IUD visit Xiancun urban village in Guangzhou, April 2015

Spatial justice and Urban De(re)generation

“Just as none of us are beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.” Edward Said, Culture & Imperialism

IUD Archive Image. Uneven Development research project. Public space next to a residential neighbourhood being cleared and gentrified with luxury high rise flats. Guangzhou, China: 2013.

Peach Tree Court Demolition

A Walk Around the Demolition Site of Peach Tree Court, Saturday 27th September 2014.

Peach Tree Court Tower Block – 2014 Demolition – IUD – Salford Archive

We cross the main road and enter the waste ground through the old school gates, the ones parents used to visit the head teacher in the 1990’s before the school was demolished. We had already smelled smoke from the other side of the road, before we saw the treacly patches of branded earth, some of them still leaking a pencil line of smoke. The blond grass of the waste ground is too damp to burn for long and the young arsonists (we caught sight of them briefly) have failed in their attempts to make the fires take hold.

Producing Waste…

Photographer Chris Jordan has created a powerful series of images on a remote atoll, which evidence how our everyday waste (lighters, bottle tops etc) is lethally consumed by baby albatrosses. http://www.chrisjordan.com/

Below are more resources which are helping us better observe and understand waste as a material and a productive force in our work

Since 2008 photographer and film maker Wang Jiuliang has been investigating the ring of garbage dumps that surround Beijing. (In 2013 IUD was privileged to exhibit our work alongside his in Guangdong Art Museum). This is a trailor for his film:

Scarred Ground – Sophie Ristelhueber

In her FOTO8 interview (11/08/2009) French photographer Ristelhueber comments on how her practice has moved in the direction of ‘scars’ and ‘traces’, ranging from freshly operated bodies inspired by the Yugoslavian civil war to aerial shots of post conflict Kuwait. Bringing her sensibility to a range of traumatic subjects she works conceptually seeing them all with a type of conceptual ambiguity and evenness despite their political context.

Fait No. 67.

“I am a conceptual person, which means that first I have an idea of something I want to do… something that becomes imperative. Afterwards I work so intently that I don’t think any more about the context. About whether I am in a country that is supposed to be Palestine, say, but which perhaps is not going to be Palestine. It’s difficult for others to understand; it’s not that I don’t care for the people around me. But once I’m working, I am working on my concept” (FOTO8 interview).

from Every One (1994)

Unbuilding….

We have been thinking a lot about unbuilding as we observe the creative destruction of tower blocks in Salford (see the above photo by IUD on the ground). These demolitions are part of the first phase of a PFI driven gentrification project. In this process many social housing tenants are evicted and their homes replaced with houses and flats for sale on the open market. The demolition industry along with property developers, builders, finance companies and so on benefit from regeneration, which is not really about the provision of better homes but the redistibution of assets, from the poor to the rich. Demolition also functions at a symbolic level, as it rids us of unwanted architectural forms, in this case high rise social housing. The significance of this is not in some failure of the modernist architectural project but the destruction of viable homes and the displacement of the poor. Regeneration in this instance calls for the replacement of unwanted bodies with the healthy bodies of the rich who have money to spend and don’t rely so heavily on council services. In her book Where the Other Half Lives, Sarah Glynn says ” ‘regeneration’ sounds as though it could be a good thing, but it is being used as a Trojan horse for state-sponsored ‘accumulation by dispossession’ on a massive scale”(page 72).

Detonation Deutschland Diptych by Piero Steinle

 

This is an ongoing selection of resources on unbuilding, rubble, demolition etc.

Julian Rosefeldt and Piero Steinle made a video installation from archival sequences of demolitions called Detonation Deutschland. See the diptych above and more on Piero’s Steinle’s website.

 

Boulevard Henri IV, Place de la Bastille, demolished section of Paris photographed by Charles Marville 1876.

Photographs made by Charles Marville of the demolition of large sections of Paris by Baron Haussmann. Marville’s work is digitized in the collection of the Musee Carnavalet (search in French only).

Artist Hilary Powell’s work is an exploration of and collaboration with demolition sites, materials and stories    http://demolitionsite.net

Rubble: unearthing the history of demolition, by Jeff Byles and published by Three Rivers Press is a well researched popular history of demolition.

This is an academic paper, which explores the performative properties of asbestos in the demolition process: Inextinguishable fibres: demolition and the vital materialisms of asbestos by Nicky Gregson, Helen Watkins & Melania Calestani, published in Environment & Planning Journal 2010, volume 42.

therubbleclub.com: a club for architects whose creations have been intentionally destroyed during their life time.

10 minute promotional video of back to back demolitions by Controlled Demolition Inc

more to follow….