Mashup Image from Facebook (*Note the black bars through the eyes were my own addition)

“Mashups combine views, data, and logic from existing Web sites or applications to create novel applications that focus on situational and ephemeral problems” .  This statement from Maximilien, Ranabahu & Gomadam (2008: 32) in IEEE Internet Computing refers to an open and programmable Web 2.0 where programmers, designers and architects work in relation to one another to develop fluid data-mediation, process mediation and user interface customization solutions.

But there is another world of audio, video and even these visual mashups which proliferate on Facebook:  collages which rework representations and expected meanings.  With ‘Wilderness Downtown‘, the band Arcade Fire shows what can be done in an interactive digital mapping mashup -  This notion of the mashup draws on 1960s US countercultural interventions of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to rework politics and gain attention in the context of 60s mass media.  Mashups were part of a tactic of political and media pranksterism.

Youth engaged in Social Networking Sites (SNS) are acutely aware of visible signs of age and grade of their peers. I entered as traveler in a foreign land, the land of high school youth aged 14 to 18.  As part of a project on community building and neo-liberal economics in the Global North, I worked with high school students on a photography project picturing place, home and community in Fort McMurray Alberta Canada: ‘Where is Fort McMurray‘.  Organizing the project and communicating through Facebook, the usual stuff came up: pictures of their cats, their friends and their family trips to typical vacation spots from this northern oil city. Then I came across the mashup above – a kind of calling card image – and stopped in my tracks.  How did they make it? Where did it come from? Shock and awe to say the least.

Picnik.com offers web-browser based image editing (in fact Flickr.com has links throughout its own user interface that encourage image editing through this now popular website). ‘Of course’ it is so simple, as I tried to master software the ‘youth of today’ are employing. Judging from my own experience, if it isn’t borrowed, it is probably stolen or better yet, free! And it is free just head over to picnik.com I was told.

The questions for me are about communication and culture. What are image/text/design compositions like this conveying as attempt to shock and awe viewers, ‘friends’ on Facebook? One student suggested that, a program like picnik.com is used ‘to make images look better.’ Agreed, pushing the contrast or the saturation on most digital images will yield a more striking and/or clearly focused image. But this is something else entirely. These compositions have the look and flavor of youth culture from another land: wild colors and cartoon characters emphasizing cuteness with no regard for western compositional aesthetic guidelines. There may also be a betrayal of memory, and this may well be the case since others like Livingstone have noted in the academic literature that youth may actively engage in the process of ‘updating’ their profiles on a daily basis, erasing traces of the past. I also consider Bauman’s Liquid Arts towards the new and destined for disposal a poignant reminder.

Composition, like a piece of music or a painting, takes time.  This current digital mode of crafting is no different as a means of work and labor for creation. Mashed-up communication are working in relation to one another as a new kind of dialogue and one that you or I may very well lack the literacy to comprehend. We may be able to analyze the artistic merit or the component pieces of the composition and even the spelling and grammar, but those elements cannot be read as a matter of finite course. Instead these seemingly disparate elements have been fused, remixed and mashed to create a new form of age and perhaps geo-socially specific dialogue.

These are ways of representing oneself to others and also ways of representing one’s world – in these examples, mashups are ways of representing towns and cities where one grew up as part of meaning-making coming to terms with them.  In the process mashups, not new wave video, are establishing the next generations’ understanding of what cities are.

-Andriko Lozowy with Rob Shields

The High Line was originally constructed in the 1930s, to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan’s streets. Section 1 of the High Line is open as a public park, owned by the City of New York and operated under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Friends of the High Line is the conservancy charged with raising private funds for the park and overseeing its maintenance and operations, pursuant to an agreement with the Parks Department.

When all sections are complete, the High Line will be a mile-and-a-half-long elevated park, running through the West Side neighborhoods of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen. It features an integrated landscape, designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, combining meandering concrete pathways with naturalistic plantings. Fixed and movable seating, lighting, and special features are also included in the park.

Access points from street level will be located every two to three blocks. Many of these access points will include elevators, and all will include stairs.

View the High Line Design.

Reviewed by Paul Crosthwaite, English Literature Research Group, Cardiff University (UK)

This outstanding study explores the engagement of Anglo-American women writers of the modernist period with a global capitalist system increasingly orientated towards the consumption of desirable commodities. Situating the authors she analyzes against a meticulously sketched backdrop of early twentieth-century socio-economic history in Britain and the United States, Alissa Karl shows how long-prevailing theorizations of modernist culture as high-mindedly antagonistic towards the vulgar machinations of the marketplace (such as those associated with Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School) misrepresent the ambiguous blend of attraction and repulsion that characterizes many modernist encounters with the seductions of consumer capitalism.

