Vanessa Vaile's List: city

• The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know,  history
• structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain  manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history
• space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is  not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space
• hierarchic ensemble of places:  sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed  places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life  of men)
• places where things had  been put because they had been violently displaced
• contrary places where things found their natural ground and stability
• medieval  space: the space of emplacement
• starting with Galileo and the seventeenth  century, extension was substituted for emplacement.
• Today the site has been substituted for extension
• site is defined by relations of proximity  between points or elements
• storage of  data
• circulation of discrete elements with a random output
• identification of marked or coded elements inside  a set that may be randomly distributed
• problem of the human  site or living space
• Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of  relations among sites.
• anxiety of our era has to do  fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time
• contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified  (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the  sacred in the nineteenth century)
• oppositions that we regard as simple givens:
• private space and public space
• cultural space and useful space
• family space and social space
• All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence  of the sacred.
• space of leisure  and that of work
• First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place
• Places of this kind are outside  of all places
• between  utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be  a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror
• a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing  heterotopia function in a very different fashion
• heterotopia of the cemetery
• cemetery was placed at the  heart of the city, next to the church
• Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in  a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in  themselves incompatible.
• Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to  slices in time — which is to say that they open onto what might be  termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies
• Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of  opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable
• not freely accessible like a public  place
• Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they  have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This  function unfolds between two extreme poles
• Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if  we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a  place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on  itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity
• The ship is the heterotopia par  excellence

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• Cities, spatial forms, processes are fundamental to societies
• Networks are global
• To study cities in the information age is to analyze the spatial form of the networked society
• 8 points of relationship between IT paradigm and dynamics of cities.
• futurist predictions failed
• Currently, this year, we passed the threshold of 50% urban population on the planet
• This kind of urbanization is different than earlier urbanization
• Simultaneous concentration and decentralization
• kept together by communications technologies
• metropolitan region is a worldwide phenomenon
• Organized around networks of communication
• The global city is a process, a network.
• Every major metro area is part of this global city
• actual space is local, and linked to local issues and dynamics
• Most of the actual space is local, and linked to local issues and dynamics.
• complexity of making your living on the global network while enjoying life in the local city
• The 8 Connections
• 1st Connection
   The global city, centralized/decentralized linked together through individuals with high levels of control
• 2nd Connection
• The Wealth of Cities.
   Knowledge Economy. Innovation as the source of the creation of wealth. A new disparity between producers of knowledge and those who are not.
• Universities are fundamental. Under two conditions -- connection to metro environ; and they must demonstrate part of the global network of universities.
• 3rd Connection
• Sociability. Communities... urban communities, virtual communities
• People combine those two forms of sociability -- developed a hybrid
• Networked individualism
• Place-based community.
• the real digital divide, in technical terms, is broadband
• 3rd world - main problem continues to be access
• education and cultural divide, which has always existed, becomes amplified by the internet
• 5th point of connection
• Identity
• people project themselves and their lives on the internet
• 6th point of connection
• governments
• relationship between planning and planning control
• 7th point of connection
• Social movements are networked
• Anti-globalization (actually, it's Anti-corporate-globalization). It's all local groups... Connected globally.
• not members of formal associations. People are increasingly distant from formal associations, but not ready to shut up, and explore the possibility to organize their own networks, and then disband when the issue is settled.
• 8th point of connection.
• Environmental issues.
• Metro growth under these conditions is a contested terrain
• Define the emerging spatial form.

• The metropolitan region is not just a big metro area.

    

  It is a constellation of settlementss, population, and activities, large expanse of territories, no name, no authority, extreme diversity, organizaed around transportation and communication, and in a network pattern of many urban centers.

    

  It can be oxymoronic. The largest metro center in the SF metro region is not SF. It's San Jose.

    

  These centers become connected. Think London and Paris.
• corresponds to the information age
• three ideal types/models.
• The Los Angeles Model
• constellation of different centers
• Extreme social and ethnic segregation
• Real Estate is still the engine of growth. Driver of spatial patterning
• Informality at the heart of the process
• Mexico City Model
• a notch above the LA pattern of segregation toward fragmentation
• Barcelona Model
• Multi nuclear structure

• vitality of public space in all urban centers. Maintenance of public space is the key element of organizing life in the city. Rather than pushing away the immigrants, public spaces are built in the neighborhoods, improving the quality of public space.

