WHAT TO DO: Complaint Chorus

Governors Island period map

Zucotti park eviction

Photos from the zucotti park eviction Nov. 15 -- (Bloomberg v. The people of OWS)

Hi All,

I've just been trying to log into Blackboard unsuccessfully for an hour. It came to my attention that some of the readings are missing from Blackboard - I should say they've disappeared since I personally loaded them! Anyway, as soon as I have access I will post the readings again. Meanwhile, for tomorrow, we're going to continue with the presentations. We'll go back to the OWS presentation and then Keri will present her reflections on fieldwork and finally we'll wrap up with observations on methodology. We'll discuss the schedule of readings and presentations tomorrow. See you all soon!

Best,

Vyjayanthi

‎++//OCCUPY_WALL_STREET_MASH_UP\\++

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38922/the-smithsonian-and-new-york-historical-society-race-to-preserve-occupy-wall-streets-art-and-artifacts

politics of air

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/world/asia/the-privileges-of-chinas-elite-include-purified-air.html?_r=1&hp

Sophia B Bosselmann -- Easterling quotations

Zoe Rosenberg -- Amazing noticeables

Simone People as Infrastructure

“The individual operations of the drug trade must be integrated in such a way that complicity and cooperation become the prevailing practices. Within each domain, each operator has a specific place and is expected to demonstrate unquestioning loyalty. This is the case even though the illicit nature and practical realities of the trade constantly generate opportunities for participants to seek greater profits and authority outside the syndicate hierarchies.” (Pg. 421)

“Government officials trick citizens with countless pronouncements of progress while finding new and improved ways of shaking them down. Parents trick their children with promises of constant nurturing—if only they would sell themselves here or there, as maids, touts, whores, or guardians. And children trick their parents with promises of support into old age—if only they would sell the land, the house in exchange for fake papers, airline tickets, or a consignment of goods that just fell off the truck.” (Pg. 424)

Gandy Cyborg Urbanization or Rethinking Urbanism

“The cyborg to be a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems. The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth, light and other essential needs. The home can be conceived as ‘prosthesis and prophylactic’ in which modernist distinctions between nature and culture, and between the organic and the inorganic, become blurred. And beyond the boundaries of the home itself we find a vast interlinked system of networks, pipes and wires that enable the modern city to function. These interstitial spaces of connectivity within individual buildings extend through urban space to produce a multi-layered structure of extraordinary complexity and utility.” (Pg. 28)

“The evolution of human-technological systems is a reflexive process in which the shaping of space begins to reflect modern aspirations for mobility, privacy, salubrity and other characteristic features of the emerging cyborg city” (Pg. 38)

“Urban infrastructures are not only material manifestations of political power but they are also systems of representation that lend urban space its cultural meaning. We can conceive of urban infrastructures as modes of cognition as well as processes underpinning the restructuring of urban space. The development of the cyborg metaphor has coincided with the re-emergence of urban infrastructure as a discursive field permeated by crisis, uncertainty and political contestation.” (Pg. 39)

Varnelis Los Angeles, Infrastructural City

"Braham divided Los Angeles into four ecologies, each with its own flora and fauna. Three of these were distinctly geographical: Sufurbia encompassed the beach communities and was where the laid back life ruled the residents and their architecture; the Foothills were dominated by privileged communities such as Bel Air or the Hollywood Hills; the Plains of Id consisted of the vast stretches of the city that were pure products of Non-Plan, a landscape of exuberant self-expression coupled with cheerful banality. Tying these geographic zones together was the fourth ecology, Autopia, the freeways. These vast concrete bands were the final great infrastructure that gave shape to the city, the last and most audacious effort to implement the plan and the very thing that ultimately killed it by producing massive homeowner backlash.” (Pg. 13)

Easterling El Ejido

“A concentration of workers in a vast agricultural factory is capable of resisting. Housing has also been a classic means of enfranchising the worker. Principled protest and political activism call for the alteration of laws and for the adherence to labor and human rights standards… the worker is not organized, but organized against. The concentration of workers in the fields is a kind of containment.” (Pg. 49)

Rao How to Read a Bomb

“Using the very connectivity afforded by the infrastructural network itself—the underlying systemic bases that form the con- ditions of possibility of modern urban planning and indeed contemporary urban life — the coordinated, simultaneous attack turns connectivity into collapse.” (Pg. 572)

“This manner of bombing, which is becoming increasingly prevalent, dispenses with the locality altogether by using the connectivity afforded by networked infrastructure to create a unified target.” (Pg. 582)

Weizman The Politics of Verticality

“Scores of scattered buildings and small villages were not named or erased from the maps, thus never recognized as settlements or local authorities, and were therefore never serviced by basic infrastructure, nor taken into consideration within any master plan.” (Pg. 2)

“Traditional international borders are political tools dividing the land on plans and maps; their geometric form, following principles of property laws, could be described as vertical planes extending from the center of the earth to the height of the sky. The departure from a planar division of a territory to the creation of three-dimensional boundaries across sovereign bulks defines anew the relationship between sovereignty and space.” (Pg. 5)

“Sewage is used as a political weapon when dislocated from the under to the over ground. When shit invisibly occupies a position underground it is merely sewage – running through a technically complex system of public plumbing. But let it only break loose over the surface and sewage becomes shit again. The latitudinal co-ordinates affirm the nature of the substance. When sewage overflows and private shit, from under the ground, invades the public realm of the street, it becomes simultaneously a private hazard and a public asset – to be used as a tool at the hand of the authorities.” (Pg. 6)