scholarly journals Polic(sh)ing up the Leipzig Main Station: an ethnographic reflection on abjection, space and resistance

Subjectivity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Kirndörfer

AbstractIn this article, I explore the interplay of abjection, space and resistance at the example of a protest intervention that reclaims a highly policed urban space in the city of Leipzig (Saxony, Eastern Germany)—the Main Station. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic material collected throughout the process of a performative counter-action attempting to reclaim and re-imagine Leipzig Main Station as a venue and politicized space with a contextual analysis regarding the discursive landscape evolving around and shaping this urban locale. My empirical analysis is structured along the theoretical discussion of abjection: While Butler's theorization (Butler in Bodies that matter, Routledge, New York, 1993) allows me to focus on the formative power of spatial exclusion and the disruptive potential of protest, theoretical accounts in which abjection is conceived as a “threshold zone” or “overlap space” (Sharkey and Shields in Child Geogr 6:239–256, 2008; Vighi et al. in Between urban topographies and political spaces. Threshold experiences, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2014) help me to outline ‘abject space’ as a space of negotiation and contradiction.

ZARCH ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
José Durán Fernández

La Ciudad de Nueva York fue pionera en la aplicación de un sistema de planificación de control urbano que pusiera orden y concierto a una ciudad que rebasa los 5 millones de habitantes a principios del siglo XX. Tal complejo organismo urbano, inédito hasta ese momento, fue objeto del más ambicioso plan urbano sobre una ciudad construida.Este artículo se destina al estudio de este originario plan urbano de 1916, el cual sentaría las bases, unas ciertamente visionarias otras excesivas, de la construcción de la Ciudad de Nueva York en todo el siglo XX. La Building Zone Resolution se creó con dos fines: resolver los problemas de congestión humana en un espacio reducido, la ciudad del presente, y proponer una visión del espacio urbano en las décadas venideras, la ciudad del futuro.El artículo es un compendio de diez textos cortos y un epílogo, que junto a sus respectivos diez documentos gráficos, construyen el corpus de la investigación. El lector pues se enfrenta a un ensayo gráfico formado por pequeños capítulos que le sumergirán en los orígenes de la primera ciudad vertical de la historia.PALABRAS CLAVE: Nueva York; Planeamiento; Visión urbana.The city of New York was a pioneer in the implementation of an urban control planning system that set in order a city that exceeds five million people in the early twentieth century. Such complex urban organism – invaluable until that moment – was the target for the most ambitious urban planning on a built city.This paper focuses on the study of this initial urban planning from 1916, which would set the basis, certainly some visionary yet others excessive, for the building of New York City throughout the 20th century. The Building Zone Resolution was created with two purposes: to solve the issues related to the human bundle in a limited space, the city of the present, and to aim a vision of the urban space in the forthcoming decades, the city of the future.The article is a compendium of ten short texts and one epilogue, which in combination with ten graphic documents, frame the corpus of this investigation. Thus, the reader will face a graphic essay composed by a series of brief chapters that highlight the beginning of the first vertical city in history.KEYWORDS: New York; Planning; Urban vision.


2013 ◽  
Vol 409-410 ◽  
pp. 883-886
Author(s):  
Bo Xuan Zhao ◽  
Cong Ling Meng

City, is consisting of a series continuous or intermittent public space images, and every image for each of our people living in the city is varied: may be as awesome as forbidden city Meridian Gate, like Piazza San Marco as a cordial and pleasant space and might also be like Manhattan district of New York, which makes people excited and enthusiastic. To see why, people have different feelings because the public urban space ultimately belongs to democratic public space, people live and have emotions in it. In such domain, people can not only be liberated, free to enjoy the pleasures of urban public space, but also enjoy urban life which is brought by the city's charm through highlighting the vitality of the city with humanism atmosphere. To a conclusion, no matter how ordinary the city is, a good image of urban space can also bring people pleasure.


Author(s):  
Mark Shepard

What happens to urban space given a hypothetical future where all information loses its body, that is, when it is offloaded from the material substrate of the physical city1 to the personal, portable, or ambient displays of tomorrow’s urban information systems? This chapter explores the spatial, technological and social implications of an extreme urban informatics regime. It investigates the total virtualization of the marks, signage, signaling and display systems by which we locate, orient ourselves, and navigate through the city. Taking as a vehicle a series of digitally manipulated photographs of specific locations in New York, this study analyzes the environmental impact of a pervasive evacuation of information–at various sites and scales–from the sidewalks, buildings, streets, intersections, infrastructures and public spaces of a fictional future De-saturated City.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Philipp Röding

The project investigates how economic paradigm shifts that occur at the beginning of the 1970s (primarily the abandonment of the gold standard and the endlessly increasing pool of capital awaiting investment that succeeded it) led to the emergence of a unique building type: the high-altitude observation deck. Part investment vehicle, part iteration of an ongoing fascination with the view from above, the project presents the observation deck as the point where three distinct paradigms intersect: observation, speculation and spectacle. Tracing the emergence of the observation deck through a series of case studies (Top of the World atop the World Trade Center (NYC), One World Observatory (NYC), The Tulip (London) the project enriches its interdisciplinary approach with archival research and fieldwork. Re-telling the complicated collaboration between architect Warren Platner and graphic designer Milton Glaser at the end of the 1960s, the project lays out how the observation deck is conceived at a time when the perceived “crisis” of New York results in a rapidly accelerating neoliberalization of urban space. An avatar of this emerging ideology the observation deck is heavily invested in making the city visually comprehensible. Incorporating a sort of neoliberalist geometry, the deck transforms the city into a product to be consumed instead of a reality to live in and thus paves the way for other ventures of what has been called the “experience economy.” Thus, it signals the ongoing shift away from an architecture that possesses any use value, towards one that, as Barthes put it with regards to Eiffel Tower, is centered only on viewing and being viewed. A speculative machine, the observation deck renders the city into a product.