    

  High density. Strong level of commercial activity at the street level.

    

  Mass transit networks that network everything with everything
• Hyper communication through mobile communication
• Strong street life. Street life as a key for the city and the key for safety. There are always people around. [Echoes of Jane Jacobs]
• strong local govt. There is no metro region govt. The main thing is the association of local governments to address a number of problems together.
• older population is in a growing immigrant society that they don't accept.
• Implications of this analysis for practice
• Three issues emerge.
• 1. Ability to manage multimodal communication channels.
• 2. High density. Is necessary, like it or not. New forms of livable high density.
• 3. Public space becomes the core of the city again. As the space of urban social life.
• The consequences
• 1. Planning of mobility and connectivity through inter modality
• 2. Environmental planning as a holistic understanding
• 3. Urban design and architecture of the city to restore meaning and mark places symbolically all around the metro landscape
• 4. The most important thing is to develop an urban design meaningful appraoch throughout the space, creating a new social identity.
• If you want a better urban life, you invent it, then fight for it.

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• explored how the formation of the colonies had involved a series of political, social, legal and geographical experiments which were then actually often bought back to the West in what Foucault – drawing possibly on Hannah Arendt’s famous work on totalitarianism – called ‘boomerang effects’.
• the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself”
• ‘boomerang effects’ centred on ordering the life of populations at home and abroad
• two-way process in the flow of ideas, techniques and practices of power between metropolitan heartlands of colonial powers and the spaces of colonised peripheries
• From the famous Panopticon prison, through Baron Haussmann’s radical restructuring of Paris through easily-surveilled boulevards, to the adoption of fingerprinting: many of the great transformations in 19th century European cities had already been tried in colonial cities and peripherie
• Cities under siege
• As our planet urbanizes more rapidly than ever before, a new and insidious set of boomerang effects are permeating the fabric of cities and urban life. Fuelled by, and perpetuating, the extreme inequalities that have mushroomed as neoliberal globalisation has extended across the world
• linked intimately into the militarized and neocolonial predation of distant resources necessary to sustain  richer and western cities and urban lifestyles
• aggressive and militarized policing against public demonstrations and social mobilisations in London, Toronto, Paris or New York now utilize the same ‘non-lethal weapons’ as Israel’s army in Gaza or Jenin
• western militaries themselves. These tend to deem cities per se to be intrinsically problematic spaces – the main sites concentrating acts of subversion, resistance, mobilization, dissent and protest challenging national security states
• In rendering all mixed-up cities as problematic spaces beyond the rural or exurban heartlands of authentic national communities, telling movements in representations of cities occur between colonial peripheries and capitalist heartlands.
• Inner city orientalism
• As ever, then, the imaginations of urban life in colonized zones interacts powerfully with that in the cities of the colonisers. Indeed, the projection of colonial tropes and security exemplars into postcolonial metropoles in capitalist heartlands is fuelled by a new ‘inner city Orientalism’.
• In France, for example, postwar state planning worked to conceptualized the mass, peripheral housing projects of the banlieues as ‘near peripheral’ reservations attached to, but distant from, the country’s metropolitan centres
• increasing militarization and securitisation of this form of internal colonization and enforced peripherality
• Samuel Huntington, taking his ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis further, now argues that the very fabric of US power and national identity is under threat not just because of global Islamist terrorism but because non-white and especially Latino groups are colonizing, and dominating, US metropolitan areas (Huntington, 2005).
• The new security economy
• Given the two-way movement of the exemplars of the new military urbanism between western cities and those on colonial frontiers, fuelled by the instinctive anti-urbanism of national security states, it is no surprise that cities in both domains are starting to display startling similarities as well as their more obvious differences.
• Crucially, the new military urbanism is sustained by a rapidly growing new security economy
• Importantly, the same constellations of ‘security’ companies are often involved in selling, establishing and operating the techniques and practices of the new military urbanism in both war-zone and ‘homeland’ cities
• The new military urbanism
• preemptive surveillance, the criminalisation of dissent, the evisceration of civil rights, and the obsessive securitisation of everyday life to support increasingly unequal societies

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