Photo: Praga Anca Moanta, in bifurcaciones 7

bifurcaciones, an online review of urban cultural studies, has released its much anticipated issue 7.

This project of Ricardo Greene, LorenaPérez, Diego Campos and Tomas Errazuriz synthesizes the atmospheres of Santiago-Sao Paulo-Buenos Aires-London-New York. We have already remarked ont he quality and significance of Spanish language urban and cultural publication. and with babelfish, systran or Google translator, one cannot seriously avoid grappling with material regardless of language. bifurcaciones is Chile’s calling card on the web as a locus for design avant gardes. My experience of Chile as a Canadian was always via it superb exiled architects, whom I enountered working as usually the best designers in architects’ offices in the early 1980s. Like a memory of a conversation overhead, this was a kind of promise of Chile. The editorial team is better organized and each issue represents a kind of virtual South America – mobile between countries, between institutions and between reflection and practice. In effect, this online journal produces an original South American global public sphere.  bifurcaciones maps in words, diagrams and images, the shifting topologies of culture in the great cities of South America.  It is a prerequisite for local mappings because it shows how cultural space is not smooth and easily accessed but structured, striated and scrumpled.  Recommended reading.

 -Rob

http://www.bifurcaciones.cl/

Festival | Symposium
Nottingham 13 -18 Jan 2009

EXPLOITS IN THE WIRELESS CITY

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - Deadline 25th Nov 2008

Since the abundant proliferation of digital communication technology, our (living) space has been expanded, transformed, reshaped. In our everyday lives we increasingly connect to mediated interfaces, be it consciously or without knowing. Digital media is increasingly integrated seamlessly into all areas of everyday life and work. The so-called ‘virtual worlds’ created in this way are merging ever more dynamically with our physical environment generating new hybrid spaces, becoming a fixed part of our reality themselves.

Our cities are increasingly pervaded by data networks, watched over by cameras, skinned by media facades, populated by users of mobile communication devices carried around with every step. ‘City’ itself has become a media space, a complex fabric, in which an immaterial layer of data is augmenting the urban landscape, both merging ever more seamlessly.

Radiator continues its investigation into the way that artists engage with locality and site, real and virtual urban space. The ‘Wireless City’ brings deep cultural changes and our traditional spatial coordinates are gradually being superseded by an enhanced network.

Sharing their inferences and conclusions, artists are invited to reflect upon the challenges facing our freedom, the poetry of resistance and also the opportunities the ‘Expanded City’ has to offer.

Radiator welcomes all forms of artistic expression aligned with the theme.
The programme will provide multiple exhibition and display opportunities across the East Midlands:
* Gallery/ White Cube Spaces — e.g. Going Underground
* City spaces/ Site-specific works
* Events
* Indoor/ Outdoor Screenings

HOW TO SUBMIT WORK
Submissions should include:
* Images/documentation/videofootage (supporting material in one of the following formats: as standard definition DVD or VHS, as a file on CD (SWF, Quicktime or Avi accepted - use standard codecs such as Sorenson, Cinepak or DivX). Any file that cannot be viewed using standard media players will be passed over.
* Description of work
* CV
* Submissions form, downloadable from here pdf or word doc. (Also Available online at http://www.trampoline.org.uk)
Key points to consider in your proposal:
* From video, animation, installation, sculpture, performance, live music and web streaming we encourage all forms of new media expressions.
* We especially encourage the submission of participatory works, which promote a high degree of audience involvement.
* Please include an SAE if you would like your submission returned to you.

Submissions to be sent to:
Radiator
Broadway Cinema
14-18 Broad Street
Nottingham
NG1 3AL
UK

Any queries please contact Matt Davenport matt[at]trampoline.org.uk | +44 (0)115 8409272

A Trampoline project with financial support by Arts Council England.

