The inner workings of a historic preservationist as she courageously tries to save buildings, neighborhoods, and communities by showing the inner beauty and wisdom that lies within our physical environment.
http://preservationlovin.tumblr.com/
Image above: Neon Museum – Las Vegas, Nevada (Photos Courtesy of Author)
72 Hour Urban Action is the world’s first real-time architecture competition, where 10 international teams have 3 days and 3 nights to design and build projects in public space in response to local needs.
The teams design, build, sleep and party on site to generate interventions in public space within an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space. 72 Hour Urban Action invites professionals and residents to become active agents of change, from the bottom-up, and to leave a lasting impact on the urban landscape.
WHAT IS URBAN ACTION?
72 Hour Urban Action is an upcoming voice in the global movement of participatory tactical urbanism, or as we like to call it, Urban Action.
Urban Action is a civic design practice that involves residents, decision makers and professionals. It harnesses creative thinking and existing resources within a community to rapidly make places. Through the power of temporality and experimentation, it encourages participation and a lasting change of perception. Through an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space, Urban Action sets the imagination free to allow for new possibilities and players in public space.
In July 2012, 72 Hour Urban Action is coming to Stuttgart to work together with local cultural activists. The world’s 1st real-time architecture competition will be the kick-off of a series of major urban interventions. All around the site of the largest urban redevelopment in Europe – Stuttgart 21 – the center of a 30 year heated public debate.
Text via 72 HOUR URBAN ACTION
The Kowloon Walled City is famous for having been one of the few structures that defied any sense of reality and survived outside the rule of law. While it was demolished between 1993 and 1994, while it stood it was famous for unlicensed practice of medicine, prostitution and the rule of gangs. Despite its haphazard construction, however, there was some sense of order towards the latter part of its existence, with postal service and police rounds as well as a rudimentary sewage system. In 1987 there were apparently 33,000 inhabitants within its 6.5-acre confines (or about 120 times the density of New York City today).
The Kowloon Walled City. See a larger version HERE, and read the English translation by hovering your mice over the image/text.
Text and Images via Rioleo
The days are supposed to be over when the social arc of our lives was determined by the class we were born into. Governments have leveled the playing field, and elites have ceded power to everyone else. Yet today, class still matters.
Political parties across the globe still claim to represent particular social classes. In the developed world, the big prize is the middle class-the class that most people say they belong to. In some places, populist movements appeal to working people. But that hasn’t stopped politicians on both the left and right from claiming to have eradicated class difference.
This series of stories explores these issues through the eyes of a disparate group of individuals: a bank employee in Egypt, a TV producer in Ukraine, an Indian scientist in New Jersey, a farmer in China, a former mineworker in Britain.
I: A Life’s Path Determined at Age Eleven
II: Tahrir Square: Revolution – the Struggle and Sacrifice for Middle Class
III: Class in the Shadow of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
IV: India: Searching for Your Caste Online
V: Indians in America: Caste Adrift
VI: Class in Rural China: What Has Changed Since Mao Zedong Visited
VII: Britain’s Long Love Affair with Class, and Its Brief Fling with Classlessness
Text and Image via The World
“I hate sidewalks.
When I arrived in Paris the first shock I felt was how much space there was for people to move around. Even on boulevards with little pedestrian traffic, such as Boulevard Port-Royal, space is divided equally between pedestrian standing room, in other words place, and roads for vehicles. How many modern cities offer this kind of abundance? While, like all tourists, I loved the boulevards in Paris, I also became familiar enough with the city to find out that I disliked the little streets that branched off them. At first I thought that it was their boring, ordinary architecture and emptiness, but there were some exceptions. The pedestrian streets of the Marais and Latin Quarter were full of people and shops, which I assumed was exceptional due to their historic value. (Google Street View of a typical ordinary street of Paris.)
Late in the fall I returned to Montreal sufficiently alienated from it to be once again shocked by the contrast in street design. All I felt upon stepping out on the street was terrified and exposed. The snow and ice of winter only made the experience more dangerous. Despite the streets being wider than those of Paris, I am required to walk on narrow strips of concrete, where any slip or missed step would cause me to tumble into a road where a passing car would undoubtedly decapitate me. (In fact a few Montreal pedestrians were horrifically killed this winter.) Any contact with another pedestrian involves invading their personal space and requires that someone yield to the other. This means one cannot walk side-by-side with another person, taking away all the pleasure of walking. And out in the suburbs there isn’t even the luxury of a concrete strip to stand on. Little wonder that no one wants to walk anywhere. Thinking back, I realized why I hated Paris’ little streets: they forced me onto the sidewalk to make space for a road and car parking lane. There was no perspective from which to appreciate them because there was not even standing room in them.”
