With great excitement, I am pleased to announce that I am embarking in one of the most unusual activities I have ever considered:  Blogging.

There are mainly two reasons for pursuing this path:

First, the way in which on-line technology has revolutionized our channels of communication has completely captivated my imagination. 

I suppose by having this blog, I will become a participant of this fairly new wave of cultural diffusion.  Perhaps, it will provide me with the opportunity to have certain  level of relevance in the place where I live and in the virtual communities that I am part of. 

Second, to have a forum where I can post ideas, opinions, comments and share stories related to land use planning, the arts and the intersection of these two disciplines.  I am firmly convinced that these two disciplines have been essential in shaping our built environment to different degrees.  I believe that great communities exist in places where the arts are a fundamental part of daily life and where the freedom of expressing one’s imagination is welcomed.  I must say, I have a steep inclination for the form of expression the exalts the greatest human attributes such as love, compassion, community and civic duty.

My hope is that the readers and commentators will find a place to share ideas, to comment and  to collaborate with new and old friends locally or in distant lands.

Respectfully,

Miguel A. Vazquez

By Rosa Mas Giralt

Reports about the pandemic of obesity affecting Western countries are never far from the news agenda. Urgent cries for action aiming at saving us from our expanding waistlines and saving our children from our sedentary influences dominate the public advice agenda. The latest addition to this collection of shock actions came from the US, where Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, tried to enforce a healthy living class for those students with a BMI of more than 30 before they could graduate. However, it seems that the university has had to relax its approach and taking the class has become recommended instead of compulsory. In another recent article for The Guardian, Rachel Williams has looked at this issue in British universities as it seems that we (the student collective) are not very keen on exercise or taking care of what we eat and we need to be helped in ‘disciplining’ our ways.

In a recent piece for Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Beth Evans (2009) provides an insightful view into critical geographies of obesity. She “critically analyse[s] the production of obesity as a ‘threat to the future of the nation’ through considering obesity as a biopolitical problem – which simultaneously addresses the individual body and the ‘population’ (Foucault 1997) – and as a form of pre-emptive politics – attempting to control the future through action in the present (Anderson 2008a 2008b)” (Evans, 2009:21). Her analysis provides a complex picture of the dynamics behind the current anti-obesity policy in the UK and helps us consider what lies behind public perceptions of fateful fatness.

Read Ed Pilkington’s article “Success at fat-fighting Lincoln University hinges on BMI test” The Guardian, 4th December 2009

Read Rachel Williams’ article “Fat is a student issue” The Guardian, 15th December 2009

Read Bethan Evans (2009) “Anticipating fatness: childhood, affect and the pre-emptive ‘war on obesity’”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 35(1): 21-38.

By Jenny Lunn

Another decade is drawing to a close. What have been the defining features of the so-called Noughties? Readers of the BBC Magazine were invited to submit their suggestions as to who and what has shaped the last ten years. The results have now been published and are divided into five categories: words, people, news, objects and culture.

New words and phrases were coined and entered common parlance such as carbon footprint, chav, War on Terror and sustainability. Tony Blair, Norman Foster, Bill Gates and Barack Obama have made their mark in different ways. The Indian Ocean tsunami, Iraq War, Human Genome project and London bombings all made the headlines. Hoodies, SatNavs, wheelie bins and Oystercards were some of the objects that came into everyday use. Google, Blogs, Facebook and Tweets changed the way we interact with one another.

These changes in culture, society and politics have all provided new material for geographers. If someone from ten or twenty years ago looked at today’s list of geography journal articles, they would not recognise much of the subject matter or be able to understand the language. This is all evidence of a thriving discipline, which is keen to analyse the geographical dimensions of the contemporary world.

Read the BBC Magazine’s Portrait of the Decade

By Matthew Rech

Simon Dalby, writing in Geography Compass, provides a compelling argument that prompts us to reconsider our place in the world, and to challenge implicit geographies associated with globalisation, geopolitics and the environment. As Dalby suggests, “some of the most taken for granted and obvious parts of environmental political thought are assumptions about context and environmental circumstances” (104), and it must be our role as geographers to continue to critique geopolitical categories and scientific understandings that shape political discourse.

Specifically, and in relation to the ongoing Copenhagen summit, Dalby takes issue with certain spatialisations used to organise our understandings of the world, which might often be out of line with the new contexts of our lives. These new contexts (meaning post September 11^th politics, the transformation of humanity into an urban species, and new thinking in earth systems science) demand a rethink of the categories we use to make sense of our place in the world.

So, as we are beholden to the twists and turns of the climate summit this month, we should be mindful that “the taken for granted nature of geographical categories – states, regions, blocs, continents, resources and environments” (104) – shape political will and discourse. And also, that whilst “geopolitical reasoning is mostly about the view from the metropoles of the global polity” (104) we must remain cognisant of strategic silences, and the unheard voices of those that climate change may threaten most.

See the BBC Copenhagen newspage

Read Dalby, S (2007) Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalisation, Empire, Environment and Critique. Geography Compass. 1. 1, 103-18

4 explorers, 5 Countries, 2000 miles, 16 abandoned sites, 5000 photographs, 3 hours of video footage, a pocket full of loose change to live on and a car full of $7000 worth of camera gear. It’s these last two bits that I find so amusing, these are the pieces of the puzzle that turn this from a hobo trip to a pro hobo trip I suppose. That and the radical mobility of our opt-in faux homelessness.

After our last trip to Europe, I wrote about urban camping. I felt like that long weekend away was a sort of like a wilderness retreat, a little escape from work and obligations to see something unstraited. Some people choose go to a pine forest for these retreats, we go to abandoned chateaus in Belgium. Seems fair enough.

But this trip was different right from the beginning. Part of it was due to the length of our expedition, part of it due to the dynamics of the crew. We had a crew of 4 – myself, Statler, Winch and Silent Motion, all up for it in a big way. We were long inspired by the perpetual homeless adventures of Dsankt at Sleepy City which seemed to pry open a new level of UrbEx or, at the least, open up new possibilities for adventurous play. So we struck out on a Sunday night from Reading, UK, across the channel on the P&O car ferry, through the sadness of Calais, France, just across the border into Belgium to Kosmos, a hotel with a weird Russian art-deco theme that had closed in 1996 where we planned to stay the night.

Transgressive Mobilities

Tourism?

Rated 1 Star on Travelocity

Strangely enough, given what a pile of crap this place was, it was really hard to get into. Finally, after making our way in, ferrying in bags of clothes, food, whiskey and 8 bottles of Chimay looted from a road side stop, we settled in for the night, with a gorgeous view of a random Belgian valley spread out before us, full P&O shot glasses of cheap drink and a horrible rattling noise from the winds assaulting some loose flap on the roof above us.

Penthouse

Winch taking in the epicness

The Goblinmerchant gets naked

We ended up finally dragging tables and chairs from other rooms to board up the windows which were allowing massive gust of wind and rain into our sleeping quarters. Essentially, we started doing home repairs. That night, falling asleep to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II playing softly on my phone, I had dreams about the property owner showing up weeks later to find that somebody had actually repaired their building, boarded up windows, brought in and cleaned up couches, filled the bookshelves with tea lights. I imagined them being, at first, dismayed and confused and then… amused, a small smile cracking their stoically disappointed Belgian head.

The thing I started thinking was that our move from UrbEx into pro hoboness was actually a move that benefited property owners because, as Silent Motion put it, “our sleeping in the space builds a more intimate connection with it, we become a part of the fabric.” So going pro hobo, in my mind, even the documentation aspect that you are scrolling through right now, is about place hacking, about finding intimacy in a world full of sterile engagement.