Window shopping at Marshall Fields, Chicago, 1910

One of the chief strengths of Karl’s book is its insistence on approaching commodity consumption not as an autonomous activity contained by the four walls of the grocer’s shop or department store, but as an economic phenomenon inextricably woven into the global capitalist network and determined by an array of power structures. In the introduction, Karl describes how her thinking on these issues evolved over the course of her research:

When I began this project, I set out to examine the conceptualization, function, and impact of consumer capitalism in women-authored modernist texts …. I soon discovered that it was not possible to discuss adequately the ideologies and operations of consumerism without considering the ways that consumerism and modernism alike interfaced with procedures of capitalist economies more broadly, with the classed hierarchies that organize capitalist cultures, with shifting but still active nation- and empire-building, and with racial and ethnic dynamics of societies in demographic flux.” (4)

The four chapters that follow make good on the ambitious terms of the project’s remit. The first chapter considers how the fiction of Jean Rhys registers the ways in which “consumerism links the evolving strategies of actual colonization (economic, military, political) with those of the metaphorical (but no less material or real) colonization of women’s bodies through commodification, fetishization, and visual appropriation” (17). Karl shows how Rhys’ heroines – émigrés to London or Paris from colonized territories or other exotic locales – attempt to utilize consumption and display in order to fashion what they imagine to be metropolitan identities; the effect, however, is to turn themselves into commodities to be possessed and exchanged by domineering, paternalistic men. The book then turns to Virginia Woolf, to examine the co-construction of consumerism and imperialism in The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Here, Karl argues that Woolf sees the practices of British imperial domination as not merely confined to the upper social echelons – in the exercise of state and corporate power – but as continually replicated and intensified ‘on the ground’ in the everyday consumption of goods that bear the imprint of distant exploitation. Woolf’s response, however, is a complex – and symptomatic – combination of complicity and critique.

Chapter 3 analyses two prominent memoirs of modernist literary culture: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company (1956). Karl skilfully articulates the ways in which Stein, the avant-garde poet, and Beach, the pioneering bookseller and publisher who first brought James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into print, did not simply reject the consumer marketplace, but rather challenged a standardized mass culture from within the market itself, positioning their wares as radical, daring commodities for a discerning, niche audience. The final chapter focuses on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand, the loosely autobiographical tale of an American woman of white European and black West Indian parentage. Karl argues compellingly that Larsen’s protagonist, Helga, uses consumerism as a strategy through which “to negotiate the discrepancies of racial identification and class positioning in order to forge a unique position for herself” (120). Commodities and consumerism “appear to offer the latitude of choice against the economic formations of race” (120), but, proving in fact to be inseparable from rigidly hierarchical social structures, they turn out to merely embed Helga’s predetermined place on the social scale.

Drawing on the detailed readings of modernist texts offered in her four chapters, Karl’s concluding Coda makes persuasive and intriguing connections to contemporary culture, indicating how many of today’s anxieties and debates about consumption, commodification, branding, and corporate power were rehearsed during the modernist period, and asserting a strong case for the relevance of modernist texts in understanding the intoxicating and troubling consumer landscape of the twenty-first century.

As Karl notes in her introduction, there has been a recent turn in modernist studies towards “geography and transnationalism,” a turn which troubles “the national and temporal parameters of modernism” (3). Modernism and the Marketplace, with its deftly rendered panorama of globalized economic relations and spatially expansive modernist texts, makes a brilliant contribution to this vibrant field of study. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel write influentially of modernism’s “geocultural consciousness” (qtd. in Karl 4); Karl’s book provides one of the best analyses yet of this mode of writing, thought, and experience.

Works Cited
Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Eds.) 2005. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

Reviewed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Department of Sociology, University of Trento (IT)

“Marching Piece” performance by George Maciunas. Flux Snow Event, New Marlborough (Massachusetts), 1977.

Contemporary artworks have addressed space in a variety of ways, often subtly and thought-provokingly, yet these important interconnections between art and spatial conceptions have not always been adequately recognised or explored in depth. As both an art critic and an art practitioner, Marta Traquino advances an original reflection on the construction, use and meaning of space in contemporary art. Indeed, Ms Traquino’s book illuminates a series of significant visible and invisible similarities between, on the one hand, a series of geographic and social theoretical conceptions of space and place and, on the other, a series of artworks belonging to the traditions of installation, performance, site-specific artworks and what is commonly, although vaguely, referred to as ‘public art’. In this context, the notion of ‘public’ plays a crucial role. Examining quite a few art exhibitions and events, one notices in them a complex co-presence of a ‘space of the public’, i.e. the space occupied by the audience (which includes how the artwork ‘reaches out’ the audience, and how the latter relates or reacts to the artwork), and a ‘public space’, i.e. the heterogeneous, visible and living space that hosts the art event, in which the artwork locates itself and upon which it seeks to act.