Excerpt of a text written by James Howard Kunstler, at Emergent Urbanism. Continue HERE
According to the spoofy urbanism of Hipcescu:On the sunny shores of the Caspian, a mere four hour flight away from Western Europe, the City of a Thousand Suns awaits you. Hipcescu, a thriving 21st century metropolis, home to the world’s highest building, the iconic Hipcescu Tower (850 m).
Visible from every angle of the city, it is a monumental tribute to comrade V. Hipcescu, our Secretary-General. And while a highly efficient state-security apparatus ensures your safety at all times, you will thoroughly enjoy our eco-friendly beaches, exciting nightlife, tax-free shopping, reliable nuclear energy sources and excellent real estate investment opportunities.
GLOBE / HEDRON is a bamboo greenhouse designed to organically grow fish and vegetables on top of generic flat roofs. The design is optimized for aquaponic farming techniques: the fish’s water nourishes the plants and plants clean the water for the fish.
Using this farming technique, GLOBE / HEDRON is optimized to feed four families of four all year round.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed to be manufactured and retailed at a low cost. Easy-to-set-up units can be combined to scale up food production capacity.
Using a geodesic dome, the load of the fish tank rests on the frame of the greenhouse and is redistributed to a larger surface. Because of this design, the aquaponic farm can be housed on more roofs without any structural building adaptation. The dome structure is designed to be built with bamboo, so that it is biodegradable and organically farmed.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed by Antonio Scarponi / Conceptual Devices in collaboration with UrbanFarmers. They are fundraising the first prototype with indiegogo: help them build it.
Text and Images via Conceptual Devices
Against those who consider architecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin.
By means of an original reading of the earliest origins of modernism, The Architecture of Failure exposes the ways in which failure has been suppressed, ignored and denied in the way we design our cities. It examines the 19th century fantasy architecture of the iron and glass exhibition palaces, strange, unprecedented, dream-like structures, almost all now lost, existing only as melancholy archive fragments; it traces the cultural legacy of these buildings through the heroics of the early 20th century, post-war radicals and recent developments, discussing related themes in art, literature, politics and philosophy.
Critiquing the capitalist symbolism of the self-styled contemporary avant-garde, the book outlines a new history of contemporary architecture, and attempts to recover a radical approach to understanding what we build.
Text via ZERO Books
Each month, the wonderful Domus Mixtape series brings together musicians, writers, artists and designers to create live sound-based portraits of cities around the world.
All text below comes from DOMUS MIXTAPE.
“For the first in our series of mixtapes on cities and their sounds, Domus travels to Mexico City, the sprawling Aztec metropolis that today is home to 20 million people. There, Daniel Perlin catches up with this month’s special guest, journalist and blogger Daniel Hernandez, to patch together an audible portrait of the Mexican capital’s underground music scene. The resulting mix is a mélange of Mexican cumbia, ska, rockabilly, hip-hop, tribal guarachero and white noise from the frenetic streets of the Distrito Federal. The mixtape includes tracks by Afrodita, Toy Selectah, Kumbia Queers, Sonido Sonoramico, Los Rebel Cats, Maldita Vecindad, as well as a segment by sound artist Rogelio Sosa and Hernandez reading an ode to the city’s noise from his upcoming book, Down and Delirious in Mexico City. Orale, chilangos!”
Tracklist
1. tepito-5may2010 – Daniel Goldaracena
2. Ni Negrita Si Baila – Sonido Sonoramico
3. Daniel Hernandez_1/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
4. El Obachere – (3Ball mix) – Erick Rincon & Alan Rosales
5. Quinto Patio Ska – Maldita Vecindad Y Los Hijos Del Quinto Patio
6. Daniel Hernandez_2/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
7. Chicalango – MC Luka
8. Rayo de Sol – Sonidero Nacional
9. GOTA (Hijo de la Cumbia Remix) – Sekreto feat Morenito de Fuego
10. Te quiero un chingo – Kumbia Queers
11. Daniel Hernandez_3/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
12. Chica Sensual – Sonido Espectral
13. No Hagas Caso A Tus Papas – Los Rebel Cats
13. Daniel Hernandez_4 – Daniel Hernandez
14. Vaiven No. 1 (Soundinstllation audio v2) – Rogelio Sosa
15. Daniel Hernandez_5/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
16. Welcome to the Witch House (†‡† Remix)/BESTIA (Toy Selectah Mex-More Remix ) – Mater Suspiria Vision/Helloseahorse
17. pasconcito (dj n-ron rico mix) – Afroditas
“Most Londoners will recognise that walking past four closed pubs on a Sunday lunchtime is a sure sign of impending apocalypse. So when I found myself walking through the antiseptic, empty, nerve-centre of banks and insurance brokers in London’s square mile one weekend, the sheer quantity of unlit supermarkets, shopping centres, clothes shops, cafes, salad bars and pubs was terrifying. The sound of this city was a deafening, noisy, silence.”
