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

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 Urban public space is a lost money-making opportunity if only because it is withdrawn from the real estate market.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/2010/04/18/comment-air-immobilities/ http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/04/18/comment-air-immobilities/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:32:11 +0000 Rob Shields http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/04/18/comment-air-immobilities/ I’m surprised no one has yet commented here on the state of immobility in air travel brought about by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland last week. The ash cloud spread across Northern Europe has caused tens of thousands of flights to be canceled. Removing air flight changes the mix of transport modes available to travelers and shippers for the affected regions. This is an important social experiment which demonstrates the effect that a future loss of transportation mobilities we now take for granted would have on societies and economies, and how everyday life would have to be adjusted to adapt.

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

The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”

Or as Geoff Manaugh so eloquently puts it, “[Y]ou go around the city, iPhone in hand – a kind of architectural dowsing rod held in front of you – discovering the traces of buildings that never were (perhaps even fragments of a city yet to come)… You walk past a certain corner on the Upper West Side and your iPhone starts to ring: you’re being called by a missing building… Absent structures detected in a wireless blur, leaving messages for you (complete with call-back number). Electromagnetic voice phenomena in architectural form.”

[Image by Geoff Manaugh]

And benjamin_aguirre adds: “This is a fascinating platform for exploring the latent imaginaries buried under/embedded in/folded into the built environment, capable of mining a precise history of a site through its virtualities rather than/in addition to its actualities. The surfacing of the virtual here washes the city-as the project’s title aptly suggests-in the phantasmagoric and uncanny. ‘Here lies architecture, unbuilt’.”

As with Dan Hill’s projections in The Street as Platform, I find this blurring between the actual and the virtual very interesting. But I’m also taken by the possibilities of how projects and applications like these can actually reshape the city. For example, Matt Jones recently wrote in The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future that “although Archigram didn’t build their visions, other architects brought aspects of them into the world.” Since we know that world-building is complex and imaginary architectures manifest in different and often concrete ways, I wonder how digitally augmented realities may become actual, material realities. Along these lines, Geoff Manaugh also asks us to imagine a scenario where “crowds of tourists mill about on 13th Street, looking around at the imaginary buttresses of a superstructure you’ve spent three years digitally assembling.”

But the content of these imaginings is also crucial. Kazys Varnelis reminds us that “Archigram were fundamentally modernist at heart, eager to see their visions realized in a capitalist utopia but the Italian radicals set out to critique the system, exacerbating its operations in works that were more dystopian than utopian… [And] my fear is that some theorists have argued against critique and self-reflection for so long that a new generation doesn’t even have an inkling of how to practice it.”

Now critics do raise issues about access to technology, and the more negative or nefarious purposes to which the same technology can, and will, be put. But what isn’t at all clear to me is how the imaginary can be used as critique. I wonder how exactly might technologists, designers and citizens proceed to reimagine the city in more critical ways.

Any ideas?

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

-Rob

Paysage de champs colorés près de Sarraud, Vaucluse, France (44°01’ N – 5°24’ E)

Mr. Cassan and his family cultivate more than 600 acres of both traditional or ‘true’ lavender and lavendin, a sterile, hardier and much more prolific hybrid with a cruder, industrial, camphor scent. His great-grandfather was among the first lavender middlemen in France, roaming the back roads on horseback and paying farmers for the lavender that grew wild in their dry, chalky fields; his grandfather was among the first generation in France to cultivate the plants as a commercial cash crop. Until 3 most mornings these days, Mr. Cassan’s son Benoît runs two huge stills that transform the cut plants from their own and neighboring farms into essences that will infuse products as varied as body moisturizer and window spray. The elder Mr. Cassan also has begun to promote lavender aromatherapy to help the town’s economy. ‘My goal is to build our economy around lavender’s essential oils,’ Mr. Cassan said, ‘to give conferences and seminars, to hand out prizes. This is how we are forging our way into the future’.”

NY Times: In Provence, Commerce’s Scent Is Tinged With Lavender

See also: Les Routes de la Lavande

- Anne

Photo by hswapnil

The annual Tulip Festival began on Friday and runs until May 19th.

In the fall of 1945, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. The gift was given in appreciation of the safe haven that members of Holland’s exiled royal family received during the Second World War in Ottawa and in recognition of the role which Canadian troops played in the liberation of the Netherlands … In 2002, the Festival celebrated its 50th Anniversary dedicated to its founder, Malak Karsh, having expanded to an event showcasing over 3 million tulips throughout Canada’s Capital Region.

The festival also includes Celebridée, “A Celebration of Ideas,” and this year’s speakers include Salman Rushdie, James Howard Kunstler and Jared Diamond, as well as talks about everything from dark matter to lost gardens.

Photo by andrewomerknapp

UPDATE 07/04/08

Pruned: The Machinic Landscape of Tulips

- Anne

“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

Before you commit to an Ikea home why not stay overnight at an Ikea store? Check in to the Ikea bridal suite for a flat-pack honeymoon

Whereas Brits may associate the Swedish furniture giant with screaming kids, traffic jams in the parking lot and an occassional riot when a new warehouse opens, it seems Norwegians see a trip to Ikea as the ultimate tourist attraction. ‘Around 900,000 visitors come to visit Ikea during the summer holidays. It’s more than one of the biggest attractions in Norway, the Holmenskollen ski jump, gets in one year,’ claimed Mr Ullebust. ‘We have five Ikea stores in Norway, all situated next to the four biggest cities, which are all in the south in the country. We found that people from the north of Norway include a visit to Ikea as part of their holidays,’ said the spokesman. ‘The Ikea Hostel will make the destination complete’.”

It doesn’t cost anything to stay, you get a free dinner, bath robes and slippers, and you get to take your sheets home as “souvenirs”! (via)