nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
Hi Rana - it was with pleasure that I read your post - FINALLY, the list is getting exciting again. I was just in New Zealand with Suketu, and am happy to report his book Maximum City won the Kiriyama Prize, which is a kind of Pacific Rim/South Asia equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S. New Zealand, which gets about 80% of it's energy supplies from solar, thermal, hydro, and wind power, is a great example of a European society that is coming to grips not only with the upcoming energy crisis that the West has fueled, but also, it's at least got a level comfort with diversity and multiculturalism than almost anything one can find in Europe. All I can say is yeah, Europe is tired, America is tired. The theory scene is wy tired. Rana, all I can say is please post more! Andreas, Keith - Rana is a guy... It's been really funny to see you both refer to him as a her Cultural Sensitivities 101, eh? Paul ps. In light of the issues I think that Rana has broached on the list, I think I'll post an article by Mike Davis on New Orleans - America's own Third World city, right in the heart of the Red States! Rana - try visiting there sometime! http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis The Nation [from the April 10, 2006 issue] Who Is Killing New Orleans? By MIKE DAVIS Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness. The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock. Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that New Orleans is back, pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home. In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, New Urbanists and neo- Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority- black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances. Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to get the work done quickly and mount one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen has proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction. With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney Frank has labeled a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction--the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return. Lie and Stall After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech that we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's] poverty with bold action We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of government, while its conservative attack dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values.
Re: nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
There is hardly a better prescription for dreaming of suicide, by cities, persons or ideoligies, than comfortable success and lack of a need to struggle to survive. The invention of the Third World brand came from the mental laziness non-western intellectuals and political ideolgues grown soft from the luxury of being treated as exotics by the west -- so long as they only intellectualized and ineptly agitated politically and posed no serious threat. Dollops of overt and covert funding assured the dogs of ample feedings and preenings, not lost on domestic curs seeking the same from their caretakers and pervasive spies and turncoats. When all goes well, whether western or eastern, or lately African and South American, daydreams of ending it all oneself rather than being tortured and murdered, as if there is a correspondence between nightmares imposed on others and aesthetic murder of one's ego, or intellectual guilt of distancing from direct guilt of doing harm by way of impotently attacking the doers of crimes against humans. Third World is hoary nomenclature of world bankism or worse, UNism, promise without substance, so it is no wonder it has become a star powerfully attacting celebrity do nothings -- hardly limited to aging rock stars, say, where Hugo Chavez's luxurious accommodations are concerned, it's a tourist magnet, oh my, Che, what a come down to t-shirts and trickets in a VE mall. Third World was peopled by political rock star academics and indies looking for replacement funding for the petered out Cold War brand, now seeking alternatives to the threadbare Viet Nam schtick, the civil and human rights carcasses, the ethnic, feminist, negritude, marxian flayed corpses. Meanwhile, western cities have continued to rot with untended pathologies, sustained by the greatest number of spies and police and largest military and military-addicted economies ever in history. Vile and villainous neighborhoods so overplayed by the media that nobody wants to squander a career looking at the failure of generations of promises at home for a better and safer homeland, and thus embarassing the erstwhile leaders of the poor who promised to lead their people better than alien insensitive outsiders, and where there is as much evidence for intellectual dishonesty as can be found outside the countries which must spawn critics and apologists or be judged uncivilized by perfectly mirrored other critics and apologists. It will be come increasingly fashionable to argue that the poor can do a better job of helping themselves than unreliable outsiders. That is a predictable cycle which follows failed intentions of good hearts when funding disappears -- except for last gasp efforts to justify abandoning the needy. And fat-gutted outsiders will become so bereft of purpose that suicide becomes highly appealing -- in the abstract, burp. Call it Camusian, rebel without cause. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
Andreas, Thank you for bringing up again the fundamental issues raised by Rana's essay. My own immediate response to her exchange with Ben was intemperate; so you have given me another chance to be more reasoned. The main demographic event of the last half-century was the rise of Third World cities. These have been seen in fairly pathological terms as having created a planet of slums (Mike Davis). Black Africa, which began the twentieth century with only about 1% of its people living in cities, ended it with half of them living there. It is a matter of some interest what social and cultural forms are emerging under these conditions, but we know at least of a religious revival, an explosion of the modern arts and a proliferating urban commerce, usually referred to as 'informal'. Rana raised the question of how these seismic shifts in the size, location and character of the human population might be manifested in the cultural representations of the West. A century ago, as Sven Lindqvist makes clear in Exterminate All The Brutes, the answer would have taken the form of a genocidal impulse rooted in centuries of colonial exploitation. Today it is more likely to take the form of a vision of Africa as a dying continent (Stephen Smith's Negrologie: pourquoi l'Afrique meurt, Hubert Sauper's movie, Darwin's Nightmare or just the endless reporting of disease, war, hunger and death). In 2005 this vision was linked to a rescue mission (at least at the propaganda level) launched by a bunch of cynical politicians and fronted by ageing rock stars). How long is it since the main