Tracklist
01 Softmain – Dream Crown
02 Scanner – Candles + Beatrice Galilee reading
03 We Are Grave – Permanent
04 Salwa Azar – Poseidon Sea
05 si-cut.db – Academic Hit
06 Scanner – Self Same Circuits
07 Bladzez Krome – Liquid
08 Neck Dust – Shrill
09 Brick Lane Buskers
10 Scanner – Night Haunts
“So let’s be clear. I am not from Rio de Janeiro. I am not a Carioca. Even after 18 years of coming and going, 5+ years lived and hours worked, partied, lost, found and wandered, I am not a Carioca. What I have is the serious problem so many gringos have. The idea of Rio has invaded me, left its mark, devoured me and consumed whatever thoughts and sounds resonate in my brain. “Tupi or not Tupi?” Goes the anthropohagic manifesto, and in writing, enunciating the multiplicity of times, spaces, sounds and feelings that is Rio. Rio, of course, does not exist, as no single city exists. It is instead a bricolage, defined geographically by divisions between its largely working-class Zona Norte, and its smaller, wealthier, iconic, Zona Sul. At first impression, its appearance from the ground is conflicted, agonistic, its favelas inescapable from view, requiring a double-consciousness and radical strategies of internal conflict negotiation. And now, annexing the often-gated zones of Barra de Tijuca, Jacaerepagua and on, any attempt to define a homogeneous sound of this city becomes even more remote, even more absurd.”
Tracklist
01. Natureza nº 1 em Mi Maior—Lucas Santtana
02. Eu Nasci Em Angola—Caxambu da Comunidade Sao Jose da Serra-
03. Dizem Que Sou Louco/Frogs, Pops, Rio, Nite —M.V. Bill
04. Orquestra Filarmônica da Favela—DJ Sany Pitbull
05. ta tomado (n-ron tamborclap riddim)—bonde nervoso
06. Alerte Limão—Chelpa Ferro
07. Pau de Arara. Baião de São Sebastião Baião—Luiz Gonzaga & Gonzaguinha
08. Crowd, Rio, Restaurant, Copa Cabana
09. Nao Foi Em Vão (Original Album Version)—Orquestra Imperial
10. Animais Sem Asas/papa capim—+2 Moreno, Domenico & Kassin, Meu Tambor—+2 Moreno, Domenico & Kassin
11. Fuego (Maga Bo Remix)—Bomba Estereo
12. Olha A Virada—Mocidade Independente, rap de felicidade accapella—Mcs Cidinho & Doca
13. Macumbinha/DJBR/toques para celular – abertura dos bailes funk
14. IDogBarks Constant 15. V.V.—B. Negão
16. Bells, Church, RioGloria Evening
17. embalaeu (N-RON and Reganomics mix)—Clementina de Jesus
18. rebichada (N-RON AMENMIX)—Chico Buarque e os trapalhões
19. Radio Samba—Nacão Zumbi
20. love banana—João Brasil
21. Shottas—Leo Justi
22. Angicos (paulo rafael mix)—Chico Science, Fred 04, Siba, Lucio Maia, Paulo Rafael
23. Crowd, Rio, Gávea
24. Vai Saudade—Velha Guarda da Portela
For Free Downloads and More Cities visit Domus Mixtapes
According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world.
From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory.
Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz. Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the “war on terrorism” as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor.
Mark Davis, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is a self-described Marxist environmentalist.
Text and Image via Verso Books
Eurozine: Free speech advocates opposed to the prohibition of hate speech tend to underrate the harm hate speech causes, argues Jeremy Waldron. Where it exists, such legislation upholds a public good by protecting the basic dignitary order of society.
