From j.tay at qut.edu.au Thu May 25 08:24:31 2006 From: j.tay at qut.edu.au (Jinna Tay) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 16:24:31 +1000 Subject: [multipliCity] a conversation on cities - testrun Message-ID: <200605250624.EKS69268@mail-router01.qut.edu.au> Hello all citi-zens, I am very excited about this list, not just because we are its creators! But I am anticipating interesting and fun conversations to be had in this space, and may we see fruitful collaborations such as papers, conferences, film making and all modes of cross fertilizations grow from the interaction of this list! So, cheers! Jinna -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/multiplicity_listcultures.org/attachments/20060525/a06d6059/attachment.html From sw.maher at student.qut.edu.au Fri May 26 08:21:47 2006 From: sw.maher at student.qut.edu.au (sw.maher@student.qut.edu.au) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 16:21:47 +1000 (EST) Subject: [multipliCity] sampler Message-ID: <20060526162147.CDM37500@mail-msgstore01.qut.edu.au> As an entree to this discussion I just have to drop this quote in from my current reading - Cities, by John Reader, Heinemann 2004 - pp141-142 "...Plato stressed diversity as the charateristic that enables a city to thrive. More than 2,000 years later, Charles Darwin similarly noted that a plot of ground sown with a diversity of plants produces a substantially greater weight of herbage than an identical plot sown with a single species, and since then ecologists have described the importance of diversity in all living systems. Plato was ahead of them all. He had, in effect, noted the fundamentals of ecology apply to human systems too; a city thrives on diversity. It is, one might say, a single multiplicity of mutually supportive activities and interactions. More of other stuff soon. SM From tripta at gmail.com Fri May 26 13:18:28 2006 From: tripta at gmail.com (Tripta B Chandola) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 20:48:28 +0930 Subject: [multipliCity] Between Brisbane-Delhi Message-ID: <855A17F1-25B7-4208-B501-CDC14EE92B4E@qut.edu.au> "From now on, I?ll describe the cities to you,? the Khan had said, ?in your journeys you will see if they exist.? But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor. ?And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all the possible cities can be deduced,? Kublai said. ?It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degrees from the norm, I need only to forsee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the probable combinations.? ?I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all others,? Marco Polo answered. ?It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to substract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve too probable to be real.? (Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities) Every time I have attempted to consolidate my thoughts, impressions, ideas about a city, the city or the cities I am propelled into the fantastic world of Invisible Cities created by Calvino. The first time I read Calvino, the city was my lover but I did not understand that then. I immersed in it for it?s poetry and it?s imagination. Now looking back, I can say without doubt that reading Calvino made it possible for me to read my city, acknowledge it as a lover, give it that validation. Since then I have re-read the not so many pages of Invisible cities and always found something new. For me it contains the essential elements, ingredients, and inquisitions of what in some ways this list, this discussion group aims to take forward. Through precise and meticulous gaze, markings of ?things? insidiously present but evidently overwritten are brought to the surface. Calvino makes the cities in the city come alive. Through conversations, multipliCity aspires for the same. The city of Brisbane provided the longitudes and latitudes for different people to come together to take this initiative and so though the ?conversations? are dispersed, Brisbane remains the marking on the map for this list. In the first post for this list, I start with the city of Brisbane. To start thinking about Brisbane as a city to me did not come easy to me. This statement needs further clarification. I come from Delhi, the capital of India. It has a population of 15 million (2005 figures) and is spread over an area of 1,483 km?. Compare this to the population of Brisbane, approximate 1.7 million and an area of 1363 km. The population density in Delhi along with a lot of other factors, historical, economical, cultural, lends a distinct character to it. Between the two cities, Brisbane and Delhi, I found it difficult to find terms of engagement with the former as a city. Delhi is and has always been the city through which I have interacted and examined the ?city-cultures?. It is strongly resonant of the classic city problems, chaos, cacophony, crime; just to mention a few. It is a in your face city. It is an almost hostile city. One has a make attempts, very deliberate, to engage with the city. At once, the city does not tell anything and reveals everything. This city, the city of Delhi, epitomizes my big-city experience. When I first