Police agent provocateurs, one armed with a rock, revealed in a peaceful demonstration against North American economic union at a discussion of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North American Pact (2005) in Montebello Quebec.

One questions whether Canadians approve of their tax dollars funding what appears to be crowd baiting? Why would any politician would want to resist calls - why take a position at all initially - for an inquiry into whether or not this is a case of police misconduct?

The political power of popular media such as YouTube to be an parallel forum to mainstream media is clear from a perusal of the ways Canadian and Quebec politicians are forced to respond, even if "no comment" is their first line of rhetorical defense. Does anyone have academic sources on YouTube as political communication and on these protest spaces? And what of the management of protest space and the importance give to "lines" in this video - We all know about the moral power of being asked not to "cross picket lines", but I presume strike lines have a specific status in law which police have to respect?

The page for Greg Elmer's lab - a bit of the media side of our editors' interests. Media, media geographies and the materiality and topologies of media are things we're continually following in the journal.

Before you commit to an Ikea home why not stay overnight at an Ikea store?



Check in to the Ikea bridal suite for a flat-pack honeymoon

"Whereas Brits may associate the Swedish furniture giant with screaming kids, traffic jams in the parking lot and an occassional riot when a new warehouse opens, it seems Norwegians see a trip to Ikea as the ultimate tourist attraction. 'Around 900,000 visitors come to visit Ikea during the summer holidays. It's more than one of the biggest attractions in Norway, the Holmenskollen ski jump, gets in one year,' claimed Mr Ullebust. 'We have five Ikea stores in Norway, all situated next to the four biggest cities, which are all in the south in the country. We found that people from the north of Norway include a visit to Ikea as part of their holidays,' said the spokesman. 'The Ikea Hostel will make the destination complete'."
It doesn't cost anything to stay, you get a free dinner, bath robes and slippers, and you get to take your sheets home as "souvenirs"! (via)

"We are beginning to see that the new model of the home-dweller looks like: 'man the interior designer' is neither an owner nor a mere user - rather he is an active engineer of atmosphere. Space is at his disposal like a kind of distributed system, and by controlling this space he holds sway over all possible reciprocal relations between the objects therein, and hence over all the roles they are capable of assuming. (It follows that he must be 'functional' himself: he and the space in question must be homogeneous if his messages of design are to leave him and return to him successfully.) What matters to him is neither possession nor enjoyment but responsibility, in the strict sense which implies that it is at all times possible for him to determine 'responses'. His praxis is exclusively external, This modern home-dweller does not 'consume' his objects [...] Instead of consuming objects, he dominates, controls and orders them. He discovers himself in the manipulation and tactical equilibrium of a system." (Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 1968)

The City in the Crosshairs: A Conversation with Stephen Graham (Pt. 1)
I think Bryan Finoki's Subtopia is one of the very best urban blogs out there and I've always appreciated geographer Stephen Graham's ability to make clear that urban critique must directly include politics and economics, so I knew I was in for a treat when I sat down to read the full (and rather lengthy) text.

Particularly fascinating here, I think, are Graham's comments about critics who tend to underestimate connections between urban morphologies and technologies of violence--and how this relates to a need to both theorise and plan beyond historical understandings of defensive or strategic urbanism by focussing on contemporary structures of capitalism and networked technologies.

Heavily implicated in these issues, of course, are US military operations, the inherent risk of dealing with 'feral cities' in foreign lands, and intensified post-911 global techno-surveillance assemblages. All of this is further complicated by nationalist rhetorics that advance a sense of homogeneous ('homeland') patriotism rather than the explicit (and actual) social and cultural heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism of cities like New York, where working to rebuild involves reinforcing two types of infrastructure: the physical one of steel and concrete, and the social one of low-wage, low-prestige and often migrant labour.

Anyway, lots of good stuff here and apparently a second part to follow.

Revista de estudios culturales urbanos - Worth learning Spanish for. The quality of material coming out of Chile and Argentina is peerless at the present time. Other key names include Buenos Aires journals such as Punto de Vista, and Prismas and writers such as Beatriz Sarlo and Adrián Gorelik and artists exhibited in the 2006 "La Normalidade". From South America's metropolitan vantage points, the knottings of postcolonialism, globalization and postmodern style are seen in a accutely political light, tempered by a sense of irony which enriches the analysis and a quality of humour and style which allows a broad readership to not reject, but appropriate these analyses as a form of autocritique.

Less typical views than the usual images (google "Pudong" or "Shanghai Bund"): every direction is a forest of new buildings, often overwritten at streetlevel as the architectural scaffolding of signage, semiosis and new media, displacing the existing housing of often exhausted 3-4 storey colonial brick building stock.

A less noticed face of progress in cities like Shanghai, is the authoritarian planning which clears the ground for glitzy highrises. I would like to hear from architects about this ethical dilemma - Foster, Portman, Kwan, Tse, Kohn Pederson Fox, Jerde, SOM... almost the Who's Who of contemporary architecture. Its hard to grasp the scale of this transformation from a single photo: since 1998 over 3000 highrise buildings have been built, assisted by US$45 billion (between 1990 and 2000 yes that's billion and obviously a much higher figure if it was over the last decade) in investment, mostly from Hong Kong and Japan. Journalists have claimed that 1/6th of the world's construction cranes were deployed in Shanghai. Since 1998, rather than land ownership, occupants were granted land usage rights (ie. leases) in which a market was allowed. Most tenants could easily be moved by municipal authorities or state corporations who gained control of key plots as incumbents. Most of the US$45 billion went for leasing costs paid to the municipality, who were key boosters of development.

