City

""This conference paper focuses on three main metaphors, which stem either from past cultural theorists or author’s personal art practice. In particular, this talk considers Walter Benjamin’s (1920's) metaphor of “botanizing on the asphalt”, Murray Schafer’s (1977) indicative use of “tuning” and Michel De Certeau’s expression of the walking as practices that "weave places together" within the city. Departing from such metaphorical schemas, this talk brings together different threads such as:
(i) actual walking,
(ii) the senses of the walker and
(iii) previous metaphors as reflective tools,
in order to elaborate on a potential orchestration of all three elements through intermedia practices (audiovisual, locative) towards a re-consideration of the artist/flaneur in the 21st century city.

(abstract excerpt)""

"Shifts in perspective allow a prismatic definition of location and forms layers and tension between multiple possible viewpoints. There are a thousand New Yorks and yet still it is New York. This is what projects utilizing elevation and perspective can now work with in ways currently untapped in the field.

The technology exists to alter data on the ground based on individual gestures (turning, direction change, shifts in location) the same is true for above the ground. This allows GPS based data to trigger above locations and at different altitudes. The shifts in scale, in semiotics, in totality and inclusion in the sense of the amount of space accessed at once; these are all factors to be quantified into shifts in sound, scope of data and narrative of data/history and are ultimately as malleable as is one’s gaze and position in a 3 dimensional space."

The recent ‘memory boom’ of films and other retro phenomena concerning 1980s postpunk Manchester has contributed to the shaping of glocal identities. Yet are these memories to be conceptualised in terms of alternative, emancipatory counter-cultures alone? While the multiplicity of remediations has repercussions on the visual archive of the city, the resulting “images for sale” (Elsaesser) add to current efforts of rebranding the post-industrial city, I would argue, thereby evoking questions of heritage, nostalgia and fan culture. This paper examines the politics of remembrance within the visual culture of 1980s postpunk Manchester and its impact on contemporary urban reconstruction. Using the films “Control”, “The Alcohol Years” and “24 Hour Party People” as examples, the paper merges concepts from film studies and memory studies and urban studies in order to critically examine the highly gendered remediations of popular music heritage and the appropriation and reworking of (subcultural) counter-memories into an official narrative.

House music has had a considerable influence in shaping the sound of pop music from the late 1980s onwards. From underground dance events to the pop charts, traces of this aesthetic can be found in many guises. This book is a comparative study which traces a genealogy of house music across England, the Netherlands and US cities, such as Chicago, from the early 1980s to the first half of the '90s. In doing so, it maps some of the power structures that are at play in the uses of its specific technologies of production and consumption. The author, Hillegonda Rietveld, was already steeped in dance club culture before she decided to write this loving piece of academic prose about house. Taking critical cultural studies as a vehicle and house music as its aesthetic fuel, she ram raids boundaries of academic disciplines, fusing ideas like a meticulous DJing curator.

