Critical Urbanism

“Hún stendur  arna, eins og jaki, ísborg sem skola  hefur á land...” var sagt í  vögunni á Arnarhóli,  ar sem ljósaverk Hörpunnar var tendra . Í röddinni mátti greina bæ i a dáun og vir ingu.
Vi  gömlu Austurhöfnina í Reykjavík,  ar sem Faxaskáli stó  á ur, stendur nú 28.000 fermetra glæsibygging sem  egar hefur hloti  athygli og lof; a  endingu fengum vi  tónlistarhús e ir áralanga bi .
Hva  er  essi bygging sem stendur
svo stakstæ  og y rskilvitleg a  okkur  ykir helst sem hér sé á fer inni framandi hlutur, úr efni sem ekki er okkar heims, okkar raunveruleika?

https://vimeo.com/113621024

Produced and authored by Jilly Traganou, Associate Professor at Parsons The New School for Design Directed by Marija Stojnic Duration: 12 minutes

New York-based designer Lance Wyman was one of the graphic designers whose numerous artifacts constructed the visual identity of the Mexico 1968 Olympics. His work has entered the canon of design history, and he is internationally recognized as one of the most important graphic designers of his generation. For the Mexico Olympics, Wyman worked under the supervision of Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, together with Eduardo Terrazas, Peter Murdoch, and other designers. In the film, Wyman describes three aspects of the Olympic design program: the Mexico 1968 emblem, the sport pictograms, and the spatial graphics. The film ends with a discussion of the subversion of the Mexico Olympics design by the Student Movement and an exploration of the influences that Lance Wyman’s work exerted on design professionals and educators of the ’60s generation in Mexico.
E-mail: traganog@newschool.edu

In this chapter I explore how local tropes of hole and suture tell us something about the changes that have taken place in how urbanity is imagined and lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo today. More than ever, there is the need to be attentive to new concepts that arise from the ground up to open up or rescale our thinking about a city such as Kinshasa in order to decenter and reframe urban theory more generally. The hole (and its opposite, the mountain/tower), offer topographical meta-concepts that Congo’s urban residents use not only to reflect on the material degradation of their cities’ infrastructure but also to rework the closures and the often dismal quality of social life that has followed in the wake of the material ruination of the colonial city. Even though the library of our knowledge about life in the cities of the Global South has considerably expanded over the last two decades, for anthropologists and others who analyze the state of things in such urban environments, this nevertheless continues to be one of the main tasks at hand: to understand how exactly such ‘reworking’ and reassembling take place, what attempts are being made to fill this postcolonial hole, and what possible answers urban residents come up with in response to the challenges it poses.

In 1975–1976, Lebanon and the city of Beirut were consumed by devastating armed conflict. But whereas this empirical fact is uncontested, its historical causes and political meanings remain controversial. Sara Fregonese’s book War and the City focuses on the rationalisation of the conflict and asks: Do Western descriptions of the war live up to the realities observed in Beirut? War and the City puts the spotlight on important political practices, which are the ways actors co-construct meaning in and through their own urban environments, and how those interpretations may develop differently from far-away truth claims. This said, the book also includes (exceedingly) structuralist narratives, and it raises important questions about whose perspectives (in Beirut) are listened to and heard. Furthermore, its treatments of works from related disciplines - security studies and International Relations especially - is underdeveloped if not outright crude.

This chapter explores the spatiotemporal politics of violence in the city of Ahmedabad during Narendra Modi's tenure as Gujarat's chief minister, which have since become indicative of the militant Hindu Right's hegemonic project in India at large. I home in on the decade-long struggle over the construction of the Sabarmati Riverfront that ended in the violent eviction of over 40,000 lower-caste Hindu and Muslim day laborers from the heart of Ahmedabad, many of whom have since been compelled to live in equally violent enclosures scattered across the margins of the city. Rather than viewing this violence as a mere by-product of neoliberal governance, I reframe the banks of the Sabarmati as a historical locus of counter-hegemonic Muslim agency that openly defied the imperatives of Ahmedabad's segregated spatial order, which had been established by the repeated orchestration of Hindu-Muslim riots at the hands of militant Hindu organizations in Gujarat. Adopting this perspective allows for an exploration of how the Riverfront Project's violence of dispossession achieved what decades of riot violence could not, namely, to reorganize the lived experience of space and time at the river in ways that subsumed the relations upheld by its Muslim power brokers into Ahmedabad's hegemonic spatial order. I ultimately reveal how this reorganization of SpaceTime has turned the "excessive" Muslim agency at the riverbed into its own vectors of hegemonic violence in the Riverfront's resettlement sites, while also rendering the past and present violence of dispossession and the political openings it represents imperceptible to the middle-class "public" that now occupies the rejuvenated parks and promenades lining the Sabarmati.

