Urban Ornaments...the movie....

We - TACT - wish you with this clip a Happy Holiday Season and all the best for the New Year!

"Why we painted over Berlin’s most famous graffiti"?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/why-we-painted-over-berlin-graffiti-kreuzberg-murals?CMP=twt_gu

CfP: German Congress of Geography

The German Geographic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geographie, DGfG) and the Geography Department of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin extend a cordial invitation to all geographers to participate in the German Congress of Geography in October 2015 in Berlin.
The Call for Papers is now open until 11 January 2015. You are invited to submit your papers to the sessions, which can be found here. 
http://dkg2015.hu-berlin.de/files/2014-10-08_dkg2015_call_eng.pdf

The Pessimism, Despair and Hypocrisy of Berlin’s Street Art...no comment....

http://polysingularity.com/blu-street-art-berlin/

 

CFP: The Ideal City: between myth and reality – Urbino (Italy) – 27-29 August 2015

In the wake of globalization and State rescaling, cities are regaining relevance as social laboratories for new and innovative practices of social inclusion and participation. Within this trend cities are becoming again and more than ever a project. Policy‐makers, planners, inhabitants and mob le people build representations and idealizations that make a big part of the allure of urban life. Cities are imagined, made and remade “by design”. This has long tradition: from the grids of Roman cities to contemporary capitals like Brasilia, from Megalopolis like Shēnzhèn to living experiments like Soleri’s Arcosanti; from urban lives in the Renaissance to the Futurist vertical dreams; from, the 19th‐century garden cities to the current hype for smart cities.

For more visit: www.rc21.org/en/urbino2015

4th RC21-IJURR-FURS Summer School in Comparative Urban Studie

Research Committee 21 (RC21) of the International Sociology Association, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS) and the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (Italy) invite applications for 25 places on our fourth collaborative School on Comparative Urban Studies, to be held in Urbino (Italy) from August 16th to September 2nd 2015. 

The School is being held in conjunction with the RC21 Conference on the theme of “The ideal city: between myth and reality. Representations, policies, contradictions and challenges for tomorrow’s urban life” to be held on August 27-29, 2015.

http://www.rc21.org/en/conferences/summerschool2015/

CfP: Multiple moralities and shadow economies in post-socialism: debating positive and negative incentives to tackle the informal economy

Marie Curie/IAPP Summer School: Zagreb 29 August " 1 September 2015
Call for applicants
In recent years, growing attention has been paid to fighting, or at
least controlling, incomes that are hidden from or unregistered by,
the state for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes.
Starting from the assumption that such non-compliance is not some
minority practice (according to an OECD report, of the global working
population of some three billion, nearly two-thirds - 1.8 billion -
work in the informal economy, see Jütting and Laiglesia, 2009) and
pushed by the need for governments to gather revenues to face the
economic crisis, the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27)
and Norway, as well as the EU Candidate countries, have been
earnestly seeking new policy measures to enable the formalization of
undeclared work (see EIRO, 2005; European Employment Observatory,
2004, 2007; Renooy et al, 2004; Williams and Renooy, 2009, 2013).
Two broad approaches have been distinguished towards undeclared work:
a deterrence approach which seeks to engender compliance by detecting
and punishing non-compliance, and an enabling approach which aims to
encourage compliance by either: preventing businesses or people from
engaging in undeclared work from the outset; providing incentives to
enable the transfer of undeclared work into the declared realm, or
facilitating commitment to ~tax moralityTM (Small Business Council,
2004; Williams and Renooy, 2009).
Conventionally, the deterrence approach was dominant across most
European countries. However, the recent crisis and recalculations of
the advantages of formalisation of informal economies have led to
rethinking the way to deal with undeclared economies. Rather than
seek to eradicate the undeclared economy, it is now becoming more
popular an approach to encourage the formalisation of undeclared
work.
Previous research from the GREY project (http://www.grey- project.group.shef.ac.uk/) has suggested that the informal economy
may be higher the broader is the gap between individual and state
morality. Our understanding is that where a citizen does not see the
advantage of contributing to state development, or when s/e perceives
the state as unreliable, not giving but only taking, or not giving
enough, they are more likely to leave the game. In this respect,
economic actors may even perceive as oemoral  not contributing to the
state (and thus doing something stigmatised by state morality).
Indeed, there is an increasing amount of work in the informal economy
and the emergence of individual accounts that contrast with a state-
led view on individual morality (see, among others, Van Schendel &
Abrahams, 2005; Wanner, 2005, Morris, 2012; Morris & Polese, 2014;
Polese & Rodgers, 2011).
For this Summer School, we welcome the submission of early stage
researchers with empirically-based papers, based on recent research
by PhD students and early post-docs, as well as theoretically-rich
accounts on the relationship between the formal and the informal
economy, state-citizen dynamics and conflictual moralities.
Contributions may be on (but are not limited to):
Informal, undeclared, shadow, underground and unrecorded economic
activities
Tax evasion and tax non-compliance
Tax morality
Informal economies and governance
Informal economic practices and policy making
Suggestions on how to increase compliance among taxpayers, companies
and stakeholders
Moral foundations and alternative moralities of criminal or illegal
activities
Please submit 200 word abstracts and a short biographical statement
with your current position and affiliation  to:
iapp.summerschool@gmail.com
Deadline for abstract: 15 February 2015
Travel, board and lodging for the selected participants will be
covered by the organisers.
This summer school has been made possible thanks to a generous grant
from the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission (grant
no. 611259)