In order to explore the interweaving of art and space, Marta Traquino brings together a scholarly genealogy of spatial theorists and some of the most important art movements of the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century. By doing so, she reveals how a fruitful dialogue between these two streams of thought and practice might be developed. In the first part of the book, she draws on the spatial theories of Henri Lefèbvre, Marc Augé, Anthony Giddens, Yi-Fu Tuan, David Harvey and John Urry, stressing how the elements of ‘excess’, ‘compression’ and ‘mobility’ transform contemporary spatio-temporal experience. However, these same characteristics also seem to confirm the centrality of experience in the definition of social spaces and places. From this point of view, art and experience form a well-established couple. Yet while theoretically this intimate connection had been already noticed by pragmatists philosophers, it is in art movements such as Fluxus that the integration of the spectator into the process of creation of the artwork itself reaches its logical end-point.

The experiential perspective thus enables us to observe the inherent dynamism in the constitution of social space. A series of artworks from the late 1950s through the 1960s, which include for instance Allan Krapow’s ‘environments’ (1957-58), Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966), Douglas Huebler’s Location Piece #2 (1969) and Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969), are discussed in details by the author, who notices that these artists reflexively highlighted how space is performatively produced and discursively represented. Other recent artists who have critically worked on what Lefèbvre used to call ‘spaces of representation’, specifically through large-scale artworks, are also reviewed: these include for instance Lawrence Weiner (Smashed to Pieces, 1991), Krzysztof Wodiczko (The Tijuana Projection, 2001), Susan Hiller (The J-Street Project, 2002-05) and Beat Streuli (with his late 1990s and early 2000s series of huge photographs of ‘strangers’ in public places).

One of Traquino’s central claims in her book is that place corresponds to an inhabited and lived type of space where the body represents the measure of an emplaced subjectivity always imbued with memory. A range of artists have elaborated on such an insight, focusing on either the body at a small scale, like Bruce Nauman in Square Dance (1967-8), or outdoor interventions on a larger scale, like Ian Hamilton Finlay at his Little Sparta garden (1966) and Gordon Matta-Clark with his famous house cuts (Splitting: Four Corners, 1974). According to Traquino, the Fluxus movement in particular has set an ‘open path’ in contemporary art as regards the reflection on the experience of emplacement. Fluxus’ motifs of ‘globalism’, ‘experimentalism’, ‘humour’, ‘simplicity’, ‘specificity’ and ‘presence’ all seem to revolve around a relational and phenomenological take on the artistic event. In particular, Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Mieko Shiomi and Ay-O instantiate the search for new types of ‘relations in public’ – to employ Goffman’s category – which question official and institutional definitions. This way, Fluxus art was designed to operate inside ‘social interstices’ which would challenge the common – and, mostly, taken for granted – ordering of space.

Contemporary artists such as the Istanbul-based Oda Projesi collective and the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk inherit many of the Fluxus’ early insights and resolutely proceed along a trajectory Traquino describes as ‘from public space to lived places’. But the institutional context in which contemporary artists operate and the public funding of site-specific artworks, installations and performances also give rise to contentious actions, in some cases even self-defeating ones. In the last sections of the book, Traquino critically reviews a series of cases in which some more or less pronounced ‘detachment between theoretical presuppositions and actual practice’ became visible. The case of Lisbon’s Expo ’98 is extensively discussed. In this as well as other cases, the limits of contemporary public art’s self-legitimation can be ascertained. As the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko acutely put it: ‘To attempt to “enrich” this powerful, dynamic art gallery (the city public domain) with “artistic art” collections or commissions – all in the public’s name – is to decorate the city with a pseudo-creativity irrelevant to urban space and experience alike; it is also to contaminate this space and experience with the most pretentious and patronizing bureaucratic-aesthetic environmental pollution’.

About the author as critic:
História da Arte: Marta Traquino
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea I
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea II – Do espaço ao lugar: Fluxus
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea III – A arte como um estado de encontro

About the author as artist:
Que cor tem agora o céu?
Guest Artist – Marta Traquino
What colour has the sky got now?

