rj koscielniak

the suggestion here is that understanding these interactions (the spaces of citizenship, the successes of encroachment, the cracks, spaces and moments of alternative practice, or the positive hybridities) can provide an important basis from which to develop new and normative insights for planning.

vanessa watson, ‘seeing from the south’ (2009)

allan hill is the lone resident of the packard plant.

Toy an Horse - Marcos Ramirez Erre, 1997.

Teddy Cruz: “Erre inserted his horse into the de-centered, deterritorialized, and multi-dimensional flows that constitute the border [between USA and Mexico], where it dwelled for a brief moment (impossibly) occupying both sides at once in defiance of the dialectic forces that govern space…It reminds us that the contemporary city is still able to elude the absolute ordering devices that attempt to render it homogeneous and one-dimensional.”

but in the changing american cities - including st. louis - we appear to have lost touch with the challenging reality of the future and are heading for the hills in search of small little caves and sanctuaries.

more than any other sector of local activity it is politics that reflect the stampede toward the hills. and in this sense the city is increasingly dominated by the negative politics of anxiety and fear. so much so that one if intrigued by the current amount of social and political effort in st. louis to keep the city on its collision course towards extinction as a viable economic entity and wholesome population center.

the politics of anxiety and fear is becoming so pervasive within the city that it has produced something of a municipal death-wish as we ponder the almost insurmountable problems of population, housing, race, education, mass transportation, crime, health, police relations and breakdown of community.

the city is caught in a transitional trap that [is] taking its toll of human creativity. most of this is due to changing technology, advancing science, shifting industrial processes and public policies that are strongly weighted against the city in behalf of the expanding suburban areas, against the traditionally poor in behalf of the more dynamic income sectors, against the black and brown in behalf of the white, and against the old and very young in behalf of the more productive middle age group.

ernest calloway, december 10, 1971 (from ‘urban politics of anxiety, fear’)

Opening sequence of “Satantango” (1994)

“This European epic is seven hours long. It is adapted from a novel by Laszlo Karsznahorkai and reflects the obsession of director Bela Tarr who began the film seven years ago. It took two full years to film this opus. The story is presented through a series of chapters of varying lengths with titles like ‘The News That They are Coming,’ ‘We, the Resurrected,’ ‘The Freeze,’ ‘Only Problems and Work.’ and finally ‘The Circle Is Completed.’ The enormously complex saga is centered in an abandoned farm machinery plant upon a Hungarian plain. There live a small band of hobos including three couples, a doctor with a drinking problem. All of them want to leave and they will do anything they can to do it. A set series of events occurs, but the story presents those events from each of the different character’s viewpoints. The film ends on an ironic note.”

blackbird

keep your teeth clean.

federal art project: 1936-1938

I want to argue that one of the most urgent problems in planning and architectural theory today is the need to develop a different social imagination — one that is not modernist but that nevertheless reinvents modernism’s activist commitments to the invention of society and to the construction of the state. I suggest that the sources of this new imaginary lie not in any specifically architectural or planning production of the city but rather in the development of theory in both fields as an investigation into what I call the spaces of insurgent citizenship….By insurgent, I mean to emphasize the opposition of these spaces of citizenship to the modernist spaces that physically dominate so many cities today. I also use it to emphasize an opposition to the modernist political project that absorbs citizenship into a plan of state building and that, in the process, generates a certain concept and practice of planning itself. … The spaces of an insurgent citizenship constitute new metropolitan forms of the social not yet liquidated by or absorbed into the old. As such, they embody possible alternative futures.

James Holston, from “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship”

(note: this is what I do all day - reading and writing and learning to see insurgent citizenship in the united states - as it is animated in the story of rapid de- and dis-urbanization. holston is one point of origin. ps. this is not about occupy or tactical urbanism. this is the lived experience of defiance and resistance.)

This summer, I will be in Baltimore as part of the Baltimore Mayoral Fellowship.

cities
brick