“We speak openly and with civility about all kinds of human difference” is the fourth draft principle for global free expression proposed by the Free Speech Debate project. That is something we can all applaud. But as Timothy Garton Ash’s commentary indicates, it raises further issues that are not conveyed in the formulation of the principle itself. Should “speaking openly” mean speaking without any legal constraint, even when the speech is manifestly uncivil? So the discussion raises the issue of hate speech and the difficult question about whether it is ever appropriate to legislate against it.
The most striking thing about Timothy’s commentary on this issue is the absence of any substantial consideration of the harm that hate speech may do to those who are its targets. The message conveyed by a hateful pamphlet or poster, attacking someone on grounds of race, religion, sexuality, or ethnicity, is something like this:
“Don’t be fooled into thinking you are welcome here. The society around you may seem hospitable and non-discriminatory, but the truth is that you are not wanted, and you and your families will be shunned, excluded, beaten, and driven out, whenever we can get away with it. We may have to keep a low profile right now. But don’t get too comfortable. Remember what has happened to you and your kind in the past. Be afraid.”
Excerpt of an article written by Jeremy Waldron, Eurozine. Continue HERE Image via Out of the over flow
“At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the disciplinary debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the professions involved. At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are extended to a broader discussion about urban and societal change. Then, the central issue is not merely how to solve a specific spatial problem or improve a construction method with the help of a new technology. Rather, the debate revolves around its possible impact on urban society at large. What does this new technology mean for urban culture, what impact does it have on how we shape our identities and live together in the city? When those questions surface, Dutch philosopher René Boomkens argues, the professional debate has turned ‘philosophical’. [1]
The discourse on ‘Sentient Cities’, that has arisen over the last few years can be understood as such a philosophical enterprise. [2] What is at stake in the debate is not so much the issue of how to engineer smarter buildings that sense — and adapt to — our daily routines or idiosyncratic preferences. Rather, our in-car navigators, friend finding ‘solutions’, location based information systems and other urban sensing technologies may very well force us to rethink some of the core concepts through which we understand and value urban life.
Here I will show that the debate about the Sentient City can be understood as a dispute concerning the urban public sphere. On the one hand, the rise of sentient technologies is said to contribute to the (already on-going) demise of urban public spaces such as town squares, multifunctional streets and public parks. On the other hand, there is a hope that those same sentient technologies could enable new forms of publicness and exchange. These are no longer based on bringing people with different backgrounds and opinions spatially together (as in coffeehouses or town squares), but on the organization of publics around particular issues of concern.”
Excerpt of a paper written by Martijn de Waal. Continue HERE
Filmed & Edited by Patrik Wallner. He says: Traveling to the Hermit Kingdom is already bizarre enough, but when we heard that North Korea would be celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the Great Leader & eternal president, Kim Il-sung, there was no way to let such an epic birthday party slip through our hands.
Laurence Keefe, Kirill Korobkov and I flew over to Pyongyang for two days to witness the madness. While skateboarding within the DPRK was our main intention, it was overshadowed by the celebrations & the ‘no sliding’ anywhere rule.
For more info please go to visualtraveling.com
The three minute clip portrays a small insight into North Korea from the 15th of April 2012.
Unfinished Modernisations is a collaborative, long-term research platform on architecture and urban planning. It brings together partners from both institutional and non-institutional sectors from South-Eastern Europe: TrajekT, (Slovenia), Umetnostna galerija Maribor (Maribor Art Gallery) (Slovenia), the Croatian Architects’ Society and the Institute for Contemporary Architecture, Zagreb (Croatia), the Belgrade Architects Society, Belgrade (Serbia) and the Coalition for Sustainable Development, Skopje, (Macedonia). The initiators and authors of the concept of the project are Vladimir Kulić and Maroje Mrduljaš.
The project is aimed at fostering interdisciplinary research on the production of built environment in its social, political and cultural contexts. It encompasses the countries that succeeded former Yugoslavia, spanning the period from the inception of the socialist state until today. The topic of the 14 researches is the way in which divergent concepts of modernization conditioned architecture, territorial transformations, and urban phenomena. The project seeks to detect effective, resilient, and socially responsible models of architecture and urban planning in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states. Special attention is going to be paid to critical re-reading of modernization processes and contextualization of local architectural and urban planning concepts within the framework of international evolution of architectural discourse. While largely unexplored and lacking appropriate interpretation, many of the models created in the region were original and experimental and may be used as inspiration for a progressive current practice both inside and beyond the regional borders. The project also seeks to reconstruct an important segment of the shared history of Central and South-Eastern Europe and to strengthen cross-cultural respect and understanding through trans-national collaboration and mobility.
