TRANZIT PAPER | space. body. politics. Portugal Creative Link | Consórcio Erasmus SMALLER CITIES 2nd and 3rd november [PAC] PLATFORM FOR ARTS AND CREATIVITY; [ID] DESIGN INSTITUTE Cidade Campus 1. Concept The Cidade Campus will bring together activities, collaborations and knowledge from across the Programme for Guimarães, European Capital of Culture (ECOC) 2012, plus introduce a new set of interactions, presentations and interventions to collectively ‘re-imagine the possibility of the city’. This is not a normal conference or symposium: there will be no long keynote speeches ortedious plenary sessions. 1.1 Participants Participants will be anyone with an interest in city-making: we will have an open-door ‘first come first served’ policy, with security ensuring the spaces are not over-full. The target is for 300 plus people to participate over the 2 days. Cross-cutting Theme 1 - THINK: Smaller Cities. This will explore each of the 5 Work Areas with a focus on the specific opportunities / challenges for smaller cities. Cross-Cutting Theme 2 - UNLOCK: Open Cities.
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey – review Echoes of the Paris Commune? … The 2011 London riots. Photograph: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images The increasing urbanisation of the globe is frequently discussed and worried over. This is ironic, as there has seldom been a period less preoccupied with how to create the city as a positive, active, collective polis rather than an atomised, accidental antheap. The essays here revise certain old-school Marxist judgments while making equally critical remarks on the young, "horizontalist" left dominant at, say, the Occupation outside St Paul's. Harvey's reworking of Marxist political theory places the city first and foremost, in terms of its position as a generator of capital accumulation, as opposed to, say, the factory. That's not the case with his frequent recourse to the Paris Commune of 1871, a brief and bloodily-suppressed socialist experiment in working-class self-government. For Harvey, there are two principal adversaries to organisation. But how to get to that point?
New book by David Harvey: Rebel Cities | Pop Theory Between trying to take a day off and teaching overload (at the same time), I have been speed-reading David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution, bought on a day out in Bath. I know, this is the sort of book you are meant to buy at Booksmarks or somewhere like that, but Bath is the closest place to where I live with decent book shops (Oxford doesn’t count, because it doesn’t actually have great bookshops, apart from Blackwell’s, and the OUP bookshop, both of which are more like academic libraries where you can buy the books, if you see what I mean). It has some familiar limits, shall we say – an aversion to rights-talk when thought of as anything more than a convenient strategic fiction, and a simplistic contrast between ‘individual rights’ (not to be trusted), and ‘collective’ rights (more of these, please). The two most interesting pieces in this new book are in the middle. [The baby's just been sick, I have to pause]. Like this:
Sophie Chevalier sophie.chevalier7@wanadoo.fr Sophie Chevalier est maître de conférences en ethnologie à l’Université de Franche-Comté depuis 1996. Elle a aussi enseigné ponctuellement en Grande-Bretagne, en Suisse et au Brésil. Après une licence de droit à l’Université de Genève, elle a étudié à l’Université de Paris X-Nanterre où elle a obtenu sa thèse de doctorat ; puis elle a passé deux ans post-doctoral comme chercheur associé au Department of Social Anthropology de l’Université de Cambridge (GB). Elle s’intéresse à l’anthropologie économique, plus précisément ses travaux concernent la culture matérielle contemporaine, les pratiques de consommation et les échanges. Elle a ensuite mené des recherches en Bulgarie, sur le passage d’une économie planifiée à l’économie de marché, vu à travers les pratiques économiques quotidiennes des habitants d’une petite ville. Par ailleurs, elle vient de terminer une recherche européenne qui incluait huit pays, « Parenté et solidarité » (6ème PCRD). Co-direction :
The Price of Walkability This is a community post, untouched by our editors. Not so long ago, walkable neighbourhoods had a price penalty associated with them – not a price premium. However, a structural shift is occurring, which demonstrates a fundamental change in demand in our cities. The Atlantic Cities recently released an article based on research from the Brookings Institution that shows just how much more expensive walkable, mixed-use, dense, and amenity rich neighbourhoods are in comparison to the typical suburban communities. Photo c/o ifmuth (Flickr) Of course, the flip side of this coin is that retail businesses do better in walkable neighbourhoods, due to increased footfall, houses are worth more per square foot, and even rent for office spaces increases. Although baby boomers and millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 2000) are extremely different in a number of respects, they share a similar desire to live in dense, walkable, urban communities with easily accessible amenities.
Urban Times - Optimistic Forward-Thinking Online Magazine Can crowdsourcing save the city? TED is currently in full swing, and the program this year has an entire section devoted to the city. Fitting, given that this year’s TED Prize went to a city-centric project, one that hopes to crowdsource ideas to solve urban problems and reinvent cities. It’s predictably named The City 2.0. The site has a flashy splash page, but the innards still need some work—tapping in my current city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, sent me to a generic index page that encouraged me to “get connected” with other aspiring urban planners in my area, but responded to my clicks with little more than a broken Google Maps interface and some “COMING SOON” dialog boxes. For now, it’s long on pizzazz and short on details. The TED Prize website fortunately has more on what The City 2.0 hopes to accomplish: To be clear, that’s $100,000 to be equally split among ten groups. That’s a little better. The most obvious barrier is money. The next issue is how to choose the best project. Photo from The City 2.0.
Gigi Roggero: The Power of Living Knowledge Should customers of the telephone company 3 need online assistance, they will be surprised by what they find on the dedicated area of its website. Those that respond to them are not in fact technicians paid by the company, but rather – through a free forum – other customers. For the best responses 3 rewards the contributors with modest prizes. Above all, the firm draws up monthly charts in which those that contribute to the forum can see their own value and merit recognised. This anecdote represents the functioning of an increasingly hegemonic entrepreneurial model present not only in the field of telecommunications and demonstrates the central elements necessary to an analysis of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the conclusion of the anecdote illustrates the ultimate truth of capital: it might do without property, but not without command. The new space-time coordinates of cognitive capitalism Creative class and precariousness: for a critique of the politics of recognition [4] Cfr.
eipcp.net transform.eipcp.net Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray (eds) New publication with texts from the project transform. Contributors: Boris Buden, Rosalyn Deutsche, Marcelo Expósito, Marina Garcés, Brian Holmes, Jens Kastner, Maurizio Lazzarato, Isabell Lorey, Nina Möntmann, Stefan Nowotny, Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray, Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Simon Sheikh, Hito Steyerl, Universidad Nómada, Paolo Virno 14 09 08 - Tom Waibel In her DVD-project “Antonio Negri. 14 09 08 - Amira Gad Amira Gad's dissertation from 2009 investigates the notion of institutional critique defined as an art practice that questions, comments and criticizes the very institutions involved in the production, display and commerce of art. The spanish autonomous publisher Traficantes de Sueños announces a reader including 12 out of more than 100 transversal-texts published during the transform project. Gerald Raunig / Stefan Nowotny | Wien: Turia + Kant 2008 12 09 08 - Martin Büsser 18 06 08 - Rodrigo Nunes Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal.
The Pace of Pedestrian Flows in Cities D. Jim Walmsley Gareth J. The article discusses the proposition that the pace of life in big cities is faster than in other sizes of settlement, thus creating conditions conducive to the high levels of social pathology found in those cities.