"Contrapolis; or, Creativity and Enclosure in the Cities"
26th and 27th of March 2008.
Organised by Marina Vishmidt
with the support of the Jan van Eyck Academie, NAi and the Poortgebouw
queries: maviss@gmail.com
NAi www.nai.nl
Poortgebouw www.poortgebouw.nl
Rotterdam http://www.cntraveller.com/Guides/Netherlands/Rotterdam/
"Displacement of residents, whether they are gentrifying artists priced out of Soho or the poor and unemployed excluded from New York altogether, is no random by-product of gentrification but its structural condition. Decay, disinvestment, abandonment . . .prepare the way for profitable reinvestment . . . Like all the social relations that art supposedly transcends, housing is one of the historical circumstances of its existence". Rosalyn Deutsche, "Alternative Space"
"And howsoever oppositional we architects may be, as long as we fail to challenge basic elements of society, such as the concept of private property, nothing will improve. This is a great paradox for me". Achim Felz, "IKAS: An Experiment in Extra-Parliamentary Architectural Opposition"
Description of Event
Two days of workshops, discussions, walks, presentations, installations and screenings that articulate approaches and experiences around the contentious nexus of culture and urban regeneration in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, London, Glasgow and Barcelona.
Although the whole of Rotterdam will be the terrain of the weekend's activities, the workshops, artworks, documentation and public debate will take place at the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Poortgebouw . Artists, activists, scholars, architects, planners, designers and local people will be invited to contribute their ideas in separate workshops devoted to topics such as informal planning, the role of creativity in urban development policy, and the conditions for art-based intervention. A public discussion is also scheduled. The aim of the workshops is to develop perspectives including, but going beyond, the variously instrumentalised, palliative or autonomous roles for culture in urban transformation as framed in contemporary analyses. We will compare the urban development framework in each of the five cities by focusing on an overall tendency in neoliberal city planning to prioritize elite consumption, tourism, privatisation and micro-management of public space. In addition, we will look at the ways in which the promotion of 'culture' or 'creativity' slots into these agendas. Other topics will include: the prospects for 'counter-planning', 'planning from below' and struggles against the dispossession and eviction of marginalised communities in the regenerated European city. While all these phenomena are locally situated, they can be said to share certain features such as methods of organising autonomously and scepticism towards the market and private property as the engines of economic growth and social life in the city. "Contrapolis" is intended as a platform for exchange of tactics, experiences and analysis.
The core question of the event would be "how is art, and cultural production more broadly, at once driving capitalist valorisation in the city and able to project forms of social relations that do not produce value for capital?"
Departing from the structure of an academic symposium, this event provides two days of informal but rigorously mapped interaction and exploration and will culminate with an evening of screenings and a public debate at the NAi which will build on the discussions of that weekend as well each participant's field of practice. Participants will be expected to participate in all the workshops and walks, although only the concluding session of public debate will be mandatory and actively promoted as open to the public.
Workshops
I would like to hold three workshops over the duration of the weekend, two on Saturday and one on Sunday.
The workshops will be open to all participants and the public. They will be framed on the basis of three questions, and moderated by the participant whose research area and practice is most congruent to the question.
Workshop 1 – Creative Dispossession
moderated by Merijn Oudenampsen and Marina Vishmidt
presentation by Merijn Oudenampsen
With state-supported finance capital as the dominant social actor in the contemporary urban fabric, 'creativity' and 'property' become interchangeable as rich sources of speculation. Although Negri and other post-autonomist theorists have put forward that 'real subsumption', or, the integration of life (emotion, sociability, imagination) into the production process heralds a 'loss of measure' that can be emancipatory, this is more frequently experienced as commodification and enclosure of resources that once had some horizon of personal and collective development beyond exchange value – in other words, the law of value persists, making more and more drastic stratifications between 'low-value' and 'self-valorising' subjects. If 'creativity' is the watchword of urban re-development in cities like Rotterdam, whose 'creativity' is desireable, and on what terms? It has often been noted that 'uneven development' is not just a byproduct, but a condition of capitalist exchange: if 'development' is structurally reliant on 'under-development' elsewhere, and sometimes next-door, can 'creative' approaches challenge or only patch up, the effects? Is it the 'creativity' mobilised by government, semi-government and private interests to eliminate 'unproductive' sectors of city life such as social housing and community spaces? Is 'creativity' only acceptable as a commodity, lest it become a channel to resist, recompose and reclaim a right to the city?
Workshop 2 – Informality and Ideology
moderated by Maria Theodorou and Marina Vishmidt
presentations by Anthony Iles, Maria Theodorou and Sitesize
Between a high-gloss urbanism beholden to the logic of the market on the one hand, and the endeavours to valorise low-impact and improvised solutions to housing shortages that can be called 'informal urbanism', a zone of indiscernibility comes into view. When architects and planners, frequently in the employ of NGOs, advise impoverished communities how to make the best, most sustainable use of their meager infrastructures, is this 'counter-planning' or reinforcement of the social organisation that destined them to self-managed squalor in the first place? Is it pragmatism or a resignation to a smaller and smaller portion for greater and greater numbers of people of the social wealth produced in cities? Is there a relationship between envisaging the slum inhabitant as a 'social enterpreneur' (cited in Mike Davis, 2005) and the reign of enterpreneuralism as ideology that seems to exponentially generate slum conditions? What is the fractious dialectic between self-exploitation and self-organisation, and what are the prospects for a politics of housing which is neither reliant on social gurantees that will not re-appear nor content to hand over the institutional terrain to unaccountable private interests?
Workshop 3 – Once Again, the Real Estate Show
Presentation by Rachel Koolen
The original "Real Estate Show" was organised by Co-Lab Projects in an occupied building on New York's Lower East Side in 1980. (http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/gallery/talkback/fmlippard.html). That project, as well as Martha Rosler's "If You Lived Here" in 1989, focused on gentrification and evictions, property, capital and the art market, community organising, and the role of artists in and about these processes. In 1997, Maria Eichhorn's contribution to the Skulptur Projects in Muenster saw her buying a plot of land with the exhibition money and giving it to a local community housing group. Nowadays, the art market and the property market rise and converge when it comes to the re-valorisation of 'blighted' inner-city and suburban neighbourhoods. Additionally, independent and publicly-subsidised art initiatives frequently come under pressure from a spectrum of policy and business actors to 'engage' with constituencies and address social contradictions that those same actors are busy exacerbating through redevelopment and privatisation. With the much-discussed limitations of 'socially engaged practice', how could artmaking participate in contesting the very scenarios it is more than often called upon to passively validate, and function as a mode of social doing that enacts an 'otherwise' to the current state of the situation? Is a homeopathic criticality for the 'progressive' institutions the last best hope for practices that resist the imperatives of social work?