Funded PhD places available in Digital Humanities at University of Kent

The University of Kent is recruiting for new funded PhD places, to join in the 2015/16 academic year. We have a special interest in proposals for Digital Humanities, Digital Heritage, Spatial Humanities, and cross-disciplinary humanities research.

Eastern ARC scholarships:http://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/postgraduate/eastern_arc.html 

Eastern ARC is the new research consortium, uniting research capacity in the Digital Humanities and heritage at the universities of Kent, Essex, and UEA. At Kent we are particularly interested in proposals on past built environments, ancient cities, and comparative urbanism, among a few other key areas.

CHASE scholarships: 

http://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/postgraduate/research_council/ahrc.html

CHASE is an Arts and Humanities (AHRC) funded doctoral training centre in which seven universities collaborate. Here we are particularly interested in interdisciplinary humanities research, certainly still including archaeological and historical disciplines and the Digital or Spatial Humanities.

50th Anniversary scholarships: 

http://www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/postgraduate/50th_anniversary.html

Call for Proposals: Special Issue on Travel Writing and the Visual

Studies in Travel Writing, Taylor and Francis

Special Issue on Travel Writing and the Visual

Travelling and moving from one place to another have always been accompanied by some sort of need and desire to record experiences visually. According to McGrane, “To travel is to see – travel is essentially a way of seeing, a mode of seeing: it is grounded in the eye, in our visual capacity” (Beyond Anthropology).

It is through seeing that distant places, foreign people and objects seem to gain consistency. Through the years, sketches, watercolours, photography, film and digital media have framed and recorded every aspect of our movements and experiences of dislocation. What happens then when visual means and products (traditional and digital) come to influence or complement tales of displacement and mobility? In what way does the writing of present and past experiences of departure reflect and respond to visual images? How are issues of identity, gender, race and class expressed through the interlacing of words and images in travelogues? And how do the recording, display and narration of personal and collective experiences of travel provoke and encourage us to experiment with new ways of seeing and being?

We invite article proposals on visual elements of travel texts for a Special Issue of Studies in Travel Writing to be published in 2018. Articles will discuss the relationship between travel writing and visual media, within different geographical zones and historical contexts, in order to discuss and explore: how visual means evoke, engage with, comment on, or develop travel texts; in what way travel texts of any period respond to a visual aesthetic; how recent travel writing has engaged with new visual techniques (e.g. the DIGITAL CAMERA, new modes of image storage and processing etc.).

The following lines of enquiry are of particular interest (although other contributions are also welcome):

-       Representations of landscape; perceptions of urban and rural spaces;

-       Travel in extreme situations and hardship;

-       Written and visual narrations by people with disabilities and illnesses;

-       Children’s travels;

-       Women’s journeys;

-       Mystical and religious journeys;

-       Imagined journeys.

Proposals (in English and between 500-600 words) should be sent together with a brief biography to: giorgia.alu@sydney.edu.au, or sally.Hill@vuw.ac.nz by 16 December 2014.

Giorgia Alù (University of Sydney)

Sally Hill (Victoria University of Wellington)

Call for Chapters: Paris of the Periphery: The Parisian Image and the Making of Urban Modernity in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1850-1930

We invite submissions (in the form of a 1000-word abstract) for consideration as chapters in an edited volume exploring the many connections between Paris and the modernizing cities of Eastern Europe and Latin America in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (1850-1930).  Our objective is to reopen and reinvigorate the comparison of the borderlands of modern Western urbanity by bringing together the histories of cities on the continental and transatlantic periphery that were fashioned or imagined as regional Parises in miniature (“Paris of the East,” “Paris of South America,” “Paris of the Balkans,” “Paris of the Andes,” “Little Paris,” etc.) or that interpreted significant elements of their urban environment, experience, or culture through the prism of Paris.  We are particularly interested in going beyond the focus on urban planning alone in the consideration of this relationship.