came to Brisbane in 2005, I constantly wrote back home, told people there/here/everywhere that I did not think Brisbane was big-enough-a-city for me. It was too organized. It was too resolved. It did not have enough stories. It did not have enough de-tours. Everything that Delhi has. At least it seemed to me at that time. Now looking back at it, I realize that I was discounting Brisbane the ?city? feel, specifically, the big-city feel not because it doesn?t have it?s share of histories and realities but because I hadn?t worked out within which terms I was going to engage with it. I think somewhere I was committing a major anthropological error of setting the premise even before I knew what the context was. I re-visited Brisbane in early 2006. This time around I was eager to live the city, whatever it was, instead of being distant and dejecting in the name of obsessive fixation for Delhi I have. When it came to cities, I was ready to be adulterous. I was eager to take more than one lovers and not commit myself only to Delhi. It would be stretching it too far to state that now that I was ready Brisbane and Delhi offer the same experience. They are `different? cities requiring ?different? skills and perspectives to de-code it offering ?different? experiences. This time around, I walked a lot around the city, I took public transportation much more readily, trying to read maps, stopping strangers to get directions, I chatted with cab drivers and with fellow-queue people at woolies. In short, I was ready to get lost in the labyrinth of the city to find it elsewhere, inverted and suspended. Unlike Delhi that offers wide range of everyday experiences owing to huge disparities in income and education to state the most basic distinctions, Brisbane appears monolithic and rather staid. The insistence and amazing practice of ?no-class-barriers? in Australia give the city a completely different texture to the others highly stratified ones. With my limited experience of Australian way of life, I think distinctions are prevalent, however insidious, but because everyone believes, and for the good, in the ?no-class- barrier? system it doesn?t manifest itself prominently in everyday practices. At some levels, it even leads to lack of a dialogue with other issues. What do I mean by that? How can a social system essentially based on egalitarianism come across as not addressing a lot of issues, of racism, of sexism? In the media, in the prominent references of the mainstream, one never comes across these issues being fiercely debated or questioned. It almost seems like one doesn?t want to address these issues. I completely acknowledge my rather limited understanding and would like to facilitate discussions to engage with these issues. What interests me within urban- ecologies is the construction of the ?other? and how that determines the fabric and ethos of that place and it is in this context that I raise issues about the representation and presentation of the ?other? in the Australian context. It would be interesting to evolve a vocabulary universally prevalent to address the ?other?. In the context of Delhi, there are many ?cities? and many ?others?. Class, caste, religion, income levels, educational background, political connections, all creates significant others. This is by no means a comprehensive list. The manner in which the ?other? is constructed is such that it manifests significantly in the spatial movements within the city. Middle-class ?Hindus? would be struck by paranoia to enter densely populated ?marker? Muslim areas and vice versa. This is not an absolute reality but the prevalent sensibility through which the two sections would engage with the city. Middle class residents of the city would dread the ?slum? dwellers for their moral bankruptcy. The ?slum? dwellers fiercely limit the interactions of their ?women? and ?children? into the city to safeguard them from the wrath of the hostile ?city?. The different manners in which the city and its cities are appropriated constantly keep shifting. Do the classifications of the ?other?, real and imagined, leave a distinct mark on the urban-morphology in the case of Brisbane? _____ looking forward to conversations! cheers, tripta -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/multiplicity_listcultures.org/attachments/20060526/36da896d/attachment.html From tripta at gmail.com Fri May 26 16:39:58 2006 From: tripta at gmail.com (Tripta B Chandola) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 00:09:58 +0930 Subject: [multipliCity] Fwd: Between Brisbane-Delhi References: <855A17F1-25B7-4208-B501-CDC14EE92B4E@qut.edu.au> Message-ID: Begin forwarded message: > From: Tripta B Chandola > Date: 26 May 2006 8:48:28 PM > To: Multiplicity at listcultures.org > Subject: Between Brisbane-Delhi > Reply-To: t.chandola at qut.edu.au > > "From now on, I?ll describe the cities to you,? the Khan had said, > ?in your journeys you will see if they exist.? > > But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from > those thought of by the emperor. > > ?And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all > the possible cities can be deduced,? Kublai said. ?It contains > everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist > diverge in varying degrees from the norm, I need only to forsee the > exceptions to the norm and calculate the probable combinations.? > > ?I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all > others,? Marco Polo answered. ?It is a city made only of > exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a > city the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal > elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. > So I have only to substract exceptions from my model, and in > whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities > which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my > operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve too probable to > be real.? > > (Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities) > > Every time I have attempted to consolidate my thoughts, > impressions, ideas about a city, the city or the cities I am > propelled into the fantastic world of Invisible Cities created by > Calvino. The first time I read Calvino, the city was my lover but I > did not understand that then. I immersed in it for it?s poetry and > it?s imagination. Now looking back, I can say without doubt that > reading Calvino made it possible for me to read my city, > acknowledge it as a lover, give it that validation. Since then I > have re-read the not so many pages of Invisible cities and always > found something new. For me it contains the essential elements, > ingredients, and inquisitions of what in some ways this list, this > discussion group aims to take forward. Through precise and > meticulous gaze, markings of ?things? insidiously present but > evidently overwritten are brought to the surface. Calvino makes the > cities in the city come alive. > > > Through conversations, multipliCity aspires for the same. > > The city of Brisbane provided the longitudes and latitudes for > different people to come together to take this initiative and so > though the ?conversations? are dispersed, Brisbane remains the > marking on the map for this list. In the first post for this list, > I start with the city of Brisbane. To start thinking about Brisbane > as a city to me did not come easy to me. This statement needs > further clarification. I come from Delhi, the capital of India. It > has a population of 15 million (2005 figures) and is spread over an > area of 1,483 km?. Compare this to the population of Brisbane, > approximate 1.7 million and an area of 1363 km. The population > density in Delhi along with a lot of other factors, historical, > economical, cultural, lends a distinct character to it. Between the > two cities, Brisbane and Delhi, I found it difficult to find terms > of engagement with the former as a city. Delhi is and has always > been the city through which I have interacted and examined the > ?city-cultures?. It is strongly resonant of the classic city > problems, chaos, cacophony, crime; just to mention a few. It is a > in your face city. It is an almost hostile city. One has a make > attempts, very deliberate, to engage with the city. At once, the > city does not tell anything and reveals everything. This city, the > city of Delhi, epitomizes my big-city experience. > > When I first came to Brisbane in 2005, I constantly wrote back > home, told people there/here/everywhere that I did not think > Brisbane was big-enough-a-city for me. It was too organized. It was > too resolved. It did not have enough stories. It did not have > enough de-tours. Everything that Delhi has. At least it seemed to > me at that time. Now looking back at it, I realize that I was > discounting Brisbane the ?city? feel, specifically, the big-city > feel not because it doesn?t have it?s share of histories and > realities but because I hadn?t worked out within which terms I was > going to engage with it. I think somewhere I was committing a major > anthropological error of setting the premise even before I knew > what the context was. I re-visited Brisbane in early 2006. This > time around I was eager to live the city, whatever it was, instead > of being distant and dejecting in the name of obsessive fixation > for Delhi I have. When it came to cities, I was ready to be > adulterous. I was eager to take more than one lovers and not commit > myself only to Delhi. It would be stretching it too far to state > that now that I was ready Brisbane and Delhi offer the same > experience. They are `different? cities requiring ?different? > skills and perspectives to de-code it offering ?different? > experiences. This time around, I walked a lot around the city, I > took public transportation much more readily, trying to read maps, > stopping strangers to get directions, I chatted with cab drivers > and with fellow-queue people at woolies. In short, I was ready to > get lost in the labyrinth of the city to find it elsewhere, > inverted and suspended. > > Unlike Delhi that offers wide range of everyday experiences owing > to huge disparities in income and education to state the most basic > distinctions, Brisbane appears monolithic and rather staid. The > insistence and amazing practice of ?no-class-barriers? in Australia > give the city a completely different