Granted, as part of the construction boom (from my observations of completed but near empty projects, Shanghai is overbuilding in office space), over 120 million square metres of housing was built but generally in less favorable, less serviced locations, such as industrial suburbs from where the Shanghai textile industry was removed or closed down (with a loss of over 400,000 jobs, mostly women) or in new towns built from scratch but without strong social networks of service providers or even complete facilities. The new highrises have more services, but not necessarily more space, so many families continue to crowd many generations into one unit. For those occupants that refuse to move, buildings can be knocked down around them until they give up due to the construction noise - which can run 24 hours a day.

Its unpatriotic to be critical: senior planners worry about ability of community to keep pace with construction. Some claim that the culture of Shanghai is in fact utterly open to change - an ongoing triumph of absolute pragmatism. While even he is worried about the sprawl, architect Ma Quingyun claims 'That's true Chineseness...We don't care about the look of the building, so much so everybody still lives in Shanghai in ugly buildings. We care about how convenient life is.' Yet, divided by a 500m-wide river, it is neither a convenient nor human-scaled city and what has been built demonstrates that the only duty of architects in Shanghai was to flamboyantly decorate the outside and tops of standard highrises. Only now is innovation come into discussion, for example, in building systems or energy use. So Shanghai architecture has actually not been innovative, just fast. ...Except for those who don't want to move.

(Amonst others, I recommend a+u Architecture and Urbanism May 2005 special issue: Beijing-Shanghai Architecture Guide, Deborah S. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (U. California Press, 2000), and Gilbert Stelter's online bibliography.

Ubiquitous Media-Asian Transformations offers abstracts of the papers and a useful synthesis of the works and online resources for the plenary speakers, who included: Bernard Steiger, Barbara Staffor, Friedrich Kittler, Shigehiko Hasumi, Mark Hansen, Katherine Hayles and Masaki Fujihata.

The most novel element was University of Tokyo's brilliant, interdisicplinary, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies graduate students' Thinking Forest. This project allows visitors to choose a representative sticker (any animal, flower) and to stick it on to the graphic of a forest of keywords painted on the 50m+ long construction hoarding fronting the site of their new building. (I'll future post an image when I get a connection with some bandwidth!)

"The socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has seen the future and it's got two wheels, three speeds, an adjustable seat, indestructible tires, a basket, and a bell. It's 50 pounds of ecofriendly handlebars, comin' at ya.

The French are turning Paris into a bicycle zone, pretty much overnight. Even now, astride small alleys and behind boulangeries, paving stones are being ripped to fit 750 bicycle rent 'stations.'"

Having enjoyed a similar bike rental program in Lyon, France last year, it's exciting to see a similar endeavour being pursued in Paris. The system works, for the most part, marvellously. Problems include: finding a bike that "works" (many have wobbly tires, malfunctioning gears, etc.), finding the station where you want to return a bike full, some finicky-ness regarding the release mechanism (sometimes it just doesn't want to let go), and not being able to purchase a short-term access card using a North American credit card (the French cards have a special security chip that we Canadians don't yet have).

Both Lyon and Paris, mind, are not exactly bike friendly cities (unlike, for example, Stockholm or Copenhagen or Amsterdam). Too often bike lanes run straight into nowhere, if there are bike lanes at all. Truth be told, bike lanes should all be physically separated from traffic rather than being merely a painted lane at the side of the road (as we find so often in Canada, for example).

"Global Cities looks at the changing faces of ten dynamic international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.

Exploring each city through five thematic lenses – speed, size, density, diversity and form – the exhibition draws on data originally assembled for the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2006 Venice Biennale. This unique show presents existing films, videos and photographs by more than 20 artists and architects to offer subjective and intimate interpretations of urban conditions in all ten cities.

As Global Cities takes place in one of the focus cities, the exhibition uses London as a touchstone for comparison. New commissions by a group of six artists and architects – Nigel Coates; Zaha Hadid & Patrik Schumacher; Fritz Haeg; OMA*AMO/Rem Koolhaas; Nils Norman; and Richard Wentworth – explore the local context through issues such as sustainability, public space and social inclusion."

Gotta love a franchise that calls themselves Big Chain! This and more at Groceteria - "a site about the history of the American supermarket, from both an architectural and a business perspective." (via)

Public washroom signs in Bangkok by Jan Chipchase

Open is a "bi-annual journal about art and the public domain" - although I think it's fair to say it covers all sorts of topics related to space and culture. Here are a few of the articles available online:

'How Many Movements?' Mobile Telephones and Transformations in Urban Space by Caroline Bassett

Mobile telephones create aural space that is both technological and imaginary. Caroline Basset explores the new spatial economy that is the result of the dynamics between physical and virtual space, between old and new space. Fragmentation and individualization are not her primary findings. Rather, according to Basset, the changing dialectics of presence/absence also generate new types of connectedness and continuity, of mobile subjectivity.

