Cities Interrupted

Visual Culture and Urban Space

Shirley Jordan, Christoph Lindner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474224437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Cities Interrupted explores the potential of visual culture – in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media – to strategically interrupt processes of globalization in contemporary urban spaces. Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, the book brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of 'interruption' in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today's rapidly transforming urban environments. The idea of 'interruption' addressed in this book refers to deliberate interventions in the spaces and communities of contemporary cities – interventions that seek to disrupt or destabilize the experience of everyday urban life through creative practice. Interruption is used as an analytic and conceptual tool to challenge – and explore alternatives to – the narratives of speed, hyper-mobility, rapid growth, and incessant exchange and flow that have dominated critical thinking on global cities. Bringing art and creative practice into the centre of discussions about the future of cities, alongside discussions of development, design, justice, health, sustainability, technology, and citizenship, this book is essential reading for anyone working at the intersections of a range of urban, cultural and visual fields, including urban studies, urban design and architecture, visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, and social and cultural geography.

1 VISUAL CULTURE AND INTERRUPTION IN GLOBAL CITIES

Shirley Jordan and Christoph Lindner

What is interruption?

Cities are constantly undergoing change, their fabric shifting in small or seismic ways, some planned and some unplanned. Discourses and theories of mobility, acceleration and flow are often used to account for this change, particularly in the era of globalization. Key critical paradigms that attempt to capture and account for late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century urban evolution have shaped our understanding and, to some degree, our perception. David Harvey (1989) and Doreen Massey (1994) have written on the time–space compression involved in globalization; Saskia Sassen (1991) has popularized the concept of the global city as a transnational space of rapidly circulating capital; while Edward Soja (2000) has emphasized the spatiality of urban transformation under intensified conditions of globalization. Numerous studies seek to account for new and often overwhelming combinations of speed and scale. Manuel Castells (1996) has developed the concept of the ‘space of flows’ to describe the fast-paced networks of communication and power dominating the global information society; Arjun Appadurai (1996) has called attention to the sense of acceleration that accompanies the global flow of people, goods, services and data; and John Urry (2007) and Tim Cresswell (2006) have stressed the new forms of mobility that globalization facilitates and often necessitates. Meanwhile, more alarmist accounts of globalization and urban change have emerged from provocative thinkers like Paul Virilio and Jonathan Crary who warn, respectively, against the atomizing, anonymous speed-space of the accelerated city (Virilio 1997; 2007), and against late capitalism’s relentless war on rest and sleep (Crary 2013).

This volume traces urban phenomena that cut across and complicate such discourses on globalization and cities. Building on a series of workshops organized in Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London and New York, it completes a trilogy of interrelated studies developed by a group of international scholars whose work on the visual culture of global cities has given rise to new thinking on violence (Lindner 2009), inertia (Donald and Lindner 2014) and, in the case of the current volume, interruption. In particular, Cities Interrupted brings together researchers in architecture, geography, urban planning, photography and art to explore some of the ways in which visual culture responds to, intervenes in, decelerates and critiques global conditions of urban speed and mobility.

In this introductory chapter, we wish to set the frame for the discussions that follow by sketching some of the key debates about interruption and exploring some preliminary examples that bring into focus core issues at stake in the volume as a whole. We begin, therefore, by addressing the question ‘what is interruption’? Interruption, commonly understood, entails breaking in upon an action, bringing about a temporal rupture, creating an interval that draws attention to itself precisely as deliberately ‘counter’. Interruption, as we understand it in this volume, entails a wide range of such temporal interventions, while also addressing the idea of spatial interruption in the built environment that calls attention to issues of ongoing urban development and restructuring. To say that cities are sites of permanent interruption might seem like a truism, for it is clear that interruption is the very stuff of the urban condition, made up as it is of competing drives and currents, endlessly reinvented obstacles and avenues, unceasing reinvention. Indeed, ‘flow’ itself may be seen to consist of a rapid succession of interruptions. And, while ‘interruption’ has been harnessed as an analytic tool for thinking about, say, documentary photography (Roberts 1998), the concept has not yet received close attention in either urban studies or cultural studies.