The Chinese Dream Neville Mars, Adrian Hornsby, and Saskia Vendel (project management) 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2008 .  704pp+79pp magazine.  ISBN 97864506529 [Amazon.ca]

The Chinese Dream surveys scenarios of possible Chinese urban development over the dozen years to 2020. Using graphics and text, the book explores the urban implications of current plans, population migration and the consumerist aspirations of Chinese society. The title is reminiscent of Victor Quinaz‘ 2004 award-winning  film of the same name about a dishwasher in China who longs for the glamour of New York.  The format is the image-rich architecture book, in the style of Koolhas and Mau’s S M L XL. The architects’ approach to books is as a built object, not an extended argument, nor a visual communication design. While it is innovative in its provision of endnotes and authorities in the form of urls, free layout of blocks of text, mixing of Chinese characters and roman text, and in its provison of visual glossaries of urban design ideas, as a whole it hard to read as a linear narrative.   Take a look .  An ironic magazine from 2020 is even bound into the closing sections of book to explain the culture that the authors expect to emerge. 17 chapters consider changing urban design and architecture in China, including the imported idea of ‘creative neighbourhoods’, green suburbs, and new retail and consumer environments.

The book contributes to, but otherwise sits outside of the academic literature on framented urban form and suburbanization. A scale from actual to dream bleeds off the lower right corner of the pages grounding each of 17 chapter-scenarios. Mapping these regional development trents onto urban and rural China, the book presents a stark picture of the implications of the hyper-urban development of China. Shanghai with its central highrise Pudong district, is one well known form in which China’s cities are developing. However, at a broader scale of whole cities and urban regions, this book shows the significance of Chinese growing cities. Where one sees most often the idea of 400 one-million population cities, the book argues that China is headed in the direction of a single Northeastern megalopolis of 400 million.

What if you built the whole mass of Western Europe in 20 years? What if 400 Million Farmers then moved in? What if it happened between now and 2020?What woudl it look like? How whould it work?…. Would there be jobs? Would it be dense? Green? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else?

If one accepts the premise that China is a society under construction, this book attempts to map aspirations and dreams into urban landscapes. While the book attempts to alert all to the challenges and risks of a future megalopolitan China, it glosses the human rights history of China’s development to date as ‘the most successful humanitarian project ever to have taken place’, and in a non sequitur, advances economic evidence to support this claim (these are very different categories). However it does provide critical nuance elsewhere such as the details of the lack of popular benefit from current growth.  This is a symptom of the global neglect of critical and cultural discipline to architects’ and urbanists’ education. Reflecting the small business status of the architect and developer, economics is privileged, politics gets in the way, while culture is reduced to the history of architecture with scant attention to beliefs, social interaction, ritual and memory, or to issues such as cross-cultural communication. Hence there are few countertendencies to the ability of authoritarian planners to resculpt entire cities whenever thought necessary.  Other art and architectural reviewers also mention this but lack the critical insight to see that this is a pivotal issue.  In general my impression is that ‘desire’ is rendered as consumeristic in this text, but the harder to quantify desire for community seems not to figure in any way. Surely Chinese citizens are not so one-dimensional? In short, there are many more aspects of the emotional repertoire which guarantee that Chinese society will evolve less deterministically than this books suggests.

Super Brand Mall, Pudong, Shanghai.  Photo: Rob Shields

While the creators conclude by offering an offshore website www.BURB.tv ’seeded’ with ideas from the book but welcoming communal contributions within its pre-set information architecture.  My sense is that rather than computer-mediated expression, sociology can predict that authorities will not be able to forestall such large masses in high density cities will repeat the political awakening (although not necessarily the outcomes) of nineteenth century British industrial cities, as documented by Simmel, Weber and Engels.

Shanghai neighbourhood.  Photo: Rob Shields

At the same time, from where I sit in the wheat, potash and oil rich northern Canadian prairie, I read this book as a warning. It surmises that as wealth increases and families demand more commodious apartments, the per capita footprint of Chinese cities expands. Laid out on page after page of maps and graphs, it presents a design to preserve arable land by creating more compact city forms that will still be able to accommodate the projected 930 million Chinese living in cities by 2030. To paraphrase, this means:

1 new Beijing every year for 35 years… = 2 X the total built volume of China… driven by population growth… rural-to-urban migration… China becomes an urban society.