Through a series of chapters on individual cities in either Eastern Europe or Latin America (see list below), the volume aims to explore the following clusters of questions:

• What did it mean to call an Eastern European or Latin American city the “Paris of…” its region?  Who fostered this association, when, and why?  (Groups to consider may include, but are not limited to:  politicians, businessmen, urban planners, architects, city officials, tourism officials, visiting travelers, immigrants, journalists, advertisers, students, artists, writers, playwrights, songwriters, bohemians, modernists, scientists, other local social/political elites.)  Did everyone mean the same thing when they used it?  How did its meaning change over time in a particular urban or national context?

• What historical changes in Eastern Europe or Latin America after 1850 encouraged locals to identify with or reject Paris as a model of urban modernity?  Were there political conflicts or transformations at the national level that encouraged or discouraged this association? Were they related to social or cultural changes within the city itself?  Were they fostered by growing personal networks or other transnational material connections to Paris?

• Which Paris served as the model for the implementation or interpretation of modernity in an Eastern European or Latin American city, when, and why?  The “City of Light”?  “Capital of Pleasures”?  Haussmann’s Second Empire or Beaux-Arts capital?  “Old Paris”?  Bohemian Paris?  Were there other general images of Parisian modernity that Eastern Europeans or Latin Americans used to map their own modern urban experience?  Other specific neighborhoods, streets, or architectural details in Paris that they saw or wanted to see echoes of in their own city?

• To what degree did urban planners, architects, and city officials in each Eastern European or Latin American city consciously seek to emulate Haussmann’s Parisian reforms or model their own urban environment after Paris specifically?  Were there other urban models of equal or greater importance for them?  Consciously or not, to what degree did they end up replicating the look of Paris in miniature?  To what degree were other changes or other people beyond their control responsible for the “Paris of…” association?

• How did local manifestations of modernism and nationalism shape the view of Paris as a model of cultural modernity over time?  Did they reinforce or break down this connection?  To what degree did new cultural actors such as bohemians, modernists, popular entertainers, or nationalist ideologues ridicule the pretention to make their home city more like Paris – or even ridicule Paris itself?  To what degree did architects, planners, and others look to national traditions or other kinds of modern cities (such as the North American skyscraper city) as a counterweight or alternative to the identification with Parisian modernity?  To what degree did they simply re-imagine Paris to better fit their own experiences and ambitions? 

Each of the book’s empirical chapters will focus on a single city, written by an expert on one of our two focus regions.  No contributor will be asked to make direct comparisons between Eastern Europe and Latin America in the course of his or her study.  Similarly, no proposed analytical focus is too narrow.  We will work with the selected participants to situate specific topics or periods of interest within the broader framework of the study.

As we already have authors working on Buenos Aires, Budapest, Prague, Quito and São Paulo, we are looking for further contributions exploring interactions with Paris in other Eastern European and Latin American urban contexts such as Athens, Bucharest, Belgrade, Caracas, Cracow, Havana, Lima, Mexico City, Montevideo, Odessa, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Warsaw, etc. Proposals for chapters on other capitals or large cities normally considered part of these two regions are welcome as well.

The deadline for chapter proposals is January 15, 2015.

After the completion of the review and selection process at the end of March 2015, the editors will submit a book proposal to several academic presses.

To submit a chapter proposal, please email both Dr. Brian Bockelman at bockelmanb@ripon.edu and Dr. Alexander Vari at vari@marywood.edu

Dr. Brian Bockelman
Department of History
Ripon College
300 W. Seward St.
Ripon, WI 54971 

Dr. Alexander Vari
Department of Social Sciences
Marywood University
2300 Adams Ave.
Scranton, PA 18509 

Online Database: Becoming Istanbul

Becoming Istanbul explores contemporary Istanbul through an interactive database of over 400 media. An up-to-date collection of artists' videos, photography series, documentaries, news reports, cartoons and architectural projects, the database is organized according to 80 concepts that instrumentalize typical discourses relating to the city and suggest new points of view. Its media include the visual productions of artists and researchers who have problematized actors and phenomena typically disregarded in urban discourse, as well as the declarations of decision makers involved in Istanbul’s current transformations.

http://database.becomingistanbul.org/

more at http://saltonline.org/en/30/istanbullasmak

Upcoming: 6th International Urban Geographies of Post-communist States Conference: 25 Years of Urban Changes

Dear colleagues/CATs,

We would like to invite you to the 6^th International Urban Geographies of Post-communist States Conference: 25 Years of Urban Changes (a.k.a. the 'CAT-ference') to be held in Prague on September 23–26th 2015.

Further details, including the call for papers and sessions, will be announced in December 2014. As usual, the event will showcase high-quality scholarship on the post-communist/post-socialist city, and there will be a dense social programme that includes a field trip.

