Assorted Links #43

• The Meaning of 9/11's Most Controversial Photo
• Maker Faire Kansas City 2011
• Olympukes (2004)
• Canopy by United Visual Artists
• TypArchive

Credits: Photo from Occupy Wall Street Spreads Beyond NYC.

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Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson on Cultural Geography

"Culture is not a residual category, the surface variation left unaccounted for by more powerful economic analyses; it is the very medium through which social change is experienced, contested and constituted."

Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson, from "New Directions in Cultural Geography," Area, 1987.

This is part of a collection of quotes related to cities. They don't necessarily reflect our views, just topics of interest. We welcome you to add others.

Credits: Photo from Smithtown Radio.

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Wall Trees of Hong Kong

Forbes Street in Kennedy Town.

Hong Kong, dense and vertical, isn't known for its street trees. But it has something most cities don't: wall trees. These trees, usually Figs (Ficus microcarpa), are found clinging to the masonry retaining walls built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as the city carved its neighborhoods into the steep green hillsides overlooking Victoria Harbor. The trees, having found purchase on the wall via a digesting bird, ultimately root in the fissures and cracks in these walls, some developing into specimens of impressive size and Michelangelo-like form.






If Michelangelo did the roots, Roger Dean (artist of the trippiest Yes album covers from the 1970s and 1980s) was certainly responsible for some of the compositions.

These trees are habitats for urban wildlife. They contribute shade where it is often lacking. They filter the hazy air and take a few decibels off the constant din of traffic and construction. They even add stability to the walls, as their fine roots enmesh the structure with the soil and bedrock behind it. Beautiful and functional, the trees are an important urban phenomenon that the city is beginning to appreciate and protect.

Credits: Photos of Hong Kong trees from Forz, Ivan Valin and Jashhk. Album cover by Roger Dean.

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Tagging the Megalopolis: Pixação in Sao Paulo

Modern graffiti, more than the artistic expression of poor youth in the metropolis, represents a unique urban phenomenon. Starting in New York City during the 1970s, graffiti borrowed its Italian name from the first technical dictionary of Renaissance art through a reference to decorative interiors. Today the term symbolizes a practice carried out publicly on the street.

From its early days, graffiti was assimilated into contemporary art and its circuit of galleries. The work of graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the youngest artist profiled in the Documenta’s 1982 edition, acquired significance beyond the art of a street performer. Within the creative and corporate context of Warhol’s Factory, two of art pieces — reinterpretations of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David — were created and reproduced exhaustively to become sensational statements. They combined the experience of viewing with that of consumption, linking the images to glamour and cinema stardom. Basquiat’s modern recreations of these Renaissance icons took graffiti from the street into the gallery.



Turning to the city, graffiti is an urban practice that embodies characteristics and expressions of youth culture in the modern metropolis, particularly of poor youth. First, it is an artistic act motivated by the intention to mark time and existence. It is also a social act, geared by the willingness to overcome the social invisibility that poor urban youth endure. Lastly, it is the unconscious manifestation of the search for identity in an engulfing metropolis. Graffiti allows its practitioners to state: “Yes, I exist. I am here, and I paint on the walls of the houses that isolate you from public space, a place that belongs to everyone and anyone.”

These interventions reveal graffiti artists' desire for recognition. Their act of “tagging” the city increases their visibility within its vast scale. Their legacy is marked on the overwhelming concrete canvas of the city.

Beginning in the slums of New York City, graffiti spread among youth in most cities around the world. Its methods constitute a definitive language and skillful artistic expression. Its fast spray-painting techniques, and the complex social relations required to guarantee order and security for its practitioners, allow the practice to develop among different underground networks and actors. After its genesis, graffiti found a permanent place in global urban culture by adapting to different contexts and exposing the fallibility of security mechanisms of city governments, designed to protect the richest in society from the poorest.



Graffiti’s graphic aesthetic is heterogeneous and vast. In Sao Paulo, its practice has found a unique synthesis of aesthetic and ethical expression in the practice of Pixação. More arduous and daring than graffiti, Pixação is the act of tagging without permission. Despite facing prejudices, pressures and erasure by public authorities, Pixação persists because it is not just art, but also an act that feeds on its denial to find value in the heroism of defying insurmountable impediments. Much like the medieval knights who considered themselves commoners, Pixadores endow themselves with great courage, placing their lives at risk to reach the highest tower in the menacing metropolis.