• Amanda Lagerkvist, The Future Is Here: Media, Memory, and Futurity in Shanghai
• Anca Pusca, Industrial and Human Ruins of Postcommunist Europe
• Tim Hecker, The Slum Pastoral: Helicopter Visuality and Koolhaas’s Lagos
• Kenneth R. Culton and Ben Holtzman, The Growth and Disruption of a “Free Space”: Examining a Suburban Do It Yourself (DIY) Punk Scene
• Brian Morris, Un/Wrapping Shibuya: Place, Media, and Punctualization
• Anthony Lambert, (Re)Producing Country: Mapping Multiple Australian Spaces
• Andrea Mubi Brighenti, At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain
• Andrew C. Sparkes, David H.K. Brown and Elizabeth Partington, The “Jock Body” and the Social Construction of Space: The Performance and Positioning of Cultural Identity

Carspace (Thanks to cool design site yatzer.com)

The department for urban structure and transport planning of Technical University of Munich/Germany and the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo), a research facility of BMW Group, are pleased to announce an international call to researchers for up to 6 post-doctoral fellowships within the strategic field of “Mobility Cultures in Megacities”.

Duration of Fellowship: 6 months (extension of 2 months possible)

Location: Munich, Germany

Academic Partners: Technische Universität München, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Disciplines: Urban transport and mobility; social sciences with a specialization in mobility and transport research; other fields of study directly related

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The major objective of the program is to generate a profound understanding of mobility patterns and mobility cultures in megacities in different parts of the world. Fellows with a regional background in these cities are asked to collaborate on a set of research questions in an attractive, interdisciplinary and intercultural environment. The characteristics and challenges of the cities shown in the map have already been analysed – those places are of specific interest for the fellowship program. Please contact us for further details and background on the current research approach.

KEY RESEARCH INTERESTS INCLUDE

- Identifying the characteristics, opportunities and constraints of the megacity studied like demographic, social, economic and regulatory conditions

- Analyzing long-term mobility decisions like location choice/urbanization, motorization,…

- Studying every-day mobility patterns like activity-chains, mode and destination choices in function of spatial structure and transport supply as well as underlying social motivations

- Investigating mobility cultures, lifestyles, perceptions and attitudes in the respective cities and their “points of entry” in order to learn if and how they might change over time

- Assessing stakeholder interaction, local planning and policy discourses and their cultural background in order to develop perspectives for “good governance“

- Identifying challenges and developing strategies for the future of urban mobility

CONCEPT

The fellowship addresses post-docs in the following disciplines:

- urban transport and mobility

- social or cultural sciences with a specialization in mobility or transport research

- other fields of study directly related

Fellows from different parts of the world will be working on these topics at mostly the same time in Munich, Germany. They are asked to contribute substantially to the interdisciplinary collaboration on mobility from the perspective of one specific megacity. This should include previous research work and where appropriate additional in-depth investigations. Scientific exchange between the fellows is an integral part of the program in order to learn from the respective experiences and results in a transdisciplinary approach. Research results must be documented in a well-founded research paper including documentation of data, methodology and interpretation of results and should contribute to a transfer of knowledge enabling to tackle the global challenges of future urban mobility in megacities.

Candidates should have a cultural background in one or several of the cities listed in the map above. They do not necessarily need to be residents of the cities; also scientists with an outstanding knowledge about a special city are welcome. Fellows will be asked to collect and analyze relevant data and material regarding their research before their stay in Munich.

The fellowship program will be accompanied by scientific supervision on behalf of Technische Universität München (TUM), Prof. G. Wulfhorst, Dr. S. Kesselring and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main, Prof. M. Lanzendorf and Guest Prof. J. Kenworthy. Additionally the program is incorporated into a broad international expert network of scientists and practitioners from several disciplines.

Conclusions will be drawn in a closing conference and related international publications.

FACTS AND DATES

The research grant at TUM is funded by ifmo und comprises a monthly fellowship of 2500 Euro, travel expenses and additional research funds / family support (in function of individual proposals). Fellows will be asked to work in Munich, the relocation services of BMW Group and TUM will assist accommodation issues.

Applications are to be submitted to ifmo (by e-mail to the address below) by August 31st 2010.

The following documents need to be submitted (in English) with the application:

- Letter of motivation

- CV and list of publications

- Summary of own research work on related topics (2 pages)

- Earliest potential date of starting the fellowship stay in Munich – expected to be in 2011

- 2 letters of reference

Principal selection criteria are thematic qualification, interest in intercultural and interdisciplinary scientific exchange as well as relevance of previous work. Candidates will be invited to an international expert workshop taking place from November 17th to 19th 2010 in Munich.