In the meantime, please make sure that you reserve these days on your agenda. The official CAT-ference e-mail address is catference2015@natur.cuni.cz. Please use this address for any communication regarding the event.

CFP: Urban Pop Cultures

The Urban Pop Cultures Project
Sunday 10th May - Tuesday 12th May 2015
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Call for Presentations:
For each generation, the world's cities have provided a fertile cultural landscape in which alternatives to the mainstream emerge and flourish.
From the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem and the Swing Kids of 1930s Berlin, to the block parties that gave rise to hip hop and rap in 1970s New York, to the to the Freetekno movement that swept across European cities in the 1990s, to the punk scene of seventies London, New York and Sydney to the noughties emo revival, urban popular culture has provided a space in which society's disadvantaged, disenfranchised and generally disenchanted populations could assert agency through the formation of communities of resistance.
Of course the relationship between the mainstream and the alternative is in a state of constant flux, which raises important questions about what it means to be alternative in a globalised world, how the dynamics of the mainstream/alternative relationship play out over time and what social purposes are served by the existence of alternative cultures generally. The Urban Pop Cultures project will explore these issues with particular reference to alternative music culture that include but are not limited to indie rock, post-punk, hip hop, rap, electronica, post-rave, dark wave scenes and post-Gothic. We therefore welcome proposals for presentations, performances, installations, and interactive workshops on themes that might include:
Conceptualising Alternativity and Urban Popular Culture:
-What does it mean to be alternative - as a culture, a practice or a lifestyle?
-What draws people to or alienates people from alternative musical culture?
-What are the dynamics of the relationship between alternative cultures and the mainstream from which they diverge?
-What ideological positions motivate and underpin alternativity?
-Is there an inherent relationship between progressive sensibilities and alternative cultures?
-What events and factors trigger the emergence of alternate cultures and practices?
-What happens when alternative becomes mainstream?
-What does alternativity contribute to society in any given moment and why is it essential to understand these phenomena?
-What is it about urban spaces that causes alternative cultures to form and thrive?
Forms, Functions and Funding of Alternative Music:
-Case studies and first hand accounts of the emergence and evolution of specific alternative music cultures
-Ethnographic studies of alternative music communities -Formal analyses of musical styles that define an alternative music culture
-Band/artist profiles
-Economics of alternative music culture: industry status, funding, sustainability, etc.
-Performative spaces (clubs, scenes, etc.) -Lifestyles associated with alternative music culture
-Linguistic practices associated with alternative music cultures
-Intersections between alternative music culture and other subcultures
Alternative Music Cultures and their Urban Contexts:
-Impact of alternative music cultures on urban planning and development
-The relationship between immigration, multiculturalism and alternative music cultures -Alternative music cultures as engines for economic growth, commercialisation and tourism
-Racial, class and gender implications of alternative music culture
-Youth culture and alternative music trends
-Sexuality and alternative music culture
-Relationships between alternative music culture and fashion, film, television, computer games and the arts

What to Send:
300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday 23rd January 2015. All submissions are at least double blind peer reviewed. Proposals should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract,
f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: UP5 ProposalSubmission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs:
Daniel Riha: rihad@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: up5@inter-disciplinary.net
The conference is part of the 'Critical Issues' programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please visit: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/cyber/urban-popcultures/call-for-papers/

"Liquidated CCCP"

"Liquidated CCCP" // "Sowjetunion liquidiert"
Urban contemporary artist Zevs hit Berlin during a special wall performance for the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9th, 2014 at Urban Spree. This is the first public performance of the artist in Berlin after his infamous visual kidnapping of Lavazza in 2004 on Alexanderplatz

http://vimeo.com/111893747 

FYI: On squatting in Berlin

https://medium.com/matter/our-own-private-germany-6ce44ac93a7b

CFP: ENTANGLED HISTORIES, MULTIPLE GEOGRAPHIES

ENTANGLED HISTORIES, MULTIPLE GEOGRAPHIES
Belgrade, Serbia
Conference dates: 14-17 October 2015
Paper proposal deadline: 31 January 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

The EAHN 2015 Belgrade Conference "Entangled Histories, Multiple Geographies" aims to explore how different discourses emerged within architectural historiography and have both constructed and reproduced multiple identities, histories and perspectives on culture, nature and society. It also aims to apprehend the complex hierarchic articulation of these discourses, in terms of dominancy and peripherality, normativity and transfers.

The principal aim of the conference is to shed light on how different interpretations of architecture and the built environment have contributed to different readings of history, culture, nature and society, either simultaneously or in alternation.