Paris: Night and Day

The city of Paris has a deputy mayor of the night. It is hard to think of a bureaucratic job title with more global cool cachet, even if large parts of the job involve overseeing sanitation, street repairs and other decidedly unromantic and under-appreciated nighttime activities that make cities functional. The city also has a powerful and well-funded cultural machine, which every year puts on an all-night contemporary art festival known as Nuit Blanche.



Nuit Blanche, which literally means "white night" in French but translates as "all-nighter," is a pub crawl of at times interesting but often terrible installations, performance art and spectacle. The true purpose is to wander the city with art map in hand, poking your head in seemingly every church, theater and gallery space across multiple arrondissements. Tens of thousands of Parisians and tourists get their avant-garde flaneurie on every year, and the event has spread like wildfire across European capitals and to "cool" cities around the world. It is part of a global urban trend of late-night art: museums staying open later and hosting party-like events and regular open gallery nights that are now a staple of urban culture.

Nuit Blanche is classic Paris — mostly white; very bourgeois, arty and pretentious; and "global city/creative classy" before we knew to call it that. It would be easy to criticize if this was all that public Paris sponsored, but it is just one night on a calendar of public spectacle that has become increasingly inclusive.

Fête de la Musique is another global phenomenon hatched in France that sees every burg in the Republique drag out its collective flugelhorn and channel an inner Brassens and IAM. The deputy mayor is busy that night, trying to manage a city in which every teenage garage band, local marching band and new hip-hop crew is camped out on corners for all to hear (of course, not on the same corners, but that is a different post).



My favorite public Paris spectacle is Paris Plage, not because it is a fake beach, but because of the Paris it is designed for. Created to give a bit of summer fun to local kids and families who may not have the resources to head out of the city like the bourgeois masses, Paris Plage occupies stretches of the Seine riverbanks and the now-thoroughly cool Canal Saint Martin for a month every summer. Everything is free: water sports for kids, petanque for beginners, the old-school cool of the guinguette (think public barn dance) and of course, sand. The best part is watching hipsters like me wandering around our normal territory of the Canal banks, displaced temporarily by picnicking Indian, Chinese and French-Arab families and groups of old folks from the neighborhoods.



What makes this all possible are two factors increasingly missing in American cities. One is an urban government with the resources and willpower to sponsor truly public spectacles. So much in the U.S. is dependent on private money and initiative that few events feel truly public and truly free. The second is the sad state of violence, especially in my California cities. San Francisco is canceling iconic nighttime events like Halloween because it cannot solve its violence problem and reigning in unique parties like Bay to Breakers in what some call the "war on fun." Oakland is debating a youth curfew, which is surprisingly common throughout American cities.

There is more to cities than fun, and more to solving inequality than open public space, but at least Paris seems to recognize that public fun — day and night, young and old — is part of a healthy and happy polis.

Credits: Photos by Alex Schafran.

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Leonie Sandercock on the Ideal City

"I dream of a city of bread and festivals, where those who don't have the bread aren't excluded from the carnival. I dream of a city in which action grows out of knowledge and understanding; where you haven't got it made until you can help others to get where you are or beyond; where social justice is more prized than a balanced budget; where I have a right to my surroundings, and so do all my fellow citizens; where we don't exist for the city but are seduced by it; where only after consultation with local folks could decisions be made about our neighbourhoods; where scarcity does not build a barb-wire fence around carefully guarded inequalities; where no one flaunts their authority and no one is without authority; where I don't have to translate my 'expertise' into jargon to impress officials and confuse citizens."

Leonie Sandercock, from "City Songlines: A Planning Imagination for the 21st Century" in Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century, 2003.


This is part of a collection of quotes related to cities. They don't necessarily reflect our views, just topics of interest. We welcome you to add others.

Credits: Photo of Uttarayan Kite Festival by Meena Kadri.

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Building a Bridge to Legal Street Art

Painting by plusmn behind Francis Scott Key Bridge in Washington, D.C.

Street art needs a facelift. The global street art movement, which aims to reclaim public space, is perceived in some local communities as similar to billboard or media ads that are forced upon people without their consent.

The reclaiming of public space should be done in a way that all users of the space understand and appreciate. Murals have changed the legal boundaries of acceptable art in public space, and what qualifies as public space. By reaching out to government authorities and community organizations, muralists have achieved a level of respect in which graffiti is no longer considered vandalism.


Mural under a bridge near Highline Park, N.Y.C.

One agency that supports legal street art is the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH). The commission, with support from District government funds and the National Endowment for the Arts, provides a plethora of financial and educational programs for individuals and nonprofit organizations. The DCCAH MuralsDC Project, created by D.C. Councilmember Jim Graham in collaboration with the Department of Public Works, and programs such as Not in OUR DC! give youth a legal means to display their artistic talents in a way that fosters respect for private and public property. The goal is to have murals reflecting the culture, history and community interests of neighborhoods in areas identified as having a high volume of illegal graffiti. Through the program, more than 30 public art pieces have emerged throughout the city.


