| Eric Kluitenberg on Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:48:18 +0100 (CET) |
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| [Nettime-nl] Definitef Programma & Abstracts By-Pass: Everyday Life and Contemporary Urbanism in India and China, De Balie, Zaterdag 15 November 2008 |
beste nettime-nl'ers, Hierbij het definitief programma van de By-Pass conferentie in De Balie, Zaterdag 15 november, 10 - 17 uur. Abstracts en info over sprekers is hieronder bijgevoegd. De voertaal van de conferentie is Engels, daarom is het programma ook in het Engels gesteld. Een algemene beschrijving in het Nederlands is al eerder via deze lijst verstuurd en op de site te vinden. www.debalie.nl/bypass vriendelijke groet, Eric ------------------- By-Pass Everyday Life and Contemporary Urbanism in India and China International symposium www.debalie.nl/bypass De Balie, Amsterdam Saturday November 15; Time | 10.00 - 17.00 hrs Admission | € 17,50 / 12,50 (including lunch) For the first time the majority of the world population today lives in cities. A significant part of the new urban expansion in the past decade has been in Asia, where urban expansion, crisis and mass migration emerged in the context of a boom culture. By-Pass is an international symposium about urban culture and everyday life in the rapidly transforming mega cities of India and China. The symposium will bring together a renowned group of scholars and practitioners to examine these changes specifically at the ground level. Here, urban structures are continuously reconfigured by 'the Bypass'. The bypass is not formal, but at the same time, more than the informal forms that have always existed in cities. The Bypass is a tactic that is deployed by all kinds of urban groups - slum dwellers engaging in incremental development; street level entrepreneurs establishing newer networks of production and selling; civil society organisations and formal planners short-circuiting policy and planning processes, private and governmental agencies employing tactical ways to assemble land, urban media forms that disrupt official channels etc. The language of the Bypass cannot be articulated through mainstream ideas of formality, legality, planning, public etc. - it warrants a newer creative engagement. Asian cities offer an important site for this engagement. The symposium will focus on discussing and engaging with the complexities of the Bypass. This will be done through an exploration of newer ideas on incrementality, entrepreneurship, piracy, mapping, networks, media-urbanism and image of the city by architects, urbanists, historians, geographers and media scholars. By-Pass is organised by De Balie in Amsterdam in collaboration with Sarai in Delhi and CRIT in Mumbai. With: Awadhendra Sharan (Historian, Delhi), Juan Du (Architectural theorist, University of Hong Kong), Martijn de Waal (Media scholar, Amsterdam / University of Groningen), Prasad Shetty (CRIT, Mumbai), Ranjani Mazumdar (Film maker and theoretician, Delhi), Ravi Sundaram (Sarai, Delhi), Rupali Gupte (Architect, Mumbai), Solomon Benjamin (Political scientist Bangalore / University of Toronto), Wing-Shing Tang (Social geographer, Hong Kong),. Symposium editors: Prasad Shetty (CRIT); Ravi Sundaram (Sarai); Merijn Oudenampsen (Urban sociologist); Eric Kluitenberg (De Balie). A web dossier has been set up for the symposium, which brings together various background materials: www.debalie.nl/bypass. The symposium can also be followed live via internet at: www.debalie.nl/live . Recordings of the symposium will later be made available in the web dosssier. ------------------------------- SPEAKERS Awadhendra Sharan is a historian and Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi, India). His work involves research that connects environmental issues to urban space, with reference to the city of Delhi. He also works with Sarai, Delhi and offers guest lectures at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi and School of Environmental Studies, Delhi University. Juan Du is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Hong Kong and Principal of IDU architecture. She teaches architectural design and contemporary urban theory. She has practiced and taught in the United States, Europe and China and co-curated “Performative-Cities" in the 2007 Shenzen - Hong Kong Biennale Martijn de Waal is a researcher on urban and social issues and digital media at the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam. Contributed an essay on Chinese urban visuality to the recent anthology "The Chinese Dream" published by the Dynamic City Foundation (Rotterdam / Beijing), Fall 2008. Ranjani Mazumdar is an Independent Filmmaker & Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India). Her publications and films focus on urban culture, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of "Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City" (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Her current research focuses on globalization and film culture, film and history and Bombay's cinematic city in the 1950s Rick Dolphijn is assistant professor at Humanities, Utrecht University, where he lectures and writes on communication theory, cultural theory, philosophy of science, media theory, linguistics, art and cultural studies. He has visited and studied cities in China and India and has written on Asian urbanism and Deleuzian theory in architecture magazine Volume, amongst others. Rupali Gupte is an architect and urbanist. She works is a Senior Lecturer at the Kamala Raheja Institute of Architecture (Mumbai, India) and is also an executive member of CRIT, Mumbai. As an urban researcher she has worked in India and Africa and lectured at UK, US, and the Netherlands. She recently showed a work on mapping post industrial landscapes at Manifesta 7: The European Art Biennale in Italy, Her works includes studies of housing types in Mumbai, a novel on a semi-fictional history of Mumbai's urbanism and writing on the city's tactical infrastructures. Solomon Benjamin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. He researches the way land (mostly incrementally developed), economy (mostly constituted around small inter-connected firms), locates in a mainstream 'everyday politics'. Disrupting high modernism. The emergent urbanism poses new conceptual spaces beyond the current anxiety with progressive policy and activism. Wing Shing Tang is Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University. His research focuses on urban (re)development and planning in Hong Kong and mainland China. Current research projects include "land (re)development in Hong Kong: the land (re)development regime, hegemonic construction and the people", "utopian urbanism in Hong Kong", "the geographies of power of sustainable development in Hong Kong: an inside-out approach", "the urban revolution in China: meeting Foucault with Gramsci and Lefebvre", ------------------------------- PROGRAMME 10.00 - 10.30 Introduction The Conference as intervention Eric Kuitenberg The problematic of Asian Urbanism Ravi Sundaram Session 1 - Setting the Frame Prasad Shetty (Moderator) 10.30 - 10.50 Three Petitions and a City: the Public and the Private Awadhendra Sharan 10.50 - 11.10 People's Activities in an Urban Village in Guangzhou: Beyond Informality Wing Shing Tang 11.10 - 11.30 Indian & Chinese Occupancy Urbanism: Disrupting the Nation State & appropriating High Modernism Solomon Benjamin 11.30 - 11.50 Back to the Future Juan Du 11.50 - 12.30 Discussion 12.30 - 13.30 - LUNCH BREAK Session 2 - Imagining the City Eric Kluitenberg (moderator) 13.30 - 13.50 Workforms + Playforms Rupali Gupte 13.50 - 14.10 Two City Forms: Axionometric Vision and Linear Perspective Rick Dolphijn 14.10 - 14.30 The Urban Fringe Ranjani Mazumdar 14.30 - 14-50 Green Tea, Black Coffee, Splendid Cities? Urban culture in contemporary Chinese visual culture Martijn De Waal 14.50 - 15.30 Discussion 15.30 - 16.00 - BREAK Session 3 - Open Session & Closing Discussion Merijn Oudenampsen (chair) 16.00 - 17.00 Round-Table with Solomon Benjamin, Rupali Gupte, Juan Du, Rick Dolphijn & Ravi Sundaram ------------------------------- ABSTRACTS Three Petitions and a City AWADHENDRA SHARAN In December1985 oleum gas leaked from a unit of the Shriram Foods and Fertilisers industry located in Delhi. Coincidentally, earlier the same year the lawyer-activist M. C. Mehta had filed a public petition before the Supreme Court of India arguing that the operations of the factory were hazardous for the communities that lived in the vicinity. In that same year, Mehta filed two other writ petitions, subsequently referred to as the Delhi land Use Case and Vehicular Pollution case. I will address these three petitions, in their invocation of the idea of 'public', in this presentation. The presentation is by way of an initial inquiry into the limit of the idea of the 'public' to suggest other ways in which we may imagine a new project of the commons in the contemporary. Mehta had suffered no personal injury. He spoke instead as a citizen, acting as a custodian of public rights and interests. The burden of the petitions was several. Local authorities had failed to discharge their public functions. Smoke and highly toxic gases were being allowed to pass into the air and effluents were being discharged into the water. Industries, both hazardous and illegal, were functioning unchecked in the city, posing constant danger to millions of people and causing diseases ranging from tuberculosis to asthama, skin diseases to cancer. Toxic wastes, their collection, treatment and disposal, were ill attended to. There were also problems in the rural areas of the city, with many legal and illegal insecticide