Special attention will be given to addressing conflicting and complementary views, explanatory systems and theories that stem from understanding and interpreting the past by means of architecture. By "entangled histories" we mean architecture as both a prerequisite to and an instrument in shaping and understanding different or even competing histories of the peoples and places, while "multiple geographies" refers to the roles of the built environment in constructing and interpreting time frames and spatial scales, as well as cultural and political entities in which these histories unfold.

The conference will be structured according to three broad themes.

The first theme is historicity. This includes architectural responses to the appropriation and interpretation of the past from antiquity to the recent past; the roles of architecture in constructing meaning; its roles in conceptualizing or negotiating historical time and time frames, as well as how the interpretation of the built environment deals with various regimes of historicity and produces conflicting identities.

The second theme considers tradition/ innovation in architecture, which can be traced equally in modern, early modern, and pre-modern periods. The theme explores the roles of architectural history in addressing questions of center-periphery, globalization, and cultural, political, or religious propaganda in the built environment. Examples might include transfer of architectural traditions and/ or innovations within Europe or beyond; appropriation of traditions or imposition of innovations for cultural, political, or religious reasons; or hybrid traditional-innovative conditions. It also opens the question of architectural history and its role in the simultaneity of multiple modernities, ideological restructuring of cultural and political discourse and similar topics.

Finally the third theme looks at the role of politics, both in terms of the direct interaction of (local) powers with the field of architecture and of the intermediate pressure of geopolitics. The topics treated here could range from ideological matters - such as the instrumentalisation of architectural historiography, etc. - to operative policies related to economic and social issues, including the role of the State (in early modern and modern times; as a specification, during the Cold War, it can treat both the socialist regimes and the welfare capitalist State). The geopolitical perspective could embrace a larger chronological span and explore, aside from the phenomenon of globalization (with all its aspects), mechanisms that led previously to shape networks of political influences.

We invite papers that explore one of the three main themes listed above. These themes have been, and could be, addressed from different conceptual perspectives central to the topic of "entangled histories" and "multiple geographies". These perspectives might include, but are not limited to, those of conflict and change; ruptures and continuities; global entanglements and segregation; regional integration and disintegration; political and cultural homogenization, and standardization and heterogeneity.

Proposal due date: 31 January 2015, noon CET (Central European Time)

Please submit 300 word abstracts through the conference website submission portal: http://www.eahn2015belgrade.org/submission

New Special Issue by Visual Documentation Journal, Routledge

New Special Issue of Visual Documentation Journal, Routledge
'The Imaginary City in the Twenty-first Century'
Volume 30 Number 4 December 2014
Editors: Ayşe Erek and Ayşe H. Köksal

This special issue of Visual Resources examines the ongoing debates about art and urban imaginary by connecting the city with its past and its present. Not only are the cities structured in different forms of representation and imaginaries they are also themselves spaces of imagination and creativity. Hence urban imaginary and art are interwoven in countless ways in the city to reveal or conceal multiple stories. The five essays collected here propose new interpretations on the dynamic ways of producing urban representation interlaced with the contemporary art world, the urban visual culture, as well as its institutions, such as museums, biennials, exhibitions, and cultural events.

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gvir20/current#.VGoAeleUeIk

Open Call: Street & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal

http://www.urbancreativity.org/ 

It was a great event: "Urban Ornaments" in the Urban Spree/Berlin ! Thank you!

Wonderlab Berlin: FUNDING URBANISM

Wonderlab Berlin: FUNDING URBANISM
October 28-November 1, 2014
Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, Köpenicker Straße 48, 10179 Berlin

As an effect of the economic crisis and social movements in the past decade many actors in architecture and planning recognized that traditional funding models lost their capacity to feed small-scale, community-oriented urban projects. While designers elaborated new methods to address problems of community, participation and ecology, they also created alliances with a new generation of developers and economists as well as law specialists to experiment with new models for funding urbanism. 

For Wonderlab Berlin, the Wonderland Platform for European Architecture invited protagonists of the new civic economy from various European cities to join the Funding Urbanism workshop in Berlin: four days of site visits, public presentations, debates and screenings as well as an exhibition at DAZ. 

Wonderland Platform for European Architecturen is a Vienna-based network for exchanging experiences, information and knowledge for young practices. Wonderlab is a three-part workshop series conducted in cooperation with the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). 