""L. S. Lowry, known today as a great English painter, was one of the first people who found inspiration for art in industrial landscapes. He was only 22 when in 1909 moved with his parents to industrial town Pendlebury, at the Manchester periphery, where `factory chimneys were more frequent sight than trees`. He used to say about the beginning of his career:
`I did the paintings of factories and industrial workers because I lived on the spot. There was nothing much else for me to paint, you see. At first I detested it, and then, after years I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it.`
In 1955, when already gained popularity, he made Industrial Landscape, one in a series of paintings that resemble children drawings, with its modified perspectives, coal mines, factories and back-to-back houses typical for this part of England. Everyone who sees his work today understands that Lowry succeeded in finding beauty in a rough reality of the industrial town.
Decades after, Manchester was a place where one of the biggest and most important annual meetings of architecture students happened. About 450 participants gathered to discuss the theme - Identity, and among them were three of us coming from Pancevo to be workshop tutors. Our project, Hunter Diaries, drew inspiration from parallels between two cities – Manchester and Pancevo, both recognised as important places in history of development of industry. Manchester is often regarded as the first industrial town in the world and has already gone through the phase of deindustrialization. Pancevo, on the other hand, is a small Serbian town, going through transition and still having considerable problems with its industrial legacy, among which - the pollution.
Two weeks spent in Manchester were full of wondering around derelict and reused factories on bicycles and sleeping in adapted old warehouse, while producing different projects related to industrial landscapes. After that, we presented results and did a workshop with residents of Pancevo, trying to make a clearer picture about significance and potentials of its industrial heritage. Repeating the workshop in different contexts was recognised as a good opportunity to compare experiences and way of thinking about the topic that considers not only architects, but also the general public. Among participants were students of different disciplines, painters, writers, art historians, designers and illustrators. While in Manchester research had a character of `hunting` industrial relicts in a modern city, in Pancevo it presented an opportunity to get to know factories that are our daily surrounding and become aware of their values. For many of us, it was the first time we visited old brewery, railway station and silk factory, industrial machines in them, and met and heard stories of some of the workers left. There is a need in capitalist society to make all space maximally utilized, useful and productive, and derelict industrial locations are often perceived as ruins, disturbing places where nothing happens and nothing exists. But is it really so? For us, these visits strongly resembled detective stories and children adventures of place exploring. Tim Edensor, a professor in Manchester, indicates that industrial buildings are places where a series of activities take place – such as free car parking, alternative and creative work and play. Industrial ruins are places of surprise and alternative aesthetic and sensual experience. Lack of defined meaning and function, unclear borders between past and present and intimate relationship with the memory of the place, are what make them so interesting and significant in increasingly homogenous, socially over regulated and over designed postindustrial cities.
It was interesting to look at differences in perception of industrial heritage between participants in two cities and follow its changes in a moment when something that was un-used industrial area becomes a heritage. Does public, and to what extent, perceive valuable industrial architecture of the city as its own heritage and part of the local identity? In Manchester, participants were mostly architects, interested in heritage as an element in brand and image creation, catalyst of urban regeneration. In Pancevo participants have mostly reacted on neglecting of buildings and since Pancevo is one of the most polluted cities in Europe today, many felt the need to react on this issue when talking about industry. Is industrial heritage a symbol of progress and pride for the local community, or on the contrary – a symbol of dereliction, hard work, pollution and illnesses? Even in Manchester, one can still feel industrial past of the city. On of the participants, Boris, explains his view of the city:
– Manchester was full of bricks, concrete and barbed wire, with almost no trees. Through the city flows Irvel river that was once full of fish and other river species. People used to swim there during the summer and water could be drunk. During the industrial revolution pollution started and life in the river is still not regenerated. Yet, it is not fully lifeless. You can find some ducks and swans in it, but water rat is the most common animal.
Projects we got as a result were exhibited in both cities. We got photography, paintings, drawings, comics, sculpture, video-material, essays and one pop-up book. Marija made parallels between industrial machines and flowers growing in its surrounding. Boris was inspired by Manchester’s dogs, homelesses, gray skies and bricks. Jovan took photos of the details from the factory interiors, and Vuk made short video on Silk factory. This is what Vuk says about his experience:
-The most interesting part for me was entering the old silk factory. I have always found that building mystical. It is amazing to visit places that used to be full of people working and are now completely empty and derelict. I’ve been living in Pancevo for a long time and this is the first time I’m finding out some things.
For the end, we ask when was the last time you visited some of the industrial heritage buildings in a city. For example: Provijant warehouse, one of the oldest buildings in a city; Red warehouse with its unique wooden construction; Silk factory, that was influenced by examples from France and UK; a Brewery, one of the first industrial buildings in a region, or Lighthouses that used to navigate ships that sailed on Danube. Though many are not aware of this fact, experience shows they have a lot to offer. German architect Fritz Schupp said in 1932:
`We need to recognise, that industry with its huge buildings is no longer a disturbing part in our cityscape and in the countryside, but a symbol of work, a monument of the city, which every citizen should show the stranger with at least the same amount of pride as their public buildings.`
In recognising industrial heritage and its values Pancevo is still far from positive reuse examples and cases of industry museums that attract visitors across the world and bring income. But lets take a look on what is happening in our surrounding – 40.000 people visited Mikser Festival this year in unused industrial buildings of Zitomlin in Belgrade; Senje Coal mine in central Serbia is being reactivated in eco-museum and regional center for industrial heritage; Sound and Vision Festival in Majdanpek promoted industrial tourism through organised visits to industrial locations and Nis Art Foundation exhibitions brought hundreds of visitors to the complex of tobacco industry in Nis. So - It IS possible!"""

