Postdoctoral Fellowship
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”.
[image credit: Christoph Gielen]
“This year China will add more than 17 million people to its urban population. To house this unprecedented wave of migration from the country side, cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are building countless high-rise residential towers at breakneck speed. The construction sites, surrounded by concrete walls, are almost impossible to enter without a guide who knows how to get past suspicious guards. But once inside, it’s like entering a science fiction novel. Even in the middle of the night, bulldozers, cement trucks, and workers swarm the sites as muscular cranes hoist cargo to ever-greater heights. Bamboo scaffolding and mesh encase the partially built residential high-rises, giving them the appearance of gargantuan cocoons. Entire neighborhoods arise within months of groundbreaking…”
Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta and Heriberto Yepez. 2006. Here is Tijuana! London: BlackDog Publishing. 192 pp. ISBN: 978 1 904772 45
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.
André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist (eds.) 2009. Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. 356 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7546-7461-0.
Reviewed by Peter Lugosi, School of Services Management, Bournemouth University (UK)
Jansson and Lagerkvist’s edited collection explores the processes through which spaces become uncertain, opaque…strange. At times these uncertainties emerge as negativities – fear, loss, exile, discomfort, but they may also be positive in the form of novelty, excitement, amusement and wonder. Some things are strange because they are new, and fall outside existing norms or even systems of classification, while others become strange as they become outdated, abandoned and increasingly obscure. Jansson and Lagerkvist’s text brings together concepts from geography, media and cultural studies in stressing how the immediacy and apparently straightforward nature of space inevitably obscures and excludes. Familiarity, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the strange; the ordinary exists alongside and in relation to the extraordinary. The various chapters in this book examine, through different contexts, the processes and agencies that produce, and, more importantly, mediate strangeness. A thread running through all the chapters is the importance of the media, mediation and representation in uniting the mundane with the fantastic, or the obvious with the obscure, thus normalising or extinguishing strangeness in the creation of effect or experience. However, the chapters also show how mediation can serve to delineate the deviant, the extraordinary, and the fantastic or highlight the strangeness of those things that are somehow vague. The authors demonstrate how strangeness emerges through changing relationships of power in which it is experienced differently by various people, at different times, and how strangeness is absorbed into cultures and societies.
[cc image credit: Joseph Robertson]
The book is split into three sections: part 1 examines the different scales at which opacity emerges and how mediation influences the manifestation of strangeness. In the opening chapter Carney and Miller wrestle with notions of vagueness in general and with how vagueness emerges in urban contexts, before offering two specific forms of cultural practice that at once captures strangeness but can also be read as attempts to mobilise it. The first of these is early 20th century photography of derelict, marginal urban spaces, which presents possibilities for vagueness and strangeness to emerge in amongst, and in contrast to, the ordered sensibilities of cities. The second example offered by Carney and Miller is the Eruv, a process through which large urban and suburban areas are redefined by its Jewish residents as one enclosed space, thus allowing them to travel between premises and to transport objects without breaking the rules of the Sabbath. Both these examples of mediation and social practice offer different readings, interpretations and the possibility for alternative experiences of the spaces being represented, thus allowing socio-spatial practices to challenge or disrupt existing power relationships.
In the following chapter Löfgren changes the scale of analysis to the microcosm of the home and considers the fate of media objects and technologies, for example, photographs, cassettes, videos, records, CDs, reels of home movies, slides, computer games, consoles, diaries, drawings and media players. In their prime these objects amuse, enchant and capture moments in people’s life, but once they become redundant, they are hidden, and people attempt to dispose of these strange remnants from the past. While individuals retain, or recapture, a nostalgic connection with some objects, such as photo albums, diaries and video footage, they are estranged to many others. Löfgren narrates his own experiences and relationships with the dying and hidden objects that subsequently haunt him.
Ahrén and Sappol change scale again in focusing on representations and displays of the human body. The chapter takes the form of two dialogues by the authors who take turn to comment on the ways in which representations or displays of the body engage the viewer; how they can, in specific forms, appear to create an image of order and unity, while in others displaying its disordered, dysfunctional nature, but at all times transforming the body into an object of consumption. These processes of representation and display make a series of scientific truth claims, while at the same time reproducing power relationships, for example about the central status of the healthy male body ideal against which the strange other, the female or the sick, is imagined. However, these representations of the body also serve to highlight its strangeness – and, for the authors at least, they challenge the viewer to reflect on their sense of selves and embodied experiences of space. In the final chapter of Part 1, Parks considers an overlooked aspect of mediation and mediatisation, the satellite, which, in their various forms, transmit information around the world, while also casting a digital gaze back on the earth.
Amos Rapoport. 1969. House Form and Culture (Foundations of Cultural Geography Series). Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. 150 pp. ISBN: 978-0133956733.
Reviewed by J.A. Adedeji, Department of Architecture, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (Nigeria) and S.A. Amole, Department of Architecture, Obafemi Awolowo University (Nigeria)
The book “House Form and Culture” was originally written in 1969 by Amos Rapoport and published as one of seven books in the “Foundations of Cultural Geography Series” edited by Philip Wagner. This series considered the underlying theoretical constructs that have shaped, and continue to shape, the built environment, including religion, beliefs, customs and socio-cultural forces at large. Rapoport presented neatly distilled correlates of culture and house form with a large volume of cultural illustrations from across the globe. The book is also a presentation of cross-disciplinary studies of dwellings, buildings and settlements from architecture, planning and cultural geography.
An interesting aspect of Rapoport’s book is its balanced view. After giving substantial evidence against factors other than culture as house form determinants, he went on to present his basic hypothesis that “house form is not simply the result of physical forces or any single causal factors, but is the consequence of a whole range of socio-cultural factors seen in their broadest terms.” In view of the logical arrangement of Rapoport’s argument, the book naturally divides into two parts: chapters 1-3 are for the defence of the primacy of culture, and chapters 4-6 explain the modifying influence of other factors. As expected, the later part is relatively thin compared to the former, which is the real bone of the argument that Rapoport grinds into powder.
Rapoport’s book is the direct opposite of traditional patterns of study in architectural theory and history where efforts have always been on monuments and “high style” buildings of various civilizations. The foundation of the book was laid on the intellectual debate of the meaning and characteristics of folk, primitive, and vernacular buildings on one side, and modern buildings on the other–possibly even forming a continuum. Relying on the work of Gould and Kolb (1964), Redfield (1965) and Mumford (1961), among others, Rapoport argued that “primitive” buildings were produced by “primitive” societies which had a “diffuse knowledge of everything by all” with elementary technology.