Eric Fischer- Twitter and Flickr World Map - CC Cultural Product Copyright 2011

Eric Fischer of Oakland California has produced a stunning set of maps of flickr photos and Twitter tweets from geolocation tags in the posts.  These respatialize the world as lit up by these particular forms of new media/Web 2.0 use.  A higher resolution image of the world map is also online.   I especially like the North American map with its annotated areas and zoomable detail.  A Toronto Star article gives more detail, but browse the photostream of cities.  What is interesting is to see the lack of popularity of flickr in a city such as Jakarta or Singapore, and the obvious importance of blue twitter in suburbs (see Toronto).  Twitter follows main roads, suggesting the importance of tweeting from automobiles and public transport.  Mobility:  Twitter as commuting, flickr as tourist travel?   Spectacular tourism sites such as Banff and Jasper in the Rocky Mountains appear as red-orange flickr concentrations without tweets. These media settle like mists, differentially on the topography and the activity-scapes of everyday life.

-Rob

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/2010/10/02/survivall-in-exhibition-vivo-arte-mov-at-mam-salvador-da-bahia/ http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/10/02/survivall-in-exhibition-vivo-arte-mov-at-mam-salvador-da-bahia/#comments Sun, 03 Oct 2010 01:36:24 +0000 Rob Shields http://www.spaceandculture.org/?p=1391

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

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.

Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland captured by NASA satellite Terra – MODIS on April 15, 2010.

Editor update: Alain de Botton imagines a world without planes

Parkour Motion Reel by saggyarmpit

via

It is reported that the low-lying coral islands are being innundated during storm tides making the subsistence gardening of their residents impossible.  Dan Box plans to blog the move over the next months.  Although the process has been ongoing since 2003, there are funding problems for residents who are all forced to re-establish themselves anew.

The Itinerants of Mumbai

The urbanite is often quite uncomfortable with [Mumbai's] most idiosyncratic citizens. That is because they seem to be so at ease in his landscape. Before he sees it coming someone knocks on the car window demanding a few rupees in exchange for a prayer, a flower or a book. Somehow it always feels wrong to refuse the trade, as if it the hawkers were actually asking for nothing but their due. The sedentary car user comes to terms with the nature of reversals, brings the window down and makes a deal. It is encounters like this one, multiplied a million times, that saves this city day after day. For all its shortcomings and in spite of a recent rise in nationalist politics, Mumbai has proved to be an urban oasis for many migrants and travelers ever since the first fishermen settled on its shores. It is the capacity of Mumbaikars to accept a high level of promiscuity with strangers that has made it so safe despite the vertiginous divides existing between castes and classes.

Itinerants become human connectors in an increasingly divided yet interdependent world. As much as the pathways and signals mediate roads and neighbourhoods, itinerants constantly connect the city’s many different dimensions to one another. They are the x-factor that allows this exuberant unpredictable city to function day after day. It is these ever-present encounters that make us realize how full of mad contrasts the city is. Where one brushes shoulders with ipod listening teenagers one moment and the very next, faces a tribal ritual masochist doing a thousand year old dance. Further down the lane, one come across the last of a dying breed of water carriers using ancient goatskin pouches walking past piles of used mineral water bottles.  One can hear a knife sharpener’s wheel screaming, next to a well-stocked shopping mall selling everything under the sun…”

via

- Anne

Superb entry for a portable exhibition venue for Yorkshire Forward, by Various Architects. More at Dezeen.com

-Rob