment applied here, from a diverse range of perspectives, serves to highlight the prevailing narrowness of most contemporary understandings of the informal city. Given the diversity of approaches, the volume would have occasionally benefited from greater editorial input: for example, some chapters contain a large amount of historical detail that eclipses the extremely interesting case study and empirical material. Most importantly, a concluding chapter would have helped to bring together the disparate threads from across the book’s two halves, and draw out some of the cross-cutting themes arising from the variety of case studies presented. However, despite these minor weaknesses, this book’s major contribution is in its exploration of the social, spatial, cultural and aesthetic processes which constitute the informal city, which is (re)presented as fluid, dynamic, and most importantly, as part of the city. This aspect should ensure its interest to scholars of space and culture; as in rethinking the informal city, we are forced to re-evaluate our understandings of the city itself.

References

Davis M, Planet of Slums. Verso: London, 2006.

Gilbert A, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31:697-713, 2007.

Robinson, J., Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, London: Routledge, 2006.

There is no doubt that most Canadian Arctic settlements will be affected because they are predominantly in exposed locations on the shoreline. Iqaluit, a quickly sprawling capital of Nunavut with a population of about 7500 is the focus of my research on Inuit urbanization and Arctic cultural capitals. Iqaluit is mostly under 10m above high tide, rising to a ridge about 30m above sea level. The most dramatic case is Tuktoyaktuk, at the mouth of the the Mackenzie Delta on the Beaufort Sea where many parts of the town have been undermined by tidal action. However other settlements such as Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, have already suffered from major storms; flooding washed out a key bridge.

Yesterday, Forum on the Future released its report ‘Megacities on the Move‘ that argues for planning to ensure more sustainable access to goods and services in cities.  They present four scenarios as videos – one solution, ‘Planopolis’ is here. But urban access to goods such as food depends on long supply chains back to rural locations.  We need solutions for the far corners of the world as well as cities.

- Rob

Salzburg

Eastern Europe’s cities are an education in different regimes of public space. Within the spatialisation Lefebvre describes as modernist, rationalized ‘Abstract Space’ public areas of cities are reduced to their function, utility and managed in terms of maximizing value within an overarching vision of land as a commodity to be bought and sold. Although utility is included in calculating its exchange value, this monetary abstraction – the price of land — ultimately over-rides even the use value of land and a necessary platform for economic activity. This tends to reduce city spaces to infrastructure which is understood in terms of needs such as transportation, costs of land and maintenance. Urban public space is a lost money-making opportunity if only because it is withdrawn from the real estate market. Elements such as sidewalks are thus reduced to the minimum required by social uses and safety standards.

In the late 20^th century, under what Lefebvre understood as a statist mode of production and accumulation, urban space is not just infrastructure but managed more consciously as a means of social control and as a way of facilitating commerce and trade. This implies policing the minutiae of uses of these areas, moving on loiterers and banning unproductive uses of space. Legitimated, tax-paying businesses are favoured by banning or limiting street traders and peddlers.  Traveling between Ukraine and Austria highlighted this for me on a recent trip.

Salzburg, Austria

Like many Western cities, the touristic ancient squares of Salzburg provide a good example of such management – a widespread approach, not something unique to Salzburg. Impeccably swept by street-cleaning equipment, stalls vending (usually gourmet) food simulate historical uses of the Platz and Markt and long-established cafes have the right to put out tables for patrons within carefully bounded,, but unmarked, areas. The invisibility of these boundaries of areas of entitlement undergird the simulacrum. The squares are thus vastly empty apart from specifically placed activities such as taxis queued for customers, tourists and tour groups headed one way or another, clustered around a fountain or jockeying for the ‘Kodak spot’ from which to take cliched snapshots as personal souvenirs of Salzburg. Missing in this sketch, and perhaps detectable only via tourists’ weary feet, is the genera absence of public seating and benches in these squares. The only available seating is in cafes for paying customers. Needless to say, itinerant peddlers and beggars have been systematically moved on by police.