Public Events: 

Wednesday, OCT29 

19-21h Recovering Resources: presentations and roundtable discussion with LCC (Rotterdam), T Spoon (Rome), Architettura Senza Frontiera (Milano), Stealth (Amsterdam/Belgrade) and Fatkoehl Architekten+Urban Catalyst (Berlin). With the participation of Stefanie Raab (Coopolis, Berlin), Luke Haywood (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin) and Michael Lafond (id22 Institut für kreative Nachhaltigkeit, Berlin) 

21h MOVIES IN WONDERLAND: "Life in the Coffin Factory", D.: Alexander Dworschak, Michael Rieper, Christine Schmauszer. A 2013, 48 min. OmeU" 

Friday, OCT31 

19-21h Organizing Regeneration: presentations and roundtable discussion with Ramon Marrades (Valencia), Urbego (Copenhagen), SIC (Madrid), Ateliermob (Lisbon), Homebaked (Manchester), Kristien Ring (Berlin) and Bostjan Bugaric (Ljubljana-Berlin). With the participation of Tore Dobberstein (Complizen, Berlin) and Francesca Ferguson (Urban Drift, Berlin) 

21h MOVIES IN WONDERLAND: Selection of short films on “Funding Urbanism” 

Saturday, NOV1 

11h guided tour at the exhibition

REMINDER : “Urban Ornaments” Exhibition and round table discussion at the Gallery Urban Spree, 2nd November 2014, 5pm

 Urban Ornaments

An ornament – originating from the Latin “ornare” – signifies a material element that is added to a structural form through the process of adornment or decoration. In contrast to this minimalistic definition, however, the concept of ornaments also became to encompass a much broader understanding: social and political considerations are now essential parts of ornaments. Identifying itself with this latest turn of the interpretation of the ornament, the exhibition uses Adolf Loos’ provocative text “Ornament and crime” (1908) as a starting point. The photographic works displayed at the exhibition not only aim to reflect, thus, the Loosian argument from a contemporary perspective, but also try to shed light on the various types of logic behind the aestheticization of urban space.

Artists:

Bence Bakai : “Since 2000 I am a street art enthusiast.Taking photos since i know my self. From 2008 I live in Berlin.”. http://ben-soir.tumblr.com/

Viktor Hodobay : “Basically what I do is street photography. Most of my work is focusing on people and their relations to their artificial habitat, the way they use public space and how their appearance merges into and forms our urban environment.”

Péter János Novák: The hungarian photographer-illustrator Péter János Novák is taking digital photos about urban landscapes since more than two decades.  The presented black and white photos are shots from various european countries, taken with his pocket digital camera short barrelled, pancake lens. http://betonon.tumblr.com/

Ruthe Zunz: With her artistic work, Ruthe wants to overcome boundaries and forge links between people and communities. Her photographs show the familiar features in strangers as well as the unknown in neighbors. She is fascinated by the vibrant metropolis and shares her passion through her photographs. n 1998, she co-founded Walkscreen and continues to work on international artistic collaborations. She has exhibited in China, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan and Finland.

http://www.walkscreen.de/ws_start_e.htm

Roundtable Discussion:

Ayse Nur Erek (Yeditepe University, Istanbul), Nicole Huber (University of Washington), Oleg Pachenkov (European University, Sankt Petersburg), Heike Oevermann (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), Júlia Székely (CEU Budapest), Lilija Voronkova (CISR, Sankt Petersburg)

Organized by TACT in co-operation with the Georg-Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin
http://theartistandthecity.blogspot.de

CfP: Cities of a new type

Dunaújváros, Hungary, May 21 - 22, 2015

Deadline: Dec 1, 2014

Cities of a new type. New industrial cities in popular democracies after 1945

International conference in Dunaújváros

In the socialist countries after 1945, several cities were erected from scratch next to an industrial complex: the main ones were Dunaújváros (named Sztálinváros from 1951 to 1961) in Hungary, Eisenhüttenstadt (Stalinstadt from 1953 to 1961) in East Germany, Nowa Huta in Poland and Dimitrovgrad in Bulgaria. They were supposed to become cities of a new type, different from the chaotic, segregated and capitalist city. They had to invent a socialist way of life and the population of these cities (mostly workers) did create a specific working class culture, even if it was different from the one that was expected by the authorities. Each city was progressively built through ideological ambitions, but also through concrete constraints and unexpected evolutions. The history of each city has so far been studied and written mostly from a national or regional perspective. We want to consider them from an international point of view and to put them in a comparative and transnational perspective.

We will consider the entire socialist period, from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. That is to say not only the time of the construction (the early fifties) but also the following decades, when the young cities got older and were transformed, according to local factors and according to the transformation of each popular democracy. However, we will not consider the post-socialist period.

The conference will focus on the four above-mentioned cities, but it will also consider smaller new cities (Ózd and Komló in Hungary, Nová Dubnica in Czechoslovakia, Nowe Tychy and Jastrz?bie in Poland, Schwedt and Hoyerswerda in East Germany, etc.) and new districts in already existing cities (for instance, Poruba next to Ostrava in Czechoslovakia or Halle-Neustadt next to Halle in East Germany).

