Exactly right, exactly. (in these collections the humanities are often equated with history at the expense of artistic production)…

Progressive Geographies

In the Politicised Literary Geographies event, one of the things discussed was the relation between the discipline of Geography and the Humanities. Geography is often put in a Social Sciences faculty (which can be seen as an issue by Physical Geographers) or in a Science faculty (potentially a problem for Human Geographers), but rarely in the Humanities – I’m happy to be told of examples though. But why does Human Geography research not orientate itself towards the Humanities at least as much as to the Social Sciences? There are counter-examples of course, but the links to literature, philosophy, art etc. and their ways of working seem to be outweighed by the links to economics, anthropology, political science and sociology. History in historical geography is perhaps the key area in which the Humanities remains crucial. The two books pictured below – GeoHumanitiesand Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worldswere attempts to begin just…

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Urban Renewal Brochures

As one is wont to do, clicking here and there and avoiding grading and writing, I came across this blog and its very interesting current post containing urban renewal brochures from the 1950s. Most interesting to me is that the images from New York are so seemingly devoid of people. Where are the people? More importantly, after they lay this “abstract space” across the landscape  where will the people that live there go. . . .Thanks to dubravka sekulic for this blog.

http://arsenalofexclusion.blogspot.com/2012/04/urban-renewal-brochures-from-1956.html

going on right now…

Experimental Geographies

This looks like really fantastic – a CUNY conference that examines how we might come to think about and inhabit cities differently. Further details are available here.

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Places.

by Ares Kalandides

Talking about public art in a city of such social tensions as Johannesburg is not straightforward. On the contrary I find that, permanent art, mostly in the form of sculptures often seems out of place, in the midst of such poverty and misery. My question irritates Stephen Hobbs, who together with his partner Markus Neustetter and their joint Venture “The Trinity Sessions” has been appointed chief curators for public art for a period of three years. “Why do we ask about the impact of art when it’s in public space, but take it for granted as soon as it’s in a museum?” As in many other cities around the world 1% of the construction budget for public buildings in Johannesburg is supposed to go to art. Sharon Lewis, who heads the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), explains:

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I saw this story featured on the chronicle.com today and found a WordPress reblog here… Stephen Duncombe’s book on zines was/is great, and here he’s come up with the greatest sabbatical project I’ve seen in a while. Could there be an idea for an urban cultural studies sabbatical project here?

citythreepointzero

When the artist Alex Hartley built a geodesic dome out of scrap metal for his 2011 exhibition at Victoria Miro, he invoked Drop City, an iconic northern Colorado commune of the mid-1960s. Drop City achieved sudden fame in 1965 through the patronage of Buckminster Fuller. Patronage is perhaps too emphatic – Bucky gave the Droppers $500 because they wrote to him. But by 1967 it had become one of the nodes on an international freak network, spoken in the same breath as the UFO Club in London or Haight-Ashbury. It had its own festival (‘Joy’) in June 1967. Even the normally stuffy architecture journals hit on it, big time. Even if hardly anyone actually went, it was, no question, a place to be. For most, Bucky’s dome was best known as a scheme to seal Manhattan from the elements under a structure of truly Biblical proportions, Man’s final triumph over…

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Benidorm and Spanish Sociologist Mario Gaviria

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Benidorm — a planned resort city on Spain’s coast between Alicante and Valencia — has long been a destination for tourists. I can’t say I’ve been there, but references to the city abound in Spain and in Spanish literature and culture since the 1970s. For example: the opening/intro sequence to each and every episode of the Spanish ‘social science fiction’ show Plutón BRB Nero, which aired in 2008 and 2009 and was directed by filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia, includes a gratuitous/humorous reference to Beniform (see here for an article on the series and on Spanish sci-fi in general) alongside such ‘world class cities’ as London and New York. I remember seeing a Spanish novel titled simply “Benidorm, Benidorm, Benidorm” and — as Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago recently pointed out to me — there is a British sitcom called Benidorm from 2007, which seems to be unavailable in the US but can be ordered on region 2 DVD from the UK. The list likely goes on and on…

The deal is:

that Spanish Sociologist Mario Gaviria — who helped to popularize Henri Lefebvre’s ideas in Spain and who edited/introduced a number of Lefebvre’s books in Spanish versions (The Right to the City, From the rural to the urban [collection]) during the 1970s — also helped to design the resort city that is regarded by many as a blight if not also a victory of consumer society over the landscape. [article here] While I have looked through Gaviria’s books at Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, they haven’t been republished and are unavailable if not also uncatalogued (I asked around at more than a few chain and independent / even architectural-urbanist bookstores). He did some great work on tourism and urbanism, anthropological work, ecological work, but it still seems strange to me that a supposed Lefebvrian had a role in designing Benidorm, much less in touting its advantages over the years…

