Film: "Creativity and the Capitalist City"

I am sorry for not to blog in the last months. I have been very busy and stressed with my masters thesis. I will post some of that online soon. Also, I am working on a new film regarding various collective housing models in Berlin: (1) market rate, sustainable, participatory, and common space  building groups (in German Baugruppen), (2) cooperatively financed housing (in German Genossenschaften), and even strategies that develop duel ownership to permanently remove the property form the real-estate market (especially here the Mietshäser Syndikat).

Below is an interesting film that I watched last night that reveals through a documentary film perhaps the most prevalent and pervasive term in contemporary city development throughout the world — creativity. The film was made by urban sociologist Tino Buchholz and is called "Creativity and the Capitalist City: The Struggle for Affordable Space in Amsterdam." It presents many scales of creative activity: squats, anti-squats, city branding, resistance, and the right to the city. Website for the film here. It also has interesting interviews from activists, business leaders, branding organizations, artists, citizens, and political geographer Jamie Peck.

trailer

 


full film in english:
 

the city and the political REFLECTION

http://citypolitical.net/2012/07/20/city-political-papers-now-in-colour/#

The Architect in the Neoliberal City

What is the role of the architect in the neoliberal city?

I am interested in pursing this question during the next five months in Berlin while completing my masters thesis, which I will document on this blog. The project will be both research and practice in attempt to articulate strategies of critical spatial praxis.

Political or police architects?

Below is a draft of the paper I presented at the conference "Architecture and the Political," Beirut, Lebanon, where I try to construct an ethnography using Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, while trying to compare progressive architectural strategies to Jacques Ranciére's concept of politics. If you have any feedback, please leave it below or in an email. Thanks.

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POLITICAL OR POLICE ARCHITECTS? interpreting architecture in place

ABSTRACT

Architects have mobilized in increasing numbers over the past decades to confront rising inequality. Paralleling architecture’s potentially political project, Jacques Rancière has developed a new conception of politics as “disagreement” that confronts our representative democracies’ “police order.” I will approach both topics—new socially-conscious/public-interest architectures and Rancière's politics—as sets of controversies, as advised by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), and try to make them visible. An ethnographic construction will present architecture and politics in the making between concepts, agents, and objects. The Alley Flat Initiative at the University of Texas will perform the controversies in a real place, at which point we can begin to trace the projectile of categories such as Rancière's politics and “political architecture.”  Once the measurements are documented, new projectiles can be proposed in between Rancière's police order (as “police architectures”) and political emancipation (as “political architectures”), between restriction and openness. New experimental practices must build on top of the solid foundations of ANT assemblages with malleable disciplinary specificities, oscillating between critical distance and proximity, while advocating for continued experimentation in the field, placing bricks in time and space.