We particularly welcome papers investigating topics such as:

- The comparison between the cities. The conference will examine both the history of the towns (plan, architecture, construction techniques, etc.) and the history of the people who came to the towns (migrations, work in the factory, everyday life, housing, etc.). For each topic, comparisons shed light on unnoticed facts. For instance, putting next to each other the plans of the new cities shows significant differences and leads to think about the urban morphology or about the relationships between the city and the factory. Similarly, comparisons between the pieces of furniture in the new apartments lead to think about design in socialist regime.

- The understanding of exchanges between the cities. Archives give evidence of economic and cultural collaboration, mainly through delegations exchanges. And these exchanges concerned the different involved actors: decision-makers of local authorities, party members, city planners, engineers, workers. What did people from Nowa Huta know from Dunaújváros and Eisenhüttenstadt? In what extent did these cities constitute a network? In this sense, the conference participates in the current historiographical reflection on the economic and cultural collaboration between socialist countries and on the integration of socialist space.

- The question of the models. What was presented and considered as model? In the official discourse, there was only one model: the USSR and its main new city from the 1930s, Magnitogorsk. But the actual influence of the Soviet Union is hard to understand. What was known exactly from the Soviet Union? What was imitated? Magnitogorsk seems to have been very far and actually little known; other building sites, like the reconstruction of Stalingrad, were maybe more familiar. And the USSR founded many new cities, all over its huge territory and during the entire socialist time. What was done with this knowledge? The contribution of specialists in Soviet history would be very appreciated.

Despite the official discourses, Soviet Union was certainly not the only model. The new cities in Eastern Europe also looked at what was done in Western Europe and also outside Europe. These cities were built through different derivatives and borrowings that were put together.

The conference will be held in Dunaújváros and Hungarian researchers will then present hitherto unseen archives from the steel factory Dunaferr: paintings, photographs and various sources about the functioning of the factory or about the daily life of workers (for instance Dunaferr possesses a precious collection of brigádnapló – the diary that each brigade had to write about work and life in the factory). Such archives, which present interesting resemblances with archives from similar cities, will contribute to the historical, nuanced and objective understanding of the socialist way of life.

Please send an abstract of up to 500 words and a brief academic CV to pepperart.dunaujvaros@gmail.com. Deadline for submission of proposals is 1st December 2014. Conference language is English. Funding is available to cover travel and accommodation expenses.

Organisation committee:

Jérôme Bazin, Paris-Est Créteil University.

Mihály Molnár, Pepper Art Projects (Budapest). Dóra Molnár Pepper Art Projects (Budapest).

Gábor Rieder, independent art historian (Budapest).

Scientific board: Ulf Brunnbauer (Regensburg University), Sándor Horváth (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Dagmara Jaje?niak-Quast (Frankfurt/Oder University), Katherine Lebow (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Research), Andreas Ludwig (Potsdam Center of Contemporary History), György Szücs (Hungarian National Gallery).

URBAN ORNAMENTS

Two weeks to go to the new group photo-exhibition organised by TACT at Friedrichshain, at the Urban Spree Gallery.

ANCB Lectures -Urban Interplay - Community, Identity and Space

PUBLIC DEBATE 

Urban Interplay - Community, Identity and Space

Saturday, 18 October 2014, 4:00 pm 

Francine Houben, Mecanoo architecten and Benedetta Tagliabue, EMBT

ANCB Lectures on the occasion of the opening of the Aedes exhibitions A People's Palace by Mecanoo architecten and Barcelona RE.SET on the work of the Fundació Enric Miralles 

Francine Houben of Mecanoo architecten and Benedetta Tagliabue of EMBT are two of today's leading architects. On the occasion of the opening of the corresponding Aedes exhibitions, ANCB presents lectures by both architects, who share a common focus on the importance of interaction in public space. 

http://www.ancb.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=14706293#.VDv4XRYeLdk

WE TACT... Exhibition and Roundtable Discussion "Urban Ornaments". November 2, 2014. Urban Spree, Berlin

CFP: Negotiating Change in Urban Spaces from the Middle Ages to the Present - Oxford

Deadline: 31.10.2014 

This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the ways in which physical transformations of urban spaces have been negotiated and/or narrated over time. The politics of space continues to attract leading research, especially during moments of palpable transition such as the tearing down of city walls or the rebuilding of war-damaged districts. In these situations, struggles over municipal laws, codes, or regulations, or the changing aesthetics or rhythms of urban spaces illuminate a great deal about how the city has been imagined. They underscore the narratives that urban dwellers, professionals and government officials have told about the built environment and used to influence its transformation. In this sense, the imagined geography, image, role and importance of a city as conceived by a myriad 'interested parties' is as important as its physical reality. However, these rhetorically and visually defined cities never stop taking their legitimacy from the physical city. 

