Love, Ryan, ‘Aporia of Participatory Planning’, Footprint, Issue 13, (Autumn 2013), 7-20.
Ryan Love begins by commenting on the increase of citizen involvement in the planning process from the 1970s but that this increase in involvement leads to difficulties in reaching consensus [7]. The changing trends in the economic model means that there is an increasing focus on business and tourist users which ‘diminishes any local sense of ownership or involvement’ [10]. He calls for a reappraisal of the city and of city planning in that it is no longer possible to have a single monolithic concept [8]. He talks a lot of the subordination of civic participation to legal norms in which the rational juridical processes are transferred to the ‘daily concrete interactions of the city’ [9]. Therefore the rationalisation of culture into definable terms loses the essence of culture itself which is at core undefinable. Paul Ricour refers to this as ‘the unfolding of a single experience of mankind’ in which human experience is distilled into one single form in order to allow decisions to be reached [11]. This in turn is seen to cause its ‘subtle destruction’ [11]. Love refers to Adorno’s 1978 essay Culture and Administration in which culture is subsumed rather than comprehended when it is institutionalised [11]. The defining of place by means of description in planning terms confines it to being ‘character-defining’ and filed away [12]. Love sees planning as relentlessly pursuing the subsumption of both culture and community [11]. Only attributes that can be accepted into the canon can be understood and as such inhibits any kind of critique of the plan [14]. Thus the challenge for the counter-culture is to constantly re-invent itself in order to remain outside of the accepted culture. The rational planning process however, is always stronger when pitted against the irrational protest. For example the use of ‘value of place’ as a reason for opposition is now labelled as ‘idealism’ as it is deemed to lack rationality [16]. Love has bleak image of a system in which there is no room for agency as it is always lost within a framework of bureaucracy. Love concludes that there needs to be a new form of participatory praxis in which there is the ‘constitution of a new institution, a new hegemony – one that fixes the centre of agency nowhere but in itself’ [17]. Davidoff creates a manifesto for the change of the planning process in the context of late 1960s America and its critique of institutions. He stated that ‘the present distribution of such things as wealth, income, education, and health is unequal, city planning has supported the maintenance of such inequalities’ [443]. He also comments on the prevailing assumption that the ‘planner’ would ‘consciously serve’ a ‘unitary non-political public interest’ [443]. He advocates making the planning process a plural one in which there are more than one centrally conceived proposal [444]. He states that contemporaneously planners have avoided dealing with national problems by focusing on one element of the city system – the physical environment [444]. In the contemporary setting the phrases of decentralisation reflects the worldview that people perceive the government as a negative force with its own interests, compared to the earlier view of the government as a benevolent reflection/manifestation of the people. Indicating how the current dominant ideology appears within the phrasing of planning policy. As well as the move from democracy to accountability. Local advocacy groups actually become local management groups, losing their opposition force. There is a constant gravitation between the ‘grey area’ of common sense and rigid rules. There is a current debate as to whether democratisation of the planning process will necessarily lead to more social equality. The answer is in whether you believe that political change initiates social change or visa versa. Planning policy tends to have a momentum of its own that operates outside of party political changes. Though it is informed by the prevailing hegemony. ‘What is called alternative with respect to culture is no less than culture’s vital protest against compulsory integration’ [11]. Davidoff, Paul, ‘Democratic Planning’, in Joan Ockman (ed.), Architecture Culture 1943-1968 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 442-45.
Love, Ryan, ‘Aporia of Participatory Planning’, Footprint, Issue 13, (Autumn 2013), 7-20. The human body is augmented by the digital age. Avatar body. The physical body is always attached. Are we becoming homeless? Real individual is placed into an unreal, homeless individual. Suspension of place and culture. Accept the ‘different’. United Nations define homelessness as a detachment from society. The hostility to the immigrant is caused by the exposure of the banality of the sacred.