This idea was made even more funny when the property owners showed up at 8am the next morning and started putting up more fencing on the site. Between us and them, the place was going to be completely remodeled soon. We waiting 30 minutes or so for them to leave and made our hasty escape.

Although I am tempted to write about all 16 sites we went to, I can’t. The reason for this is, quite simply, that I cannot relay the epic nature of the experience to you in a blog posting, try as I might. With every day that passed, the crew got more raw, more volatile, more energetic, in a weird, confused sort of way. It was a delirious panic that I think would have even made Dionysus proud. I was drunk for most of it, partly because I do better fieldwork after a few beers and partly because the experience was so raw that it had to be shielded, it was like trying to stare into the sun. Now I know why so many homeless people drink.

Staring at the sun

The raw light of experience

Boundaries that existed in our little UK bubble began to break down. We did not speak the language, we did not meet a single person outside of the grocery stores and petrol stations we ravaged, washing our hair in their bathroom sinks and leaving piles of trash in their parking spaces, running under the turnstiles at the restrooms that demanded 50 cents. All that existed, all that mattered was the adventure and the bond between us which grew tighter with every sip of Jupiler in the back seat of Statler’s car, with every step walked over squishy mold/carpet. We could not think about what was happening because as Dostoevsky points out “one must love life before loving it’s meaning.” And this love was on fire. We began infiltrating live sites, barbecuing dinner in wheelbarrows, lighting dozens of candles in random rooms of Nazi extermination camps and free climbing timber into bell towers in crumbling buildings to photograph the holes in the roof veiled in cloudy continental morning mist.

The films here were shit

Dinner cooked over pieces of the gas chamber

Do they know we're in here?

Winch was the primary conspirator of this little frozen-toed expedition. Always up for a challenge and a laugh, he had booked this absurd holiday in December, I think, to break our will. After all, only the broken can be admitted into the ranks of legend. After taking in a few leisure sites over the first few days, he hits us with the news – we are going after heavy industry. Now, given that I am about to give a paper on reanimating industrial spaces through urban exploration at the 2009 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Durham at the end of the month, I thought this is a grand idea. Until it actually started going down.

We walked up to Transfo, a power station in Belgium, to find it swarming with people. We waited until dusk. When we thought everybody had gone home, Silent Motion ninja’d his way in to the secure building past the motion sensing lights and infrared alarm system. We got in and snapped some pics for about 10 minutes before some worker ran up and started rattling the doors to the heavy equipment room. Whoops. Turns out they were not all gone, but Silent Motion clearly could give a shit and starting climbing the infrastructure of the building to get a landscape shot.

Raw Metal

Ghosts of industry

On our way to Germany, we stopped to infiltrate Kokerei Zollverein, again swarming with people including professional photographers and men in suits. I swore that this infiltration would end badly. The only bad outcome, in reality, was my nausea from being meters away from workers as we snook past them and hid in the shadows. All my photos from there are shaky save two:

Fear processing factory

Pulled

After my moment of existential crisis, we made our way to an abandoned train yard Munster Gare, a glorious moment for me for some odd reason. Something about the intersections of transportation (mobility), dereliction (history, aesthetics) and remote location (opportunity for playfulness) made this my favorite site of the trip.

I'm the captain of this ship!

The passengers

No more goods

Unnecessary

After my locomotive jizfest, we drove into Germany. I had not been since I was 19 years old when I pursued the country on a underage American-in-Europe beer run, and was dismayed to find that it was actually a really beautiful place. Mostly because the further East you go, the more derelict structures begin to dominate to landscape. I always thought of dereliction being about the failures of capitalism, but nowhere was abandonment more apparent that in East Germany, markers to the collapse of communism and the retreat of the Soviet Union. The group entered a fervor as we drove through the country side, everything began to look derelict. At one point I remember Silent Motion saying, “Hey there’s a building over there!” and Winch responding “Nice, does it has trees growing out of it?”

We had resigned ourselves to a week of squatting. It was safe to say, at this point, that we had all left our lives behind. I didn’t care about my research anymore, I just wanted to keep getting high on adrenaline. No one ever talked about their jobs, their families. We talked about girls, 4chan, about what country had the best beer (hint: it’s Belgium), about football. Even our Blackberries and iPhones served only to get us aerial photos and to update our facebook status so everyone knew how much more fun we were having than them being homeless, elite and stacked with fat kit. As we crept into East Germany, we were all broken.

I don’t mean that in a bad way. What had been broken was our expectations, our existential dilemmas, our need for unnecessary daily crisis. These things were overwhelmed by the experience of the present, by what was just around the horizon. I felt, for the first time on this project, like I had actually broken the research barrier. I was not studying UrbEx anymore, I was UrbEx. I sat in the back of the car, delirious and drunk, and saw Winch staring at his fingernails. He says “When you look at my fingernails what do you see?” I told him “Maybe the blood and sweat of old inhabitants.” He considered it and replied “I don’t want to clean them…” This was our arrival, the point at which we had committed to dreaming instead of sleeping. And with that, we moved into Berlin, into Ex-Soviet Territory. But that, my friends, is a story for another day.

Never done

The New York Times‘ media writer, Adam Carr, has a great column in the Times about the “fall and rise” of Manhattan’s once-great media empires, like Conde Nast and the Times itself.

Beginning with a parable of the golden olden days of media work, he points out that the new landscape emerging is flatter, more diverse, riskier and more opportunistic:

Historically, young women and men who sought to thrive in publishing made their way to Manhattan. Once there, they were told, they would work in marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks and then one day, if they did all of that without whimper or complaint, they would magically be granted access to a gilded community, the large heaving engine of books, magazines and newspapers.

Beyond that, all it took to find a place to stand on a very crowded island, as E. B. White suggested, was a willingness to be lucky. Once inside that velvet rope, they would find the escalator that would take them through the various tiers of the business and eventually, they would be the ones deciding who would be allowed to come in.

As we all know, those times are over.

Earlier in November, the New York comptroller said that employment in communications in New York had lost 60,000 jobs since 2000, a year when the media industry here seemed at the height of its powers.

I arrived in New York that same year as part of Inside.com, a digital news site conceived to cover a media space that was converging and morphing into something wholly new. The site covered the mainstream media’s efforts to come to grips with new realities and efforts by new players to cash in on emerging technology.

Few of us could have conceived that in the next decade some of the reigning titans of media would be routed.

But Carr sees an emerging upside in the entrepreneurial talents of younger writers and communicators unburdened by the expectations and responsibilities of past majesties and dead business models:

For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

I’m not sure where the new jobs in media will come from; they won’t surely won’t come from “new media” as it is often described. But Carr is on to something when he points out that the very uncertainty of the current downturn also creates new opportunities for those smart, nimble and lucky enough to create new models for monetising writing, communication and news.

Foregrounding and accompanying the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system, the “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea” advertising campaign has become the latest in a line of marketing tools that suppose specific connections between products and potential consumers. For example, as Dell emphasise the veritable sweet-shop of choice and variety available to the discerning customer, so Microsoft opt to empower the consumer through placing them at the forefront of the development process. Here, consumers have creative control, are able to express themselves freely and individually, and in the case of Microsoft, are the literal embodiment of their chosen operating system.

Whilst arguing for the inclusion of a political economic analysis of mass media and culture in Geography, Clayton Rosati provides a compelling argument as to the possibility of using such examples of corporate enterprise to explore the industrial production of culture.

As Rosati suggests, “through [the] deployment of media machinery, media companies…can better captivate emergent structures of feeling and as such better transform the means of cultural production to intensify the industrial production of culture” (571). Thus, the necessity for corporate enterprise to “perfect its enchanting song and the means of delivering it above the din of every other song” (571), necessitates a similar propensity to manage, and further, to transform consumer taste and preference.