The article explores the critical, performative, and everyday spatial practices of commoning vis-à-vis the normalising order of the metropolis, capitalist-state governance, and urban development patterns. Through this broader lens, drawing on my participatory action research with Prinzessinnengarten Kreuzberg and the corresponding Commons Evening School, I explore the struggle to secure the future of the urban garden in, against, and beyond the instrumentalisation of temporary-use.

The present MA thesis aims to analyze to what extent State-building policies (i.e., when State authority leverages on its coercive power in order to channel human and natural resources from the ‘peripheries’ to a chosen ‘center’) enforced by Tokyo central government have been able to shape and modify the urban landscape of Okinawa’s main island to the convenience of the ruling class, by pointing out the connection between public policy and environmental intervention.
Specifically, we believe that when a certain State is strongly ideological and profit-driven in drafting its own financial policy, there is a high risk that such ‘center’ may go as far as to deploy all of its coercive power to wage a silent war to the ‘peripheries’, thus formally eliminating those social interstices and territorial spaces where citizens are allowed to express their identity, creativity and most often dissent towards the above-mentioned State authority.
Such theoretical framework owes much to some of the most countercurrent sociologists from the 20th Century, such as James C. Scott, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and Edward W. Soja. Despite some radical differences in their post-Marxist – or non-Marxist-at-all – approaches to the matter, they all agreed on that the greatest liberal democracies of our age are still based on an everchanging capital-driven exploitation mechanism, which is yet well concealed behind the veil of growing wealth and technological progress. Indeed, Marxist thinkers had long disregarded geography and the study of regional economy, as they believed only a macroanalysis of market fluxes would have made a reliable index of the state of health of global capitalism.
On the other hand, Scott et al. argued that despite its potentially deadly downfalls, capitalism has been – and most likely will keep being – able to restructure itself by continually renegotiating the exploiters/exploited dialectics on a local basis, namely by changing the landscape of smaller regional entities through State-mandated – in conjunction with corporate-mandated – development and de-development policies. In hindsight, this is exactly what modern nation-states have been doing since the late 18th Century, and it became even more patent when modernist and grand planning designs came to account for the greatest budget item of public expenditures in imperialist nations – just like Shōwa Japan was, for instance.
By making such assumptions our starting point, the present study again aims to demonstrate how public policy changes in very different areas (e.g., urban planning, mechanization of agriculture, public transport) undertaken by apparently very different masters (i.e., Imperial Japan, US Civil Administration and Post-War Japan) share a common ground in that they all contributed to turn Okinawa into a ‘periphery’, mainly by changing its landscape so as to make it more legible and plain in the eyes of the ‘central’ authority. This not only allowed a smoother appropriation of resources, but also dispersed Okinawans’ dwellings and social gatherings, thus preventing them from developing a genuine and definite ‘Okinawan’ identity.
After tracing back the primary causes of such issues, our ultimate purpose is to elaborate on some solutions towards a sustainable development for Okinawa.

How do urban security assemblages evolve? Scholars inspired by Deleuze's Control Thesis detect profound shifts in the ways security operates. Different to Foucault's disciplinary logics, they argue, security assemblages now rely intimately on expanding casts of policing agents, digital surveillance and statistical knowledge(s). They reach beyond enclosures and national borders, and they challenge democratic politics ever more forcefully. Whether this general trajectory of security management holds true across the global cityscape is yet far from evident. Not only do most studies of contemporary control draw conclusions from European and North American cases exclusively. Many also reproduce and project abroad distinctively Eurocentric assumptions about state-society relations, governance and insecurity. This article foregrounds and problematizes these penchants. It then looks at the Moroccan city of Marrakech to detail how urban security assemblages may evolve in different ways, at other speeds, and following different steering logics than what is generally set out by research on control. The article concludes with a discussion of how insights offered by places such as Marrakech contribute to more robust, analytically refined and globally inclusive research on the contemporary politics of urban security.

In Datta A. and Shaban A., Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias of the Postcolonial State, London: Routledge

‘Speed kills’ is the conclusion Cugurullo draws in Chapter 4. Exploring ‘fast regulation’ in the Emirates, he argues that the desire to speed up the making of the new eco-city of Masdar in the UAE made the ‘core principles of sustainability’ subservient to the need to generate new business investment in the region. Thus speed came at a price and the price has been ecological devastation in the region. Arguing that sustainability and business are not always complementary interests, Cugurullo claims that although conceived as an eco-city to respond to the crisis of urbanization and climate change, the Masdar project brought about irreversible depletion of environmental resources in the region. For Cugurullo, speed has killed accountability in Masdar since its claims have not been supported by post-project monitoring. Taken together, Cugurullo, Murray and Watson outline how the speed of new city-building across Africa and the Gulf transfers risk and precarity associated with speed to social and environmental landscapes. They highlight the tenacious but often hidden links between speed and capital accumulation in the construction of new cities. Their chapters thus highlight what is lost in the fetishization of speed and what is at stake when speed becomes the priority for urbanization.