…Movement into the cities is mostly temporary ‘Leaving the Land not the Village’ (1980s slogan). Rollover migration leads to sprawl clusters and city form becomes scattered and discontinuous.

…There is a specific region in the East where this development is in all forms taking place…PUC People’s Urbanity of China: 96% of China’s population…GDP…migration flows…arable land. Area 3,302,997 Km sq. Population 2004: 1.263 Billion, urban population 2004: 530 million, density 2005: 382 persons/km sq. Population 2020: 1.488 Billion, urban population 2020: 893 million, density 2020: 451 persons/km sq.

About one third the size of the USA, only India will be comparable in its population density. This will put extreme pressure on arable land, requiring China to outsource much of its food supply, with enormous impacts on global markets and the global ecology. This urban-region, stretching from Beijing in the north to Shanghai in the south. Zhangzhou in the west and the eastern coast, will define the future of China itself. An S-shaped metropolis stretching across the region is proposed to preserve at least some land near in Qingdao and Zhangzhou.

Reviewed by Rob Shields, University of Alberta, Canada.

Photo: Munim Wasif ‘Water Tragedy’ Series, Shortlisted Prix Pictet 2008.

The idea of “island” deserves to be rethought today. Long a topos where bygone colonial powers articulate various fantasies underlying their world historical projects, the island has in recent past added to itself an element of dystopian exigency by becoming a place of choice, a target, so to speak, at which the more bellicose of the foes of the new imperial cents launch their military attacks. Just as Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu was chosen as the site of a surprise air raid sixty years ago by Japan, itself a relatively small island nation dreaming big of hemispheric domination, the island of Manhattan was selected lately by al Quaeda as a target of opportunity where the phallic symbols of American capitalist global hegemony were toppled by missiles of a hitherto unthinkable kind. Either in literary-geographic imaginations or through real encounters between cultures, island has historically been a site where the self meets the Other and, through this meeting, fashions and refashions itself in a process of asymmetrical mimicry characteristic of what we call colonialism.

From Plato through Descartes to today’s cruise ship commercials, island is often described as a place of escape, a place to escape to, as well as a place to escape from. Suspended in space and time, the distant island easily and understandably offers itself as a pole of projection for the less traveled in the metropoles, receiving investments that are at once psychical, symbolic, material, and, by extension, geo-political. An elsewhere both known and unknown to the empire, the island challenges any easy cutting of open space constitutive of colonizing centers’ territorial practices, marking from afar the ambiguity of empires’ very own boundary by locating itself as a liminal opening of and to the Other, an Other-opening, where, in spite of or because of its being distant and isolated, all the tensions and anxieties, conflicting desires and fears, associated with identity formation, exploration and conquest, are staged in full colors. (more…)

Will the G20 become the L20? The ‘Leaders 20′ would be  a regular meeting of not only Finance Ministers but Prime Ministers and Presidents who meet to discuss global problems including climate change?  There is still a long way to go, but the Toronto Globe and Mail reports that the Nov. 15 emergency meeting on the global economy in Washington has been expanded beyond the G8 to include institutions such as the UN and many countries such as India and China.

At the 2005 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland, former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin recalls that ‘the emerging countries were invited to lunch, then dismissed’:

University of Toronto G8 Research Centre’s Director, John Kirton, quoted in the same article.  HE comments that Bush has ‘basically admitted that the G8 could not do the job.’

The President of the United States comes over to a meeting of finance ministers chaired by a Brazilian and says, ‘I need your help.;  You see a very important structural shift.

For the U.S. to suddenly realize that in fact the major emerging economies have to be at the table is a major, major step forard…  You cannot say that the Chinese are a major part of the solution but, by the way, when we sit down to discuss these things, you won’t be there.

