Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination
Thank you Alejandro for an interesting text! And Brian and Teddy! After reading all those posts regarding the city and it's possibilities and challenges I was thinking about the origin of the cities. Who made the cities and for whom the cities were built? I think I need to go to Diegos rich text to reflect further about settlers versus nomadic. The Greek built cities to protect themselves from pirates and robbers, the state was born from these cities or settlements. The cities organized (and still does) the people's dwellings and workplaces to facilitate the conmuting between workplace and house, the idea of Owen's falansterium (it was Alicia Migdal who put my thought in this direction, thanks for it), a development of the cloister as unity of production is precisely to avoid or make unnecessary those movements. People should sleep, eat and work in the same place. I has lived in Sweden for almost whole my adult life, the housing in Sweden is related to the working places and the collective transport and the motorways are grided to make conmuting easy and fast. The idea is to tailor the city to working people, giving them leisure when they are free and using them as consumers. The housing for the poor is always conditioned to the needs of the rich (it means the security issues of the rich make them unconfortable, the poor hount them, they can be robbed or assaulted by them, people downtown Rio de Janeiro say: we are not safe if the people living in favelas (around the hills) come down. How can we make a city with urban planning for all and not only for the rich and wealthy? Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination
On 03/28/2012 04:52 AM, Ala Plastica wrote: In contrast to this idea of natural understanding, an intervention in the environment is often conceived as an occupation based on the idea of transport corridors. In this way, zones are divided according to economic interests and the imagery is guided by commercial means of communication and financial institutions with only a few spaces of brilliant modernity. This can be defined as an ego-system, a system that generates social and environmental toxicity affecting life quality and health conditions seriously. This is exactly what we wanted to poke fun at when we started talking about the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor! It's what my friend Angela Melitopoulos calls corridorical thinking. But this notion of ego-systems is more clear, it goes straight to the heart of the issue. The world is now full of huge, top-down infrastructures, carried out through state planning processes, just to support the illusion of ego cut off / freed from the others. Mind you, I am not sure that all the projects Teddy talks about really fall into this category, I think it's important to look closely when people (even politicians) really try something different... Unfortunately, what is not included in this matrix is the point of view of desirable social human relationships that links the economic and social system with the place vocation. To a great extent, the development of ego-systems occurs in societies due to the break of the flow of social doing -the ability to do things. When this social flow of doing fractures that power of doing turns into the opposite, the power-over who conceives but does not execute, while the others execute but do not conceive. This whole text is beautiful, and what's more, spot on. Thanks for this, Alejandro. Did you write it? In what context does it fit? In echo I am going to paste in a text which our group (the Compass) used as a kind of invitation or convocatorio for people going to the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010. We wanted to meet people and hear their stories, to enlarge the process of co-creation. The echo is very strong, you'll see: CARTOGRAPHY WITH YOUR FEET Driven by the pressures of corporate competition, Midwestern capital elites envision a network of high-speed trains linking the scattered cities of flyover land into a dense urban grid. Oblivious to territories, histories, and peoples, you whisk your way from center to center like a roulette ball spinning through the global casino. What gets lost in these dreams of power are the connections between the city and the country, the earth and the sky, the past and the future. What kinds of worlds are installed on the ground by the neoliberal planning processes developed in the technocratic universities? Why do these projects fail even before they begin? How to start building a cultural and intellectual commons that can seep into the fabric of everyday existence? The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor is a call for longer, slower, deeper connections between the territories where we live. It’s a cartography of shared experience, built up by those who nourish lasting ties between critical groups, political projects, radical communities and experiments in alternative living. Why not help build the commons by overflowing your usual daily routines? Why not make the journey to the US Social Forum into a chance to discover the worlds we can create right here in our own region? This workshop draws from the inspiration of Grace Lee Boggs and the travels of the Compass Group on our Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor. The idea is to