This conference seeks to gather together academics from a number of disciplines interested in this relationship between material change and discourse. Some examples of the many ways in which this can be explored include investigations into the primacy of place in debates over urban change, be it structurally, politically, or socially understood. Likewise, investigations of mental geographies have enriched our understandings of clashes over urban development, through an increased sensitivity to how different forms of borders are created and policed. Other researchers have looked to explore questions of memory or heritage in material change. Indeed, this holds true for a whole range of political, social or cultural ideas. And of course, explorations of the relationship between the local and the global have raised fascinating questions of how urban identities were understood in space and changed across time. 

We are seeking papers that consider the complexities of negotiating and/or narrating urban transformations according to any disciplinary approach. There are no restrictions on geographical region or time period but a reference to change according to one of the following themes: 

- Infrastructural change 

- Changes in housing and/or living standards 

- Changing regulations, including of the sounds, smells and rhythms of urban life 

- Local and/or global relationships in the city 

- Aesthetics or artistic depictions of the city 

- The development of heritage and sites of memory 

- Changing tensions between secular and religious spaces or relationships 

- Policing, surveillance and deviance 

In order to ground the conference discussions in the realities of navigating change in the city, the conference will also include a number of architects and urban planners to help enrich the ways in which we talk about the city. 

The conference will take place at Nuffield College, University of Oxford and will be consist of panels of short summary presentations based on pre-circulated papers of 5-6000 words. There will be no conference fee - coffee and meals including the evening meal are included. Limited funding to subsidize travel costs and accommodation is available, to those without a full wage or institutional support. 

Paper proposals of up to 500 words and as well as an abridged curriculum vitae should be sent to S.R.Davies@swansea.ac.uk by 31 October 2014. The conference language will be English. 

Please address all queries to: Sheona Davies, S.R.Davies@swansea.ac.uk

CfP: Subversive Practices and Imagined Realities in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe since 1945

Session Convenors:
Amy Bryzgel, University of Aberdeen, a.bryzgel@abdn.ac.uk
Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovakia, euringer-batorova@vsvu.sk

In communist Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the building of socialism had as its final endpoint a utopia that provided the ultimate motivation: sacrifice now, reward later. In its sheer impossibility, it was an elusive and illusory dream that formed the foundation for everyday life under totalitarian regime. Within this visionary world, artists such as Alexander Mlynarcik (Slovakia), Marko Kovacic (Slovenia) or Mark Verlan (Moldova), created their own parallel worlds, utopias, dystopias, and fantastic domains. In many cases, alternative and nonofficial artists’ works served to carve out a unique space in the so-called “grey zone” of Europe, which offered an alternative not only to state-sponsored socialism, but also to Western capitalism, both of which many artists and dissidents viewed with equal suspicion. This panel will examine a range of artistic ideas, participative strategies, subversive practices, networks and projects (imaginary or real), which demonstrate an alternative sphere of thinking and modes of creative living, and which possibly attempt to move beyond the classical binary systems of West and East – all from within an everyday world order that seemed to be set in stone. We also invite papers that offer a more differentiated view, even extending to the post-socialist period, aiming to re-evaluate the nexus of aesthetics and politics and produce new interpretations and analytical approaches regarding counterculture and censorship, which explore the relational aspects of following binaries: official and unofficial, political and apolitical, permitted and prohibited – under totalitarian rule.

The deadline for abstracts is November 10, 2014. Paper proposals must be emailed directly to the session convenor(s). You must provide a 250 word abstract for a 30 minute paper. Include your name and institution affiliation (if any). Please follow the format found in the “Paper Proposal Guidelines” document found here: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2015
You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks from the session convenor(s). - See more at: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2015#sthash.PXRmHWA3.dpuf

Unfortunately no fee is payable to speakers; all speakers must register and pay to attend the conference.

See more at: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2015

Public art festival - ARTPROSPECT in Saint Petersburg

 
http://www.artprospectfestival.ru/category/news/

Micro-urbanism. City in details

Micro-urbanism. City in details. Ed. by Olga Brednikova and Oksana Zaporozhets. Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2014.

The book is devoted to and inspired by contemporary city. A variety of research approaches grasping the fluidity, plurality and ambiguity of urban life are united by micro-urbanism as a common analytical perspective. Micro-urbanism is a possibility to look at the city at the close distance, to discern it in nuances and details. It unfolds a dense everyday life of the city and highlights the urbanites as its main actors, who create the city, its places and routes via everyday activities, senses and feelings. Along with the usual, though not quite familiar, urban characters such as public transport passengers, wedding companies and omnipresent tourists, the book introduces relatively new participants of urban life: urban explorers, graffiti writers, sellers and buyers of flea markets, and many other. Vivid narrations bring to life vibrant and emotionally saturated city.

http://igiti.hse.ru/en/culture/news/132972210.html