 

More links for Spanish readers:

http://elpais.com/diario/2002/08/03/babelia/1028329573_850215.html

http://elpais.com/diario/2007/12/13/sociedad/1197500401_850215.html

http://www.google.es/imgres?q=costa+iberica+mvrdv&um=1&hl=es&biw=1920&bih=882&tbm=isch&tbnid=UBLCTxV_9wRxJM:&imgrefurl=http://lasumablog.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/costa-iberica/&docid=7a6g8ufMy8BgUM&imgurl=http://lasumablog.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/costa-iberica1.jpg&w=500&h=500&ei=CU6rUN-1J4SWswaZ74CoAg&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=396&sig=112046836172689491766&page=1&tbnh=142&tbnw=153&start=0&ndsp=46&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:66&tx=115&ty=35

URBAN – Journal – Polytechnic University of Madrid / School of Architecture

In Madrid I was able to talk with Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago — who runs the multipliciudades blog [for readers of Spanish] and is also editor of the journal “Urban” [web site in Spanish and English here]. Urban has recently published a number of interesting pieces, here is the list of the last four issues in the ‘new series’ of Urban [which was originally launched in 1997]–note the special issue on Henri Lefebvre…

urban NS04
Doreen Massey / Carlos Jiménez Romera, Jorge Leon Casero, María Mercedes di Virgilio & María Soledad Arqueros Méjica & Tomás Guevara, Jesús Leal & Miguel Martínez & Antonio Echaves & Enrique García / Alexandre le Maître / Estíbaliz López de Munain & Leire Romero & Victoria Vázquez
September 2012

urban NS03
Los conflictos de la ciudad contemporánea / Conflicts of contemporary cities
Don Mitchell / Alain Bertho, Fabrizio Bottini & María Cristina Gibelli, Cristina Fernández Ramírez & Fernando Roch Peña, Imanol Zubero, Luis Miguel Valenzuela Montes & Julio Alberto Soria Lara, Clara Irazábal & Gabriel Fumero
March 2012

urban NS02
Espectros de Lefebvre / Spectres of Lefebvre
Grégory Busquet / Jean-Pierre Garnier, Laurence Costes, Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin, Kanishka Goonewardena, Peter Marcuse, Andy Merrifield, Thierry Paquot, Claire Revol, Carlos Sánchez-Casas, Łukasz Stanek / Christian Schmid 
September 2011

urban NS01
Los futuros de la planificación / Planning Futures
John Friedmann / Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck & Nik Theodore / Erik Swyngedouw / Frank Eckardt / Jordi Borja / Stuart Elden & Derek Gregory 
March 2011

T2M Conference–Transportation and Mobility (Madrid 2012)

The 2012 T2M Transportation and Mobility Conference was held in Madrid — since this was my first time attending I would have to say I would definitely go back. It was a very cozy and even intimate conference with a conversational feel, sessions were well attended and discussion was lively. Each year they take what I would call a ‘class photo’ above you can see the photo from this year. Usually there are optional excursions highlighting the theme of the conference — the one I went on was a tour of the ‘ghost station’ Chamberi in Madrid that is open to those interested, now as a museum of sorts–not to be confused with the Railway Museum / Museo del ferrocarril, which was the conference’s central location (Delicias). The session comprised by Susan Larson, Araceli Masterson and myself was framed as a way of blending trains/transportation with culture in general terms, and the discussion was quite interesting indeed, (thanks to those who made it so worthwhile!), and even though most of the other sessions were not as ‘cultural’ (in humanistic terms) there was a great talk on intermodality in Anglophone film as well as some fascinating airport talks (the phrase “airports are about cars” is now etched in my memory). Anyone who attended the excursion to the ghost museum should take a look at Araceli’s paper on that very museum, which can be found with some other excellent articles in this book (ch. 8) – Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails (2012). See the full program below…

Images from Madrid 14-N

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Here’s a feeble attempt to post something after so much time away from blog, life, teaching, and so on–a few images shot from the streets of Madrid on November 14 during the “huelga, huelga, huelga general” [general strike] or to use another chant “Las huelgas no se venden, las huelgas se defienden” [strikes aren’t for sale, strikes are for defending–[better translation out there?]. I wasn’t present for some of the infrequent skirmishes of the day, but a highlight was the manifestation of 6:30 in the afternoon which, as with other protests of the day, drew from a wide cross-section of Madrileñans, both younger and older who gathered in central Madrid from Cibeles up to Plaza Colón and back down to the statue of Neptune by the Prado and of course on the Gran Vía and elsewhere. Television coverage was on the whole slanted toward the PP / Rajoy of course, which might be expected.

More on the T2M conference which I was attending there [in the Museo del Ferrocarril at Delicias] later…