happenings in space #8: jan. 25 - 31
infrastructures and ecologies, color and conservation, urban healing after george floyd, neil brenner on new urban spaces, and collective memory in public spaces.
we have a new president. we are closely observing the transition. we are trying to not worry about producing. we are preparing for a rainy week and looking forward to sunny days to come. we are managing expectation by not setting ourselves up for failure.
TUESDAY JANUARY 26
INFRASTRUCTURES AND ECOLOGIES — UVA PROJECTING FELLOWS — 6PM (ET)
Projecting Fellows brings together the 2019-2020 class of fellows from American architecture schools to explore a cross section of emerging interests in the discipline and the vehicle of the fellowship project. Commonly selected via national call for proposals, fellowship projects are dually indicative of emerging interests in academia and evolving institutional agendas.
Priyanka Bista, Design for Spatial Justice Fellow, University of Oregon, 2019-20
José Ibarra, Urban Edge Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2019-20
Zannah Matson, Design for Spatial Justice Fellow, University of Oregon, 2019-20
Galen Pardee, LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow, The Ohio State University, 2019-21
PANDEMIC AS PORTAL: “Coloring the Conservation Conversation” — OSU — 6:00PM PST
Pandemic as Portal is a nine-week series featuring visionary thinkers who are imagining the world anew as it reconfigures in the midst of the pandemic. Each speaker will explore their highest vision of environmental and social justice, think about the crucial steps we can take as individuals and communities to bring that vision to life, and share stories of how this new paradigm is already taking shape. J. Drew Lanham is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature, and a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27
Healing, Truth-Telling, and Harm: How Responding to the loss of George Floyd can Repair a Broken Nation — GSAPP — 5PM EST
Alondra Cano is the city council member from the district in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered in March 2020. She was a leading proponent of abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department. During this session she will share what she has learned from the tumultuous events of 2020, and what we can take away about planning and design of multicultural and inclusive American cities.
THURSDAY JANUARY 28
Neil Brenner — New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question
Neil Brenner is a critical urban theorist, sociologist, and geographer whose work opens new theories of urbanization with relevance across the social sciences, spatial humanities, design disciplines, and environmental studies. The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing across the planet. In his most recent book, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford, 2019), Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization.
DECONSTRUCTING ‘COLLECTIVE MEMORY’ IN PUBLIC SPACES — 6:30PM
A lecture by Shelby Green: The early efforts at historic preservation presumed a “collective memory,” meaning references to a past that is accepted as commonly shared and that is collectively commemorated. It assumes general agreement on the events of the past that should be recounted and their meaning. This “collective memory” has been used to construct narratives that define communities and urge specific rules and values that should be embraced. In recent years, we have come to see that that “collective memory” is indeed “curated memory,” and that memorializing it in public spaces has enabled the assertion of power by the curators over others and has often excluded those others from the stories of the nation, sometimes intentionally and other times, unthinkingly. The challenge going forward is how to enable our institutions (legal, political and social), as well as individual designers and planners, to rewrite the narratives to reveal memories of a diverse people.
EXHIBITIONS, SCREENINGS, NOTABLE READS
COUNTRYSIDE: THE FUTURE AND THE PAST — PLACES JOURNAL
ESSAY: Two recent exhibitions showcase efforts by vastly different visual thinkers to document transformations in rural life. One body of work is determined to remain detached; the other is driven by political commitment.
STEVE ROWELL: UNCANNY SENSING, REMOTE VALLEYS — JSMA
EXHIBITION: Steve Rowell investigates ecology and post-natural landscapes in his multicomponent installation Uncanny Sensing, Remote Valleys (2013-20). The project’s title combines “remote sensing” (a method of data collection from the physical world via sensors and other remote technology) and “uncanny valley” (the cognitive dissonance caused by lifelike replicas of living things). Through the use of autonomous aerial cameras, air-monitoring sensors, and sound detectors, Rowell gathers and contextualizes media and data from the field. His presentation of this nonhuman documentation of animal behavior, plant cycles, waste, displacement, erosion, and other elements of the human-altered landscape investigates how we understand, perceive, and experience the environment through technology.
CRITICAL COOKING SHOW — e-flux architecture
SERIES: Through the act of cooking, kitchens establish implicit, visceral understandings of the world. No recipe is neutral; no tool universal. Since the advent of social media, and particularly since lockdown, people around the world have opened their personal kitchens to the unknown viewer. As an intimate, geosocial, critical space, kitchens are places for stories to be told; for new kinships to be made, and new alliances to be forged.
MAPPING THE NEW POLITICS OF CARE — YALE, COLUMBIA
EXHIBITION: Launched by Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership, Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research, this map explores the vulnerabilities of our communities in the age of #COVID19 and how to respond to them. | COVID-19 affects our communities differently. Health and social vulnerabilities that predate the pandemic have fueled uneven effects across the United States. Unless we address the long-standing inequalities embedded in the social and political landscape of the country along with the immediate needs produced by the pandemic, we will come out of the current crisis just as vulnerable as when this all began.