As Ed Yardeni, a market strategist explains in the article:

If Abu Dhabi or Shanghai sets up a financial centre that allows everybody to skirt these regulations, we’ll still have all these excesses.

That these centres, which are not at the epicentre of global capital and information flows, to be understood as having the potential for independent action, indicates the sort of shift in perceptions that adds up to a new understanding amongst financial elites of the globally inter-knit nature of economies, and the networked, rather than simply hierarchical possibility of agency.  No one is able to insist that the financial world is solely the White House and a few New York and London trading floors.  Whether or not this world network of many centres is able to consolidate its status, a tectonic shift has taken place in the spatialization of world finance.  It is not surprising that Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) resorts to an interactive map to present the recent turmoil in financial markets.

A networked topology to global finance has long been a reality, as suggested in the diagram above of relationships between financial centres (each city is abbreviated as a pair of letters) from Peter Taylor’s book World City Network but it was governed hierarchically from a very few dominant centres, as if from the top of a pyramid.  This centre-periphery topology reinforced the power of the dominant centres and States.  However a more egalitarian network form would raise the importance of multilateral, transnational institutions capable of coordinating flows across the network, for example to mitigate the transmission of shocks or panics across the net.  Where some have argued that States have returned with a vengeance as major global actors, this vision suggests that these States will have to work together, muting their power and independence.

Serendipitously, I read Sturken’s Tourists of History while visiting one of the kitschiest cities in the Canadian prairies: Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Moose Jaw has made a tourist industry out of Chinese immigrant exploitation of the early 20th century, and the violence of 1920s bootlegging gangsters. In Moose Jaw, in between dramatized tours of tunnels that were staged to represent the lifestyle of early Chinese immigrants, I settled down with this, Sturken’s latest book. In it, Sturken untangles the complicated relationship Americans have with consumption, kitsch and the contemporary American traumas of the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11. Her analysis brilliantly textured my reading-week prairie getaway.

The book also develops the thesis Sturken presented in her 1997, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering where she explored cultural memory as a constant negotiation between individual and collective desires and narratives positing “cultural memory and history as entangled rather than oppositional”(1997: 5). Unlike others such as Pierre Nora (1989) who suggests that individual memory is always culturally mediated, accessible only in trace-form, Sturken understands cultural memory and responses to cultural trauma as necessarily entangled.

The thesis of Tourists of History is that American culture has become a ‘comfort culture’ where kitsch consumption has become the predominant cultural response to collective traumas. While this could easily have become a Marxist critique of the commodification of collective grief, Sturken takes another path. She suggests that the compulsive consumption of kitsch is a form of traumatic repetition, where the traumatic event - Oklahoma City bombing or 9/11 never ends. This traumatic repetition is tied to the idea of kitsch objects as “failed commodities” (Olalquiaga in Sturken 2007: 20). It is precisely because kitsch objects cannot contain or represent the emotional response of the event they are tied to that they become compulsively produced and circulated. Continually consuming kitsch is a form of traumatic repetition— an earnest attempt to contain, in a way understandable in the dominant market economy (as a commodity)— collective grief.

Underlying this form of consumption and engagement with trauma are two married concepts: tourism of history and American innocence. By employing the subjectivity of the tourist, Sturken suggests that kitsch consumption offers a passer-by experience of ‘othering’ history; a shallow, one-dimensional understanding of cultural traumas. Furthermore, the forms the kitsch takes (teddy bears, breast cancer Barbies, snow globes) produce a culture of innocence, where every trauma compulsively represents America’s “loss of innocence”.

She states,

It is precisely when kitsch, consumerism, and reenactment aim to smooth over the moment in which grief and loss are powerfully present that opportunities for broader cultural empathy and new ways of response are lost (30).