These squares are amongst the most visited tourist sites, globally. The tourist experience is impeccably organized and planned in time and space in ways which reduce pilgrimage to historical and popular cultural sites to a series of commodity transactions. Alas, there is no outdoor music in this city of Mozart and The Sound of Music. Buskers are absent in favour of performances in the formal concert halls of the Salzburg Festivals where seats generally cost USD200 or more, marking it as an exclusive event for the global rich.

As Lefebvre noted, Abstract Space favours the visual at the expense of other senses. This is one reason why it is difficult to work out or back from Lefebvre’s separate ‘Spaces’. These are correctly cut off as analytical objects — but as he also argues contain previous spatialities within them. He divides each historical regime of space according to a corresponding historical dialectical mode of production. While he goes to great lengths to construct an ‘open text’ and avoid closure in his narrative subsequent deployment of his ideas tends to reify each ‘Space’ and hypostatize his argument. ‘Space’ becomes a thing, rather than a social process of spacing and ’spatializing’. Spatialisation is thus my preferred term and represents a step beyond Lefebvre.

It is true that benches appear to be a nineteenth century addition to cities (and one wonders at the history of public seating).  If there is one site where benches do appear in Salzburg, it is in parks and gardens. But in the vast majority of its urban public space, the human body is accommodated only in erect posture as a mobile pedestrian. These prevent non-residents from temporarily inhabiting a space unless paying for a seat. A specific form of exhausted meandering results, what Tiessen calls a ‘Meanderthal’ tourist mobility, which is unpredictable, distracted and slow paced. This distinct mobility is one of the more annoying aspects of tourism for more intent and directed locals whether on foot or in cars. It is directed from sight to sight in gross form but aimless from moment to moment until attracted by the allure and affect of visual objects – commodities, bargains, souvenirs in so-called ‘tourist traps’ or images of appetizing dishes or the site of food. The best haunts of locals are often more hidden and sometimes identified through the odour of cooking, rather than by visual cues.

L’viv, Ukraine

By contrast, L’viv, Ukraine (Lvov) is a historical city unfrequented by mass tourism. The birthplace of Sacher-Masoch, significant site of both the Holocaust and Holodimir, home of a famous Opera, and one of the few baroque cities untouched by the Second World War, like Salzburg the entire city-centre of L’viv is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Some of its squares have been developed for tourists in preparation for the 2012 European Football Championship. For example, the Toller Place is partly occupied by outdoor cafes (more expensive than the surrounding restaurants that also spill out onto the cobbled square). An ongoing effort moves unlicensed peddlers selling pastries off the square at least into alleys and entrance hallways of buildings. However an outdoor stage and seating hosts free entertainment and benches with bronze plaques discreetly advertising the local Lvivski beer are provided. Buskers offer competing renditions of Western and world music. There is thus a more complex visual and auditory touristic experience and clues to a fundamentally different regime of public space in contrast with the Abstract Space of Salzburg. Again, Lefebvre had a term for these environments whcih are the dialectical alter thesis of Abstract Space: ‘Differential Space’, a space characterized more by the rich co-presence of different uses rather than planned homogeneity and the result of myriad additions and subtractions. This square in the throes of revitalization in L’viv demonstrates how the two – Abstract and ‘Differential’ — are performatively interlaced and can be rebalanced in a more inclusive manner.

What really distinguishes L’viv from the cities of Western Europe is its extensive greenery, parks and promenades. Like Salzburg there are distinct seasons with less clement weather yet, lined with benches, L’viv’s public spaces support an active and inclusive public life which seems to include all ages, abilities, genders and social groups. Families with children occupy benches or stroll by elderly men playing chess in impromptu games on the benches. Strollers practice a now rare, genuine flaneurie – strolling in the heart of the city ‘to see and perhaps be seen’ — of the sort hosted by promenades such as Barcelona’s Ramblas. This is a way of participating in the life of the city and bringing these places alive. Nor is it simply a scene of pedestrian mobility. Rather than seeking what Perniola calls the ‘tranject’ — a simulated cinematic tracking shot as the visual synthesis of what a city is, people stroll and meander (perhaps more energetically than tourists), children trace complex racing zigzags, toy electric cars are available for rent for a few minutes, photographers pose tourists with life-sized plush animal, hawkers display Ukrainian memorabilia on some benches. Monuments to local personages and nationalist heros such as Taras Shevchenko overshadow the space. They underscore the importance of past events such as the historical tragedy of the Ukrainian famine and the pre-capitalist spatialisation of peasant serfdom which lasted into the twentieth century in Ukraine.