One reason for this is that interruption is something of a slippery, capacious concept. It is that very slipperiness, however, that makes it both attractive and appropriate for our purposes as we set out to test its critical potential. As will become clear, the case studies in this volume all address the term, each asking, in their own way, pressing questions about the nature, effects and effectiveness of interruption. The latter is a key issue for all contributors. To what extent does a given interruption have ‘teeth’ as a means of stymying, in however small a way, the overwhelming tsunami of globalization? Does some of what we like to think of as interruption in fact contribute to the race towards an ever-accelerating global future? Does interruption resist or reinforce what it critiques? Who really wants interruption, and in what context?

Interruptions are often unpredictable and are brought about by a vast range of agents. Their most salient and immediately conspicuous forms are embodied, for example, by global terror, which has transformed the architectural map of many cities (think, for instance, of New York after 9/11) and found its way into visual culture in innumerable fashions. One might also cite the economic interruptions in flows of capital as a result of the global financial crisis, or interruptions effected by provisional failures of systems and infrastructures, such as the blackout in Lower Manhattan following Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or the massive disruption of European air travel following the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010.

Interruptions can also result from carefully managed State-induced changes. One unusual, highly ironic and visually spectacular example was the recent clean-up of Beijing in readiness for the November 2014 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Air pollution, a serious health hazard in Beijing, is part and parcel of its narrative of growth. Habitually at dangerous levels, the thick smog is a dominant feature of the city environment. As Beijing prepared to receive over twenty world leaders and geared up for the summit, the authorities orchestrated an interruption in the ongoing pollution of the city in order to improve air quality and avoid the embarrassment of foreign dignitaries having to wear face masks. The operation of factories, construction sites and even crematoriums was restricted in order to minimize emissions and ‘interrupt’ smog-producing activities. Factories within 200 kilometres of the city centre closed. It was forbidden to light fires. The use of cars was restricted. A six-day holiday was declared and attempts were made to lure city dwellers out of town by offering free entry to museums and other attractions so that the city centre would feel less populated. This short-lived but telling interruption in what is the ecological disaster of Beijing was all the more important given that APEC promotes green growth and environmental protection. How paradoxical that a global city – by definition characterized by the density of its production activities and priding itself on being a thrusting, throbbing hub – should, in order to showcase itself, grind to a halt. A remarkable visual phenomenon was brought about by the government’s decision briefly to re-cast the city as clean. The smog-less sky was newly revealed, in a hue that was wryly referred to by city dwellers as ‘APEC blue’.

Our emphasis in this volume is deliberately placed on less obvious and less explosive instances of interruption. We have sought out quieter ‘pockets’ of resistance, to use a metaphor coined by John Berger (2001), and smaller spaces of contestation associated with or brought about by visual culture. Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York and Paris, chapters discuss variously how unruly bodies interrupt cityscapes; how everyday spaces may be transformed into sites of interruption; how street art seeks to push back against the homogenization of urban space and the flattening of cultural difference. We explore how new aesthetic and technical practices in urban photography self-consciously put the urban environment on hold; how installation art and performance may undermine or conversely reinforce the totalizing visions of architecture and urban planning; how post-industrial urban ruins are revivified in order to decelerate the global flows that produce them; as well as how visualizations of urban redevelopment oscillate between smoothness and friction in their surface engagements with the city. To bring these sorts of concerns into sharper focus, we turn briefly to consider two examples of what we mean by interruption. Both are artistic responses to architecture and urban planning, and both demonstrate in key ways the kinds of thinking that interruption can generate and the challenges involved in its interpretation.

Anarchitekton

A solitary man runs through the streets holding aloft a cardboard maquette of a building mounted on a stick, like a placard. In Barcelona, Bucharest, Osaka and Brasilia he performs this puzzling urban ritual carrying scale models of real high-rise edifices, either already built or unfinished, that are emblematic of the city in question, or of its suburbs, and against which his performance is set like a miniature echo. This is the pseudonymously named Idroj Sanicne, a character who acts out street interventions devised by architect and visual artist Jordi Colomer and whose global architectural runs are captured on film, brought together and projected in galleries for Colomer’s Anarchitekton project¹ (2002–2004; Figure 1.1).