In this way, the predilection of a kitsch response to cultural traumas has political consequences. Sturken’s reading of kitsch, memory and trauma is further nuanced as she teases out the consumption of kitsch as both participating in repetitive presentations of American innocence and ironic kitsch consumption as a form of political aesthetic.

Substantively, Sturken focuses on two key traumatic events in American history: the Oklahoma City bombings and 9/11. Within these two events she discusses the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, the architectural plans for ground zero, and various other forms of trauma tourism.

People with interests in material culture, cultural memory, the pedagogy of memory, architecture, monuments, tourism and kitsch will find this an engaging and delightful read.

Review by Tonya Davidson, University of Alberta, Canada.

-Ondine

Photo by Alan Saunders

- Anne

A two year action research project run jointly by geographers at the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester. We use the term autonomous geographies to define ‘…those spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship, which are created through a combination of resistance and creation, and the questioning and challenging of dominant laws and social norms.’ The Project looks at how activists make and remake these types of spaces in their everyday lives by exploring their core ideas, beliefs and visions, how they are translated into action, what kinds of spaces for participation and identity are created and what it means to live in-between the overlapping spaces.

See also:
Notes towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics (pdf) by Jenny Pickerill and Paul Chatterton
The Surprising Sense of Hope (pdf) by Jenny Pickerill
Demand the Possible: Journeys in Changing our World as a Public Activist-Scholar (pdf) by Paul Chatterton

(via critical spatial practice)

Open Anthropology: Derek Gregory: The Cultural Turn in Late Modern War and the Rush to the Intimate

On the US military’s ‘cultural turn’ through the Human Terrain System program and related efforts: “This carefully staged space of constructed visibility is also always a space of constructed invisibility. And what has been made to disappear, strangely, is the conduct of the war.”

Pruned: Nomadic Hotels and Lighthouses

Extraordinary feats of mobility: transporting entire structures in order to save them from coastal erosion.

- Anne

Though on land it seems possible to stake out territory, claim a static point of view and amass maps, boundaries, and frameworks that coalesce around them, such apparent fixity is impossible at sea. The sea is “an intricate site of encounters and currents,” a space of transit, mobilities and constantly changing perspectives. Dissatisfied with terrestrial structures of history and modernity that are built upon fixed instrumental reason and progress, Iain Chambers invites us in Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity to develop sea legs and let their illusion of motion on land inform a re-consideration and re-constitution of the borders and histories of the Mediterranean.

From shifting points of view, Chambers successfully re-writes the ‘imaginatively constructed’ conceptual and historical forms of the Mediterranean as malleable, multiple, and polycentric. As multiplicities emerge, the ‘Mediterranean’ under study, like the sea, shifts. At times it is the sea, or the region, and at other times it is localized in Italy. Indeed, more than one third of the book is taken up in a discussion of Naples, a city marked by pessimism, disasters and organized crime, which for Chambers embody the fragmented and multiple modernities he champions.

The multiplicity of the Mediterranean becomes impossible to deny in Chambers’ eclectic history, which is itself composed as fragmented but mostly coherent waves of encounters and currents. Given Chambers’ previous work, it is unsurprising that postcolonialism emerges as a strong current. Chambers highlights the immigrant as a key figure that both exposes the precariousness of citizenship and marks the connections between Europe and the rest of the world. This tracing of relationships between the West and the rest is a familiar but striking argument that is also extended historically: though the problem of immigration is often presented as a recent and urgent concern , Chambers traces the role of migration in the making of modern Italy.

Another current in this multiple Mediterranean is the role of artistic works as uprooted and unstable interventions. Chambers discusses films, multimedia projects, paintings, and music that present not a unified and static world but rather discontinuities, a ‘subverted eye’ , and the melding of localized sounds from Spain, Portugal, Greece, Egypt, and Algeria. These currents are also marked by fleeting encounters with many theorists including Agamben, Deleuze, Derrida, Vico, Fanon and Benjamin, whose work provide a subtle counterpoint to Chambers’ discussions. (more…)