Author(s):  
Valerie Imbruce

Food equity includes the right to food that is cul­turally appropriate. Immigrant neighborhoods can be sites of contestation over who participates in the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Manhattan’s Chinatown is a good example of a neighborhood where food is central to its com­merce, cultural heritage, and reputation as a tourist destination. The coronavirus’ origin in China caused imme­diate material impact on Chinese restaurants and food purveyors in New York City as well as in other cities with major populations of Chinese people. Chinatown suffered disproportionate closures of its grocery stores, restaurants, and produce vendors due to COVID-19 as compared to other neighbor­hoods in NYC. The grassroots response to this crisis is a reminder that people have the power to use food to assert the society that they desire, to shape a highly contested urban space, and to claim their right to the city.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-200
Author(s):  
Davy Knittle

This article reads the transformation of urban space in US cities during and since the urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s in dialogue with queer and disability theories of access to the social and the built environment. Knittle focuses on obsolescence as an urban planning strategy used to justify the removal of buildings and people from the present, as he explores how queer and disability studies have negotiated and advocated for access to the present and the future while refusing assimilation to normative social forms. He reads across body and city scales to consider access as dynamic and to map how the ableist expectations projected onto disabled bodies in what Alison Kafer describes as a “curative imaginary” appear on the city scale as an “urban curative imaginary.” To explore resistances to obsolescence that refuse assimilation while demanding access, Knittle reads the “window poems” of queer New York School poet James Schuyler. In these poems, Schuyler documents small and large forms of urban transformation from his Manhattan apartment during the 1950s and 1960s. Schuyler’s poems, Knittle argues, model strategies for how to identify the obsolescence of normative space rather than the obsolescence of queer and disabled bodies. He uses the poems’ focus on the queer potential of how urban spaces change to argue for a queer disability urbanism that takes the dynamism of access as a precondition for negotiating equitable forms of social participation and public life.


space&FORM ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 225-240
Author(s):  
Wiesława Gadomska ◽  

This article raises the issue of setting up and developing urban parks on islands which are situated around New York’s borough of Manhattan. Among the principal consequences are an improved balance of developed green spaces in the city and the emergence of attractive public places with a variety of functions and high-quality design solutions. As for the urban landscape, interesting relations are created with respect to views of the unique silhouette of the city, and in particular of Manhattan.


New York City's identity as a cultural and artistic center, as a point of arrival for millions of immigrants sympathetic to anarchist ideas, and as a hub of capitalism made the city a unique and dynamic terrain for anarchist activity. For 150 years, Gotham's cosmopolitan setting created a unique interplay between anarchism's human actors and an urban space that invites constant reinvention. Tom Goyens gathers essays that demonstrate anarchism's endurance as a political and cultural ideology and movement in New York from the 1870s to 2011. The authors cover the gamut of anarchy's emergence in and connection to the city. Some offer important new insights on German, Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish-speaking anarchists. Others explore anarchism's influence on religion, politics, and the visual and performing arts. A concluding essay looks at Occupy Wall Street's roots in New York City's anarchist tradition. Contributors: Allan Antliff, Marcella Bencivenni, Caitlin Casey, Christopher J. Castañeda, Andrew Cornell, Heather Gautney, Tom Goyens, Anne Klejment, Alan W. Moore, Erin Wallace, and Kenyon Zimmer


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ballard ◽  
Philip Harrison

This article examines how developers attempt to move into new settings, and how such attempts sometimes fail. Unlike long-standing developers, who are in various ways ‘embedded’ ( Henneberry and Parris, 2013 ), newcomers have to overcome their lack of familiarity with the context of their intended project. Using the case of a proposed megaproject at Modderfontein in Johannesburg, we examine how a Chinese developer worked to articulate with the Johannesburg planning environment. It produced an extensive network by deploying its staff to Johannesburg, hiring local professional staff, winning the favour of provincial politicians and hiring consultants in the UK in order to help close a deal with planners responsible for approval. Sophisticated efforts to pitch the project to municipal planners using win-win narratives failed to satisfy the planners’ material concerns that the project would break up urban space, would be financially exclusionary and could undermine economies elsewhere in the city. The developer ultimately withdrew as a result of delays in approval combined with a financial crisis it faced in its home context. The article considers the interplay between the transnational networks that emerge around megaprojects; the communicative space of project negotiations that is characterised by different cultures of planning; and the political economic context that allows – or interrupts – transnational development.


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