With their complex, precarious, and improvisational approach to architecture and infrastructure, as well as their alternative economies, shantytowns around the world are increasingly being studied by urban geographers, social theorists, and architectural scholars alike. Some see these communities as creative in their employment of recycled materials, sustainable practices, and new modes of social relations, while others—and here I’m thinking specifically of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006)—view these expanding metropolises of the poor as excrescences of global neoliberalism and creative mostly in the unimaginable systems of brutality and exploitation existing within them.
Saul Anton, “A Thousand Words: Francis Alÿs Talks about When Faith Moves Mountains,” Artforum Vol. 10, No. 40 (Summer 2002): 146–147.
Claire Bishop similarly contrasts Bourriaud and Sierra in her influential essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79.
See →.
Saul Anton, “A Thousand Words,” ibid.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 178.
McKenzie Wark, “How to Occupy an Abstraction,” Verso blog, October 3, 2011. See →.
Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228.
Glenn Beck is an American conservative, television network producer, political commentator, and host of the radio talk show the Glenn Beck Program in the United States.
Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
Design has become less about objects and more about funneling people toward experiences. In this process, data-mining and the designed environment will become fused to shape people’s movements through space in a way that will make architecture’s historically predominant role in doing this seem feeble in comparison.
Steve Lambert and Andy Bichlbaum, A Celebration, 2008. Quoted from page A1 of the publication.
Ibid., A7.
Ibid., A12.
Ibid., A2.
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 109–142.
Glenn Greenwald, “Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land,” TomDispatch.com, October 25, 2011. See →.
Sean Captain, “The Inside Story of Occupy Wall Street,” FastCompany.com, October 7, 2011. See →.
Ibid.