In L’viv’s public spaces, at times such as the early evening, ‘the city’ is much more obviously its occupants than its buildings and infrastructure. If Lefebvre refers to this as ‘lived spatiality’, let’s dub this ‘L’viv-ed space’. All-comers participate and are subject to the regulatory gaze of not only the police but the crowd, which provides a normative critical mass. While this public space is abstractly designed, it departs from the Abstract Space of the modernist city in a way which is dialectical on multiple levels – not just spatially but temporally in the way history is injected into the present.

A critical memory is unavoidable (even if it is as selective as Salzburg’s, for pogroms, genocides and the memory of the L’viv ghetto are generally repressed — the historical presence of a East European Hassidic Jewish population is difficult to imagine given the scant remaining population that has not emigrated).  Before and before this successive waves of invasion and violence have swept through the region.  As ‘Differential Space’, this is a spatialisation in which absence and presence intermix while abstract rationality and state nationalism are well alive.  Given the violence of the past, it is thus a historical irony that, if Salzburg provides a model for organized mass urban tourism, present-day L’viv provides an object demonstration in how to make lively, ‘L’vivly’, self-organizing public spaces in cities.  I don’t think either city boasts a ‘clean’ past – that is why they are such sites of historical significance – yet they boast different presents in the way they relate to the past temporally and spatially as tourist destinations.

- Rob

]]> http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/11/07/livelylived-space-salzburg-and-lvivly-space/feed/ 4 http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/10/17/natures-urban-crisis/ http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/10/17/natures-urban-crisis/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 04:28:43 +0000 Rob Shields http://www.spaceandculture.org/?p=1403 Paradoxically, it is in cities that the destiny of nature is being decided. Massive consumption by a mostly urbanized human population drives the exhaustion of natural resources and rising pollution. On the occasion of meetings in Tokyo to address decreases in biodiversity, interest in more ecological industries is increasing. Ray Côté is the leading expert who recently presented (.ppt) at the City-Region Studies Centre has charted attempts to create eco-industrial parks where the byproducts from one plant are used as the inputs for another. In ‘L’Economie circulaire: L’Urgence écologique’ (Presses de Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées, Paris 2009) Jean-Claude Lévy calls this a ‘circular economy‘ in which ecological factors are placed at the centre of product cycles. With around half of industrial production, China wishes to be a leader, drawing on past traditions of harmony with nature (Lao Tsu), even if ‘eco’ remains more a metaphor than a truly green reality. Clearly what happens in cities and industrial parks needs to be a central concern if issues of biodiversity and sustainability, rainforests and oceans, are to be seriously addressed.

Survivall at MAM Salvador by A. Lemos, M. Fiorelli and R. Shields (Photo copyright A. Lemos and M. Fiorelli)

An update to our previous post on “locative art” using Google Maps and our collective article in Wi – Journal of Mobile Media (Hexagram Institute) – where Andre Lemos recently discussed locative media in Brazil.  Survivall is a locative art piece online here and there.

-Rob

The High Line was originally constructed in the 1930s, to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan’s streets. Section 1 of the High Line is open as a public park, owned by the City of New York and operated under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Friends of the High Line is the conservancy charged with raising private funds for the park and overseeing its maintenance and operations, pursuant to an agreement with the Parks Department.

When all sections are complete, the High Line will be a mile-and-a-half-long elevated park, running through the West Side neighborhoods of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen. It features an integrated landscape, designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, combining meandering concrete pathways with naturalistic plantings. Fixed and movable seating, lighting, and special features are also included in the park.

Access points from street level will be located every two to three blocks. Many of these access points will include elevators, and all will include stairs.

View the High Line Design.

Carspace (Thanks to cool design site yatzer.com)

The department for urban structure and transport planning of Technical University of Munich/Germany and the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo), a research facility of BMW Group, are pleased to announce an international call to researchers for up to 6 post-doctoral fellowships within the strategic field of “Mobility Cultures in Megacities”.