Whilst, in terms of the example of the advertising for Windows 7, we may debate the ‘emergent structure of feeling’ we might associate with the ubiquity of computing technologies, Rosati’s article places a notable emphasis on the importance of the spatialities of industrial production.

“Geography is central to this process, not simply in containing the infrastructure of the industrial production of culture, but also in defining its proprietary limits…and further unifying its consumers in a shared exclusion” (571-2). Here, not unlike ‘The spatial politics of virtual worlds’, seemingly intangible and elusive networks of power are placed within international and spatial divisions of labour.

By Matthew Rech

Read Jason Palmer’s report on the release of Windows 7 on BBC online

Read Rosati, C (2007) MTV: 360˚ of the industrial production of culture. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 32. 4, 556-75

Every time I have the opportunity to take a trip – big, small, exotic, mundane, work-related, totally frivolous, near, far – I am grateful. I am grateful for the opportunity, the variety and the inherent surprises that come even when you think for sure they will not. And I am grateful for the chance to share my experiences with others. Whether or not they are grateful is something that apparently very few travelers actually consider, but I would like to consider it.

Since I have been living in Asia and traveling in Asia I have found, in sharing my experiences, I rely heavily on words like myriad and juxtaposition. But these words do so little to actually communicate what I mean. Or at least they seem ineffective in comparison to what I see around me. How can I really demonstrate what I mean when I say there are myriad subtleties in the art of multilingual (or non-lingual) communication in Asia, or that Asia is replete with the most incongruously wonderful juxtapositions I have ever seen? Just saying it seems limited.

And why would it matter? Because, of course, with traveling comes the requisite sharing of said experiences, either with other travelers, or maybe with those who would, but can’t and those who could, but don’t. Ihave a great audience in my classroom for sharing, though I was reluctant to share my trips with my students in the US at first, a result of scars from having to endure my own Freshman English teacher’s every vacation to Hawaii (Mark Reischling I know you loved it, but us? Not so much.) Eventually I did begin to share and whether or not it had the Reischling effect on the kids, it totally changed how I traveled. I began to look around the world in a wholly new way; trying to see everything through the eyes of my students gave my trips a completely new focus. I brought back Vegemite and didgeridoos and boomerangs from Australia and let my students try all of them when we studied the region in Geography. I shared my photo essay of the street people and permanent protesters from D.C. when we covered Civil Rights and Liberties in Government class. I brought in albums from Italy when we studied the Renaissance in World History and the photos for my graduate thesis on Area 51 when we covered the Cold War in US History. Photos of the Ancient Agora and the Theater of Dionysus were passed around when we covered mythology and Ancient Greece. From Russia to Alaska to the Baltic States to Mexico and Jamaica – I wondered: What would my students find interesting, or surprising or bizarre… what might shock them? How could I impart what it was like to be in all these places… How could I create the sense of place in a way that they could relate to and provide context for what they were studying?

I read somewhere recently that the abundance of travel writing was getting simply ridiculous. Something to the effect that people live under the misconception that everyone wants to read about their every trial and tribulation on the road and that somehow a well-inked passport makes one the next great… well, you know, travel writer.  And I had to admit, it is kind of true. There are more travel blogs out there everyday, and in some ways, this might kind of be one. I do not read many of the travel blogs that profess to be the “key” to any sort of wisdom, and I love the idea that something one reads on the internet could in any way be “off the beaten track…” [Sorry Lonely Planet, I still love you and I turn to you often, but yo, you are way mainstream.]

Still, I have a certain love for travel literature.

I think my love for the genre has more to do with my innate nosiness. And my geographic inclinations. I like to read about the experiences that people have and see if I can relate/imagine/comprehend/covet/sigh-with-relief over their experiences. And I love to contemplate the complete sense of a place. My favorite travel authors include Hunter S. Thompson, John Steinbeck, Wendy Dale, Elizabeth Gilbert, selected works of Bill Bryson and one particular book by Michael Crichton.

Didn’t think those were all “travel writers”? HST’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘72 are two of the most effective pieces of literature to capture to flavor of a region and a nation, respectively, ever written. Thompson was completely aware of the significance of creating a sense of place in his writing in order to offer a unique context that would contribute to the story in a way that dialog or description never could. John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is brilliant in it’s ability to convey the vernacular geography of America and the attendant topophilia during the 1960s as he made his way around the country in his camper (named for Quixote’s horse, Rocinante) and his standard poodle, Charley. The themes in all three of these books are still completely relevant today – and totally worth reading if you have not.

Wendy Dale wrote a novel called Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals that I read while on a cruise in the Caribbean back in 2004, I think. Yes, I said cruise. And to that end I was with the least adventurous person I have ever known, bless his rigid cotton socks. That book saved me from myself on that trip and reminded me of my own adventures during a particular summer in Guadalajara. Most people are now familiar with Liz Gilbert, and those same people all seem to have very clear opinions on her work, specifically Eat, Pray, Love. I adored this book and found that, in many ways, Gilbert shared parts of the travel experience that others have overlooked, though I am sure that I fall into her target demographic so maybe that is why I liked it so much. I find Bill Bryson a bit much on times, I could not get through his book on Australia – while I was planning and traveling through Australia – but I love, love, loved The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, detailing a 14,000 mile trip around the US in the late 1980s. Again, for the reasons that I have found particular travel literature so alluring, I like this book because it points out the little things that might go unnoticed, but make all of the difference. No one misses the Statue of Liberty or the Grand Canyon, but there is so much in between that really gives those experiences meaning…

So, when I write about share my travel experiences it is in a constant effort to impart the unseen, to share the texture and feel of the place through the less obvious experiences: it is the intention of communicating the sense of the place. ‘Sense of place’ has been defined a million ways. If you look to Wiki you get this as an introduction:

To some, it is a characteristic that some geographic places have and some do not, while to others it is a feeling or perception held by people (not by the place itself). It is often used in relation to those characteristics that make a place special or unique, as well as to those that foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging.

As a teacher of Geography I have told my students it is the attempt to share the total experience of being in a place with someone who has not been there: what does it look like, smell like, sound like, feel like, even taste like… As a student of Geography I have been fascinated not only by the inherent nature of the sense of places, but also in placelessness and the love of places – topophilia. [Check out Yi-Fu Tuan.]

I have just returned from a long weekend in Saigon. If put to the task of ably communicating the sense of place in Saigon, could I? I could tell you that the texture of Saigon is tangible in every sensory way. I could tell you that the auditory experience of Saigon is immeasurable on any sort of scale I could describe. I could tell you that the juxtaposition of people, places and things cannot be enumerated. Would that be enough? I could tell you that I am constantly struck by the reality that such a great percentage of the world falls into a category easily labeled as “poor,” but they seem to take it all in stride so much more readily than I coped with my four hour delay. Would any of that give you a real sense of Saigon? If I tried to express the “emotional connections between physical environment and human beings” (Tuan’s definition of topophilia) would it be my own or those I had observed? Could I share the way that I see people around the world do the most ingenious things with what is on offer from their surroundings or is that suddenly my own emotional agenda?

More to the point, would it matter? And further… who am I to take up this endeavor?

I suppose the answers to those questions are what will indicate my status as a “Travel Writer.”

FYI: Some other notable books I consider to be brilliantly fantastic travel literature include: The Motorcycle Diaries, The Rabbit Proof Fence, Shutterbabe, and Long Way Round [I mean, Ewan McGregor in leather...?]

By Georgia Davis Conover

For nearly a decade some governments, jewelry industry members, and consumers have been working to ban so-called blood diamonds, which are mined in Sierra Leon and sold to help finance guerrilla fighters. But the practice of using mineral wealth to finance war is still continuing in Africa, unchecked.  According to the television news magazine, “60 Minutes,” gold mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for just under one percent of the gold processed world-wide each year but brings in 300 million dollars, much of which is used to finance an ongoing civil war in DRC.