units operating in them. Humans were not alone to suffer, Mehta argued, the toxics affecting tress, shrubs and agricultural crops too. Historic sites of the city - the Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Old Fort, India Gate and Jantar Mantar - were also mute sufferers. My presentation is about the slippages between the different terms deployed in Mehta's petition - polluting, hazardous, (il)legal, dangerous, (un)safe, rural/urban to argue that it is precisely through such slippages that what is imagined as the 'public interest' related to the 'environment' remains always necessarily enmeshed in other dimensions of the urban everyday that are about spaces for living and work, modes of travel and recreation. Indeed, I shall argue, the plea for better environment may potentially also pose new risks for these other spaces/ modes of being. One response to this, in India and elsewhere, has been to re-enact the public, through arguments roughly phrased as 'claims to the city.' This, I shall suggest, is increasingly inadequate both in terms of understanding the contemporary everyday and as a mode of intervention in it. Back to the Future Juan Du With an official municipal history of only 25 years, Shenzhen's stunning speed of urban development has been the subject of much analysis and debate. While some applaud the city as a successful model of modern planning in Asia, others consider it devoid of history and culture. However, these opposing positions overlook the very complex and nuanced process of urbanization that is contemporary Shenzhen. The historical presence and transformations of the former agrarian villages within the city is one of the most important instruments for the on-going urbanization process in Shenzhen. Developed outside of the jurisdiction of municipal planning and regulations, these village sites have each become urban environments in their own right, together presenting a rich variety of informal modes of urbanization. Analysis of these village sites presents a re- evaluation of existing theories on the development process of Shenzhen and demands radical reformation to the process of modern urban planning. Green Tea, Black Coffee, Splendid Cities? Urban culture in contemporary Chinese visual culture MARTIJN DE WAAL In the past decade or so, China, a country of farmers, has become a nation dominated by megacities. Where once farmers plowed the yellow earth, now mirror-glassed high rises have appeared to demarcate yet another emerging 'CBD' (Central Business District). Official ideology - and its visual culture - saw a similar turn. Up to the era of the cultural revolution, the countryside was eulogized, cities were vilified. Now modern cities are portrayed as places of joy, as sites where one can gloriously get rich. Postcards, tv series, billboards, city marketing videofilms eagerly portray this newly minted Chinese Dream of middle class life in a modern urban setting. But how do these representations relate to more direct experiences of city life? And where can we find the dissonants to this new official urban mythology? In the work of some contemporary Chinese artists and filmmakers we find a more critical eye on the new urban society that is emerging in China. The Urban Fringe RANJANI MAZUMDAR Globalization in India has brought about many shifts in the nature of the relationship between cinema and the urban experience. These shifts need to be located within a map where the expansion of television, the rise of multiplexes, the global circulation of DVDs and the rise of a new cinephile culture, have led to speculations about a new imaginary film spectator who can handle a different kind of cinema in India. It is this contemporary context that has given rise to a cinema on the margins of the popular, which we can provisionally call the Fringe. Emerging from the periphery of the Film industry, the Fringe is struggling against prevailing forms to create a new cinematic language. These films speak in a global language to evoke a crumbling urban world which appears unfamiliar in relation to the melodramatic form commonly associated with India's popular cinema. Influenced by Hollywood, European, and Asian cinema, the Fringe circulates like a virus alongside the delirium of globalisation today. In a context where "Bollywood" has emerged as a chapter in Indian diplomacy and advertisement for India's global rise, the new urban fringe suggests a very different world. Two City Forms: Axionometric Vision and Linear Perspective RICK DOLPHIJN In order to conceptualize two very different strategies for urban change, art history offers us two perspectives (that of axonometric vision and that of linear perspective) that give us better insight in how cities, especially in its European and in its East-Asian appearance, are subjected to processes of Change. Connected to the Deleuzian