Adams Morgan mural, Washington, D.C., part 1.


Adams Morgan mural, part 2.

World Habitat Day 2011: Cities and Climate Change

The United Nations has designated the first Monday of October every year as World Habitat Day. This year, World Habitat Day will be celebrated on the 3rd of October. The idea is to reflect on the state of our towns and cities and the basic right of all, to adequate shelter. It is also intended to remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat.

The United Nations chose the theme Cities and Climate Change because it is fast becoming the preeminent development challenge of the 21st Century. In this new urban area with most now living in towns and cities, we must bear in mind that the greatest impacts of disasters resulting from climate change begin and end in cities.

— UN-HABITAT

Housing is an enormous challenge within the Cities and Climate Change theme. Approximately one billion people currently live in slums, a figure that is expected to grow threefold by 2050 (UN-HABITAT). Widespread housing upgrades could harmfully impact global climate change if the following concerns are not addressed:

1. In terms of mitigation, housing policy must take into account the environmental impacts of building materials, maintenance, density and infrastructure. Cement production, for example, accounts for 5 percent of carbon emissions worldwide. Mitigation demands low-carbon materials such as uncooked earth and wood from plantations, optimally bamboo. It requires new technologies for affordable wind, solar and biogas energy. It should also be based on planning for public transport and population density.


From goinggreentoday.com.

2. In terms of adaptation, housing policy must take into account the risk of extreme climate events such as floods, droughts, storms, landslides, heat and cold. In the face of such events, housing policy must facilitate and require decentralized technological solutions that increase building and/or neighborhood autonomy in case of city-scale infrastructure damage. Limiting water consumption, recycling waste and harvesting rainwater are essential measures. Urban development policy should also control land use to increase infrastructural efficiency.


From firstgroup.com.

3. Social justice is another critical concern. Who pollutes the most, and who is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change? In other words, who today is benefiting the most from carbon-intensive lifestyles, and who will pay the price of adaptation tomorrow?

Credits: Photo of an informal settlement from environmentalresearchweb.org. Photo of Dubai from citypictures.org.

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Interlude: The Emergence of Cities in Books

On a particularly foggy Friday evening in San Francisco (with nothing to do but putter about indoors), I sat down to watch a TEDx talk on the Ngram Viewer by Harvard University researchers Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. Now under the auspices of Google Books, Ngram Viewer allows users to search for words in a database of five million books from across centuries.

While fiddling around with Ngram Viewer myself, I thought it would be interesting to look into the emergence of the word "cities" — and thus the emergence of the idea itself — in the canon of English books. Here's a snapshot of the results, juxtaposing a search for "cities," "pollution" and "industry" across Google Books' digitized repository of English books published from 1700 to 2000:

As it turns out, references to "cities" started showing up in the canon of English books in the early 1700s,  permeating rapidly until the beginning of the 1800s before plateauing. References to the term — and presumably its popularity as a topic of interest — picked up again between 1880 and 1920, and have since been in gradual decline. At the same time, we see a rapid increase in references to "industrial" from 1880 to 1920, with a precipitous decline from 1980 onwards (perhaps we have become inured to the concept). References to "pollution" spiked only from 1960 onwards, interestingly enough, coinciding with the publication of Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961.

To put one's finger on the pulse of the human zeitgeist from 2000 onwards, a comprehensive scouring of books wouldn't be complete without a search through blogs, news and media on the Web. I suspect that references to "cities" aren't in sharp decline within the online corpus — if anything, the grand undertaking of global human migration, along with a proliferation of digital literature on its delights and discontents, has only just begun. 

Credits: Screenshot of Ngram Viewer taken by Min Li Chan.

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Documenting Egypt's Abandoned Palaces

Photographer Xenia Nikolskaya lives in St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Cairo. She has done 15 solo shows, and her pictures are featured in the Bibliotheca Alexandria Arts Centre and Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening. She has done commissions for Newsweek, Conde Nast Traveler and the Hermitage Museum.

Nikolskaya currently teaches photography at the American University in Cairo and is editing her upcoming book, "Egyptian Dust: The Social Life of Endangered Spaces," which will be released in February 2012. The book will include 70 pictures featuring buildings in ten Egyptian cities, with text by historian and poet On Barak.

Polis recently met with Xenia Nikolskaya in Stockholm to talk about the project.

