› Notes from the 'Global Place' conference - The Diigo Meta page

• 21 Feb 08
  

  Yule Heibel

  Still to read through this blog post, which I bookmarked because it includes such a great photo of Liane LeFaivre, friend from way back when at MIT days! Liane has a new book out on playgrounds, also bookmarked today, and has (judging by Kauffman's blog entry) been up to interesting things elsewhere, too. Re. the conference itself, Kauffman writes, "The conference was a resounding call for pragmatic utopianism and an integration of urbanism and ecology. It had an emphasis on getting things done rather than living to an ideal. Yet there was some agreement that there is gap between academic discussion and the cultural and material realities. Enough talk. There is a greater need for implementation." This makes me think that my interest in the local isn't so marginal, perhaps, insofar as *theory* happens ...what's the word?, across time & space? = unlocalized?, while *implementation* is local. So, if you understand the local very well -- and it's really NOT easy -- you get a better sense of how theory can work or be useful. K. adds a very useful observation re. the difference btw. space & place. The latter is made over time.

  conference ecology liane_lefaivre place_making playgrounds reference urbanism

  • Proposed design solutions rarely spoke of how sustainable architecture practices could be incorporated into a larger idea of empowered development that addresses issues of poverty and self-reliance. Many participants mentioned the necessity of giving urbanizers the freedom to determine and adapt to their own built environments. Yet we glanced over the subject of how communities with differing wealth, expertise and capabilities could autonomously and locally apply sustainable solutions from the bottom up.
  • there is great variation amongst the situations and drivers that bring people to move entire lives and families from one space to another. But space is not even the same as place. Place is something uniquely made over time. We should wonder how ‘place’ is made when people exodus en masse to locations of proximity to economic opportunity.

    • 

      Yule Heibel on 2008-02-21

      - great point.
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    • The legislative branch has lost much of its political power to the executive, which is usually aligned with global corporate capital.

      
      

      Privatization removes functions of legislature and shifts them to the private sector

      
      

      Sassen believes that cities are a critical space for overcoming the hollowing of the legislative body and in their capacity to make informal politics.

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        Yule Heibel on 2008-02-21

        - Beautiful! That clenched hand, ready to thrust forward, encapsulates Liane's innate enthusiasm and energy wonderfully! I can just hear her saying "yes! take the picture now!"

    • As a critical regionalist, Liane Lefaivre seeks to understand the context of a place in order to give it meaning.
      
      Le Faivre’s current project uses the concept of play to confront major issues affecting European cities, especially the tension between communities. Citing Schiller, Gross, Freud, Huizinga, and the Dutch painting genre “Children’s Play,” she talked about the importance of play in exploring our world and in crossing over cultural boundaries.

      
      

      Post World War Two, the Dutch chose to instill civic values and a civic experience through play. Aldo Van Eyk designed multiple play spaces in central neighbourhood locations in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam playgrounds were not conceived individually, but as part of a net. They were polycentric, interstitial and participatory.

    • Michael Sorkin, whose work deals with the investigation of how politics and architecture are ‘conjoined,’ came with a stunning if somewhat ironic talk about slums as utopian propositions. At the core of the urban crisis are slums, where 1.5 billion people live. And though slums remind us of the most desperate of human conditions, and are very real problems, they are paragons of efficiency and democracy. They can respond to our environmental oversights.

      
      

      The canary in the minefield has croaked and the solution is to build sustainable cities.

      
      

      As Jane Jacobs spoke of good cities being self-organizing and morphological, slums, with these and other desirable qualities give us the possibility of thinking of the utopian condition:

      
      
      • high degrees of internal equality, which can be identified as the basis of solidarity
      • low levels of consumption
      • high levels of reuse and recycling
      • logical adjacencies to economic resources
      • high levels of self-organization stemming from tight community grouping
      • scales that are morphologically adaptable

    • Celebrated Indian Architect Charles Correa conveyed the great hope India has placed in its cities. He pointed out how they break down the caste system, provide freedom, generate economic skills and are agents of social engineering. He maintained that we need to increase the carrying capacity of cities, and that we should not be looking for beauty in them, but in the synergy that delivers the quality of what we would call a ‘city.’ While celebrating the absorptive capacity of Indian cities as destinations for rural immigrants who otherwise would have gone to ‘Australia’ he described Bombay as “a great city and a terrible place.”

      
      

      Correa, in one of the more referenced moments of the conference, differentiated between the scientific ideas of similarity as they relate to building large-scale projects from scratch:

      
      

      Same-similar is life. Same-identical is death.

      
      

      Correa then presented his own bill of rights for Indian Housing:

      
      
      • open to sky space
      • malleability
      • incrementality
      • participation
      • income generation
      • equity
      • disaggregation
      • pluralism

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        Yule Heibel on 2008-02-22

        "Same-similar is life. Same-identical is death." = interesting way to put it...

    • With neoliberalism shaping globalization, there’s heightened competition amongst cities to attract industry and tourism. Rather than seeing cities as efficient and perhaps aesthetic places to live, they are being reconceived and marketed from the demand side as sites from conferences, festivals and conventions. Susan Fainstein argued that global cities can bear responses to the transitory whims of global corporations, the competition for foreign capital, and the placelessness of global culture.

      
      

      Global citiies are strategic sites for economic control - yet they cannot control themselves - control emanates from them, but its not clear how much control cities have over their own boundaries.

      
      

      While cities are becoming more responsive to global forces, Fainstein thinks we should encourage democracy on the local level to allow for equitable relationships. Inspired by David Harvey’s “Social Justice and the City,” and praising Amsterdam as a city with high social equality without sacrificing prosperity, she listed three factors that allow cities to deliver justice:

      
      
      
      
      1. the extent to which government is entrepreneurial
      2. the amount and quality of planning
      3. the amount of focus given to those most in need
      
      
      
      

      Fainstein praised Sen and Nussbaum for their ‘capabilities approach’ to development which seeks to ensure substantial freedoms to people, and sees poverty as capability-deprivation. One such poverty is environment degradation, which often is caused from distant global forces and reinforces environmental injustice. Global climate change has the potential to disproportionately impact poor communities who may not be able to react to problems they didn’t create. Local populations need to be able to respond to global challenges in a way that ensures social justice.

    • Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future discussed the role of mobile devices in the future of the city. With mobiles, people can record, document, and annotate social space. Ideas, insights and emotions can be transmitted. Townsend calls this functional telepathy “telepathic urbanism.”

      
      

      Telepathic Urbanism would help us experiment with new social ways of urban living that are based on real-time information and feedback. Thus we could get more out of the existing structures of cities and optimize our lives in them through a better representation of their energy, resource and material realities.

    • And finally, Robert Jan van Pelt, expert witness in the trial against holocaust denier David Irving, explains in this video (sorry embed not working) how an architectural analysis of Auschwitz proved that the holocaust was not an accident.

      
      

      we can follow all these decisions and see that their is no practice of killing, then their is a practice of murdering, then there is a policy of murdering…architecture of the camps morphed into the question of answering holocaust morphology…was it intended yes or no?

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Yule Heibel on 2008-02-21
  - great point.
• 
  Yule Heibel on 2008-02-21
  - Beautiful! That clenched hand, ready to thrust forward, encapsulates Liane's innate enthusiasm and energy wonderfully! I can just hear her saying "yes! take the picture now!"
• 
  Yule Heibel on 2008-02-22
  "Same-similar is life. Same-identical is death." = interesting way to put it...

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