FURTHER INFORMATION AND ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSION OF APPLICATION

Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo)

A Research Facility of BMW Group

80788 München

Germany

E-mail: irene.feige@ifmo.de

Website: http://www.ifmo.de/

Find this information and download the paper on our website http://www.sv.bv.tum.de/index.php/de/aktuelles/94-post-doctoral-fellowships-mobility-cultures-in-megacities.

[image credit: Christoph Gielen]

China’s Instant Cities

“This year China will add more than 17 million people to its urban population. To house this unprecedented wave of migration from the country side, cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are building countless high-rise residential towers at breakneck speed. The construction sites, surrounded by concrete walls, are almost impossible to enter without a guide who knows how to get past suspicious guards. But once inside, it’s like entering a science fiction novel. Even in the middle of the night, bulldozers, cement trucks, and workers swarm the sites as muscular cranes hoist cargo to ever-greater heights. Bamboo scaffolding and mesh encase the partially built residential high-rises, giving them the appearance of gargantuan cocoons. Entire neighborhoods arise within months of groundbreaking…”

Reviewed by Nurri Kim, Do Projects

My first significant personal exposure to Mexican culture (and Mexican people) was after I moved to the United States in 2003. As a Korean educated in Japan, and with no previous experience of America beyond what I knew from popular media, I remember wondering what these bright yellow “Piso Mojado” signs were supposed to mean and, from there, slowly unfolding the enormous significance of this culture for Californian and American life. I was especially fascinated by those Mexican men with big cowboy hats I saw standing in groups by the side of the highway, waiting stoically for day jobs that might or might not come.

Five years of living in New York have taught me that these men and the millions of other Mexican men and women in similar positions are an indispensible part of the American economy. The flows of the city are hugely dependent on their delivering, making, operating, or fixing things, in a way that reminds me of Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture series. It’s hard to imagine passing through any commercial service in New York that doesn’t depend on these efforts in some way. You name it: even the most downhome-looking Korean restaurant in Koreatown, with the ajumma cooking handmade tofu in the storefront to show off its authenticity, has a line of Mexican guys busy in the steamy hot back of the kitchen cooking and delivering the bulgogi and kimchijigae to the tune of salsa music. But especially as compared to their ubiquitous contributions to the culture, they’re virtually invisible in it — the mainstream, anyway, will never help you understand who these people are, where they’re from, how they got here and how they survive on the interface of two (or more) cultures.

[cc image credit: Nathan Gibbs]

That’s why I was so curious to discover Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta and Heriberto Yepez’s “Here Is Tijuana!” Of course, Tijuana is literally and figuratively an edge case within Mexico, but as a node of transition between cultures and the first place on Mexican soil physically encountered by many visitors, I thought a book about the city would be an excellent place for me to begin my investigations, its title announcing the reader’s arrival like a tollgate traffic sign at the borderline.

The format of the book and the content

“Here Is Tijuana!” is organized in three chapters (”Avatars,” “Desires,” and “Permutations”) written by authors from three disciplines (an anthropologist, an architect, and a writer/psychotherapist) with three different relationships with the city (having either been born, studied, or currently living there). I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to write this book. From the preface:

“One afternoon three friends were discussing nothing else, but Tijuana. The three of them conducted one of those discussions that ultimately tend to abolish friendship. At the end of the discussion, there were two very clear issues: one, that the three of them would never be in agreement about Tijuana; and the other, that it was necessary to produce a book that would reunite the different postures about the city in order to extend the conflict to others as well.”

And so it seems that the process of making the book itself reflected the nature of its subject. Instead of writing an anthology with separate signed contributions, they apparently decided to let the city tell its own story through a succession of static images juxtaposed against quotations, statistical data and other figures, short interviews, and correspondence (e-mail, letters, notes, etc.). It’s very ambiguous as to whose viewpoint is being expressed at any particular moment, or if the authors even wish to endorse a specific viewpoint at all, and the overall effect is to emphasize that whatever opinions or impressions one holds about Tijuana, however jumbled or even contradictory, they might all simultaneously be true.

Emerging codependences

Often this use of supposedly neutral “data” requires some knowledge of origins — the name of an institution, for example, or a URL — to decode the meaning apparently intended by the authors. At first I had a hard time reading between the lines, often helped where an image added texture and flesh to the flattened “facts” and figures (a price list of services provided by prostitutes in Tijuana, a schedule of assembly-plant salaries, counts of inbound and outbound passengers at the airport and bus depot, and so on). I certainly don’t think you have to read this book linearly, but I followed the conventional page order, and by the time I was reading the “Permutation” section, all of these fragments had slowly built up, connected with one another and developed a weave that resembled narrative.