propose an act of collective discovery and creation, to be carried out by anyone who’s heading to the Social Forum. Multiple caravans each chart their particular pathways and organize their own activist campaigns, artistic exchanges, skill-sharing sessions, solidarity dinners or whatever else they desire on the roads to Detroit, then converge at the Allied Media conference and the US Social Forum to share stories, images, and artifacts from their detours through the Midwestern labyrinth. Meanwhile, those with different priorities can invent their own forms of travel and exchange, explore diverging temporalities, set up “stationary drifts” in the neighborhoods they inhabit and continue the projects they’re pursuing, while the moving worlds pass through them. By taking the time for a conscious experience of the territories we are continually traversing, we can build up what Stephen Shukaitis calls an “imaginal machine”: a many-headed hydra telling tales of solidarity and struggle, daily life, and outlandish dreams in the places that power forgets, leaving their inhabitants free to remember living histories and work toward better tomorrows. The Compass Group will present images, narratives, and documents from our Continental Drift in 2008, then open up the concept to input
Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination
Thank you for your considerations Brian and Anna. I presented these ideas about the vocation of the place http://greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=258 in April 2004 in Baltic, New Castle at the symposium called ARTISTS AS AGENTS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE conceived by Helix Arts. The text refers to our feelings about our own experience and that of people and contexts where we work (the estuary of the Río de la Plata, the Parana Delta) but I think that can be applied to other contexts Saludos Alejandro - Original Message - From: Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 11:58 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination On 03/28/2012 04:52 AM, Ala Plastica wrote: In contrast to this idea of natural understanding, an intervention in the environment is often conceived as an occupation based on the idea of transport corridors. In this way, zones are divided according to economic interests and the imagery is guided by commercial means of communication and financial institutions with only a few spaces of brilliant modernity. This can be defined as an ego-system, a system that generates social and environmental toxicity affecting life quality and health conditions seriously. This is exactly what we wanted to poke fun at when we started talking about the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor! It's what my friend Angela Melitopoulos calls corridorical thinking. But this notion of ego-systems is more clear, it goes straight to the heart of the issue. The world is now full of huge, top-down infrastructures, carried out through state planning processes, just to support the illusion of ego cut off / freed from the others. Mind you, I am not sure that all the projects Teddy talks about really fall into this category, I think it's important to look closely when people (even politicians) really try something different... Unfortunately, what is not included in this matrix is the point of view of desirable social human relationships that links the economic and social system with the place vocation. To a great extent, the development of ego-systems occurs in societies due to the break of the flow of social doing -the ability to do things. When this social flow of doing fractures that power of doing turns into the opposite, the power-over who conceives but does not execute, while the others execute but do not conceive. This whole text is beautiful, and what's more, spot on. Thanks for this, Alejandro. Did you write it? In what context does it fit? In echo I am going to paste in a text which our group (the Compass) used as a kind of invitation or convocatorio for people going to the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010. We wanted to meet people and hear their stories, to enlarge the process of co-creation. The echo is very strong, you'll see: CARTOGRAPHY WITH YOUR FEET Driven by the pressures of corporate competition, Midwestern capital elites envision a network of high-speed trains linking the scattered cities of flyover land into a dense urban grid. Oblivious to territories, histories, and peoples, you whisk your way from center to center like a roulette ball spinning through the global casino. What gets lost in these dreams of power are the connections between the city and the country, the earth and the sky, the past and the future. What kinds of worlds are installed on the ground by the neoliberal planning processes developed in the technocratic universities? Why do these projects fail even before they begin? How to start building a cultural and intellectual commons that can seep into the fabric of everyday existence? The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor is a call for longer, slower, deeper connections between the territories where we live. It’s a cartography of shared experience, built up by those who nourish lasting ties between critical groups, political projects, radical communities and experiments in alternative living. Why not help build the commons by overflowing