If we were to write a model of the Eastern block scientific society and its spacial representation, or perhaps wider – science at large, we would have to begin with, "In the beginning there was the secret ..."The secret has distinct priority in the individual/society equation, in fact, and is a central symbol in western cosmology and knowledge production. In case of the socialist model of knowledge production the scale of experiment was unlimited.

By close reading the urban, this paper render visible the phenomenon of secrecy and cancelled geographies. It considers secrecy as a cultural construct, with its own iconography, and in some cases iconology.

There has always been an interest in the communicative-aesthetic aspects of urban landscapes for different purposes: for city marketing (Kearns and Philo, 1993), for the expression of power and authority, of geographic possession, ideology, or building-expressing identity and everyday culture (Mitchell 2001, 2002, 2003; Said 2002). Predominantly, it has been argued that singular meanings and narratives have been invented, and underlined for urban landscapes by political authorities as if they were the only reality (Till, 1999; Mitchell 2001), although urban landscapes have been conceived as containing a multiplicity of communicative contents and processes as numerous as the people of the city, who everyday struggle for life (Mitchell 2001, 2002).

La città che cambia: rappresentazioni, metafore, memoria Napoli, 21, 22 e 23 ottobre 2020 Palazzo Du Mesnil, Via Chiatamone 61/62 Call for Papers "Una città non è disegnata, semplicemente si fa da sola. Basta ascoltarla, perché la città è il riflesso di tante storie." (Renzo Piano, 2000) Le città, nelle parole dell'architetto Renzo Piano, sono un luogo in eterno divenire, un contenitore mutevole di storie. Raccontano di tempi passati, angoli di storia, tradizioni e memorie che convivono accanto alle più impellenti urgenze espressive della modernità; e, allo stesso tempo, si proiettano verso il futuro. Sullo sfondo delle città, oggi come allora, si scrivono romanzi, opere cinematografiche e teatrali, si profilano personaggi, si immagina l'inimmaginabile, si generano discorsi che stabiliscono pratiche identitarie inclusive ed esclusive. Come testimonia Charles Baudelaire nella dedica dell'opera Lo spleen di Parigi (1869), è soprattutto la frequentazione di "città enormi" a far nascere il desiderio di nuove forme di scrittura. Caratterizzate da una profonda disomogeneità spaziale e politica, che regola l'entropia su cui l'immenso sistema si regge, le città si offrono inoltre come spazi aperti alla traduzione e alla contaminazione, dove i significati linguistici, culturali e sociali vengono di volta in volta rimediati, negoziati e ridefiniti. Ascoltare la città significa comprenderne le sue innumerevoli lingue, in quello spazio pubblico che è paesaggio calpestabile e, al contempo, leggibile e analizzabile, definito da Rodrigue Landry e Richard Y. Bourhis come Linguistic Landscape (1997). A partire dalle considerazioni esposte, nell'ambito della sesta edizione della Graduate Conference dell'Università degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", invitiamo a proporre contributi che, tenendo presente lo spazio urbano come categoria critica, gravitino attorno alla rappresentazione dell'esperienza caleidoscopica della città. I temi che si intersecano sono molteplici, e, mirando ad un confronto interdisciplinare, tra le varie possibili, si propongono le seguenti linee:  La città multilingue  La città tradotta  La città narrata  La città mediata  La città immaginata

This exhibition retracing Walter Benjamin's winter movements in Moscow in December 1926, and their contemporary spatial and political resonances. Zig-zaging on the frozen streets of the city, he is exposed to a strange and uncoded universe. These range from frost ornaments on frozen windows, to peasants shawls knitted with frozen ice flowers, and the madness of temperature scales extending beyond zero. The irresistibly cold urban landscape of Moscow becomes for Benjamin a prism that enables continuously shifting interpretations. Today we similarly grapple with the dark melancholia of extruded airplanes, mass displacement, and the ubiquity of catastrophe and violence. The presence of these traumatic events has radically transformed our relation to safe zones, and disfigured our cities into grotesque grey zones and contested territories. Straying mutates from an aberration to a universal, and becomes a new formula, metaphor and trope for geopolitical tensions worldwide.