Unfinished Modernisations will be carried out through a variety of activities: 14 researches, 5 conferences (Zagreb, Skopje, Beograd, Split, Maribor), exhibitions, publications, and interactive web-site/blogs. All these efforts will culminate in a final exhibition in Maribor (Slovenia), the 2012 Cultural Capital of Europe, which will give the project broad European exposure.
Text and Image via Unfinished Modernisations
Real Estate 4 Ransom is a documentary by Prosper Australia, a not for profit organization devoted to economic justice for all Australians. Co-Directors Gavin Emmanuel and Karl Fitzgerald say:
“Real Estate 4 Ransom is a documentary about global property speculation and its impact on the economy. Real Estate 4 Ransom considers the changing motivations behind property investment and challenges the notion that the Global Financial Crisis was caused by bank lending alone.
Shot over 5 years, the film focuses an economics lens on many of the big picture issues world politics are grappling to deal with. The 40 min documentary looks at whether genuine freedom has been delivered by the democratic system.
We investigate the inefficiencies of the economic system and the impact this has on potential homeowners and small businesses. The documentary argues that with a simpler tax system, entrepreneurs have a better chance to succeed and the average Australian has a better chance of owning their own home.
What role did real estate play in the crashing of the global economy?
Co-Directors Karl Fitzgerald and Gavin Emmanuel have crafted a 40 minute documentary which features high profile economists, international guests, local home-buyers and renters, all who discuss their take on the state of Australia’s economy.”
Hamburg´s garbagemen portrait their city in the Trashcam Project – with their garbage containers. Standard 1.100 liter containers are transformed to giant pinhole cameras. With these cameras the binmen take pictures of their favorite places to show the beauty and the changes of the city they keep clean every day.
The Trashcam Project was developed by Christoph Blaschke, Mirko Derpmann, Scholz & Friends Berlin and the Hamburg sanitation department. Special thanks to Hamburg based photographer Matthias Hewing (www.matthiashewing.de/) for his professional advice and the challenging lab work with the giant negatives.
Garbageman Hans-Dieter Braatz is taking a picture with a 1.100 liter garbage container transformed into a pinhole camera. It will take 2 minutes of framing and one hour waiting. Picture taken by Mirko Derpmann with a fuji gw690 on Fuji Velvia.
St. Georg is a part of Hamburg where one can find clear signs of gentrification and quite an organized oppositional movement. This site should be occupied by a massive glass and steel cube by now. But somehow the process seems to have slowed down mostly due to the financial crisis. Photographed with a pinhole garbage container by garbageman Roland Wilhelm, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106×80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 10 minutes exposure time. In the front you can see the shadow of the bin.
The Fleetschloss in Hamburg photographed with a pinhole garbage container by
garbageman Hans-Dieter Braatz, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106×80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 45 minutes exposure time.
Text and Images via The Trashcam Project
Childhood exposure to lead dust has been linked to lasting physical and behavioral effects, and now lead dust from vehicles using leaded gasoline has been linked to instances of aggravated assault two decades after exposure, says Tulane toxicologist Howard W. Mielke.
Vehicles using leaded gasoline that contaminated cities’ air decades ago have increased aggravated assault in urban areas, researchers say.
The new findings are published in the journal Environment International by Mielke, a research professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the Tulane University School of Medicine, and demographer Sammy Zahran at the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University.
The researchers compared the amount of lead released in six cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New Orleans and San Diego, during the years 1950-1985. This period saw an increase in airborne lead dust exposure due to the use of leaded gasoline. There were correlating spikes in the rates of aggravated assault approximately two decades later, after the exposed children grew up.
After controlling for other possible causes such as community and household income, education, policing effort and incarceration rates, Mielke and Zahran found that for every one percent increase in tonnages of environmental lead released 22 years earlier, the present rate of aggravated assault was raised by 0.46 percent.
“Children are extremely sensitive to lead dust, and lead exposure has latent neuroanatomical effects that severely impact future societal behavior and welfare,” says Mielke. “Up to 90 per cent of the variation in aggravated assault across the cities is explained by the amount of lead dust released 22 years earlier.” Tons of lead dust were released between 1950 and 1985 in urban areas by vehicles using leaded gasoline, and improper handling of lead-based paint also has contributed to contamination.
Text and Image via Science Daily
CHALLENGE:
The “nav-u” U35 is a personal navigation device you can put on a bicycle.