And something else slowly revealed itself, too: Tijuana’s conjoined twin city across the border. San Diego emerges from the trip into Tijuana like the other surface of a Möbius strip. It’s not simply that the Mexican city becomes the site of displaced industries and repressed desires, though this is inarguably the case. It’s that the two places depend on one another, each place made possible by certain kinds of flows across this most extreme of borders. And while voice after voice here are entirely correct to insist on the place’s singularity (”It’s not even Mexico, it’s Tijuana”), in the end it’s also clear that like the countries they belong to, both cities are part of a single binary system. And that is something I’ll remember the next time I catch a glimpse into a Korean-restaurant kitchen in Manhattan.

Reviewed by Peter Lugosi, School of Services Management, Bournemouth University (UK)

Jansson and Lagerkvist’s edited collection explores the processes through which spaces become uncertain, opaque…strange.  At times these uncertainties emerge as negativities – fear, loss, exile, discomfort, but they may also be positive in the form of novelty, excitement, amusement and wonder. Some things are strange because they are new, and fall outside existing norms or even systems of classification, while others become strange as they become outdated, abandoned and increasingly obscure. Jansson and Lagerkvist’s text brings together concepts from geography, media and cultural studies in stressing how the immediacy and apparently straightforward nature of space inevitably obscures and excludes. Familiarity, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the strange; the ordinary exists alongside and in relation to the extraordinary. The various chapters in this book examine, through different contexts, the processes and agencies that produce, and, more importantly, mediate strangeness. A thread running through all the chapters is the importance of the media, mediation and representation in uniting the mundane with the fantastic, or the obvious with the obscure, thus normalising or extinguishing strangeness in the creation of effect or experience. However, the chapters also show how mediation can serve to delineate the deviant, the extraordinary, and the fantastic or highlight the strangeness of those things that are somehow vague. The authors demonstrate how strangeness emerges through changing relationships of power in which it is experienced differently by various people, at different times, and how strangeness is absorbed into cultures and societies.

[cc image credit: Joseph Robertson]

The book is split into three sections: part 1 examines the different scales at which opacity emerges and how mediation influences the manifestation of strangeness. In the opening chapter Carney and Miller wrestle with notions of vagueness in general and with how vagueness emerges in urban contexts, before offering two specific forms of cultural practice that at once captures strangeness but can also be read as attempts to mobilise it. The first of these is early 20^th century photography of derelict, marginal urban spaces, which presents possibilities for vagueness and strangeness to emerge in amongst, and in contrast to, the ordered sensibilities of cities. The second example offered by Carney and Miller is the Eruv, a process through which large urban and suburban areas are redefined by its Jewish residents as one enclosed space, thus allowing them to travel between premises and to transport objects without breaking the rules of the Sabbath. Both these examples of mediation and social practice offer different readings, interpretations and the possibility for alternative experiences of the spaces being represented, thus allowing socio-spatial practices to challenge or disrupt existing power relationships.

In the following chapter Löfgren changes the scale of analysis to the microcosm of the home and considers the fate of media objects and technologies, for example, photographs, cassettes, videos, records, CDs, reels of home movies, slides, computer games, consoles, diaries, drawings and media players. In their prime these objects amuse, enchant and capture moments in people’s life, but once they become redundant, they are hidden, and people attempt to dispose of these strange remnants from the past. While individuals retain, or recapture, a nostalgic connection with some objects, such as photo albums, diaries and video footage, they are estranged to many others. Löfgren narrates his own experiences and relationships with the dying and hidden objects that subsequently haunt him.

Ahrén and Sappol change scale again in focusing on representations and displays of the human body. The chapter takes the form of two dialogues by the authors who take turn to comment on the ways in which representations or displays of the body engage the viewer; how they can, in specific forms, appear to create an image of order and unity, while in others displaying its disordered, dysfunctional nature, but at all times transforming the body into an object of consumption. These processes of representation and display make a series of scientific truth claims, while at the same time reproducing power relationships, for example about the central status of the healthy male body ideal against which the strange other, the female or the sick, is imagined. However, these representations of the body also serve to highlight its strangeness – and, for the authors at least, they challenge the viewer to reflect on their sense of selves and embodied experiences of space. In the final chapter of Part 1, Parks considers an overlooked aspect of mediation and mediatisation, the satellite, which, in their various forms, transmit information around the world, while also casting a digital gaze back on the earth.

