Following on our issue of Space and Culture, the first refereed publication on Hurricane Katrina, and recent anthology What is a City? The Urban after Katrina (University of Georgia Press 2008) edited by Philip Steinberg and Rob Shields, one of the contributors, Jordan Flaherty, reports on the recent evacuation of the city for Hurricane Gustav as a correspondent for Democracy Now:
And, not to forget the worsening situation in Haiti, see here
-Rob
Space and Culture readers may be interested in my recently completed PhD dissertation, A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media.
From the abstract:
Following urban computing and locative media and their accompanying visions from labs, conferences and classrooms to journal publications and popular media accounts, this dissertation presents four case histories in corporate, academic and artistic design practice. An analysis of the Mobile Bristol, Passing Glances, Sonic City and Urban Tapestries research and design projects draws out the idea that everyday life in the future city is expected to become more expressive, engaging and meaningful. The increased extensibility and transmissibility of the city itself, along with an increased ability to be socially embedded within it, is seen to be a fundamental promise inherent in these projects. The dissertation argues that such spatial and cultural potentialities can be productively understood as involving temporary, selective and mobile publics, where creative and playful interactions emerge as primary means of social innovation…
I’ve posted both the full dissertation (1.33 mb pdf) and individual chapters, and feedback is always welcome.
- Anne
Found Space Tiles by Stephanie Davidson
As an architect I often ask myself, how can this surface, this wall or floor, give more? What more can it give? In answering this question, I have produced a series of ceramic tile prototypes - tiles that reach out to be touched.Much like appropriating found objects, in my work I use the found spaces between bodies and architectural surfaces, and turn them into positive forms. The design process is incidental; the forms happen, they aren’t sculpted or orchestrated. The resulting tiles are a formal hybrid between two very necessary and basic architectural elements, the body and the wall. Part body and part wall, the tiles echo the presence of a person, a posture, and literally reach-out to touch and be touched.
What these tiles give is a reference to the human body, embedded in a building material. The tiles encourage direct physical interaction; through touching and leaning, bodies find new niches for support, undulating folds and protrusions for resting, stimulating pressure points, or simply fitting like a garment - a new-found intimacy.
In my process of form or space finding, I’ve used fabric formwork to cast or fill the negative gaps between bodies and walls. The finished tiles, after being materially translated into ceramic, freeze a posture, a moment of body-wall contact, as well as the behaviour of fabric - stretching or bulging in response to the pressure of the body and the weight of the plaster. The tiles play with the senses, appearing still soft and responsive.
Made in posture and/or body-specific clusters, the tiles are designed in standard finished dimensions, to be incorporated into standard tiled walls. This series of prototypes has been made to be integrated into a standard and inexpensive 15 x 15cm tile surface.
Research and prototypes for Found Space Tiles were made during a residency for architecture + ceramics at the European Ceramic Work Centre (ekwc) in s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, October 2007 - February 2008. They were exhibited in the designboom mart at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in NY in May 2008, and have been recently added to materia.nl, a well-known web-database of new and innovative architectural materials. Found Space Tiles will be produced by the Dutch ceramics company Corunum and will be available in August 2008.
- Ondine
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize - Best Documentary - Sundance Film Festival, Trouble the Water opens in select cities this weekend.
Trouble The Water takes audiences on a journey that is by turns heart stopping, infuriating, inspiring and empowering. People leave the theaters wanting and needing to do something – not only about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, but about the underlying issues that remained when the floodwaters receded – failing public schools, record high levels of incarceration, poverty, lack of government accountability and structural racism…”
Looks interesting - let us know if you happen to catch it.
- Anne
Knowing Places: The Inuinnait, Landscapes and the Environment, Béatrice Collignon. Translation of Les Inuit : ce qu’ils savent du territoire. Translation and scientific editing by Linna Weber Müller-Willie. Circumpolar Research Series No.10, CCI Press, University of Alberta: Edmonton, Canada, 2006. ISSN 0838133X.
The points become fewer, the lines fade out as fewer and fewer people travel along them. Empty spaces increase… the territory has become increasingly limited to those few points from which they can carry out…activities only to provide extra food….The lines from those points all lead back to the settlement. These lines have begun to resumble modern highways where the modern weekend hunter travels, unaware of the areas on either side – areas that used to be important to his father, grandfather and forefathers.” (p.195)
Can one of the most different appreciations of the landscape and sense of geography can be found amongst the Inuit? In an environment where ice-covered land blurs into sea, there is not only a detailed vocabulary and profound sense of snow and ice, for example landfast and sea ice, but also of location and the landscape as an ecosystem of animals and their territories. Survival over centuries has depended on close attention to the details and possibilities of hunting and fishing grounds, but this is changing with life in settlements, more rapid travel by snowmobile rather than by dogsled, a shift to English, European bans on seal-hunting and more recently a US ban which ended the livelihood of guides for polar bear hunters. A small ecotourism industry exists on Victoria Island.
Collignon offers a very readable and important account of place-naming amongst the Inuinnait, the Inuit who live in the western areas of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Her work is centred specifically in and around Ulukhaqtuuq ([Ulukhaktok] formerly Holman) on Victoria Island. She marvellously describes the cultural and economic schanges which are resulting in a loss of geographical knowledge and declining familiarity with the region. While,
the Baffin Islanders made use of the increase range of the machines…Inuinnait have primarily taken advantage of the speed. They do not travel farther, but do not stop at the traditional staging areas anymore and they go ‘back and forth’ more often….from the 1980s onward, snowmobiles…have been a means toward a life increasingly centred in and around the settlement.” (p.188)
The result of several sojourns and over more than a decade by the French anthropologist, the book is an excellent translation of her Ph.D. research for the benefit of northern residents. On the one hand she gives us diary-like descriptions of going hunting, showing how people interact with and comment on sites and the landscape, on the other hand by analyzing place names she shows the importance of place to memory and the relational deep-structure of Inuinnait geography. Read the rest of this entry »