Some nice color pictures of Paris at the turn of the century. I thought they might be useful for those of you that work on Paris, urban space, etc. Here is the link: Paris 1900
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Today I gave a presentation called “Mobile Planning: There’s an App For That” for the American Planning Association’s Chapters and Divisions Webcast series. More than 400 planners across the US participated. This is part of my annual update of the latest apps that support planning. In the coming days a video version of the presentation will be available at http://www.youtube.com/user/PlanningWebcast
Each year I provide an update on mobile applications. Some of you may have read my previous report last fall on Planetizen.For 2013, there is a lot to share. The growth in mobile apps is amazing and increasingly they are supporting the things we do as planners. If you have apps that should be added to my growing list for 2013, please let me know.
The most basic of apps is those that share information. This is a simple way for planners to share information with users…
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Inaugural post from Stephen Vilaseca’s new blog: Investigating Art & Politics in Urban Space…
The Italian workers’ rejection of rigid, authoritarian hierarchy, and impersonal, rationalized routines, and call for more flexible, cooperative social production forced capital into a paradigm shift. The industrial factory gave way to networked organization and production. The technological innovation of the personal computer, however, gave capital the means with which to extract surplus value, not from labor materialized in a product, but from labor based upon language. In other words, the new social laborer ushered in a new era of capitalist development known as post-Fordism and cognitive capitalism in which the very faculty of language is exploited for economic gain.
The theoretical basis for autonomist Marxism’s privileging of communication in contemporary configurations of capital is Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. In this text, the autonomist’s category of social labor in the form of Antonio Negri’s “socialized worker” (Books for Burning xl) and Maurizio Lazzarato’s “immaterial laborer” (“Immaterial Labor”) finds its…
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Conference: British Interwar Architecture June 2013 (deadline Feb. 4)
STYLISTIC DEAD-ENDS? FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON BRITISH ARCHITECTURE BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS
THURSDAY 20TH – FRIDAY 21ST JUNE 2013, ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, OXFORD
CONFIRMED KEYNOTE: PROFESSOR ALAN POWERS (INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR/NYU LONDON)
CALL FOR PAPERS
As interest in the full range of architecture in the interwar years grows, now is a good time to examine the various manifestations of modernism and non-modernism in the period. This symposium, to be held at St John’s College, Oxford, will pick up on the richness and variety of architectural output that engaged with the International Style whilst not ideologically part of it, and that which sought to ignore it all together.
This symposium aims to bring non-Modernist, but not necessarily non-moderne, monuments, to the foreground. The symposium aims to encourage terms like the neo-Georgian, Tudoresque, streamline moderne, twentieth century gothic revivalism, and vernacular to be discussed and to engage with each other on the same platform.
The recourse to discussion of style, and the evolution of style, needs to be problematised. The narrative of architectural history has tended towards the development of style rather than the examination of architectural ideas across a number of simultaneously existing stylistic options. Were there formal or theoretical interests that transcended stylistic concerns during the interwar period?
We are seeking papers on this material, including but not limited to the following broad areas, from architectural historians and scholars of related fields:
Public and commercial architecture
- Domestic architecture
- International practice and influence (how foreign practice influenced British architects and vice-versa, British architectural output throughout the Empire etc)
- Architectural theory and methodology (how does work on this period bring into focus broader theoretical and methodological questions)
- ‘Afterlives’: any aspect of a building’s life after its completion (architectural, textual, or visual reformulations or appropriations)
- Cross-disciplinary, cross-media approaches and responses to interwar architecture (e.g. filmic responses to interwar architecture, papers from non-architectural historians etc.)
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on interwar architecture from academics and graduate students working in architectural history. Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words by February 4th, 2013 to stylisticdeadends@googlemail.com.
David Lewis
Neal Shasore
History of Art Department/St John’s College
Oxford University
Intro to HyperCities Video
Video
The video is from 2009, but the HyperCities project continues, providing great possibilities for future urban cultural studies research projects or teaching modules. Todd Presner of the project narrates.