This story should be of interest to geographers who, according to Nick Clarke, are becoming more involved in research on political consumption.  Their work, for example, aims to show how people form ethical positions that influence their purchasing behaviors.  It also demonstrates how consumers become actors within a more global economy based on buying and selling.

Of course, action depends upon knowledge.  Like diamond miners in other African countries, gold miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo are paid low wages and the work is dangerous. Unlike diamonds, however, there is little publicity, and thus little movement to cut off the market for this “blood gold.” Officials with Wal-Mart, the largest buyer of gold in the United States, say they plan to check the origin of ten percent of the gold that passes through their stores beginning next year, but they do not actually say if the company will refuse to sell products made with Congolese gold. High-end jeweler Tiffany’s does track its gold through the commodity chain; the ore in Tiffany’s jewelry comes from a single mine. Meanwhile, the Responsible Jewllery Council (sic) is working to come up with a process to determine the origin of gold destined to become jewelry.

Watch the “60 Minutes” story.

Read more about Congo Gold on the “60 Minutes” website.

Clarke, Nick. 2008. From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption. Geography Compass.

Amazon's Global Kindle Reader

I heard that Amazon now has a global version of Kindle. I was disappointed to find this morning that the new version still will not work in my country.

Since I’ve wanted one for some time, but have been waiting until they got a version that would work in my country, I checked out their website this morning, only to be disappointed again. Apparently the new global version will only work in SOME countries.

In case you are thinking of purchasing the new Global Kindle for a Christmas gift this year, since the new version will only work in SOME countries, I thought it would be helpful to most expats to have a complete list of which countries it will, or will not work in.

STARRED (*) countries marked below indicate that Kindle needs to be ordered from a SPECIAL PAGE on the Amazon site.

The Global Kindle version DOES work in (as of Dec. 2009):

Aland Islands, Albania, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Aruba, Australia*, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Boznia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Holy See, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Kenya, Kiribati, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Liberia, Leichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Moldovia, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozembique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Réunion, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Serbia, Seychelles, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Virgin Islands – British, Virgin Islands – U.S., Wallis and Futuna, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

The Global Kindle version does NOT work in (as of Dec. 2009):

Afghanistan, Algeria, Antarctica, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bouvet Island, British Indian Ocean Territory, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chile, Chad, China, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, French Southern Territories, Gambia, Guinea, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Isle of Man, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Korea – Democratic People’s Republic of, Korea – Republic of, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco (including the Western Sahara), New Zealand, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Pitcairn, Qatar, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Helena, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, Sudan, Svalbard and Jan Mayan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tokelau, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Uzbekistan, Yemen.

Cultural geography can bring you notoriety, fame and critical acclaim. Ask Jonathan Gold, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2007. Gold won the prize for his restaurant reviews, spanning 25 years of eating and writing in Los Angeles. Unlike many restaurant reviewers, concerned with haute cuisine and Michelin stars, Gold explores the

Vegan Thai Food in Los Angeles (from quarrygirl.com)

entirety of food experiences in Los Angeles; from innards to insects, from ant-eggs to octopus, often cooked by immigrants to the city. According to a profile in the New Yorker, Gold’s interest in the foodscapes of Los Angeles began in his first year of university where, during a cultural geography course at UCLA, he mapped ethnic restauarants in a city district. From these humble beginnings, he has managed to craft a lifetime career.  So, for all those of you struggling with cultural geography projects this week, take heart (though, if you follow Gold’s example, that’s just one organ of many you’ll be trying out).

Avital Oz's “Linkage” (1982), left, and “Black Sun” (1980), from Benjamin Genocchio's review of his retrospective in the New York Times, courtesy of Art Sites.

Australian visual art audiences will no doubt be pleased to see art Australian critic Benjamin Genocchio writing for thew New York Times.

In a recent article, Genocchio reviews the work of noted minimalist Avital Oz, a former protege of Sol Le Witt. It’s typical of Genocchio’s stylish yet understated prose, which makes him one of our best art writers.

For those interested in Genocchio as a critic and writer, the ABC’s Ally Moore interviewed him last year (click forward to 19 minutes in the sound file). The interview canvasses resale royalty rights and why Genocchio thinks that any droit de suite will only benefit the estates of the top few artists. His most recent book is Dollar Dreaming, about the Australian Aboriginal visual art market.

So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart still be as loving,
And the moon still be as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

—   Lord Byron

Innocent Stroll?

By the light of the moon, Marc and Hydra walked through the common, stopping every once and a while to blow something up. It was a quiet wintry night, a night for explorations of the soul before landscape, a post-phenomenological spectacle of Autumn ritual thought adornment. And then, the unthinkable happened. One explosion, set off by the Marc in a hysterical frenzy over his departure from the land of the mystics, shook the ground with a terrible rumble.

The grass of the common began separating, the earth seizing and shaking like a new born baby addicted to crack; trees capsized into an emerging crevice that revealed a hidden underground storage facility, untouched for 42.75 years, filled with the records of the lost souls dragged down to Dante’s 7^th circle of hell.

An exposed vein

Something new

Records of the Lotus War (Photo by LutEx)

A decision was made to explore this emerging subterranean wonder. Hydra, designated lead explorer on this spontaneously scurrilous expedition, entered the metal-lined den with trepidation; there was evidence of habitation, or at least adaptive reuse. The mole people had been here, burrowing into the earth, connecting the tunnel with another inhabited by a perpetually sleeping dragon that shook the tunnel with his deep exhalations.

The mole people were encountered soon after, mining away at the sidewalls of the tunnel, inviting collapse, but also inquiry, undertaken carefully by Marc who spoke conversational Molish. LutEx, master and commander of the underground, resided there with his Queen it seemed. They join the expedition for the promise of chocolate éclairs. Earlier that night, he tells Marc later, he mined a Jewel, and Diamond from the depths. The Diamond, as she then became known, joined the expedition on the promise of existential freedom.

As they move through the tunnels, LutEx explains that there was indeed a sleeping Dragon at the end of the tunnel, and that the mole people has constructed a wall between them and the beast to keep it’s steaming slumbering sighs from singing their eyebrows. It turned out they were not trying to dig to the Dragon, but to avoid it while working their way through the 7^th circle. As Hydra commented on the quality of the construction, suddenly, running steps are heard.

Experiential barrier

The Goblinmerchant, vendor of the mystical, last seen at the Pyestock Stargate, emerges from the depths at breakneck speed, smashing through the wall in a brave but foolish attempt to challenge the Dragon. Little did he know, the Dragon had a guard. The Goblimerchant is caught in a time-space compression web, cast by a magical troll hidden in a subterranean enclave, forcing him back into the 7^th circle, restoring the barrier the mole people had constructed, a barrier, which, it seems, the Dragon allowed to exist.

For his transgressions, the group sees the Goblinmerchant subjected to endless torture, first by having his hair pulled from the follicles by a diabolical goblin-engineered torture machine, and then tied by his feet and hung from the roof of the bunker, on show until the end of time for other daring explorers, an example of the dangers of crossing the Great Dragon of Clapham.

Torture and Punish

Sisyphustic dilemma

With the expedition now complete, with lessons learned, The Diamond is indeed given her freedom, teleported back to the surface by a goblin transporter restored by the mole people to beam in food supplies and port.

Beamed

As for Hydra and Marc… Last was heard they had joined LutEx and his Queen in the underworld, digging into the 8^th circle of hell.