We wanted to demonstrate the device by using the attractions of Tokyo, a city whose roads developed in irregular and complex ways.
IDEA:
Using the running log function of the bicycle navigation system, we started the project by drawing gigantic animal geoglyphs over Tokyo. People tweet what animals they want us to draw. From their requests, our staffers draw animals over the map.
The bike group rides all over Tokyo, logs the routes and uploads the drawing to the website immediately. Progress status with drawing and running footage are posted on Twitter in real time every day.
Fifteen animals are completed in 40 days.
RESULT:
The project was featured in TV news shows, newspapers, magazine articles, and over 80 online news articles. In addition, it was mentioned innumerable times on blogs and tweets. Moreover, it was also reported in other countries, and we received lots of positive feedback, support and messages of encouragement.
Before the campaign, Sony held third place in the market for navigation systems, but it rose to the first just two weeks after the start of the campaign.
A promotion for a bicycle navigation system also became a promotion for the city of Tokyo.
The Tokyo Zoo Project
Via Popupcity
Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space employs the theme park in identifying, dissecting and describing the properties of PROPASt – privately-owned publicly accessible space in a themed mode – a hybrid form of public space emerging in urban environments worldwide Mitrasinovic does not propose that theme parks and PROPASt are, or will ever become, desirable substitutes for democratic public space, but deliberately cuts across the theme park model in order to understand the principle of systematic totality employed when such a model is used to revitalize urban public space in the United States, Asia and Europe. In doing so, Mitrasinovic has created compelling and multifaceted inferences out of a plethora of minute details on the design and production of theme parks across continents. Mitrasinovic s central argument is that the process of systematic totalization that brings theme parks and PROPASt into the same conceptual framework is not only obvious through formal similarities, but also through systemic and symbolic analogies: through values, conditions and techniques that have been extended upon the entire social realm. By illuminating the relationship between theme parks and public space, this book offers critical insights into the ethos of total landscape, a condition that emerges from overpowering convergences of the following three domains: a/ a globally emerging socio-economic system organized upon the idea of systematic totality; b/ a material apparatus that establishes its dominance on the ground; and c/ a system of totalizing narratives -designed and operated by the media and entertainment industry- that establish its dominance in cultural imaginations across national boundaries. One of the central premises of this book is that theme parks and PROPASt are complex artifacts designed to materialize such convergences and to spatialize corresponding social and environmental relationships. Mitrasinovic builds his compelling narrative by simultaneously studying phenomena, processes, practices, and forms interwoven in the types of spatial production characteristic of the total landscape. In parallel, Mitrasinovic systematically builds the argument for the necessity of a meta-disciplinary conception of the artificial by juxtaposing and integrating a great variety of insights from both emerging and established fields. In that respect, this book is an essential guide to those interested in cities and urban futures, particularly to scholars and students of urbanism, architecture, design studies, cultural studies, media studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, economy, and marketing.
Download PDF HERE
Text via Amazon
The RedBall Project : Artist Statement
Through the RedBall Project I utilize my opportunity as an artist to be a catalyst for new encounters within the everyday. Through the magnetic, playful, and charismatic nature of the RedBall the work is able to access the imagination embedded in all of us. On the surface, the experience seems to be about the ball itself as an object, but the true power of the project is what it can create for those who experience it. It opens a doorway to imagine what if? As RedBall travels around the world people approach me on the street with excited suggestions about where to put it in their city. In that moment the person is not a spectator but a participant in the act of imagination. I have witnessed it across continents, diverse age spans, cultures, and languages, always issuing an invitation. That invitation to engage, to collectively imagine, is the true essence of the RedBall Project. The larger arc of the project is how each city responds to that invitation and, over time, what the developing story reveals about our individual and cultural imagination.
- Kurt Perschke
Crack The Surface takes a look at a small collection of explorers who risk it all to access and infiltrate closed or forgotten spaces, and focuses on their participation and experiences within their local and global exploring community.
Produced In Association With :
silentuk.com
sub-urban.com
placehacking.co.uk
allcitynewyork.com
shaneperez.com
Filmed Using :
Canon DSLR : 550D / 7D / 5D
Canon 24mm F1.4, Sigma 30mm F1.4
GoPro Hero HD
Velocommerce is commerce that is dependent on the bicycle (from the French word ‘velo’ referring to bicycle). India is a fantastic place to observe velocommerce in action.This project has opened our eyes to this crazy universe of activities, products, services, design, economy and humanity that is mobile using bicycles. The interesting thing about being on a bicycle is that it immediately frees you as an entrepreneur from the shackles of immovable real estate. Velocommerce is all about the mobility of property, and it challenges notions of ownership and private capital. It is special because it exists at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mobility, sustainability, grassroots innovation, cultures, local economies and decentralized, last-mile service delivery.
