Author: Louise

Global Barcelona: Cultural territories and the limits of consumption

Speaker
Mari Paz Balibrea (Birbeck College, London)

Discussant(s)
Patria Roman-Velazquez, City University

This paper will attempt to recontextualize dominant images of the city of Barcelona by discussing the terms in which this is a global city, but based on Kees Christiaanse’s reflections on the closed city rather than on Saskia Sassen’s well known definition. I will explore the concept of cultural territory (Fessler and Berenstein) as a demarcated space in the city defined by the presence of what is understood as a cultural manifestation, in order to make sense of the conditions of visibility in the city of Barcelona. The final section of the paper will be devoted to the analysis of the documentary film by José Luis Guerín, En construcción [Under construction] (2002), by focusing on its politics of space and reappropriation of the notion of cultural territory.

Disease and Governance in Global Cities

Speaker

Roger Keil (The City Institute, York University, Canada)

Discussant(s)

Alan Ingram (Geography, UCL)

Global Cities and the Post-Westphalian Geography of Emerging Infectious Disease

Contemporary Caribbean architecture

Speaker
Mimi Sheller (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Swarthmore College, USA)

Discussant(s)
David Lambert (Royal Holloway) 

Infrastructures of the Imagined Island: Software, Mobilities, and the New Architecture of Natural Paradise

Software is re-coding and re-scaling island space, assembling islands in new configurations of territoriality and governance while generating new kinds of atmospheres of place, landscape, and nature. Travel and leisure destinations, especially in the Caribbean, are being disembedded from national territories and repackaged as “natural” enclaves that are connected to “global” metropolitan transport, media, and data flows. This paper explores how informational space and tourist space are converging in new fantasies of mobility, accessibility, and island paradise. It aims to show how new metropolitan spatialities are affecting remote Caribbean islands and other dispersed enclaves as much as “advanced” urban complexes, as Caribbean states and territories adjust to complex new infrastructures and architectures of mobility. The paper first reviews recent developments in contemporary architectural theory associated with Computer Aided Design (CAD) and “liquid” or “mobile” architectures of hyper-urbanism, cyberspace, virtual reality, computer gaming, and evolutionary software.  The empirical analysis then turns to two specific Caribbean examples of the disembedding of island space from structures of local governance and territoriality through which new virtual islands – amalgams of infrastructure, architecture, and software – are unbundled from local communities, citizenries, and publics, and repackaged as intensely capitalized destinations of “untouched natural paradise”. The first vignette concerns Zaha Hadid’s masterplan for a new resort on Dellis Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands. The second refers to the new resort of Atlantis at Paradise Island in the Bahamas, especially its relation to computer gaming and fantasy spatiality. The paper concludes by drawing comparisons with other global island developments in regions such as China’s Pearl River Delta and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Abu Dhabi), showing the wider implications of the emergent mobile infrastructures and virtual realities of the imagined island as it intersects with new forms of urbanism.

Transnational urban forms

Speaker
Fulong Wu (Cardiff)

Discussant(s)
Gareth Jones (LSE)

Chair
Hyun Bang Shin, LSE

“Packaging a way of life: Chinese new urbanism and gated communities”

Gareth Jones will draw on his experiences in South American and South African cities to start the discussion.

Kinshasa

Speaker

Filip de Boeck

Filip de Boeck, co-author of: Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (2004)