For the last four years you have been documenting abandoned Egyptian palaces for your project "Dust." How did you come up with this idea?

One day, by chance, I walked by the Sarageldin palace in Cairo's Garden City. It was a fascinating little villa with sculptures and a garden — very romantic. The doorman asked me if I'd like to see the inside, and of course I did. All the windows were covered with shutters, and I was very curious to see the interior. It was like a sleeping beauty. The furniture was still in place, but it looked like the residents left suddenly, possibly at the time of the revolution in 1952. When I processed my pictures, the first thing I noticed, besides the beautiful interiors, was the dust. The dust is clearly visible in the pictures.


Sarageldin Palace, Cairo, 2006.

How did you capture the character and sense of abandonment in these interiors?

In my opinion, you can’t really understand a work of architecture if you bring in artificial lighting. Every building is designed for a certain combination of exterior and interior lightning. A flash or extra lamps would alter this vision.

The exterior light in these buildings is very low, often coming from the side. That is why you can see the dust. With sidelight you get character. You use it if you want to show all the wrinkles and beautiful experience in an old man's face, for example. It is the same with buildings.


Kasr el Doubara, Cairo, 2008.

Which time period is most interesting to you?

I have been documenting interiors from 1869 to 1956. In 1869 the Suez canal was built, and foreign money flew into Egypt. Governor Isma'il Pasha attracted foreigners with land grants. If you had money you could build almost anything. In 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser kicked out wealthy foreigners.

What meanings are associated with these abandoned palaces today?

I would say they are not highly valued because of their connection with colonial times. Today, Egypt is moving towards a lot of glitter and gold — that’s the fashion. And these palaces were Western European fashion, cultivated in Egypt by force.

Sakakini Palace, Cairo, 2008.

Update on the Solar Decathlon

Empowerhouse, Parsons the New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology.

Almost exactly two years ago, I went to visit the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. This year’s Solar Decathlon had the same goal — to design and build the best energy-efficient house powered by the sun. Like the houses in 2009, and the houses designed in the four previous competitions, the houses this year are most striking because of how different the designs are for each.

Some contributors invented new material to insulate the home more effectively (used in CHIP, designed by the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the California Institute of Technology), others were inspired by traditional architectural forms and materials (TRTL, designed by the University of Calgary), while others were designed to sit on the roofs of existing buildings (Team New York’s Solar Roofpod, City College 0f New York).


Solar Roofpod, City College of New York.

The entries span four continents and five countries, and each are based on ten criteria. The top five criteria are: architectural design, market appeal, engineering, communications and affordability. You can visit a photo gallery of the houses here.

Interestingly, there was only one home that was designed for an urban setting: Team New York’s Solar Roofpod. This house was creatively designed to be placed on a roof to better leverage the rooftop space in New York buildings, incorporating roof gardens, storm water capture mechanisms and sustainable air conditioning through a heat transfer process (rather than electricity). Team New York brought up the question of how practical many of the home designs are for urban locations, including the fact that the definition of affordability for the competition — $250,000 — was out of the reach of most New Yorkers and city residents. One other home, Parsons the New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology’s Empowerhouse, also considered urban application: It will be used as a Habitat for Humanity house in D.C. after the competition.

You can visit the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. from September 23 to October 2, 2011.

Credits: Photos of Solar Decathlon homes from solardecathlon.gov.

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São Paulo: City of Contrasts

Vila Prudente, São Paulo's oldest favela.


Cidade Jardim, a high-end residential and shopping complex.

With a teeming population of over 11 million, São Paulo is Brazil’s economic, cultural and administrative hub. As the financial capital of Brazil, and indeed Latin America, it is a booming global city with high growth and low unemployment rates. Yet UN-HABITAT reports that there is approximately one millionaire for every one hundred of the city’s poor and that São Paulo continues to have one of the highest income disparities in the world. Such disparities manifest themselves spatially, etched in the city, as depicted perhaps most famously in Teresa Caldeira’s "City of Walls."

In order to directly experience São Paulo’s housing inequities, IHP Cities visited one of its high-end gated communities and one of its makeshift squatter settlements (favelas) on the same day. The first is an exclusive residential and shopping complex named Cidade Jardim (Garden City), perhaps in an attempt to evoke Ebenezer Howard’s utopic vision. The latter is Vila Prudente, the oldest favela in São Paulo, settled in the 1950s.


Fortified entrance to Cidade Jardim residential towers.


Exploring the Cidade Jardim residential complex.