Part 2 of the book, entitled Dislocation, disruption and disobedience focuses on the various cultural practices and events that either challenge existing power relationships, or expose some deviant aspect of culture, and thus serve to challenge perceptions and experiences of space and notions of self. Habel examines the experiences of women at the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition and the ways in which various representations and mediations of those experiences shaped women’s engagement with the event. Lagerkvist draws on Lefebvre’s work on rhythms, which she uses in her analysis of representations of China and Shanghai’s past, as they are reconstructed, through the juxtapositioning of objects in a colonial building, the La Villa Rouge. Straw considers the role of 20^th century crime novels and films in creating and reproducing particular representations of cities as criminal spaces and centres of deviance. A similar theme is explored by Wilbert and Hansen in their discussion of walking tours of London crime scenes. They focus on historical and contemporary representations of murder and the relationship visitors share with the spaces in which these events actually took place in London. More specifically they consider several walking tours of these city spaces and discuss how these strange, marginal spaces are performed by guides and visitors in relation to these representations of crime and criminality. Deviance of a different kind is the focus of Hammond’s chapter: she discusses the fate of a modern Spa complex built in the city of Bath in the UK.  Hammond considers the ideologically loaded constructions of Bath as a historical city, which she uses to explain the negative reactions to the Spa.

Part 3, Secrets and Wonders of Media Spaces, shifts focus on to the obscure and magical spaces of the media and of mediation. Ericson’s essay sheds light on a physically present, but hidden media space of Broadcasting House – The British Broadcasting Corporation’s office and studio complex. His discussion is concerned with the physical design of the building, the complex functions entangled in its design and also in the symbolic aspects, which has provoked much debates among architects, critics and commentators. On the one hand this media space is seen as a sacred temple of communication, but it also functions as a carefully controlled machine for the production and transmission of sound. Themes of revelation and control also emerge in Jansson’s chapter, which focuses on two centres of media production and orchestration at the Expo 67: the Operations Control Centre and International Broadcasting Centre. As with the preceding chapter on Broadcasting House, Jansson offers a particular reading of these two facilities as highly orchestrated attempts to make visible and transparent mysterious media backspaces that have considerable influence in shaping the flow of people and information. This orchestrated spectacle demystifies the act of mediation and control but it is an estranging act – obscuring the potentially problematic acts of such centres of mediation and positioning the visitor as an observer of the media spectacle.

Sloan deconstructs the postcard; or, more specifically, pictorial representation of the moon on postcards and interrogates how these playful representations, once they are written, addressed and sent, thus being incorporated into networks of communication, interaction and interpretation,  create strange and fantastic objects for viewers. Jacobs’ objects of attention are representations of museums and galleries in film. In films these venues are liminal sites and places of transgression for those “haunted, in hiding or are in transit” (297), which include spies, criminals, lovers, socially marginal characters alongside tourists and art connoisseurs. Museums and galleries in films reflect the superficiality of touristic consumption, while also demarking and reinforcing social distinction between the educated, the snobbish and those lacking cultural capital; they are spaces of contemplation as much they are sites of deviance, intrigue, danger and excitement where crimes, illicit meetings, chases and supernatural events take place. Representation in films is a theme also explored in the final chapter by Pike. He is concerned with the various manifestations of underground spaces from train lines, tunnels and sewers to hidden dwellings and realms. These hidden places of mystery, resistance, evil and awe sometime act as the backdrop or context to a more immediate, compelling plot, while at other times reflecting more broadly the vertical, hierarchical nature of society.

This is in an eclectic collection of essays, and although the editors make a good attempt to produce a coherent account of the (re)emerging themes of the book, it is inevitably the start of a dialogue on the subject rather than any attempt to produce a definitive notion of strange spaces, if such a thing was ever possible. This eclecticism means the individual chapters will appeal to readers interested in the specific subjects e.g. material culture (Löfgren), touristic sites and the multidimensional nature of touristic production/consumption  (Wilbert and Hansen), cinematic (Pike; Jacobs), photographic (Sloan; Carney and Miller) and textual representation (Straw) or the contested nature of urban space (Hammond; Carney and Miller), but the book’s fundamentally ambiguous theme means it is unlikely to become a core reader of a particular university course or become the basis of a distinct area of academic debate. Nevertheless, this book, like any other provocative academic work challenges us to rethink and to re-imagine what may appear to us as natural, obvious and transparent, and to appreciate its strangeness.

