With the increase of "global nomad" visas (Japan, Spain, Portugal) we are going to see more and more middle-upper class and upper-class adults, a high percentage of foreigners, evicting locals (and their businesses, their deep-rooted social lives, etc.) from the centers of city's. Not all cities, but those that are safe (not US), have nice public transportation, cultural activities, and decent weather.
As this occurs, we will see corporations trying to recreate and sell cultural atmospheres of how life "used to be," locally, before this expulsion. By cultural atmospheres, I'm referring to cultural consumer products that people sell and that recreate some local historical or traditional aspects, for example, films, posters, hotel interior designs, etc. These local cultural fabrications of the past, of course, are acritical and say nothing of how we got from point A (past) to point B (present). In other words, info about the mistakes and the humans that made the poor decisions, are nowhere to be found. So we don't learn and this expulsion, economic polarization between rich and poor, increases.
Then a socio-economic divide will grow thicker between locals and non-locals. The local economy will split between (for instance, in Spanish cities: el precio normal vs. el precio turista).
Are you saying that an innocent nomad visa is related to a global split between rich and poor?!
Yes!
So you also benefit from this wrongdoing.
Yes...
(A long time ago, I wrote about this in the article, "La Barcelona nostálgica." Maybe I should update it...)
"The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns. and rural communities. Opportunities for work. Breaking free of parochial gender norms. Avoiding heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Pursuing non-traditional careers and public office. Expressing unique identities. Taking up social and political causes. Developing new kinship networks and foregrounding friendship. Participating in arts, culture, and media. All of these options are so much more available to women in cities."
--Leslie Kern
a sustainable form of urban transportation ; )
"...the word place turns up in common phrases such as "a place for everything and everything in its place" or "know your place" or "she was put in her place." In these expressions the word place clearly refers to something more than a spatial referent. Implied in these terms is a sense of the proper. Something or someone belongs in one place and not in another. What one's place is, is clearly related to one's relation to others. In a business it is not the secretary's place to sit at the boss's desk, or the janitor's place to look through the secretary's desk. There is nothing logical about such observations; neither are they necessarily rules or laws. Rather they are expectations about behavior that relate a position in a social structure to actions in space. In this sense "place" combines the spatial with the social — it is "social space." Insofar as these expectations serve the interests of those at the top of social hierarchies, they can be described as ideological. The example of the business can be extended to society as a whole. Just as the business has a social hierarchy, society has levels of power and influence related to class, gender, race, sexuality, age, and a host of other variables. Similarly, the building in which the business is located has spatial divisions, and the world outside is divided up into segments—houses, streets, public places, libraries, shops, and so on. Just as in the business, there are expectations about behavior in these places that are related to positions in the social structure. Many of these expectations are written into law. Most, however, remain unstated and taken for granted."
The Manual de Mapeo Colectivo by the Argentine urban exploration collective Iconoclasistas has been translated to English. The entire book is available online for free here:
issuu.com/iconoclasistas/docs/manual_mapping_ingles .
from the lost Medianeras series, I just found this, I think it was around Travessera de Gràcia and C/ Ciudad Real (Barcelona)
Nov. 2011
public (not sponsored by an institution) art in Barcelona
petition to engage the local government in the conversation
“The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that inherently wasteful and damaging… The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible — the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour commutes.”There is a very positive trend, however—according to their research, the younger generation in the United States (the “millennials”) is moving into the cities, where they can use their legs, bikes, and public transport.
[The city] isn’t just a place to live, to shop, to go out and have kids play. It’s a place that implicates how one derives one’s ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, how one learns to talk with and learn from people who are unlike oneself, which is how a human becomes human. (Sennet, “Civitas” 83)
Re-reading old notes on Henri Lefebvre I came across a passage that seemed so multi-applicable, not just to space, but all objects of analysis across time. Here are a couple lines of it:
"A comparable approach is called for today, an approach which would analyse not things in space, but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationship embedded in it. The dominant tendency fragments space and cuts it up into pieces. It enumerates the things, the various objects, that space contains. [. . . ]" (page 90, The Production of Space, 1974)
"España no era sino un cárcel compuesta de pequeñas cárceles que se precipitaban hacia el infierno." (42) ["Spain was a prison composed of little prisons, which precipitated towards hell."]
The economic ways of some prostitutes and immigrants, thieves, and pick pockets. Their realities of Barcelona were projected on decorative pins and sold in the local bookstore La Central.
Here you can see the pins foregrounding a colorful Bus Turistic:
The municipal government must have found their content scandalous as it has ordered the removal of these pins from the bookstore.
These pins fulfilled at least a valuable component of the alternative tourist package, and more seriously and lesser known, they add to the pile of proof that the contentious workings of city branding are omnipresent.
A few determine what will and will not be acceptable for public knowledge.
Full article here. The artists have made their pins available for purchase directly from their website here.
Sayoonara Part I
our apartment is so tiny and the city is so fascinating, i spend most of my hours outside the apartment. what really fascinated me about this coffeeshop (a chain called Veloce) was that, although we were brought together in a small space (getting out of a smaller space) within this camera frame, drinking the same couple drinks (matcha, tea, coffee, or orange juice), sharing the same burnt coffee smells and warm stuffy air, most of us were in completely different worlds. i saw this individual isolation in a lot of communal and private spaces. this is a weird phenomenon--wanting to be alone together. in separate stories, separate emotional capsules same quiet communal space. notice folks are reading on paper, and they're reading! i will miss this place very much.
