The 4th class will be on FEBRUARY 20, 2012, at Altes Finanzamt, Schönstedtstraße 7, in Neukölln. We welcome everybody to join our discussion of Jean-Philippe Vassal’s “Toward a Performative Contextualism”
Re-city, the ‘total makeover’ of the European City
The European urban condition stands out from those of the rest of the world. Currently, the European population is shrinking and ageing faster than any other world-region, but this does not prevent the growing push for the city. Europe currently leads the rest of the world in reaching the 75-90-3 split. Thus, the next collective core responsibility and challenge for city makers must lie explicitly in the existing city. In re-city rather then new-city. Continue reading
“2011 and All That: From Ideology to the Confluence of Revolts”
Whatever the fate of the revolts of last year – and they are anything but finished – 2011 will go down as a turning point in political history and geography. There were surely many precedents: economic crises that sparked from the heart of capitalism, the anti-austerity revolts that resulted, the antiglobalization movement a decade ago, the Zapatista revolt even earlier. Yet the confluence of a still-unfolding Arab Spring, Chilean and continuing European anti-austerity revolts, Chinese strikes and the global Occupy movement, en masse made 2011 a year of transition. Neoliberalism is dominant but dead. Continue reading
This class will take place at Altes Finanzamt, Schönstedtstraße 7, in Neukölln. We welcome everybody to attend our talk. Find the “Ten Theses on Politics” here.
Art-Architecture Complex / Design and Crime / First Pop-Age
Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. While architects such as Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron draw on art to reanimate design, architecture has inspired fundamental transformations in painting, sculpture and film, which are also explored here. Continue reading
“The Ground-Zero of Politics: Musings on the Post-Political Polis”
The city has undergone radical change over the past two decades or so, most dramatically in its modes of urban governing and polic(y)ing. New forms of neo-liberal urban governance in fact annul democracy: while promising equality, they produce instituted forms of governing in which political power seamlessly fuses with economic might. Governance arrangements shape the city according to the dreams, tastes and needs of the transnational economic, political, and cultural elites. In his lecture, Erik Swyngedouw will talk about what he thinks went wrong, but also about what he calls proper urban politics that foster dissent, create disagreement and trigger the experimentation with more egalitarian and inclusive urban futures. Continue reading
The second City and Political II class shall take place on January the 26th at 8pm at the Public School, in Program Gallery on Invalidenstr. We shall be reading Samuel Mockbee’s “The Rural Studio.”
kenton card photo, spring of 2008
We will begin the discussion by listing the key terms Lefebvre introduced in his essay, “The Right to the City,” so bring the terms you think are most important. And then the discussion will move to the Mockbee text.
Also check out the following brief films about the Rural Studio.
And also check out the Rural Studio‘s website.
Lastly, for a more critical essay by Paul Jones and Kenton Card ‘Constructing “Social Architecture”: The Politics of Representing Practice’, or Kenton Card’s ‘Democratic Social Architecture or “Experimentation on the Poor”: ethnographic snapshots’.
The first City and Political II class shall take place this evening at 8pm at the Public School, in Program Gallery on Invalidenstr. More information and signup can be found here.
We shall be reading “The Right to the City” by Henri Lefebvre, found in Writings on Cities, page 147-159.
