To conclude IUD’s time at the People’s History Museum we are putting on line the talks from our Demand Utopia! event on January 12th.
Nick Mansfield delivering ‘Owenites, Chartists to Clarion Socialists and their educational spaces’
Professor Loretta Lees Gentrification & Displacement talk
We hope you had a great night. We did.
Recordings by Jamie Heerlyn
Photographs by Kenny Brown
This collaborative project published by Polity Press attempts to challenge classic notions of gentrification. Using a transurban comparative analysis it asks us not to over generalise this process of urban transformation all too often linked to the ‘Global North’. It asks how can we make sense of the many specific cases of gentrification happening across the world within a context of on-going planetary urbanisation.
“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.
Latour & Hermant’s on-line book Paris: Invisible City (1998) presents a challenge to all urban photographers and the observational methods central to their work. The project questions how much we really can understand about the modern city by simply looking. Starting off on the rooftop of the famous La Samaritaine department store it begins by examining the panorama of Paris.
The book explores the labyrinth of overlapping networks that underpin the functioning of the city. Using Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory as a methodology, it highlights the ‘invisible’ and unnoticed connectivities that compose the city. It presents us with a layered portrait of place “bypassed by the normative representational mode” (Networks of Design). Latour uses the term ‘oligopticon’ to define these hidden networks that ultimately serve to make Paris the functioning city that it is. As a social researcher he believes that they are a means to appreciate the intertwined totality of municipal space. Unlike the absolutist all seeing gaze of Foucault’s panopticon, with the oligopticon “extremely narrow views of the (connected) whole are made possible–as long as connections hold” (p.181, Reassembling the Social). By drawing our attention to the complexity of these ‘co-existences’, the work ultimately demonstrates the sheer impossibility of understanding Paris or any urban space through a single image or glance.
Urban semiotics and the social semiotics of space
Roland Barthes – Semiology and the Urban
Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class by Jerome Krase
Downloadable PDF of the Discussion
For the full range of Social Science Bites interviews see:
Audio recording of Doreen Massey at the School of Arts, University of Northampton, November 28th 2012.
http://researchsupporthub.northampton.ac.uk/2013/02/11/on-space-in-conversation-with-doreen-massey/
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