Public Interventions. The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition by Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, is specialized in the influence that globalization and digitization processes have on the transformations of urban space. In this essay, she looks at the possibilities of artistic practice to ‘make’ public space that can produce unsettling stories and make visible that which is local and has been silenced.

Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside by
Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg

In this article, media experts Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg ask us to consider if unquestioned connectivity – the drive to connect everything to everything, and everyone to everyone by means of electronic media – is necessarily a good thing. To stimulate ideas, the authors propose a possible alternative: a practice of ‘mindful disconnection’, or rather the ‘art of selective disconnectivity’.

Urban Media and the Politics of Sound Space by Jonathan Sterne

Muzak, also known as ‘nonaggressive music deterrent’, is used more and more often as a strategic weapon in the effort to make public space ‘safe’ and controllable. But according to Jonathan Sterne, its use is primarily aimed at excluding non-consumers – whereas he believes it should be seen as a vital component of urban design. In Sterne’s opinion, besides an aesthetical dimension, sound also has a political and ethical dimension.

Modern Japanese Classic by Benedict Radcliffe

Kosmograd reports: "The wireframe car, sits impassively, unexplained, a ghost from the virtual. It marks a point of slippage between the world and a mirror world. It certainly confused the hell out of local parking wardens, who issued it with a number of tickets."
(via rhizome.org)

"Change and difference are not what separate us or tear us apart but the constituents of what glues us together—the very dynamic of all social process."

--Neil Blair Christensen, Inuit in Cyberspace

Photo Essay: What the World Eats



Mongolia: The Batsuuri family of Ulaanbaatar
Food expenditure for one week: 41,985.85 togrogs or $40.02
Family recipe: Mutton dumplings



Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca
Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09
Favorite foods: pizza, crab, pasta, chicken



Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
Favorite foods: soup with fresh sheep meat



Great Britain: The Bainton family of Cllingbourne Ducis
Food expenditure for one week: 155.54 British Pounds or $253.15
Favorite foods: avocado, mayonnaise sandwich, prawn cocktail, chocolate fudge cake with cream



Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Family recipe: Okra and mutton
(Thanks to Biella for the photo link and Alex for the quote.)

We recently watched Jacques Tati's 1967 film Playtime, so were quite taken by Adam Greenfield's post on Playtime, mobile culture and the city, and the conversation between him and Enrique Ramirez in the comments.

Michael Jenson brings up related concerns in his essay "New Urban topologies: The Desire for Public Place in the Age of Virtual Geography" which we found in the the desire issue of on-line journal DRAIN. We liked the play and deterritorialisation issues too.

Things Magazine got us thinking about the new American embassy in Iraq, and contemporary connections between nationalism and monumental architecture. Others think there is a more basic question at hand: "[H]ow is it that the Americans cannot keep the electricity running in Baghdad for more than a couple of hours a day, yet still manage to build themselves the biggest embassy on Earth?"

We can't imagine where we'll find the time to read Dan Hill's amazing documentation of the recent Postopolis! event, but we're going to try. And if you managed to attend The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement conference last month in NYC, we'd love to hear about it!

Jan Chipchase is talking about more than the sounds of the city when he explains that "Tokyo is increasingly resonating to the sound of money changing hands. Or to be more precise - to the sound of prepaid Edy cashless money transactions." This is part of the consumer megalopolis.

And we liked Faraway Places, Fabulous Journeys: Travels on Paper 1450-1700 and Beneath the Neon: Life and death in the storm drains of Las Vegas, both of which we scored from plep.

The BBC reports outrage from the Church of England: Sony used a simulation apparently based on Manchester cathedral as a setting for a shootout in a violent videogame. In my opinion, this marks a watershed in the public, and possibly in the legal understanding of virtualities. While some would hold that any attention, whether positive or negative, is good advertising, the Church's demand that the game be recalled from sale indicates the losses that will be at stake.

Usually, moviemakers seek a "location release" in advance for any place they film, just like the similar "person release" for anyone who is recognizeable in their footage.

Sony's defense that the cathedral is simulated, not directly filmed, relies on notions that the virtual is somehow "unreal". The law is unclear, but many people will immediately recognize that the reality of virtual places and of other simulations is exactly why they are successful. The virtual is "real but not actual" in the immortal words of the novelist, Marcel Proust. A simulation is more than just fiction - it stands in as good as reality. Splitting hairs on this point... misses the point.

What does this mean for other simulations of places? What places does one ask permission for? If a church is inappropriate, what about a city park? Governments have worried about the security implications of satellite images accessible from the web, but could a Google Earth allow access into a cloistered community of nuns, for example? What control do individuals and communities have over how places are experienced - both materially and virtually, and therefore how they are understood and remembered?

There are also implications for debates on terrorism, as computer games generally dramatize violent assaults not just on people but on places and groups of people in famous places in exciting ways.

More on this as we get our head around the vast implications for videogame design and more broadly, for the way we as a global society treat the virtual.