Duration of Fellowship: 6 months (extension of 2 months possible)

Location: Munich, Germany

Academic Partners: Technische Universität München, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Disciplines: Urban transport and mobility; social sciences with a specialization in mobility and transport research; other fields of study directly related

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The major objective of the program is to generate a profound understanding of mobility patterns and mobility cultures in megacities in different parts of the world. Fellows with a regional background in these cities are asked to collaborate on a set of research questions in an attractive, interdisciplinary and intercultural environment. The characteristics and challenges of the cities shown in the map have already been analysed – those places are of specific interest for the fellowship program. Please contact us for further details and background on the current research approach.

KEY RESEARCH INTERESTS INCLUDE

- Identifying the characteristics, opportunities and constraints of the megacity studied like demographic, social, economic and regulatory conditions

- Analyzing long-term mobility decisions like location choice/urbanization, motorization,…

- Studying every-day mobility patterns like activity-chains, mode and destination choices in function of spatial structure and transport supply as well as underlying social motivations

- Investigating mobility cultures, lifestyles, perceptions and attitudes in the respective cities and their “points of entry” in order to learn if and how they might change over time

- Assessing stakeholder interaction, local planning and policy discourses and their cultural background in order to develop perspectives for “good governance“

- Identifying challenges and developing strategies for the future of urban mobility

CONCEPT

The fellowship addresses post-docs in the following disciplines:

- urban transport and mobility

- social or cultural sciences with a specialization in mobility or transport research

- other fields of study directly related

Fellows from different parts of the world will be working on these topics at mostly the same time in Munich, Germany. They are asked to contribute substantially to the interdisciplinary collaboration on mobility from the perspective of one specific megacity. This should include previous research work and where appropriate additional in-depth investigations. Scientific exchange between the fellows is an integral part of the program in order to learn from the respective experiences and results in a transdisciplinary approach. Research results must be documented in a well-founded research paper including documentation of data, methodology and interpretation of results and should contribute to a transfer of knowledge enabling to tackle the global challenges of future urban mobility in megacities.

Candidates should have a cultural background in one or several of the cities listed in the map above. They do not necessarily need to be residents of the cities; also scientists with an outstanding knowledge about a special city are welcome. Fellows will be asked to collect and analyze relevant data and material regarding their research before their stay in Munich.

The fellowship program will be accompanied by scientific supervision on behalf of Technische Universität München (TUM), Prof. G. Wulfhorst, Dr. S. Kesselring and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main, Prof. M. Lanzendorf and Guest Prof. J. Kenworthy. Additionally the program is incorporated into a broad international expert network of scientists and practitioners from several disciplines.

Conclusions will be drawn in a closing conference and related international publications.

FACTS AND DATES

The research grant at TUM is funded by ifmo und comprises a monthly fellowship of 2500 Euro, travel expenses and additional research funds / family support (in function of individual proposals). Fellows will be asked to work in Munich, the relocation services of BMW Group and TUM will assist accommodation issues.

Applications are to be submitted to ifmo (by e-mail to the address below) by August 31st 2010.

The following documents need to be submitted (in English) with the application:

- Letter of motivation

- CV and list of publications

- Summary of own research work on related topics (2 pages)

- Earliest potential date of starting the fellowship stay in Munich – expected to be in 2011

- 2 letters of reference

Principal selection criteria are thematic qualification, interest in intercultural and interdisciplinary scientific exchange as well as relevance of previous work. Candidates will be invited to an international expert workshop taking place from November 17th to 19th 2010 in Munich.

FURTHER INFORMATION AND ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSION OF APPLICATION

Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo)

A Research Facility of BMW Group

80788 München

Germany

E-mail: irene.feige@ifmo.de

Website: http://www.ifmo.de/

Find this information and download the paper on our website http://www.sv.bv.tum.de/index.php/de/aktuelles/94-post-doctoral-fellowships-mobility-cultures-in-megacities.