By Jenny Lunn

Promoting cycling as a form of urban transport is lauded by politicians and planners as one way of creating sustainable cities. Despite efforts to establish more cycle lanes and networks, Britain’s cities are still not bike-friendly environments and anyone who takes to the saddle needs to be “a rugged fearless individual, wholly responsible for your destiny”, according to Janice Turner in an article in The Times.

Justin Spinney’s research focuses on urban cycling in a western context. His latest article in Geography Compass, suggests that most geographical research into cycling has focused on why people choose that particular mode of transport to get from A to B and what routes they take. Instead, he draws attention to a neglected area: the line between A and B and the experience of travelling. He seeks to draw transport geography into a dialogue with cultural geography by proposing different research methods for investigating “less tangible aspects of daily mobility”, in particular using video.

But I wonder what the video-journey of an average London cycle commuter would reveal. Two wheels having to share the tarmac with 18 metre long bendy buses; illogical one-way systems; drivers turning left without using their mirrors; the struggle to find a safe place to park your bike when you arrive at work; the stolen wheel when you return to collect your bike. Equally, it could show some of the bad behaviour of cyclists: listening to music on headphones; jumping red lights; using pavements; not wearing safety helmets. Spinney’s proposed research methodology could reveal as much about the state of society as about the experience of mobility.

Read the article by Janice Turner in The Times

Read the article by Justin Spinney in Geography Compass

The University of California asks the following of all of their potential Freshman:

Describe the world you come from — for example, your family, community or school — and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

I have been spending a lot of time contemplating this directive over the past few months as a great many of my students are applying to the University of California’s various campuses. Well, actually, only three of the campuses are Hong Kong Approved [meaning they have enough name brand appeal]: Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD (go me!) But a lot of students are applying to those three.

And so here they sit, seventeen and strung out on college applications: “The World They Come From.” How best to approach such a task? Can you answer the question with a single answer? Can anyone definitively say, “I am From X” anymore? The students I work with are (generally) multinational, multilingual, transoceanic, multiracial people. Few of them could say they have lived in one place for their entire lives. Where are they from? Is it where they were born? Where they started school? Where they finished school? The country from which they received their [first] passport? The country their dad is from? The place their grandparents are from? How about where their mom is from? A very smart man once told me, it is always a question of scale. [I ♥ geographers.]

And that is only the first step.

I gotta say, I am truly envious of these kids in some ways. This topic is one I have dreams of writing a dissertation about. Seriously. I find it fascinating.

Consider this: Are you representative of a place, or do you define a place? Do you have a place with which you fully identify? Why? When you find yourself in new places, what sets you apart from people there and what links you to them? In other words, what are the things you carry with you, and where did you pick them up in the first place? These are big questions, and for multinational, multilingual, transoceanic, multiple-passport-holding, mixed-race teenagers it is a real conundrum.

In his novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien tells the story of his Vietnam experience in the context of the things that the soldiers carried with them, some of them tangible and others; love, fear, guilt… not so much. While O’Brien uses this strategy to tell a complicated and emotional story of deeply personal, yet freakishly public experience, I think of the metaphor often as a way of explaining the nature of who we are. As an American (Sorry Canadians, United Statesian just sounds too ridiculous) living abroad, I think a lot about what has contributed to the way I see myself and others in the world. And of course, being from California, I rarely say I am from America anyhow, I say California. And why do I say this (aside from the obvious part that it is true)? If I were from Kentucky, would I say that? I cannot say, as I am not from KY… but I can say I have a special sort of pride (yeah, I know… sinful) about being from California. So, what of California do I carry with me? That may best be answered by others. How has California shaped me? I have an old friend (hi Fockler) who I taught with at Sparks High School, who used to rant about the lameness of the Golden State. Oh, he would carry on. From linguistic habits to traffic, to attitude to economics. It was a favorite target. [Though, it could have been me that inspired the ire rather than the Golden State... I may never know.] But through his ranting, I just smiled more. Yep. My state. California:

The pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future — economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It’s the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It’s also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California’s wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live.

Umm… yeah. So those might be some of the things that have shaped me.

I carry lots of stuff with me too… a penchant for Mexican food, Spanglish, clean air, hippies, live music, productive bohemianism (yeah, I just made that up), free thinkers and crazy people, idealism, true multiculturalism,  ridiculousness, poets and politicians, dichotomies and contradictions. And, like, everything in between, totally.

The world I come from? It has shaped me in every way. Can I articulate this better than a seventeen year old? At the moment I am not sure, but you can bet I am going to be working on it. I am glad I do not have a November 30th deadline though.

Or, wait, maybe I do…..

{ps: yeah, I was at this show.}
{pps: please appreciate Bobby’s shorts.}

Model sizes: 'normal' - 'overweight' - 'obese'

By William Hasty

The world’s heaviest human being lives in the UK – Ipswich to be more specific. He weighs 70 stone and, as of this week, requires highly specialised medical care to keep him alive. His case, the Observer reports, has rekindled the ongoing debate surrounding the apparent “obesity epidemic” that lies in wait not only in the US – ‘the junk food capital of the world’ – but also in the UK. For policy-makers, attempting to mitigate the impending disaster that this trend represents, children are at the centre of the debate – they are, the report insists, “far more likely to grow up into fat adults with all the health problems that extra weight brings if they are fat as children”.

Bethan Evans, in a recent paper entitled Anticipating fatness: childhood, affect and the pre-emptive ‘war on obesity’, questions the “spatiotemporalities of obesity policy in the UK”, focusing particularly on “the role of childhood and children’s bodies within such policy”. In what is an engaging and informative article, Evans, drawing upon the work of Foucault and Massumi, details the emergence of obesity as a biopolitical problem and positions the response of UK policy-makers as a “form of pre-emptive politics”. The paper concludes by arguing for “[C]ritical engagements with the spatiotemporalities of obesity policy”, or “geography risks becoming the discipline associated with the perpetuation of this immensely problematic discourse”. ‘Our fat future’, if we are to adopt the lexicon employed by those treating the subject in both the media and policy, obviously demands attention, and Evans has done much in this paper to indicate the productive ways in which geographers can contribute,  and perhaps even steer, this concern.

Observer Read full news story: Who’s to blame for Britain’s obesity episemic?, Observer, Sunday 25th October 2009

  Read full paper: Bethan Evans (forthcoming) Anticipating fatness: childhood, affect and the pre-emptive ‘war on obesity’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers



A photo by Wayne Troyer of a Make It Right home under construction, in 2008. Originally posted at Jimmy Stamp's Life Without Buildings blog

In The Atlantic, Wayne Curtis explains that the disastrous failure of all levels of government to plan and rebuild New Orleans is having some interesting unintended positive consequences.

Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) [...]

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold. [...]

We may be in one of those moments now, with notions of modern design, advances in green materials, and the technical imperatives of sustainability all converging toward a great leap in urban architecture. The architecture writer Andrew Blum has asked whether the Brad Pitt Houses could “become for the single-family green house what Seaside was for New Urbanism or Pacific Palisades was for California Modernism”—that is, a project that recasts the possible for the next generation of architects and developers. As seems fitting for such a moment, most of the construction projects under way in New Orleans are informed by seemingly conflicting strands of utopianism. But their designers are coming to some common, and edifying, conclusions.

This summer, I visited five of the new houses. I sat on their porches—New Orleans’s original green technology, offering shade in summer and shelter during deluges, connecting the home with the street—and I considered a city in flux.

But architecture blogger Jimmy Stamp, from the blog Life Without Buildings, has a somewhat more cautious perspective:

The design architects essentially relinquish control of their projects once the construction documents are handed over to Make it Right’s team of architects and builders. Ostensibly, this is to create a certain vague uniformity among the houses, keep costs down, and strengthen the vernacular elements, thereby creating aneighborhood from disparate global visions. The end result, however, is at best a diluted version of the design, and at worst, a poorly detailed, hastily constructed eyesore. [...]

