This past few days I’ve been in Changde, participating in the “Chance Encounter” Contemporary Arts Festival. Its the first of its kind in the city, and attempts to bridge between the city’s rich heritage of carpentry and stone-cutting with the capitalist juggernaut that has made its way to China’s so-called “third tier” cities.
On Friday September 9, 2016, I had the privilege of visiting Nanting Village, Guangzhou with Professor Chen Xiaoyang, from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. The occasion for the visit was a screening of Zhong Shifang’s film, “From Border to Border,” a documentary on the Chinese community in Tangra Calcutta. I will discuss the film in my next post. Today, I would like to contextualize the screening of the film with a brief introduction to Nanting Village. Continue reading
Stumbled across a bit of Luohu trivia that suggests that cross border licentiousness has been promoted on both sides of the border as a means of generating profit. According to the Industrial History of Hong Kong Group,
The opening of the “Shum Chun Casino” in 1931, provided one of the only new areas of passenger growth [for the Kowloon-Canton Railway]. By 1934 passengers visiting the casino were a major portion of the cross border revenue until its closure on 1st September 1936. The impact of the casino’s closure was such that there was a shortfall in the last four months of the year at round 30% of the net operating revenue.
A week in Delhi, thinking about globalizing urbanization and its proliferating urbanisms with the wonderful team at the Centre for Policy Research and colleague Fu Na from Shenzhen Center for Design. Currently, untangling so many thoughts about infrastructure, waste generation, generosity, desire and inequality, heat, color and spice, traveling impressions of china, gender, aggression, and the mental barbed wire necessary to construct “Delhi” out of a few days walking tour. This trip also has me noticing the stories that I notice, some documented, below.
This week I am visiting the Centre for Policy Research to learn about their Cities of Delhi project and the politics, history, and morphology of urban villages in the National Capital Territory and neighboring Gurgaon. The trip is something of an urban village bootcamp, punctuated with visits to tourist sites and intense conversation. Continue reading
This past week, I had the pleasure of visiting the Taipei Dream Community, a fascinating place where Gordon Tsai has used real estate to push forward hippie dreams–redeveloping Xizhi (汐止), stimulating community through carnivals, and artist residencies.
For the third year, Group+ has ranked its top-30 online communities, which is interesting as it is part of a model of disseminating information about not-for-profit, non-governmental organizing. Over 1,500 groups use Group+, a Shenzhen-based online platform to organize real time “community” events. Fat Bird ranked 3rd, even above the Shenzhen Reading Federation (#5) and Green Mango (#13), which have much broader audiences than does experimental theater. What do these rankings tell us about the possibilities of imagining outside the state in Shenzhen specifically and China more generally? Continue reading
One would think, and one would not be wrong, that I spend much time thinking about urban villages and glass towers, or the differences between informal and formal settlements. That said, however, it is probably more to the point is that semi-formality allows Shenzhen to function as well as it does.
“Semi-formality,” Mehran Kamrava argues in his analysis of The Politics of Weak Control: State Capacity and Economic Informality in the Middle East,
Is not simply the result of entrepreneurs’ natural impulse to evade state regulations. It is, more fundamentally, a function of the state’s own limited capacities to fulfill the regulative tasks it sets for itself. The state’s uneven enforcement of regulative policies—uneven over time or in relation to different economic actors—allows nonstate economic actors, whether overwhelmingly in the formal sector or in the informal sector of the economy, to slip in and out of semi-formality.
I’m participating in the Urban Futures Workshop at the University of Singapore, Feb 22-23, 2016. Participant abstracts and my abstract are online. If you’re in the neighborhood and tempted by critical geology, please join the conversation.
This week I have been thinking about iterations of the “local” in two sites: the 2015 Shenzhen Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture and the Baishizhou Street Museum. In particular, I’m thinking about the possibility of making connections from “here” to “there” when they hinge on the distance between (a) some outside understanding of what the local might be and (b) what might be interesting to actual locals. The possibility of meaningful dialogue is further complicated when “outsiders” and “locals” are organized by global hierarchies, internal class structures, and unquestioned ideas of what might be intellectually and/or aesthetically engaging. Continue reading
Shenzhen Noted 