Reviewed by J.A. Adedeji, Department of Architecture, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (Nigeria) and S.A. Amole, Department of Architecture, Obafemi Awolowo University (Nigeria)

The book “House Form and Culture” was originally written in 1969 by Amos Rapoport and published as one of seven books in the “Foundations of Cultural Geography Series” edited by Philip Wagner. This series considered the underlying theoretical constructs that have shaped, and continue to shape, the built environment, including religion, beliefs, customs and socio-cultural forces at large. Rapoport presented neatly distilled correlates of culture and house form with a large volume of cultural illustrations from across the globe. The book is also a presentation of cross-disciplinary studies of dwellings, buildings and settlements from architecture, planning and cultural geography.

An interesting aspect of Rapoport’s book is its balanced view. After giving substantial evidence against factors other than culture as house form determinants, he went on to present his basic hypothesis that “house form is not simply the result of physical forces or any single causal factors, but is the consequence of a whole range of socio-cultural factors seen in their broadest terms.” In view of the logical arrangement of Rapoport’s argument, the book naturally divides into two parts: chapters 1-3 are for the defence of the primacy of culture, and chapters 4-6 explain the modifying influence of other factors. As expected, the later part is relatively thin compared to the former, which is the real bone of the argument that Rapoport grinds into powder.

Rapoport’s book is the direct opposite of traditional patterns of study in architectural theory and history where efforts have always been on monuments and “high style” buildings of various civilizations. The foundation of the book was laid on the intellectual debate of the meaning and characteristics of folk, primitive, and vernacular buildings on one side, and modern buildings on the other–possibly even forming a continuum. Relying on the work of Gould and Kolb (1964), Redfield (1965) and Mumford (1961), among others, Rapoport argued that “primitive” buildings were produced by “primitive” societies which had a “diffuse knowledge of everything by all” with elementary technology.

The book linked behaviour and form, and theorized that built form has influence on behaviour, not in a causal manner but in the way of “coincidences.” Despite the firm grip of the book on the comparison between the vernacular and modern societies and their buildings, its loose grip on the varied meanings of culture leads to a conspicuously missing extraction of which set of meanings is crucial to the understanding of the study. Such deep and wide meanings of culture as later presented by Oyeneye et al (1985), Norberg-Schulz (1988), among many others, are denied the reader leaving a large vacuum of knowledge and intellectual dreariness that dates the book. Unfortunately, readers of the book are also left to find their own path through the contexts in which “form” has been used.

Nonetheless, Rapoport debunked the many “alternative theories of house form” by refuting the rather extreme explanation and weak foundation of architecture that “climate and the need for shelter” determine the form of dwellings. His balanced view on the impact of climate on house form is commendable; after giving enough evidence on the supremacy of culture over climate in determining house form, he submitted that “it is a characteristic of primitive and vernacular buildings that they typically respond to climate very well.”

Rapoport concluded the book with what he called “a look at the present.” In this way, the book presented the relationship between house form and culture from the “primitive” to the vernacular and 1960s modern period. He noted that in the past there were hierarchies in society which were legible on built forms but at the time of writing there was “the general loss of hierarchies within society,” resulting in the reality that “all buildings tend to have equal prominence.” According to Rapoport, “modern man has lost the mythological and cosmological orientation which was so important to primitive man, or has substituted new mythologies in place of the old.” Crowe (2000) had a similar view when he noted that the symbolic values of the built environment are being lost today and that is why “man was born in an hospital, lived in a building that might as well look as an hospital judging from its outlook and died in an hospital.” In this concluding chapter, Rapoport again demonstrated his balanced sense of judgment when he maintained that both “primitive” and “modern” times have myths that may be different but are commonly motivatedby being “primarily socio-cultural”–however still claiming that the “neglect of traditional cultural patterns may have serious results.”

Despite its shortcomings, Rapoport’s book remains convincing in its argument pattern, detailed in its presentation, and unparalleled in its academic ingenuity. The book should continue to be a great companion for all those who are advocates of a livable built environment.

Works Cited

Crowe, N. 2000. Nature and the Idea of a Man–made World: An Investigation into the Evolutionary Roots of Form and Order in the Built Environment. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Gould, J, and Kolb, W.L. (Eds.) 1964. A Dictionary of the Social Sciences. New York: The Free Press.

Munfora, L. 1961. The City in History. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Norberg-Schulz, C. 1988. Architecture: Meaning and Place: Selected Essays. New York : Rizzoli.

Oyeneye, O. T. and Shoremi, M. O. 1995. Nigeria Life and Culture. Publication Committee, Department of Sociology. Ogun State University Press.

Redfield, R. 1965. Peasant Society and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.