This book is motivated by a concern that the city is in danger of losing its traditional functions as a place of human interaction and reciprocity, as meeting place and associational space. The quality of individual interaction establishes the content of civic, political and cultural life in the city. The problem is that these precious resources are being suppressed by purely quantitative measures of growth and development. This study seeks to recover the sense of the city as an urban public life, an approach which conceives the city as being something more than a commercial centre and the individual as something more than a consumer. The city is valued as a key site in efforts aiming at civic and cultural renewal. This view defines urban regeneration as involving much more than economics, as pertaining to a public, communal and civic modus vivendi. The aim of this book is therefore to recover the city as an anthropological datum through the conceptual formulation of the urban public sphere. Examining the philosophical, social and ecological conditions for the recovery of the grand narrative of “the good city”, the book challenges postmodernist celebrations of otherness, difference and conflict. The postmodernist view is criticised as a condition of urban diremption.

A fictional narrative is an agitated space.  A story world is constructed with attention to selection of detail and level of its description (setting and its establishment of tone, subtext and above all, physical place).  The traditional role of the author has been to carefully use these tools to create the other world.  The city is also an agitated space.  A city  is a collection of data and sub-text to be read in the context of ethnography,  history, semiotics, architectural patterns and forms, physical form and rhythm, juxtaposition, city planning, land usage shifts and other ways of interpretation and analysis. The city patterns can be equated to the patterns within literature: repetition, sub-text shift, metaphor, cumulative resonances, emergence of layers, decay and growth.

"Chapter 2 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship
by Dr Peter Critchley

The bad odour into which politics has fallen in the contemporary world indicates the extent to which it is no longer conceived as integral to the realisation of the human personality and is instead identified with remote institutions of power and representatives. For most people, politics refers to techniques for the management and manipulation of the masses. Whereas in the original sense politics concerned the ethical end of the realisation and exercise of the power belonging to all by all as an attribute of their essential humanity, politics now designates techniques for the instrumental end of exercising power over human beings. Politics has become a means of mass management and manipulation. In its original conception, politics was integral to human self-realisation and associated with the health and well-being of humanity through the actualisation and exercise of essential power. In the contemporary world, politics is no longer ethical but instrumental, denoting the acquisition and retention of institutional and instrumental power – the power of some over others – and inherently corruptive of both its practitioner and people over whom it is exercised. That politics is considered to possess an inherent tendency to corruption indicates the extent to which it has been perverted to mean the precise opposite of its original meaning. Far from being corrupt and corrupting, politics in the classical conception denoted the means and ends of human health and well-being through the creative unfolding of immanent human power.

The question arises as to where, when and precisely how politics came to be removed from the body politic, defined as an autonomous sphere and finally came to be appropriated and monopolised by the institution of the state. With the classical Greeks, politics and public life are still grounded in human association at the level of the polis. It is well known that democracy was born in the Greek agora, that the term is Greek, meaning the rule of the people. There is no word for the state in Attic Greek. What is significant is the lack of curiosity with regard to the origins of the term on the part of those who so readily proclaim the ideal. For such a universally trumpeted value, democracy is a remarkably little known and hugely misunderstood political ideal. The apogee of Athenian democracy came some time towards the end of the fifth century B.C. Athens at this stage had still to see any institution that even resembled a state conceived in the modern terms of a professionalised institutional apparatus exercised for purposes social control. Indeed, Athenian democracy is the complete antithesis of a bureaucratised system of governance organised strictly for social control, explaining why no modern political leader dares to investigate closely the actual meaning of the democratic ideal."