It’s a slow, at times painful, process, but it’s progress. And it was recently announced that duplex homes are on the way, designed by a mix of international and local architects that include Frank Gehry and a slightly less cynical design fromMVRDV. It’s hard to imagine a dense lower 9th ward. The homes, at times separated by blocks, have a folly-in-the-park feel. Only time will tell if this will be a functioning neighborhood, a worthy pilgrimage site for architects from around the world, or an alltogether different type of folly.

The Kingpins' "Unstill Life" (detail), 2009, from the exhibition page on Facebook

Tonight the ABC screened a documentary on a recent exhibition at Hazlehurst Regional Gallery in southern Sydney entitled “Reality Check”.

It’s a brief but interesting exploration of the curatorial process and ensuing artworks produced as a part of  this exhibition, which was commissioned by Hazlehurst’s curator,  Daniel Mudie Cunningham, and based around responses to the original Sylvania Waters TV series from 1992.

I haven’t seen the exhibition so I can’t comment on the artworks exhibited, but I thought the documentary raised (though lacked the length to explore) some interesting issues. To begin with, let’s look at the artists selected for the show: Mitch Cairns, Carla Cescon, Peter Cooley, John A. Douglas, The Kingpins, David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton, Luis Martinez, Archie Moore, Ms & Mr, Elvis Richardson, and Holly Williams. Sadly, we don’t get to meet all of them. But as a group, it’s collectively what you might call mid-level contemporary artists, some of whom, like Archie Moore and Luiz Martinez, have real talent and artistic credibility, and some of whom, like The Kingpins, I’ve always thought were better known for their splashy performances and canny artistic positioning than for any ground-breaking originality. I found myself wondering what an older, more established artist might have made of the project … or was I perhaps merely curious as to what happens to all the up-and-coming Primavera stars in 15 years time?

The documentary gives us an interesting snapshot of the artistic process in the 2000’s in Australia. One thing I immediately noticed was the run-down condition of the houses many of the artists lived in, hinting at the often penurious circumstances of working artists, even if few nowadays are prepared to take the next step and attempt a class analysis.

We also get to see some intelligent discussion of the original TV series by Catherine Lumby, who I would love to see doing more television and blogging, as well as some photogenic curatorial glosses from Mudie Cunningham.

Overall, the documentary left me a little disappointed. Perhaps it was always difficult to address so much in 25 minutes, but I don’t feel as though – on the basis of the documentary – that many of the artists really engaged with the subject matter at hand. The exceptions are John A. Douglas, who presents an impressively humane perspective on the difficulties faced by the Donaher family, and Luiz Martinez, who painted a scene from the original TV show that beckons an almost Hopper-esque tabluex of ordinary life.

A mock-up of Super Colossal's Island of Culture in the Nerang River

This year, the Gold Coast City Council held a “Master Plan Ideas Competition” to decide what to do with a 16 hectare site in the middle of the growing city. The site is planned to house a new Gold Coast Cultural and Civic Precinct, eventually containing the Council chambers and a swanky new art gallery. The competition aimed to “generate creative new visions”, “stimulate community discussion” and “identify specific design features” for the site.

As the Gold Coast  competition website says, “the 16.5 hectare site is located at 135 Bundall Road and is bordered on three sides by rivers and canals. Formerly a simple rural cane farm, the site is now at the heart of a growing city with views across the skyline of Surfers Paradise, Main Beach and Broadbeach.”

Last week, the Gold Coast Council announced the winner of the competition and its $90,000 prize: Sydney firm Super Colossal, who proposed an entirely new island in the Nerang river for the precinct’s various civic and cultural buildings.

Competition judges praised the winning entry for its creation of open space, its many pedestrian bridges and its defensibility in the face of rising sea-levels. One judge even compared it to “the ancient islands in the Laguna Veneta such as the Isola Murano and Isola San Michele.”

“We think the Gold Coast is one of Australia’’s most interesting cities,” Super Colossal’s Marcus Trimble told me in an email. “Nowhere else do you have close proximity of the ocean, high rise towers, waterfront suburbia, natural and man-made lagoons and industrial buildings.” The young Sydney agency is only a little over two years old, but has already worked on the Australian Peacekeeping Memorial, as well as organising the well-regarded Pecha Kucha slide nights.

“We are also interested in the close proximity of the natural and man made waterways present in the Gold Coast,” Trimble expanded. “What is an appropriate typology of cultural building in a city where every home is a waterfront and where rising water levels present a threat? The idea of the island then comes about from an intention to intensify the activity in a single location while allowing it to sit in the round and not [be] owned by any particular part of the city.”

The “island of culture” idea might strike some as rather ironic in a city known primarily for its natural attractions and lifestyle. But the winning design is also bold and conceptually innovative in a way that might just make other Australian cities sit up and take notice.

Respected Brisbane architect Timothy Hill praised the winning entry, commenting that he thought it was “quintessentially Gold Coast,” quipping that “it’s not pie in the sky, but pie in the water.” He argues that the design has been clever by addressing its location in “strategic rather than decorative sense.”

According to Hill, “rather than doing a scheme or buildings with a styling associated with its place, Super Colossal have addressed it strategically, by proposing to build an island.” He added that it shows “the value of a competition rather than a master plan,” pointing out that this idea would never have got a look in as part of a traditional master plan process.

Mariam Arcilla, a Gold Coast curator and the gallery director of 19 KAREN Contemporary Artspace, disagrees. “Honestly I do not believe the idea of an ‘island of culture’ or one physical precinct will work for our city,” she wrote in an email. “We are not built like Melbourne or Sydney, the Gold Coast landscape is unique – there is no main downtown area or present cultural precinct because the city is long and spread out, and this is why there are many cultural pockets like art centres, artist-run initiatives, galleries and festivals peppered around various suburbs.”

But will it actually happen? Hill calls the idea “eminently sensible” and argues the Gold Coast Council “could start it straight away.” But as the unhappy experience of Sydney’s Barangaroo development shows, the vision of competition-winning architects can quickly get mangled by the machine of local politics.

Even so, Trimble is hopeful. He explains that “the island sits over the water as a luminous representation of the city’s cultural ambition,” and for now, perhaps ambition is just the right word.

I’m spending this afternoon reading Kate Oakley’s new review monograph, “Art Works” – cultural labour markets: a literature review.

It’s a major new addition to the field and I expect will prove an important teaching tool for many lecturers. Oakley surveys the last half-century of research in cultural labour markets, as well as the nature of creative work itself. You could say she examines art as a job, hobby, vocation  and calling, as well as from the sociological and cultural economic perspectives.

She then moves on to discuss the idea that work in the cultural sector is a template for all kinds of work in the future, the geography and organisation of cultural work, outlines the literature on creative work as  ‘precarious labour’ and looks at the implications of these studies for cultural policy and education.

Oakley is a significant figure in the field and so this review will end up defining the way much of the field is envisaged. It’s a thorough and highly readable account that I sincerely hope finds it way to policy-makers in Australia. It should enable them to better understand some of the implications of the nostrums and platitudes that so often litter government arts policies in this country.

One policy point that immediately comes to mind is the evidence this study furnishes for the value of emerging and fringe arts festivals and other infrastructure that supports early-career opportunities for artists. Oakley points out the literature repeatedly underlines the difficulty faced by artists transitioning from education and training to creative work:

Honey, Heron and Jackson find that most of these artists attended art college, and that many considered the years spent there as a ‘special time’ during which they could dedicate many hours to artistic practice (1997:vii). Many artists considered the first year after school the most difficult, a finding which concurred with that of earlier work (Blackwell and Harvey 1999), which found that cultural workers often experience a difficult time post-graduation, as they struggle to make contacts, organise a portfolio, and negotiate (often multiple) work contracts.