Once we got through the layers of security, including passport checks, we were met by architects employed by JHSF, the developers of Cidade Jardim. The development consists of nine residential towers with 322 apartments, the smallest being 240 square meters and the largest 2000. People who purchased their flats before construction paid $2,200 per square meter but those selling now can fetch a price of over $9,000 per square meter. The integration of the residences into the shopping mall – the most expensive in the city, with celebrity advertising campaigns from Sarah Jessica Parker and Heidi Klum – is one of the attractions for people living here. There is also a luxurious spa where membership costs $250 per month, half the rate charged to non-residents – who need to know a resident in order to become members. According to the architects we spoke to, security is one of the main motivations of the development: “People have everything here. It is important for them to be protected.”

Photo-Realistic Tokyo Model Braces a Highrise Dream

A complex scale model of Tokyo is on view by appointment at Tokyo's Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills. The model was built in 2003 by 30 Mori employees over approximately 17 months. All streets and buildings were photographed at street level and from above via helicopter. They were then adjusted in Photoshop and glued to polystyrene models.



Touring the model is a fascinating introduction to Mori's vision for the city, which is planned for construction after the company consolidates enough subdivided residential plots. "Just a matter of patience," the guide assured us.



Mori's flagship concept of Vertical Garden Cities aims to increase the "efficiency of urban infrastructure, including rail transportation and road systems, while systematically integrating diverse urban functions, including work, residence/living, entertainment, education, and commercial/retail." This means putting all urban eggs in one "super high-rise" basket (offices at the top so that executives can feel powerful, residences below for proximity to green space). Greening will allow residents to enjoy "The touch of leaves. The fragrance of the grass. The crackle of fallen leaves underfoot. ... The singing of crickets in autumn."



According to the Vertical Garden Cities guide, residents of these all-in-one structures will still be able to explore the city via train lines that pass through basement stations and terminate at spaces of consumption, such as Disneyland and Kidzania (where parents pay to enter and their children "learn about the social system" by pretending to be nurses, dentists, runway models, window cleaners and countless other professions — sponsored by companies like P&G and Coca-Cola).



Living space for the employees who service Vertical Garden Cities isn't specified. They would probably live in the western half of Tokyo, past Shinjuku, which is of such little interest to Mori that the map ends abruptly at Shinjuku Station. There are no plans to include it in the future. "What is the name of that park at the edge of the map?" I ask. "I don't know, it's not important," answers our guide.

Further Reading:
Photos of the Mori model on Flickr
Vertical Garden Cities
"Tokyo At My Feet" in Mori Living: Diary



Chris Berthelsen is the founder of a-small-lab and Tokyo DIY Gardening. He is originally from New Zealand and currently based in Tokyo.

This post is part of a collection of Featured Places from around the world. If you'd like to share photos of a great place, just add them to the Flickr group or send them to info@thepolisblog.org and we will publish your feature. Video and sound recordings are also welcome.

Credits: Photos by Chris Berthelsen.

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The Price of Solitude in Brooklyn

In the September edition of 7STOPS magazine, Benjamin Korman took a look at the Newtown Creek Nature Walk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. What he found was an homage to industry, tucked between a sewage treatment plant and creek so polluted that signs warned against kayaking. What Korman evokes in his description is not one of nature — there's about as much nature here as in your average collection of potted plants — but of foul smells and poor scenery. This is where I stop agreeing with him: He considers this a drawback, and I think it's a feature.

In a city with more than 27,000 people for every square mile, room is scarce. The complaint that New York City is turning into a city for the rich is a valid one, but there is no denying that space has to be distributed in some fashion. Aside from some prominent exceptions, such as mandated low-income units, the preferred method of distribution is raising prices to reach equilibrium with demand. Usually, this price is in dollars or the price of sharing a park lawn with a thousand neighbors. With the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, the location and the smell are the price you pay.

Korman's right: The location is undesirable. Your choice of vistas is a construction site to the west, a highway to the north and the sewage treatment plant to the east and south. He's right about the smell, too, though anyone who has lived in a fishing community will come away wondering what the big deal is. But for these reasons, I have yet to see more than three people there at any time. Contrast this with the High Line or McCarren Park, where the only time you'll see just three people is at 3 a.m. or in the middle of the winter.

Am I going to take a date or a game of chess to the nature walk? No, though I should mention that I've witnessed the latter. Will I take refuge there when one of my four roommates has plugged in his amp, and I've had a long week of work? Of course, and the smell is a fair price to pay.

Dustin Coates is founder at 7STOPS, an online monthly magazine focusing on one topic a month from seven different perspectives. A Texan from childhood, he now calls Greenpoint, Brooklyn home.