Does the fact that the players of the game have nothing to lose negate the intention of the game? Dr Aikaterini Antonopoulou, Teaching Fellow, Newcastle University
The Banoptikon videogame project, EU Inhabitation of the Oceans
Gentrification is generally accepted to be the process by which a lower socio-economic group are replaced by a higher socio-economic group in a specific urban area. Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel’s article ‘The Fine Art of Gentrification’ (1984) and Stefan Kratke’s ‘The New Urban Ideology of “Creative Cities” (2012) will be used in order to analyse the specific conditions further. Deutsche’s text analyses the correlation between the art scene and gentrification in relation to the Lower East Side in Manhattan - the East Village is seen as a place where ‘subcultural’ forms are fed into the market place [99] and where the neighbourhood is exploited for promotional value [108]. Deutsche makes reference to the change in character of the art produced in these areas which causes the artists to become devoid of any responsibility in the driving out of a poor, indigenous population who have nowhere else to go. She comments on the proliferation of photographs that show the traditional ‘bum’ sitting on the stoop of an apartment block as indicating the exploitation of the poor as ‘novel, unique, artistic’ [109]. Because the ‘bum’ is poor but avoids placement in the class struggle he is therefore aestheticized without any reflecting on the agency of the artist on the creative industry [110]. There is a general consensus within the texts that gentrification is not a natural process and is in fact strongly influenced by planners who allow buildings to decay in order to profit from the land. The attraction of people to the areas is in their romanticisation – the desire to escape the banality of the suburbs with emotive language often being used to describe those who move in as ‘pioneers’ and ‘new frontiers’ – which is clearly untrue as people already live there [Deutsche, 92]. The further attraction of these areas is cheap rent, the inner-city location and the built environment (space for studios etc.). The population who move in also must be less affected by living in areas with a high crime rate etc. There is a neo-liberal element to this in the change in economic systems and the general expectation of a certain standard of living. And the ‘invisible hand of the market’ is always there even if it is initially seen as an area for the ‘counter-culture’ [Deutsche, 99]. Gentrification is supported by cities as it attracts investment to the city (money rather than physical people) but it is also seen as a way to solve inner-city problem areas by moving them outside the city limits. It is a case of survival for the city as it is generally applied to areas where there is a high dependence on services but very little tax revenue. Neil Smith was a significant figure in first analysing the process of gentrification in the late 70s with his book The Urban Frontier. Within this book he describes the process of devaluation and red-lining in which banks refuse mortgages in order to discourage investment, this then causes the collapse of real-estate prices and results in a rent gap (the value and actual purchasing cost of buildings). When this gap is big enough, the city begins the process of making the area appear attractive to a new market of people. There are some cases in which gentrification can be specific to an area as demonstrated by Peter Marcuse with the development from Fordism to post-Fordism. During the change to assembly-line production, factories were moved to outer-cities as they required more space. They took the skilled workers with them leaving the unskilled in the inner-city. The unskilled become increasingly unemployed due to the changes in manufacturing. The skilled become middle-class due to the impact of trade unions. This process of decentralisation and suburbanisation therefore changes the constitution of the inner-city. Once the unskilled become unemployed the area becomes more deprived and is then seen as a ripe place for the process of gentrification to begin.
There are examples of artists being used to give content and character to otherwise vacuous new estates who are then removed once the homes have been sold. There are often agreements between city councils and developers by which the developers provide the houses and the council provides the culture. Culture therefore becomes a marketing tool in creating an image for the city due to the stereotype that the middle class appreciates culture. In an analysis of gentrification there is a tendency to focus on individuals rather than the general transformation of the city. The city is in fact transformed by the dislocation of people. -Deutsche, Rosalyn and Cara Gendel Ryan, ‘The Fine Art of Gentrification’, October, Vol. 31. (Winter, 1984), pp. 91-111.
-Krätke, Stefan, ‘The New Urban Ideology of “Creative Cities”’, in Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, Margit Mayer (eds.) Cities for People, Not for Profit (Oxon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 139-49. -Marcuse, Peter, ‘Housing Policy and the Myth of the Benevolent State’, in J Rosie Tighe; Elizabeth J Müller (eds.), The Affordable Housing Reader (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 36-43. -Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, (London: Routledge, 1996). |
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