Honey, Heron and Jackson find that most of these artists attended art

Is this a game?

Anthropologists have recently been writing about World of Warcraft, Second Life and other Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). Since many of these games have millions of players, with their own economies, cultures etc., it has been suggested that people within virtual worlds have developed their own culture. As an avid World of Warcraft player, I heartily agree. But I also love playing games in real life, and, in a sense, this is what UrbEx is all about.

Yesterday Marc took me to a site which felt very much life a game, a surreal landscape of industrial waste, technological failure and a ninja Ghurka security guard. We explored it, very carefully, and all went well, but when I got home, I re-dreamed the explore, making it the game I knew it was.

I call the result a Real Life Role Playing Game or RLRPG.

In a small forest, in a quiet neighborhood, there are trails snaking their way through the tress. Different paths straddle the border between the forest and fields, inhabited by Mums with prams on this lazy Sunday, and by pairs of flatmates and friends, jogging, trying to sweat out remnants of last night’s snakebite extravaganza with girls in too-short-skirts. On one of these trails, in a black hooded cloak, walks Marc of the Cata Clan, Lvl 80 Elite Explorer, back again to conquer Pyestock for bonus explorer points before returning to his subterranean home in the Paris Catacombs.

Marc moves to the perimeter of his target, taking note of the Ghurka guard walking along side him, without looking in his direction, noticing that the Ghurka is following his movements. And eyes. He has been spotted. Marc breaks into a run, trees passing by like cars on a busy highway. With a quick glance to the side, he notices the guard is keeping pace. An elite guard. Merde.

Rookinella was right to be scared and stay home today, this guard cannot be defeated with felt or plastic pirate swords. With two glancing kicks off of the leaf cover, Marc is running up a willow tree, rebounding over the 4 meter triple barbed wire fence, his cloak hood flapping in the wind, distracting the Ghurka just long enough to pull the small blade from his leg holster. The Ghurka is cut down before he can get to his weapon, his mouth held from behind to muffle the screams of agony as he bleeds out.

Moving in

Marc shoulders the guard (got he’s heavy for such a little man!) and sneaks stealthily into the entry point, the Stargate chapel, where his next surprise awaits. He stuffs the guard under the mesh catwalk and walks over to a large circular disk on one end of the room. With a deep breath, he grabs the edge of the Stargate and pulls it open to unleash the Goblinmerchant, a daemon; a vendor of all things fantastic and mystical.

But what’s this? The Goblinmerchant smells humans. Turning his comrade, he can see that Marc has heard them long before now. A group of 4, fumbling their way through. No wonder, with security gone now. The perimeter is being breached. If they make their way to the Stargate, all hell could break loose.

They run off, low to the ground, weighted down by field equipment and supplies pulled from the Stargate, supplied for documentation of the Cata Clan invasion. Through the dangling Cat 5 cables, past the air tunnel control room, up the rusty ladder. Four fellow explorers lie in ambush and a battle almost ensues until we realize they also hold a key to the Stargate.

The documentation begins, one room after another, small items and large machines from humanities forgotten industrial past, a legacy of materiality replaced by computer models and office jobs in Slough.

Controlling the minds of workers?

An exploded reactor, lucky we were there to prevent radiation leakage!

Mail delivery system

Heard the seashore in these

Tunnels or cables? Was I in those?

Flying over the site with a temporary upgrade

Don't look down

Dirty row, collected for XP

Goblinmerchant calls control to tell them the mission has been accomplished. He is awarded 3 mana potions and 5000XP points.

Phone home

Documentation complete, Marc enters the energy capacitor, a small proton particle subfield generator, and Goblinmerchant flips the switch, firing him back to Subterranean Paris.

Unstoppable

I was recently contacted by Emma James, a researcher at Newcastle University studying the recent re-emergence of psychogeography. The following is a short interview I did with her.

SI graffiti in Amsterdam

_________________________________________________________________________________

Emma James: How / where did you first hear about the concept ‘psychogeography’?

Bradley L. Garrett – The first time I heard the term psychogeography was on the cover of a book by Merlin Coverley in the London Review Bookshop, I think I read half of it standing in the store! It was a good introduction and branched me into the work of academics working with the concept like David Pinder and Alastair Bonnett, then deeper into the Lettrist Movement, Raoul Vaneigem, Guy Debord and ‘work’ of the Situationist International (SI).

E.J. – In various articles I have read, people have observed that there has been a recent re-emergence of psychogeography in the last decade.  From your research have you found this to be true?

B.L.G. – I absolutely see a renewed interest in psychogeography. There are numerous clubs on the internet devoted to the practice and the mass-market work of Ian Sinclair and Patrick Keiller in particular really make me feel like psychogeography has ‘gone mainstream’. A quick youtube search of the term reveals that many people are using psychogeographic techniques to navigate city space in new and interesting ways all the time, such as walking the city using algorithms, applying random models to a (supposedly) fixed template, replacing one arbitrary motivation (I am walking to work) with another one (I am walking 4 streets North, 2 streets East and 1 street North until I can’t walk anymore).

E.J. – ‘Who’ do you understand to be modern practicing psychogeographers (e.g. artists, geographers, everyday civilians’ etc)?

B.L.G. – I see geographers are the preeminent drivers behind the modern psychogeographic movement, primarily because their inspiration has come from reading the work of the situationists who pioneered the concept, the problem is that a lot of them write about it without ever practicing it, which I see as a failing. But there popular writers such as Ian Sinclair and Will Self who are quite aware of the lineage and practice the techniques also produce work is much more widely read, so they might be considered the primary ‘practitioners’. But, of course, we also find a lot of artists, counter-cartographers and people on the street using these techniques, even if they are not (wholly) aware of the theory behind the practice.

The other thing I find interesting is that this ‘new’ psychogeographic movement appears to be centred primarily in Britain (and especially London), which implies to me that it may be reactionary – perhaps due to the increase in government control and surveillance that has taken place over the last 10 years, making people feel a greater need to defy order, even in small ways such as walking across a piece of grass signposted not to or speaking through a bullhorn for a day. The time and space in which this resurgence is taking place sure feels a lot to me (from my readings) like the governmental regulations and reactions that led to the founding of the SI, and ultimately to the French Wildcat revolts of 1968.

So I would say that although psychogeographers tend to invoke small actions, it would behove both academics and governments to pay attention, as these small resistances may be an indication of a larger social consciousness of boredom, restlessness or downright anger. People using psychogeographic practices are just one of the groups who dare to push back a little sooner than others.

E.J. – I understand that you are studying ‘urban explorers’.  How would you view them in relation to psychogeography (e.g. as a branch of psychogeographers?  Or just another term to use for practicing psychogeographers?)

B.L.G. – In my discussions with urban explorers, most would not want to be labeled as psychogeographers, though there are some clear similarities in their practices; both are instances of what I might call mobilities of transgression or, maybe more specifically, place hacking. Both psychogeographers and urban explorers seek to redefine and/or experience space and place on their own terms, regardless of pre-existing rules, social templates or cultural norms.

E.J. – As part of my dissertation question, I am interested in people’s motivations behind practicing psychogeography.  According to various writers there are a few different ideas, e.g. political motivations/an interest to connect with the past/as a sort of rebellion against modern consumerism e.t.c.  From your research and interaction with urban explorers, what have you found their motivations behind practicing it to be?