texture to the others highly > stratified ones. With my limited experience of Australian way of > life, I think distinctions are prevalent, however insidious, but > because everyone believes, and for the good, in the ?no-class- > barrier? system it doesn?t manifest itself prominently in everyday > practices. At some levels, it even leads to lack of a dialogue with > other issues. What do I mean by that? How can a social system > essentially based on egalitarianism come across as not addressing a > lot of issues, of racism, of sexism? In the media, in the prominent > references of the mainstream, one never comes across these issues > being fiercely debated or questioned. It almost seems like one > doesn?t want to address these issues. I completely acknowledge my > rather limited understanding and would like to facilitate > discussions to engage with these issues. What interests me within > urban-ecologies is the construction of the ?other? and how that > determines the fabric and ethos of that place and it is in this > context that I raise issues about the representation and > presentation of the ?other? in the Australian context. It would be > interesting to evolve a vocabulary universally prevalent to address > the ?other?. > > In the context of Delhi, there are many ?cities? and many ?others?. > Class, caste, religion, income levels, educational background, > political connections, all creates significant others. This is by > no means a comprehensive list. The manner in which the ?other? is > constructed is such that it manifests significantly in the spatial > movements within the city. Middle-class ?Hindus? would be struck by > paranoia to enter densely populated ?marker? Muslim areas and vice > versa. This is not an absolute reality but the prevalent > sensibility through which the two sections would engage with the > city. Middle class residents of the city would dread the ?slum? > dwellers for their moral bankruptcy. The ?slum? dwellers fiercely > limit the interactions of their ?women? and ?children? into the > city to safeguard them from the wrath of the hostile ?city?. The > different manners in which the city and its cities are appropriated > constantly keep shifting. > > Do the classifications of the ?other?, real and imagined, leave a > distinct mark on the urban-morphology in the case of Brisbane? > > _____ > > looking forward to conversations! > > cheers, > > tripta > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/multiplicity_listcultures.org/attachments/20060527/24186fa8/attachment-0001.html From tripta at gmail.com Wed May 31 18:36:14 2006 From: tripta at gmail.com (Tripta B Chandola) Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 02:06:14 +0930 Subject: [multipliCity] resource: planet of slums/mike davis Message-ID: <28270D4D-0694-4798-B4EB-55DEF241BF87@qut.edu.au> My research interests are essentially involved around the 'marginalized spaces' in the city, the process of marginalization of these spaces and their interaction with the 'larger' city, the so- called 'real' city. One of the ideas I am pursuing is to understand the marginalized spaces an active and involved agency in the process of the 'marginalization'. In that vein, Mike Davis work has always fascinated me. _______________****____________________ On May 11 in International House's Great Hall at UCSD, urbanist, author and Professor of History at UC Irvine Mike Davis spoke to an audience of about 200 people about slums. Citing the UN-Habitat report, "The Challenge of Slums," Davis outlined the tragic facts about slums, including 1 billion current slum dwellers, an overlapping 1 billion people with no formal connection to their national or the global economy, and 2-3 billion people over the next half century most likely destined for slums. Summarizing his recent book, "Planet of Slums," Davis argued that slum expansion has reached a limit - an absence of free squatable land and the declining ability of slum dwellers to occupy survival niches has given rise to sectarian violence, child abandonment and other rational responses to desperate circumstances. He concluded with the hopeful picture of slums as incubators for burgeoning resistance movements. In conclusion, Davis presented the grim hope that the slum dwellers are beginning to challenge their bleak future: "I think what is happening in the world right now is an astonishing process of experimentation under extraordinarily complex and different local conditions of slum dwellers, of abandoned poor people, 16-17 year olds in forgotten slums in every big city in the world, contesting that abandonment, fighting for some kind of future." "Whether that is some radical new form of avante garde form of modernity, or whether it is to abolish modernity. Whether it is the nihilist attack on the rich in the center and all the symbols of the city from which people are excluded, or it is extraordinary new attempts to find a citizenship that will encompass everyone." "It takes all kinds of forms, but it is the beginning of some kind of rebellion of people we have otherwise consigned to oblivion." Includes audio and partial transcript. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2006/05/116000.shtml