threat to planetary ecology was an excess of black babies? Now we are told that Africa is dying, even though its population is still increasing at 2.5% and the continent has just reached a share of the world's population equal to its share of the land mass, a seventh. Meanwhile Europe cannot reproduce itself and goes into paroxysms of nationalism and xenophobia when faced with the prospect of having to replace its working-age population from abroad. It is not as if the threat posed by proliferating poor masses is new to the western imagination. In the present case, we are witnessing also the prospect of a decisive shift of production and capital accumulation to countries like China, India and Brazil. The West's grip on a world economy designed to generate substantial unearned income for us is slipping. This surely explains the Americans' resort to military imperialsim as a last ditch attempt to hold on by force and Blair's decision to go down with thier guns blazing rather than work for a European alternative. And the Europeans, what is their global strategy? Myopia and withdrawal. Somehow all of this must be registering in people's minds. The French, as usual, give prominent expression to their sense of a deep malaise, even if the solutions on offer seem equally introspective. I live in Paris which has become the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow shopping capital of the world. I like it here, because it is so unexciting. Andreas's Berlin must be more exciting, especially if it has moved on from being the building site it was when I last visited. I doubt if there would be many Indians ready to vote for Mumbai as the city of the future. It would be good to have a discussion about what cities offer promising social possibilities. But there is this unspoken undercurrent. Has the West finally hit the slippery slope of its long-advertised decline? Some people would say that we are not only dying, but committing suicide. London's Institute of the Contemporary Arts is putting on a 'discussion' next month. (Can't you imagine it? I think we have lost it. Well, there are still signs of greatness...). http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=14824 The Suicide of the West? The success of Western civilisation can be attributed to just six factors, according to Chris Smith and Richard Koch: Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism and individualism. These principles, however, have been increasingly eroded over the past century so that where once citizens of the West felt a collective confidence and pride, they instead appear to be heading for collective suicide. Should the West try and save the concepts on which it was based or replace them with new ones? Speakers: Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury, UK MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony Blair's cabinet; Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle; Roger Osborne, author of Civilization: A New History of the Western World and Jeremy Stangroom, co-founder, The Philosophers' Magazine. Wed 19 Apr 19:00 Nash Room And on that suicide note, Cheers, Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info
Re: nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
dear rana, though i am neither well-travelled in the third world and its metropolises, nor a student of their socio-economies, i would like to raise some questions with regard to your thought-provoking article. the hypothesis (the Third-World metropolis is becoming the symbol of the new) is of course rivetting, however: what if those cities which you, equally polemically, characterise as 'suffocating piles of slums and desperation (that) are too exhausted, too moribund to bring forth futures', are becoming more _visible_, yet not more exemplary for anything but the escalating miseries of globalisation, with the destruction of agricultural economies and the migration of people? i will happily join all sorts of speculations about what might and what might not happen in the future. i also admit that (and this seems to be the main point of your article, right) you successfully instill a sense of unease about the way west-europeans might live in the future. yet, living in the mellow and fairly well-organised city of berlin, and having seen different places and many different ways of living, i fail to see why your hypothesis needs to be put forward in such a triumphant language. what if the cities and circumstances you describe are in fact not the future, but a present condition which might be overcome, alleviated, collapse, change? i guess that what i want to take issue with is the simple teleology of your speculation. as though there were not many other models for the way in which people live _today_, for the way in which cities are changing, and for the way economic and social change is affecting the development of urbanisms. and for the way in which we want to imagine that change. regards, -a # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
On 24/03/06, Keith Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But I truly wonder where Benjamin got the material for his riposte Mostly from listening to Egyptians. Where do you get your information on Bolivian politics?The Guardian? I admit I'm far from knowledgeable about Bolivia, but what brought it to mind was the articles in the current issue of New Left Review. Ben # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
On 23/03/06, Rana Dasgupta [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: THE SUDDEN STARDOM OF THE THIRD-WORLD CITY I think you have a point about Westerners' changing perceptions, but perhaps you ought to have mentioned the vast gulf between those commodified images and the ways many who live in third-world megacities perceive their own environment: not as a vibrant, irrepressible source of unlimited creativity, but as a prison to which they resign themselves or from which they long to escape. The lack of clear rules and the labyrinth of informal, parallel economic and political systems, with their merciless logic of nepotism and bribery, ruling over masses of disposable people, tend to breed Kafkaesque despair rather than the thrill of unfettered, improvised ingenuity.=20 Perhaps this helps explain why, in those countries where popular movements have been most successful, as in Bolivia's recent elections, they seem to have relied heavily on the mobilisation of rural populations. Also, Western tourists and consumers are not perhaps the only ones who admire the third world: is Silvio Berlusconi, in gaining personal control of the media and the economy, consciously imitating certain third-world autocrats? As Western elites search for a political formula that maintains the trappings of democracy while staving off the spectre of egalitarianism, might they (such as those who arranged for George W. Bush to follow in his father's footsteps) not find inspiration in the rigged elections, media homogeneity, trompe-l'oeil political parties and dynastic regimes that are a fixture of politics in many countries further South? Ben # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
