Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, editors, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 1072 pp.
Space & Culture has previously posted on this book, Latour, democracy and the public.This is our second review of this tome: See Tonya Davidson’s review in issue 9.3.
Is a politics of things essential to public life today? […]
The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière, trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2006, 106 pp.
In The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière polemically addresses what he views to be a widespread trend of anti-individualism in the past and present canons of social, political, and philosophical thought. Crucially for Rancière, this trend of anti-individualism is part of […]
Contemporary mobile technologies — cell-phones, Blackberries, etc. — are resulting, I’m sure, in an increase in inter-personal collisions (connections?). The human, it seems, has difficulty navigating inner and outer worlds at the same time. This state of techno-obliviousness results in a new type of subject (or quasi-agent?): the Meanderthal. Read more about this phenomenon at […]
Less typical views than the usual images (google “Pudong” or “Shanghai Bund”): every direction is a forest of new buildings, often overwritten at streetlevel as the architectural scaffolding of signage, semiosis and new media, displacing the existing housing of often exhausted 3-4 storey colonial brick building stock.
A less noticed face of progress in cities like Shanghai, is the authoritarian planning which clears the ground for glitzy highrises. I would like to hear from architects about this ethical dilemma - Foster, Portman, Kwan, Tse, Kohn Pederson Fox, Jerde, SOM… almost the Who’s Who of contemporary architecture. Its hard to grasp […]