Text and Images via VeloWala
Matthew Gandy is an urbanist and academic who writes and teaches about cities, landscapes and nature. He directed the Urban Laboratory at University College London (UCL) from 2005 to 2011 and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Humboldt University, Newcastle University and UCLA. His extensive writing and knowledge of urban landscapes bring together culture, politics, environment and cinematic representations to produce prescient and alluring research.
What do you think are the highlights and limitations of recent media productions about cities and urban change, particularly in the Global South?
Some of the best writers on cities are journalists. Examples are Jonathan Raban’s “Soft City” about London in the early 1970s and Siegfried Kracauer’s vignettes about everyday life in Weimar-era Berlin. In terms of recent art about cities, there are classic examples such as Hans Haacke’s “Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System” (1971), as well as works by Gordon Matta Clark from the same period that remain very influential.
Recent examples of really important representations of cities include cinema: a film that really stands out is Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” (2009). Arnold uses an architectonic eye to explore landscapes of alienation on the edge of London. Another great urban film is Robert Guédiguian’s “La Vie Est Tranquille” (2000) set in Marseille. It reminds me of other “cross-section” narratives such as Robert Altman’s depiction of Los Angeles in “Short Cuts” (1993), where we learn about the city through intersecting story lines and chance encounters. Examples of this genre from the Global South include Alejandro González Iñárritu’s striking use of Mexico City in “Amores Perros” (2000) and Dev Benegal’s Mumbai in “Split Wide Open” (1999).
What aspects are not being explored in the media?
Cost constraints, distribution problems and so on constantly militate against the possibility for more diverse forms of cultural production. We need space to allow new things to be created and experienced across all creative media.
How do these compare to past cultural representations of cities?
There was undoubtedly a very intense period of creativity in the 1970s, but I think creative production comes in waves, particular conjunctions of time and place: New York in the 1970s, Berlin in the 1990s and early 2000s, arguably London in the 1990s.
Excerpt from a conversation with Andrew Wade from Polis. Continue HERE
Image above: Los Angeles River (2003). Source: Matthew Gandy
They say: “The Instant Favelas Project means the constant research and dialog between disciplines and Art. We base the project in our own exploration and concerns. Those confluences create, and this provoked the first pilot project (Piloto Kamikaze) where we explored interdisciplinary/ multidisciplinary elements such as urbanity, culture, esthetic, music, environment, etc.
Instant Favelas creates a nomad city in open spaces of Zürich. These cities develop during one, two, or three weeks, and are normally built with free-hand collaborators-Favelanders. Our mobility or nomadism plays as much with external and natural factors as with the urban rules of the city where we play.
Inside of our Restless Doubts we attempt to achieve that the viewer’s role will be active, not merely looking at the process of construction, but also asking oneself, What is going on? Why here? Why this? Is it safe? What does it cost? What does it say? And of course, Is this Art? Hopefully we will arrive at the point where the viewer translates himself into a Favelander — free-hand – mind collaborator, who will perhaps create further interventions…
Instant Favelas as an open Art-Lab Experiment collaborated with interventions inside of our constructive structure. While building and networking our city-within-a-city, we try to understand cities. Our simulation becomes a laboratory where we invite other people to make an intervention—in the sense of a collaborative response to our project—so that we can reflect together about different aspects, such as space, economy, society, demography, spirituality and so on, that shape and define a city.”
I’ve promised to write about the surveillance drone that I’ve been building over the past couple of months. I have always wanted to have my own drone that could send back a live video feed. This is partly inspired by products like the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, which is currently in use by the US military, and which you can view in action here. The Raven is basically just a glorified RC airplane, with a sophisticated landing system that allows it to be recovered by a soldier without great pilot skills (which is one reason they cost around $35,000 each).
To get to the bottom line, my drone has taken its first flights, the results of which you can see in a video of my office at Stanford and in a local park.
When my kids were younger I looked into buying an RC helicopter for this purpose and actually tried to wire a camera on a car, but the consumer technology wasn’t up to snuff back then. Now it is.
