Re-Imagining the City

Description

Re-Imagining the City: Art, Globalization, and Urban Spaces examines how contemporary processes of globalization are transforming cultural experience and production in urban spaces. It maps how cultural productions in art, architecture, and communications media are contributing to the reimagining of place and identity through events, artifacts, and attitudes. This book recasts how we understand cities—how knowledge can be formed, framed, and transferred through cultural production and how that knowledge is mediated through the construction of aesthetic meaning and value.

 

Foreword – Manfred B. Steger

Chapter 1: Situating Art, Urban Space and Globalization – Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp

Section I: Art and Urban Place

Chapter 2: Art and Culture: The global turn – Malcolm Miles

Chapter 3: Catalysing our Cities: Architecture as the new alchemy for creative enterprise – Tom Barker

Chapter 4: The Place of the Urban: Intersections between mobile and game cultures – Larissa Hjorth

Section II: Transforming Spaces and Experiences of the City

Chapter 5: Driving the Sonic City – Kristen Sharp

Chapter 6: ‘The Vacant Hotel’: Site-specific public art and the experience of driving the semi-privatized geographies of Melbourne’s EastLink Tollway – Ashley Perry

Chapter 7: The Transient City: The city as urbaness – Maggie McCormick

Section III: Exchange and Transaction

Chapter 8: ‘The Liquid Continent’: Globalization, urbanization, contemporary Pacific art and Australia – Pamela Zeplin

Chapter 9: Abdul Abdullah: Art, marginality and identity – Leslie Morgan

Chapter 10: The Visible Hand: An urban accord for outsourced craft – Kevin Murray Section IV: Interventions in Public Space

Chapter 11: Border Memorials: When the local rejects the global – SueAnne Ware

Chapter 12: Encountering the Elephant Parade: Intersections of aesthetics, ecology and economy – Elizabeth Grierson

Chapter 13: Re-imagining Dutch Urban Life: The Blue House in Amsterdam – Zara Stanhope

Conclusion

Chapter 14: Cities as Limitless Spaces of Simultaneity and Paradox – Chris Hudson