Reviewed by Nurri Kim, Do Projects

My first significant personal exposure to Mexican culture (and Mexican people) was after I moved to the United States in 2003. As a Korean educated in Japan, and with no previous experience of America beyond what I knew from popular media, I remember wondering what these bright yellow “Piso Mojado” signs were supposed to mean and, from there, slowly unfolding the enormous significance of this culture for Californian and American life. I was especially fascinated by those Mexican men with big cowboy hats I saw standing in groups by the side of the highway, waiting stoically for day jobs that might or might not come.

Five years of living in New York have taught me that these men and the millions of other Mexican men and women in similar positions are an indispensible part of the American economy. The flows of the city are hugely dependent on their delivering, making, operating, or fixing things, in a way that reminds me of Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture series. It’s hard to imagine passing through any commercial service in New York that doesn’t depend on these efforts in some way. You name it: even the most downhome-looking Korean restaurant in Koreatown, with the ajumma cooking handmade tofu in the storefront to show off its authenticity, has a line of Mexican guys busy in the steamy hot back of the kitchen cooking and delivering the bulgogi and kimchijigae to the tune of salsa music. But especially as compared to their ubiquitous contributions to the culture, they’re virtually invisible in it — the mainstream, anyway, will never help you understand who these people are, where they’re from, how they got here and how they survive on the interface of two (or more) cultures.

[cc image credit: Nathan Gibbs]

That’s why I was so curious to discover Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta and Heriberto Yepez’s “Here Is Tijuana!” Of course, Tijuana is literally and figuratively an edge case within Mexico, but as a node of transition between cultures and the first place on Mexican soil physically encountered by many visitors, I thought a book about the city would be an excellent place for me to begin my investigations, its title announcing the reader’s arrival like a tollgate traffic sign at the borderline.

The format of the book and the content

“Here Is Tijuana!” is organized in three chapters (”Avatars,” “Desires,” and “Permutations”) written by authors from three disciplines (an anthropologist, an architect, and a writer/psychotherapist) with three different relationships with the city (having either been born, studied, or currently living there). I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to write this book. From the preface:

“One afternoon three friends were discussing nothing else, but Tijuana. The three of them conducted one of those discussions that ultimately tend to abolish friendship. At the end of the discussion, there were two very clear issues: one, that the three of them would never be in agreement about Tijuana; and the other, that it was necessary to produce a book that would reunite the different postures about the city in order to extend the conflict to others as well.”

And so it seems that the process of making the book itself reflected the nature of its subject. Instead of writing an anthology with separate signed contributions, they apparently decided to let the city tell its own story through a succession of static images juxtaposed against quotations, statistical data and other figures, short interviews, and correspondence (e-mail, letters, notes, etc.). It’s very ambiguous as to whose viewpoint is being expressed at any particular moment, or if the authors even wish to endorse a specific viewpoint at all, and the overall effect is to emphasize that whatever opinions or impressions one holds about Tijuana, however jumbled or even contradictory, they might all simultaneously be true.

Emerging codependences

Often this use of supposedly neutral “data” requires some knowledge of origins — the name of an institution, for example, or a URL — to decode the meaning apparently intended by the authors. At first I had a hard time reading between the lines, often helped where an image added texture and flesh to the flattened “facts” and figures (a price list of services provided by prostitutes in Tijuana, a schedule of assembly-plant salaries, counts of inbound and outbound passengers at the airport and bus depot, and so on). I certainly don’t think you have to read this book linearly, but I followed the conventional page order, and by the time I was reading the “Permutation” section, all of these fragments had slowly built up, connected with one another and developed a weave that resembled narrative.

And something else slowly revealed itself, too: Tijuana’s conjoined twin city across the border. San Diego emerges from the trip into Tijuana like the other surface of a Möbius strip. It’s not simply that the Mexican city becomes the site of displaced industries and repressed desires, though this is inarguably the case. It’s that the two places depend on one another, each place made possible by certain kinds of flows across this most extreme of borders. And while voice after voice here are entirely correct to insist on the place’s singularity (”It’s not even Mexico, it’s Tijuana”), in the end it’s also clear that like the countries they belong to, both cities are part of a single binary system. And that is something I’ll remember the next time I catch a glimpse into a Korean-restaurant kitchen in Manhattan.