Continue HERE
The drive-in movie theater may be a uniquely North American institution, but the icon of the wide-open American landscape recently experienced its most heroic revival in Thailand, leaping forth from its humble, grounded origins and into the clear blue waters of Nai Pi Lae lagoon on Kudu Island. For the final night of the Film on the Rocks Yao Noi Festival earlier this month, guests were taken by boat to savor a final screening on a floating cinema designed by Beijing-based architect Ole Scheeren. Scheeren’s Archipelago Cinema consisted of a floating screen, cradled between two towering rocks, and a separate raft-like auditorium, together offering a spiritual and vaguely primordial cinematic experience.
Scheeren described the project rather poetically as “A screen, nestled somewhere between the rocks. And the audience…floating…hovering above the sea, somewhere in the middle of this incredible space of the lagoon, focused on the moving images across the water: a sense of temporality, randomness, almost like driftwood. Or maybe something more architectural: modular pieces, loosely assembled, like a group of little islands that congregate to form an auditorium.”
Text and Images via Archetizer
Designed by Frederic Schwartz Architects, the Empty Sky 9/11 Memorial consists of twin cement and stainless steel walls, 12 feet apart, 30 feet high and 210 feet long, that reflect the changing light of day creating a halo effect at dusk and dawn as the sun hits the parallel walls. The corridor created by these two walls dramatically draws the eye to the vacant (empty) space where the towers once stood. Working with graphic designer Alexander Isley, it was decided to engrave the names of the victims in ITC Bodoni 12 in a larger size than is usual in memorials, using a cap height of 3.6 inches, spacing the names out so that none of them are broken, and allowing for the families of the victims to easily create rubbings of their names, if they so choose. Other consultants on the project include Ove Arup & Partners Structural Engineers and Arnold Associates as the landscape architects.
Text and Images via CollabCubed
Elevated land-based islands could protect people living in low-lying areas from tsunamis – and archipelagos of them could form entire towns.
LIKE giant spacecraft that have just touched down, they give the countryside an otherworldly look.
Elevated land-based islands are what one architect is proposing for the Tōhoku region of north-east Japan, the area that was devastated by last March’s magnitude 9 earthquake and the mega-tsunamis it triggered.
Keiichiro Sako of Sako Architects in Tokyo has created a blueprint in which groups of these islands form entire towns. They are designed to protect people living in low-lying areas from future tsunamis.
Tōhoku Sky Village is not just an architect’s flight of fancy: one municipality in the affected region is making moves towards building one in its locality and others could follow.
Most islands will be used for residential purposes, with between 100 and 500 houses and apartments. Fuel stations, waste disposal and storage facilities, and car parks are on lower floors. Commercial islands, meanwhile, will house factories and processing facilities for industries such as fisheries and agriculture. As well as lifting residents high above the destructive power of the waves, the design comes with a number of safety features. A reinforced gate at the back of each island automatically closes after a tsunami warning, while steps up the sides let people climb to safety.
Excerpt of an article on New Scientist. Continue HERE
Images: Sako Architects
German interdisciplinary practice Raumlaborberlin has completed’ Officina Rome’, a villa constructed entirely out of recycled materials on the grounds of MAXXI in Rome, italy. conceived for the museum’s ‘RE-cycle: strategies for architecture, city, and planet’ exhibition currently running until 29 April 2012, the free-standing structure incorporates trash-like materials such as old bottles, oil barrels, wooden window frames, and used car doors.
See More at Designboom
Department 21 is a project where designers, artists and architects can meet, collaborate and share working space beyond the institutional boundaries of their own disciplines.
Department 21 was set up in 2009 when a group of students at the Royal College of Art, London initiated an experimental cross-departmental studio space, thereby engendering new discussions and ways of working than had been seen in recent years at the college.
Emerging from an institutional context in which individual authorship and outcome-driven projects are the dominant frames for creative production, the project is the result of a need for new, collaborative forms of exchange between students from different disciplines: it is a means to get in touch with other peoples’ practices (and in this way question one’s own practice), as well as being a platform to support collaboration beyond specialties.
The philosophy driving Department 21 is an emancipated vision of postgraduate studentship, where all those entering a space of education have the responsibility to take a position regarding their learning process. Contrary to the commonly found format of short interdisciplinary collaboration with a secure outcome, Department 21 feels it necessary to create premises for individuals to encounter the others’ spontaneous collaborative working methods based on common interests, curiosity and critical dialogue. The ongoing research work of the project is therefore to identify, test and refine methodologies that enable this type of encounter to emerge and thrive.
Info via Department 21
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Should Wanderlustmind live?
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