concepts of the fold/ the unfold and of the this presentation intends to show in what way our two main concepts allow us to rethink concepts like public space, the street, the facade and several other ideas important for architectural theory. Workforms + Playforms RUPALI GUPTE Modern Urban Planning deals with issues of Working, Living and Leisure through ideas of ideal standards and equitable provisions. These then get manifested into regulations, neatly drawn out urban plans and rules for their enforcement. These ways of planning have been dominant in Indian contexts as well. However contemporary Indian urbanism has shown that it spurs multiple patterns of everyday life, of inhabiting urban space, that somehow do not fit in the neatly parcelled plans. Work, living and leisure manifest themselves in multiple ways, occupying unique spaces in the city. This paper will discuss two studio projects conducted at the Kamla Raheja Institute for Architecture in Mumbai titled: Workforms and Playforms that build on this understanding. The paper would not only discuss the various, often bizarre, patterns through which work, living and leisure are acted out by various constituents in the city; but also the difficulties in mapping them through conventional methods. The paper will further discuss innovative methods that were explored in the studio to map these conditions and possibilities that design interventions provide in these fragile situations. Indian & Chinese Occupancy Urbanism: Disrupting the Nation State & appropriating High Modernism SOLOMON BENJAMIN Indian and Chinese cities show significant urbanisms to lie beyond the ambit of the nation state to disrupt and appropriate policy frames to be 'globally competitive'. We look at Bombay, Bangalore, as well as 'Small commodity' centers like Yiwu in China's Wenzhou districts. Essential to this politics is local authority's embedding in popular society via land -- reconstituted into complex tenure forms to defy centralized planning. Such embeddings spur an everyday politics where real estate surpluses fuel an economy of 'suitcase entrepreneurs'. These economic networks shape a vibrant globalization 'from below'. Not surprisingly, these developments are un-palatable to international investors: High powered NYC lawyers cry foul over 'legal protectionism' around unplanned land development in Guangzhou's cities; Procter and Gamble hired academics portray Yiwu to the US Senate, as centers of: 'piracy, counterfeit culture, and even possible terrorist funding'. These urbanisms also disrupt Mike Davis's narrative of future cities as violent slum-scapes, rife with social and political disintegration. Instead a more useful conceptual frame comes from legal pluralism derived 'porous legalities', notions of 'subaltern cosmopolitanism', and a consideration of the Everyday State' that returns us to Polyani's economy embedded into society. People's Activities in an Urban Village in Guangzhou: Beyond Informality WING SHING TANG One prominent feature of China's current urban landscape is the prevalence of 'villages-in-the-city', or simply abbreviated as 'urban villages' (in Chinese, it is called Chengzhongcun). Chengzhongcun is the outcome of urban encroachment on rural villages, sometimes former production brigades and clan villages, both inside, and on the fringe of, the city. Nowadays, tens of thousands of migrant workers relocate, mostly temporarily, from the countryside to these urban villages to sell their labour power in the city, while some indigenous villagers might have already relocated themselves to newly built apartments elsewhere. Concomitantly, a kind of new urban community starts to form in the city. There, people live a way of life different from the urban, which is now very much commodified, albeit still under étatisation one way or other. The way of life found in Chenzhoncun is usually characterised as self-help or informal by the literature, in that their non-state behaviour of, on the part of indigenous villagers, renting land for real estate development and building extra floor space on the top of their own houses for renting-out purposes, and, on the part of migrant workers, entering into residential contract with owner-occupiers, opening new petit-bourgeois, small labour-intensive businesses of offering catering, personal services, and transport and errand services to service the community. This paper challenges the self-help or informal concept and, instead, argues to understand their new way of life as a kind of innovative techniques to survive in the context of widespread hegemonic and sub-hegemonic construction. This argument is illustrated with a case study of Shipai Village in the city of Guangzhou. www.debalie.nl/bypass ______________________________________________________ * Verspreid via nettime-nl. 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