All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski
THE HISTORY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871
NEW TITLE:
VERSO’S WORLD HISTORY SERIES:
THE HISTORY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871
by Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray
Preface by Eric Hazan
OUT NOW
——————————–
The classic history of the Paris Commune, part of Verso’s highly praised and affordable World History Series.
In 1871, the working class of Paris, incensed by their lack of political power and tired of being exploited, seized control of the capital. This book is the outstanding history of the Commune, the heroic battles fought in its defence, and the bloody massacre that ended the uprising. Its author,LISSAGARAY, was a young journalist who not only saw the events recounted here first-hand, but fought for the Commune on the barricades. He spent the next twenty-five years researching and writing this history, which refutes the slanders levelled at the Communards by the ruling classes and is a vivid and valuable study…
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The 5th Nordic Geographers’ Meeting University of Iceland, Reykjavík, June 11-14 2013
Session:
Public Art and Accountability: Whose Art for Whose City?
Convenors:
Cultural Geography Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands
martin.zebracki@wur.nl
Geography Department, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
joni.palmer@colorado.edu
Session abstract:
Public art is a geographical conversation piece that is not uncritical in the least. This session welcomes papers that may engage with one or more of the following critical questions, or related relevant matters. By whom and for whom and from which rationales is public art made in time and space? And what does this imply for urban identity and the image of urban visual culture more particularly? To what extent are public art’s publics involved in public-art practices, and to what extent do they critically engage with them? To what extent are socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion by way of public art intentional and immanent within institutional and policy contexts and related political power regimes? What are the socio-spatial lines of public art in times of recession and poverty? To what extent could a critique of a neoliberal impoverishment of the public artscape of cities and regions be developed? To what extent could polarising shifts in the development of the public artscape be discerned? For instance, to what degree are prestige artworks within the scope of city marketing privileged by urban planners as compared to art in neighbourhoods that is aimed at social cohesion and cultural empowerment? Does this lead to a problematic partitioning of social and symbolic spaces in urban culture? To what degree does the implementation of public art produce and reproduce and as such create, maintain and deepen dominant spaces of injustice? How can the balance be geographically redressed by public art itself? And how can public art, as such, contribute to sociocultural sustainability?
Suggested topics this session attempts to explore include, but are not restricted to, the following:
· Socio-spatial legitimisation of public art (cf. Selwood 1995; Sharp et al. 2005)
· Critical geographies of public art (cf. Senie and Webster 1998; Lees 2001)
· Genealogies, ontologies, ontogeneses and epistemologies of public art
· The dynamic interrelationships between different classes of public art, patrons, planners, creators, publics, place, space and time
· New genre public art (cf. Lacy 1995)
· Spatial politics of public art (cf. Deutsche 1996)
· The relationships between public art and the public sphere (cf. Mitchell 1992)
· Deconstruction of public-art claims (cf. Hall and Robertson 2001; ‘public artopia’ in Zebracki et al. 2010)
· Site-specificity of public art (cf. Kwon 2004)
· Relational aesthetics of public art (cf. Bourriaud 2002)
· Social negotiations of public art and its site (cf. Massey and Rose 2003)
· Engaging geographies of public art (cf. Zebracki 2012)
· The relationships between imagined and reified dimensions of public art
· Non-representational geographies and embodiment of public art (cf. Hawkins 2012)
· Symbiotic relationships between public art and queer spaces
· Spatial poetics of public art (cf. Bachelard 1994 [
· Reflexive and performative methodologies of public-art research
· Public art as methodic device in geographical research
Full reference list: www.zebracki.org/CFPngm2013
If you are interested in participating in this session, please submit an abstract via the conference website http://conference.hi.is/ngm2013 by January 31 2013. Please feel free to ask Joni Palmer (joni.palmer@colorado.edu) or Martin Zebracki (martin.zebracki@wur.nl) any questions related to this session.