your usual daily routines? Why not make the journey to the US Social Forum into a chance to discover the worlds we can create right here in our own region? This workshop draws from the inspiration of Grace Lee Boggs and the travels of the Compass Group on our Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor. The idea is to propose an act of collective discovery and creation, to be carried out by anyone who’s heading to the Social Forum. Multiple caravans each chart their particular pathways and organize their own activist campaigns, artistic exchanges, skill-sharing sessions, solidarity dinners or whatever else they desire on the roads to Detroit, then converge at the Allied Media conference and the US Social Forum to share stories, images, and artifacts from their detours through the Midwestern labyrinth. Meanwhile, those with different priorities can invent their own forms
Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination
On 03/28/2012 12:48 PM, Ala Plastica wrote: Brian, Muy bueno e inspirador el texto CARTOGRAPHY WITH YOUR FEET. Gracias por compartirlo. Alejandro Encantado que te gustó. El texto iba tan perfectamente con lo que tu dijiste, me pareció como un eco desde lejos. Sin embargo, hay todavía una pregunta sobre la relación entre la resistencia y las fuerzas progresistas de la política constituida, ¿no? Hace mcho tiempo, en Paris en mitad de las noventa, la traducción francesa del libro de Miguel Benasayag y Diego Sztulwark, Política y situación, de la potencia al contrapoder, me hizo un efecto bastante impactante. Ellos decían que había que distinguir entre situaciones de resistencia y situaciones de gestión. Esto no quería decir que uno no podía, y incluso, no debía pasar de una a otra, de la resistencia a un tentativo de gestión más justa (o sea, un tentativo de urban policy). Solamente, lo importante era no confundir las dos, y jamás pensar que uno puede actuar de la misma manera en una situación de gestión como en una situación de resistencia. Trabajar con esta diferencia parece ser la base de toda política pragmática. Saber mantener la diferencia, incluso en las palabras que uno emplea, parece ser la única manera de evitar la retórica engañadora. Y más aún, de mantener abierta la grieta entre demanda popular y respuesta administrativa, de donde sale la fuerza viva de las pocas y raras relaciones democráticas que haya en el mundo social contemporáneo. *** OK, translation time -- I just couldn't help sending that text because it went so perfectly with Alejandro's. That said, isn't there still a question about the relation between resistance and the progressive forces of official politics? A long long time ago, in Paris in the mid-90s, the French translation of the book by Miguel Banasayag and Diego Sztulwark, Política y situación, de la potencia al contrapoder, had a great effect on me. They said you have to distinguish between a situation of resistance and a situation of management. This did not meant that one couldn't, or shouldn't, go from one to the other, from resistance to an attempt at a more just form of management (or what we're calling policy in this discussion). But the important thing was not to confuse the two, and never to act, when you are in a situation of management, in the same way as you would act in a situation of resistance. Working with this difference seems to be the basis of any pragmatic politics. Knowing how to maintain the distinction, even in the words that one uses, seems to be the only way to avoid a manipulative rhetoric. And even more, it's the only way to keep open the crack between grassroots demand and adminstrative response, from which emerge those few and very rare democratic social relations that we can occasionally experience in the contemporary world. all the best, Brian - Original Message - From: Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 11:58 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination On 03/28/2012 04:52 AM, Ala Plastica wrote: In contrast to this idea of natural understanding, an intervention in the environment is often conceived as an occupation based on the idea of transport corridors. In this way, zones are divided according to economic interests and the imagery is guided by commercial means of communication and financial institutions with only a few spaces of brilliant modernity. This can be defined as an ego-system, a system that generates social and environmental toxicity affecting life quality and health conditions seriously. This is exactly what we wanted to poke fun at when we started talking about the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor! It's what my friend Angela Melitopoulos calls corridorical thinking. But this notion of ego-systems is more clear, it goes straight to the heart of the issue. The world is now full of huge, top-down infrastructures, carried out through state planning processes, just to support the illusion of ego cut off / freed from the others. Mind you, I am not sure that all the projects Teddy talks about really fall into this category, I think it's important to look closely when people (even politicians) really try something different... Unfortunately, what is not included in this matrix is the point of view of desirable social human relationships that links the economic and social system with the place vocation. To a great extent, the development of ego-systems occurs in societies due to the break of the flow of social doing -the ability to do things. When this social flow of doing fractures that power of doing turns into the opposite, the power-over who conceives but does not execute, while the others execute but do not conceive. This whole text is beautiful, and what's more, spot on. Thanks for this, Alejandro. Did you write
Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination
Brian, Muy bueno e inspirador el texto CARTOGRAPHY WITH YOUR FEET. Gracias por compartirlo. Alejandro - Original Message - From: Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 11:58 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Resilient Latin America: Reconnecting Urban Policyand the Collective's Imagination On 03/28/2012 04:52 AM, Ala Plastica wrote: In contrast to this idea of natural understanding, an intervention in the environment is often conceived as an occupation based on the idea of transport corridors. In this way, zones are divided according to economic interests and the imagery is guided by commercial means of communication and financial institutions with only a few spaces of brilliant modernity. This can be defined as an ego-system, a system that generates social and environmental toxicity affecting life quality and health conditions seriously. This is exactly what we wanted to poke fun at when we started talking about the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor! It's what my friend Angela Melitopoulos calls corridorical thinking. But this notion of ego-systems is more clear, it goes straight to the heart of the issue. The world is now full of huge, top-down infrastructures, carried out through state planning processes, just to support the illusion of ego cut off / freed from the others. Mind you, I am not sure that all the projects Teddy talks about really fall into this category, I think it's important to look closely when people (even politicians) really try something different... Unfortunately, what is not included in this matrix is the point of view of desirable social human relationships that links the economic and social system with the place vocation. To a great extent, the development of ego-systems occurs in societies due to the break of the flow of social doing -the ability to do things. When this social flow of doing fractures that power of doing turns into the opposite, the power-over who conceives but does not execute, while the others execute but do not conceive. This whole text is beautiful, and what's more, spot on. Thanks for this, Alejandro. Did you write it? In what context does it fit? In echo I am going to paste in a text which our group (the Compass) used as a kind of invitation or convocatorio for people going to the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010. We wanted to meet people and hear their stories, to enlarge the process of co-creation. The echo is very strong, you'll see: CARTOGRAPHY WITH YOUR FEET Driven by the pressures of corporate competition, Midwestern capital elites envision a network of high-speed trains linking the scattered cities of flyover land into a dense urban grid. Oblivious to territories, histories, and peoples, you whisk your way from center to center like a roulette ball spinning through the global casino. What gets lost in these dreams of power are the connections between the city and the country, the earth and the sky, the past and the future. What kinds of worlds are installed on the ground by the neoliberal planning processes developed in the technocratic universities? Why do these projects fail even before they begin? How to start building a cultural and intellectual commons that can seep into the fabric of everyday existence? The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor is a call for longer, slower, deeper connections between the territories where we live. It’s a cartography of shared experience, built up by those who nourish lasting ties between critical groups, political projects, radical communities and experiments in alternative living. Why not help build the commons by overflowing your usual daily routines? Why not make the journey to the US Social Forum into a chance to discover the worlds we can create right here in our own region? This workshop draws from the inspiration of Grace Lee Boggs and the travels of the Compass Group on our Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor. The idea is to propose an act of collective discovery and creation, to be carried out by anyone who’s heading to the Social Forum. Multiple caravans each chart their particular pathways and organize their own activist campaigns, artistic exchanges, skill-sharing sessions, solidarity dinners or whatever else they desire on the roads to Detroit, then converge at the Allied Media conference and the US Social Forum to share stories, images, and artifacts from their detours through the Midwestern labyrinth. Meanwhile, those with different priorities can invent their own forms of travel and exchange, explore diverging temporalities, set up “stationary drifts” in the neighborhoods they inhabit and continue the projects they’re pursuing, while the moving worlds pass through them. By taking the time for a conscious experience of the territories we are continually traversing, we can build up what Stephen Shukaitis calls an “imaginal machine”: a many-headed hydra telling tales