Colomer’s small architectural dramas stop traffic, turn heads, generate curiosity and questions, and induce a pause in everyday urban flow. They may be read – and are intended – as interruptions, disruptions, spaces of intervention. Colomer’s gloss on our idea of interruption includes the notion of contagion: he speaks of ‘contaminating the streets’ with a new kind of imagination and estrangement that prompts critical questions, inducing us to keep on seeing and interrogating architecture and urban planning. Released from their massive materiality, the buildings are rendered newly portable, strangely mobile and uncomfortably fragile. They are returned to the world of ideas from which they originated, and are made freshly available for attention and debate.

FIGURE 1.1 Jordi Colomer, Anarchitekton Brasilia, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

The interest of this example for our purposes is its ambiguity and the way in which it is snagged between competing interpretations. On the one hand, the performances have the energy and urgency of street demonstrations; the maquette or effigy brandished aloft on a wooden stick seems like a form of grass-roots protest against the violence that architecture can do – a cry against the contagion and creeping homogeneity of global modern and postmodern design. One wonders if, when the running stops, the model building might be symbolically destroyed, sacrificed, set on fire. On the other hand, these performances also have an almost self-avowed, self-deprecating futility that renders them absurd or even comical. Colomer’s man is running hard – sometimes at full pelt – against the global tide, yet at the same time emulating globalization’s flow and speed. He is alone. He is going nowhere in particular and, with such an unfocused, unformulated, ephemeral sense of protest, is doomed to failure. Worse perhaps – and this is deliberate – the performance even lays itself open to being interpreted as something of an advertisement for contemporary architecture and planning. Is Colomer’s running man in fact, bizarrely, not struggling against but instead promoting to its inhabitants the built environment through which he runs? Is this a procession dedicated to something sacred rather than a demonstration against a negative force? One thinks of how, in early Soviet Russia, people carried architectural maquettes through the streets. The idiom provided by the maquette belongs to events characterized by both celebration and protest. Colomer’s interruptive gestures, interminably re-played in the silent looped videos that were screened simultaneously in the multi-projection gallery exhibitions that took place in Brazil and France in 2003, seem uncomfortably caught between outrage and celebration. Perhaps the clue is in the title, an anagram that draws together ‘architecture’, ‘anarchy’ and ‘marathon’, unpicking the cityscape but with no apparent programme in mind.

This spectacle is emblematic of the way in which several of the interruptions brought about via visual art in the current volume, although springing from a desire to protest, may become difficult to read as protest and instead get dragged along in, and ultimately serve to bolster, the hurtling forces of neo-liberal globalization. Think of the pop-up shops that turn bourgeois (Ferreri, Chapter 9); graffiti absorbed into the mainstream global art world (Jein, Chapter 6); or the street photography that mingles with other images in the street to become confused with advertisements (Jordan, Chapter 12). Interruption has only temporary force and may dissolve into or be co-opted by the very conditions it seeks to resist. Some of the case studies in this volume disconcertingly suggest the emergence of a deceptive form of interruption, one that appears to spring up in order to work ‘against the grain’ of globalization and its forces, but that is in fact complicit with those forces – an interruption that is cooperative rather than subversive.

Colomer’s running projects seem to exemplify the inevitable exhaustion of small protests, deeply and energetically felt but poor in resources, deprived of clear direction, and ultimately ineffectual. Their upshot seems to be a confirmation that it is not possible to find effective ways to undercut, interrupt and contest major urban...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Visual culture and interruption in global cities
• PART ONE CRISIS AND RUIN
• 2 Why we love ‘interruption’: urban ruins, food trucks and the cult of decay
• 3 Rescuing history from the city: interruption and urban development in Beijing
• 4 Interrupting New York: slowness and the High Line
• 5 Sound, memory and interruption: ghosts of London’s M11 link road
• PART TWO RESISTANCE AND RENEWAL
• 6 Suburbia, interrupted: street art and the politics of place in the Paris Banlieues
• 7 Looking at digital visualizations of urban redevelopment projects: dimming the scintillating glow of unwork
• 8 ‘Here we are now’: Amsterdam’s North–South metro line and the emergence of a networked public
• 9 Pop-up shops as interruptions in (post-)recessional London
• PART THREE BODIES AND SPACE
• 10 Interruption expanded: urban photography’s perspicacious view
• 11 Buildering, urban interventions and public sculpture
• 12 Interrupting the street
• References
• Index
• Copyright