B.L.G. – I think that most people would find that they have a range of motivations behind anything they do that requires some effort, there is rarely just one driving force behind action, especially when that action is activistic, dangerous or trangressive. There is an investment/reward ratio at work where you think to yourself “okay, yes, I could climb that crane and get some photographs, but is the experience, or the photograph I bring home, worth the possibility of arrest?”

Most urban explorers would I think contend that they are interested in the historic background these places, though one person did tell me that they “could give a shit about the history, I just like to explore.” I have heard the suggestion that urban exploration is about bearing witness to the failure of capitalism, especially in seeing sites such as industrial ruins folding back into the landscape after their abandonment. I don’t think this is true at all. To be honest, most urban explorers are in these places to get photographs that most people do not have; to see something that no one else has seen. So it is both the experience and the production/acquisition (which is of course part of the capitalist system they are supposedly subverting) that becomes the motivation.

I would say that people who define themselves as psychogeographers are much more likely to have political motivations than people who define themselves as urban explorers, though the practices are intertwined.

E.J. – As a geographer, I have noticed that there is very little writing on psychogeography within the discipline, though I have come across a few lecturers who have tried to introduce it within the course.  Would you say that there is a valid place for psychogeography within the discipline of geography, and should it perhaps be promoted/expanded?

B.L.G. – I think that geography has a lot to learn from psychogeography, both in terms of its historical roots and trajectory and in terms of modern practice. It certainly seems like there is some resistance to the concept, great publications like Alistair Bonnett’s journal Transgressions came and went, snuffed out, I think by academia’s inability to challenge theory with practice, or maybe more fairly, academia’s inability to ground theory in practice. A similar stigma exists against participatory geographies, I think, for the same reason – essentially many academics are afraid of becoming activists, afraid of getting their hands dirty, afraid of testing an armchair theories, afraid of failure. I believe, as I think many psychogeographers would, that we should celebrate failure. We would like to think that academia is a haven for free thinking, but the Ivory Tower also has its social and cultural models.

E.J. – What is your opinion on the argument that psychogeography could be applied as a new way of re-writing and representing the city (e.g. the idea of psychogeography maps alongside ‘mainstream’ mapping)?

B.L.G. – I think that this is a wonderful idea, the thing is that psychogeography, and psychogeographers, tend to not want to be boxed in. This poses difficulties when, for instance, writing grant proposals for projects. If you were to suggest to a funding body that you were going to spend a year following the ‘densest’ flows of people off of the London Tube to try and psychogeographically map nodes of interest at different times of day in the city (as I have done for fun!) you would find this funding body likely feeling that the research has no ‘research question’ or ‘direction’. The fact of the matter is that it does have a direction, it’s just that you have taken that power of direction out of the hands of the ‘elite’ academic and put it into the hands of the anonymous city dweller. I think that there is something profound in that. That is where, I would argue, the real solid tendrils of politic challenge come from in psychogeography, not from the esoteric writing style or wandering corporeal experiences, but from having the openness to resist being the one who defines what those experiences should be.

Just as psychogeographers work to subvert political, social and cultural templates, they also, I think, would be reluctant to create those templates, making playing the dual role of being both an academic and a practicing psychogeographer a rare one.  Would we benefit from melding those illusory dichotomous positions? Absolutely.

Matt Condon, writing in The Courier-Mail, says “yes”, but I’m not so sure.

The Brisbane City Council's "Creative City" strategy was heavy on the Landry/Florida rhetoric - but has since failed to deliver any meaningful policy outcomes

Condon’s article points out that the city has a historic legacy of under-appreciation of culture and the arts:

In an anguished letter published in The Courier-Mail on March 27, 1934, one T. L. Smithson Jones asked: “Sir, May I ask if there is any culture in Brisbane? For many years I have spent some months of the year here, and I frankly am appalled by what I see.”

In August this year (75 years after poor T. L. Smithson Jones’ lament) the same question was being batted about on that new-fangled thing called the internet. Acclaimed young Australian festival director and cultural commentator Marcus Westbury incited an interstate debate when he asked similar questions about culture and its comparative robustness in Australian capital cities. “This week, I’ve been discussing the respective state of cultural life in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide and been amazed at the passionate vitriol that comparisons evoke,” Westbury wrote. “It seems we love taking potshots across state lines.”

Former Queensland historian Ross Fitzgerald has described the state as a “cultural wasteland”.

And in an article in Artlink magazine several years ago titled “The New Brisbane”, local writers Stuart Glover and Stuart Cunningham pointed out our city’s “coming of age” had been announced several times in the past three decades, from the 1982 Commonwealth Games through to the Smart State manifesto.

It’s worth taking up on that final paragraph. In that Artlink article, Glover and Cunningham mentioned two festivals in particular as unique and exciting models showing Brisbane was creating new ways of presenting culture: the River Festival and Straight Out of Brisbane.

Today, neither festival exists. River Fest was gobbled up by the influential but charmless  Lyndon Terracini in his crusade to dominate Brisbane’s festivals sector, while Straight out of Brisbane (which I founded and helped to organise) died an agonising death waiting for Arts Queensland funding that never arrived. Add the previously successful Livid Festival to that list and Brisbane now has three fewer nationally-recognised  festivals than it had in the early 2000’s.

Other aspects of Brisbane’s cultural health are also open to question. While ABS data for Brisbane is not disaggregated from the total Queensland figures, across the state employment in cultural industries barely grew at all – flatlining at 48,000 jobs from 2001 to 2006. This was during boom years for other parts of the state’s employment market.

When you add in the substantial growth in state cultural employment at big institutions like the State Library and Queensland Art Gallery in that time, it appears as though private sector cultural employment in Queensland actually fell between 2001 and 2006.

This is in stark contrast to the rosy forecasts predicted by the glossy cultural policies developed by both the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council in the early 2000’s – policy documents with ambitious titles like “Creative City” and “Creativity is Big Business.”

In fact, if you talk to cultural practitioners in Queensland, you find that the micro-economic conditions for cultural growth are stagnating. Music venues are struggling with high costs imposed by tougher licensing and bouncer regulations, while small galleries and incubators are finding it hard to pay the rent in Brisbane’s appreciating property market. While music festivals such as Parklife and the Big Day Out continue to draw strong crowds, government-run cultural centres like the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Brisbane Powerhouse have not lived up to expectations, neither commissioning as much local work as first claimed or creating significant new audiences for their venues. During one recent week of the Brisbane Festival, the Brisbane Powerhouse was nearly completely empty, running only one 60-minute show, Elbow Room’s There.  One show in an entire week of the Brisbane Festival!

Ironically, Elbow Room is basically an expatriate Brisbane company, composed of Brisbane actors, playwrights and directors who left the state for greener pastures in Victoria, where there is a far stronger independent theatre scene.And there are plenty more stories like this.

Film production in the state is another good example. It remains essentially a chase for Hollywood production dollars rather trying to develop local stories and film-makers. The result is that local production is  highly vulnerable to currency fluctuations like the current strong Aussie dollar. Meanwhile, the state film funding body, the Pacific Film and Television Commission, has gone through a series of internal convulsions that have seen a clean-out of top management whom had comprehensively lost the confidence of the local film industry.

In fact, despite the publicity lavished on Brisbane and Queensland’s  so-called “creative indsutries” policies, the evidence suggests that they have failed – even in terms of the economic and employment goals they set themselves.

It’s not all bad. Brisbane’s fertile music scene continues to spawn new bands with significant national and international appeal, while many of the state’s writers are also gaining wide appeal. And Fortitude Valley’s game design sector has grown into a significant employer. But in sectors like the performing arts, dance, visual arts, artist-run initiatives and commercial visual arts galleries, design, festivals, media and advertising and even food and dining,  Brisbane and Queensland trails badly behind its southern cousins – and the gap is if anything widening.