Urban Constellations – An Overview of Contemporary Urban Discourse

A Review -The text book edited by Matthew Gandy (see also his blog cosmopolis) brings together five years of work and ideas associated with the 2005 established Urban Laboratory at University College London.  As a recent graduate from the Urban Laboratory I am well familiar with the institute’s ideas and interdisciplinary work. And especially this interdisciplinary approach is well established in the readings of the book. With an emphasis on small essays (each one of the 37 (!) essays is no longer than three pages) borrowed from Siegfried Kracauer’s use of ‘urban vignettes’ the book aims for an audience that is not solely embedded within the academia associated with urban studies. In fact the form of urban vignettes is very much reminiscent of the contemporary blog-post format and – as many of the small essays reveal – bears the potential to get across complex topics in a concise way.

Anagram Urbanism - Re-shuffling the City

Jellyfish Theatre London 2010 (image source)

When skimming through my notebook today, I got reminded of a lecture by German artists Köbberling/Kaltwasser back in November at the University of the Arts Berlin. The artists were presenting a series of projects and urban interventions in public space under the subject of considering the city as anagram. Their site-specific interventions use locally sourced materials that are transformed into object-like architectural constructions. Characteristically, the appearance of those constructions is imperfect and unfinished. After the destruction of the installations, objects and houses, the materials the artists have been using, disintegrate in the materiality of the city again.

Open Source Urbanism – The Hacking City

There exist various different notions of Open Source Urbanism and in recent years various – sometimes crucially different - approaches to conceptualise phenomena in the contemporary metropolis have been developed under this terminology. Saskia Sassen’s talk on Talking back to your Intelligent City at the BMWLab last summer was recently put online and has been inspiring this post.

Theory & Event - Supplement on OWS

Image Source

The Journal Theory & Event Volume 14 Number 4 published a supplement on Occupy Wall Street that is openly available for three month. Contributions are amongst others Slavoj Žižek on Actual Politics and the journal's co-editor Jodi Dean on Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong.

Walter Benjamin - One Way Street

John Hughes' film One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1993) provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the central ideas in Benjamin's writings. Moreover, Hughes tries to translate some of Benjamin's ideas also visually through fragmentation using sub-frames, graphic overlaps and abrupt colour shifts. Definitely worth watching.