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Architecture
• ART
• Urban
• General
• Anthropology
• General officer
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 26 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783203109
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Editors: Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Bethan Ball
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-731-6
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-310-9
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Manfred B. Steger
Chapter 1:Situating Art, Urban Space and Globalization
Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp
Section I: Art and Urban Place
Chapter 2:Art and Culture: The global turn
Malcolm Miles
Chapter 3:Catalysing our Cities: Architecture as the new alchemy for creative enterprise
Tom Barker
Chapter 4:The Place of the Urban: Intersections between mobile and game cultures
Larissa Hjorth
Section II: Transforming Spaces and Experiences of the City
Chapter 5:Driving the Sonic City
Kristen Sharp
Chapter 6:‘The Vacant Hotel’: Site-specific public art and the experience of driving the semi-privatized geographies of Melbourne’s EastLink Tollway
Ashley Perry
Chapter 7:The Transient City: The city as urbaness
Maggie McCormick
Section III: Exchange and Transaction
Chapter 8:‘The Liquid Continent’: Globalization, urbanization, contemporary Pacific art and Australia
Pamela Zeplin
Chapter 9:Abdul Abdullah: Art, marginality and identity
Leslie Morgan
Chapter 10:The Visible Hand: An urban accord for outsourced craft
Kevin Murray
Section IV: Interventions in Public Space
Chapter 11:Border Memorials: When the local rejects the global
SueAnne Ware
Chapter 12:Encountering the Elephant Parade: Intersections of aesthetics, ecology and economy
Elizabeth Grierson
Chapter 13:Re-imagining Dutch Urban Life: The Blue House in Amsterdam
Zara Stanhope
Conclusion
Chapter 14:Cities as Limitless Spaces of Simultaneity and Paradox
Chris Hudson
Author Bionotes
Index
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank Intellect Ltd., UK, and particularly Bethan Ball, production manager, and Heather Owen, copy editor, as well as the anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments on the manuscript and support for the publication.
We also acknowledge and thank RMIT Global Cities Research Institute, particularly Professor Manfred Steger, for their support of this project from the beginning and for hosting the 2009 research symposium, Art and Globalization: Urban futures and aesthetic relations , which provided the original impetus for this edited volume. Thanks to the School of Art, RMIT University for their support of this publication and Rupa Ramanathan, research assistant, who helped with the collation of the myriad of images in the text.
We thank the outstanding authors for their scholarly and immensely readable contributions to this book and for their patience and commitment throughout the project, and we gratefully acknowledge the artists and institutions who generously allowed us to reproduce their images.
Finally Kristen personally thanks her husband, Philip Samartzis, and Elizabeth thanks her partner, Nicholas Gresson, for all their support throughout the process of research and publication, and we welcome to the world Kristen and Philip’s baby son, Nicholas Konstantin Samartzis, whose arrival on 15 March 2013 made this a perfect project.
Foreword
This anthology offers a remarkably versatile and vibrant series of chapters on the role of creative practices in the necessary process of rethinking urban space. Indeed, under early conditions of globalization, the changing relationships between art, language, communications and urban space inspired in the 1980s what came to be known as the ‘spatial turn’ and ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences. Combined with a rekindled interest in the crucial role of aesthetic practices in reconceptualizing social life, this new wave of transdisciplinary scholarship on ‘space’ and ‘cities’ has emphasized the active constitution of urban space through conscious human agency within historically-specific frameworks of structural constraints.
As a result of these innovative intellectual efforts, it became increasingly untenable to carry on with conventional analyses that treated space merely as a neutral background upon which, or against which, various social processes play themselves out. Rather, social theorists trained in ‘spatial thinking’ have insisted that cities – especially the ‘global city’ of our age – contain multiple and intersecting layers of discursive and artistic expression and experience which reflect the shared interpretation of concrete ‘places’ shaped through contingent and evolving social relations. Grasping this new spatio-aesthetic dimension requires researchers to ‘re-imagine the city’ – a formidable task shouldered by the contributors of this book.
Focusing on the role of aesthetic practices and contesting discourses in urban formation, this study offers exciting insights into crucial contemporary dynamics of ‘place-making’ in our increasingly over-crowded and suburbanized cities. The contributors to this collection realize that exploring the predispositions of the myriad of artistic narratives and practices related to urban formation calls for new theorizations of ‘globalization’. Indeed, as conventional time-space constellations have undergone significant alterations, it is crucial to gauge the impact of change on the constitution of society and our human consciousness. Observing that the rising global imaginary becomes expressed and articulated in strikingly new ways, the contributors of this book remind us of the central role of human creativity in shaping alternative urban communities capable of responding to the multiple global crises of the early twenty-first century. And, yet, the spirit of this volume works against attempts to colonize the meaning of globality as a singular relation to space and the direction of globalization as a predetermined trajectory.
Finally, the contributors’ attempt to link creative practices and urban space dovetails with important academic efforts to connect more closely language-based with space-based and aesthetic literatures in the critical social sciences. In a globalizing world, where conventional European disciplinary frameworks are rapidly losing their rationale, it has become imperative to go beyond simply paying lip service to the new requirements of inter- and transdisciplinarity. This study represents one such initiative to unsettle established disciplinary territories. It has been designed specifically to bring together artists, art historians, philosophers, architecture faculty, political geographers, cultural theorists, urban studies scholars and media and communications experts in a fruitful exchange of ideas. Such a daring enterprise allows for the further cross-fertilization of literatures that have, for far too long, reproduced themselves in relative isolation. In this sense, then, this collection of chapters also makes an important contribution to the growing field of global studies, in which concrete research questions related to globalization take precedence over circumscribed concerns with disciplinary markers and traditions.
 
Manfred B. Steger Professor of Global Studies RMIT University
Chapter 1
Situating Art, Urban Space and Globalization
Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp RMIT University
Predictions and Questions
The prediction is that 70 per cent of the world’s population will be urban by 2050. What will this world be like and what kinds of spaces will humans be making for themselves? Is it possible to imagine such a future if the present reveals itself only partially and the past is soon forgotten? Can art and design play a role in defining the urban and identifying relationships with it? These questions and more inform this collection, which brings together diverse approaches to re-imagining what cities might be like, or are like, and how humans may inhabit such spaces in conditions of escalating urbanization. If the human subject has been undergoing transformations of identity as Homo economicus in rationalist forces of the global knowledge economy, or Homo digitus through economies of cyber-networks, then new questions need to be asked about being human in such a world and about the kinds of communities, identities and relationships that twenty-first-century urban and global conditions are inscribing. How does the human subject relate to time, space, place and being, now and in the urban future?
Re-imagining the City: Art, globalization and urban spaces raises these questions, and more, for discussion. It investigates art as an innovative, symbolic and material expression of global and urban conditions, and considers the critical disputes characterizing globalization and urbanization of the twenty-first century. It considers how contemporary processes of globalization are transforming cultural experiences in urban space, and how cultural productions in art, design, architecture and communications media may be contributing to the re-imagining of place and identity. Accounts of art forms, projects and events offer a way into understanding the micro-politics of local and global processes of urbanization through which cities may be finding their shape and distinctive characters.
In the economies of twenty-first-century globalization there is an emphasis on creativity as a key driver of innovative production. This suggests that different forms of art, architecture,