Daily Archives: June 26, 2013

City, Arts and Public Spaces: Jennifer Wolch

This entry was posted in Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged City Arts and Public Spaces Carbon Hoofprint environmental damage on by .

Cities are centers of consumption, and especially in the west, their ecological footprints however measured are enormous. Buildings energy use and the fuel use of transportation systems are typically the focus of urban sustainability studies, along with urban form and the conservation of habitat within and beyond urban limits. Far less attention is paid to ‘stuff’ and the cultural detritus of modern life, and even less attention is paid to the role of food in the carbon economy.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Dominic Willsdon

This entry was posted in Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged City Arts and Public Spaces Biennial visual culture on by .

Recently, I have become involved in devising contemporary art biennials, at a time when the debate about these events has slowed. Like so many of the dozens of biennials around the world, the two I am now working on – the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre and the Liverpool Biennial – date from the 1990s. Istanbul (1987) and Havana (1984) are among the older contemporary biennials (excluding Venice and São Paulo, which belong to a different time). Before it is anything else, a biennial is an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions supported by a city.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Anthony Cascardi

This entry was posted in Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged City Arts and Public Spaces Dwelling and Beyond humanities environmental design on by .

In the early stages of thought about what we have come to call “global urban humanities,” the term mega-city was suggested to us as the type of site where an exploration of the potential connections between the humanities and fields including environmental design, architecture, and urban planning might be especially fruitful. The suggestion, implicit or explicit, was that the mega-city was especially representative of contemporary conditions and that it presented a unique set of problems, ones that had yet to be thoroughly explored by any of the fields in question. While the term no longer plays a key role in the GUH project, we should not let the questions it might raise fall entirely by the wayside.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Nick Kaye

This entry was posted in Aesthetics Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged City Arts and Public Spaces Site SiteWorks on by .

Contemporary notions of site and place emphasize experiences of instability, displacement and multiplicity. In the context of anthropological and performance theory addressing the performance of place and site, including Marc Auge’s influential Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2004), and linked concepts of “theatre/archaeology,” the stability and continuity of site is called into question. In this work, a site is approached firstly as a construct that is a function of multiple aspects: sites are palimpsestual and simultaneous, embracing diverse material, historical, cultural, spatial, and personal aspects, for different visitors or occupants at different times.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Andrew Weiner

This entry was posted in Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged temporality City Arts and Public Spaces Public Spaces on by .

I’d like to start by echoing the questions that Shannon and others have already begun framing in prior posts. Part of the excitement in joining a cross-disciplinary group like this lies in seeing the precision and inventiveness with which scholars from other fields are able to engage concepts that sometimes seem to lose their edge through overuse. I wonder though about the ways in which the concept of public space might be overdetermined; the same goes for related ideas like publicity, the public sector, and the public sphere (and this is only considering one of our keywords!). I worry a bit that the extreme generativity of these concepts could also prove to be disabling, allowing people from different fields to unwittingly talk past each other even while using the same language.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Michael Dear

This entry was posted in Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged City Arts and Public Spaces Geohumanities place on by .

The ‘geohumanities’ is a transdisciplinary and multi-methodological inquiry that begins with the human meanings of place and proceeds to reconstruct those meanings in ways that produce new knowledge as well as the promise of a better-informed scholarly and political practice. The term is meant to encompass (but not supersede or replace) related but more specific constructs such as the ‘digital humanities.’

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Christian Frock

This entry was posted in Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged public City Arts and Public Spaces civic life marginalized spaces on by .

As much of my work as a writer, curator and educator focuses on the ways artists work in public space, I am drawn to dialog that parses the meaning of public space in civic life. Recently I have been thinking about two (seemingly) unrelated articles by New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman that explore the value of public spaces in an urban context. In an article dated May 31, 2013, titled “A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public Plaza,” Kimmelman considered the trend towards revitalizing marginalized spaces as “public” plazas largely for the benefit of nearby businesses, while only superficially addressing the failure of POPOS to function as truly public platforms (a revelation heightened by the Occupy movement).

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Imanuel Schipper

This entry was posted in Blog City Arts and Public Spaces - June 2013 and tagged urban City Arts and Public Spaces co production organization on by .

Especially when we talk about the specificity of city, we think of something, that is somehow close to a lived situation (with a specific narration, setting, dramaturgy, time-structure) than a fixed place. And this situation is somehow more than „only“ the place. It also seems clear to me that we (as visitors or inhabitants of that city) are producing (or at least co-producing) that situation. I would like to strength the importance of „producing meanings“ (and always re-producing new meanings) to our life and our surroundings – but also the importance of knowing that we are constantly in the process of producing meaning.

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