sad demise

Jane Jacobs... an urban philosopher/writer, an eclectic economist and a brilliant nonconformist died at the age of 89 this morning in Toronto...

banksy / brand / underground

"The art to it is not getting picked up for it, and that's the biggest buzz at the end of the day because you could stick all my shit in the Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on Rollerblades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting." ...once said banksy - britain's most celebrated graffity artist....

he had been opposing the corporate branding and became his own brand in the process...in the last few years, he has designed the cover of the Blur album, Think Tank, and has had gallery shows in britain and also has a shiny_covered book to his credit...

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i came across a fake (/?) banksy in a quiet street in vienna...and wondered if he has become a globalised brand (underground/commercial)...and chose it as an occasion to put forth some thoughts about the conundrum facing the underground: is it preferable to spread the good work - even via the commercial culture industry - or to stay small and pure and avoid ''selling out''...

while the accusation of ''selling out'' seems sometimes just an elitist defense of the pure, bohemian ghetto, its not always so simple... the manner in which the opening up of the underground culture is taking place, the concern that in the process of popularization the real message of the underground - as an alternative to the consumer cultural world - will get lost is a valid one...

for dahab

prayers...

and a piece of text by Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi...

from 'TERRORISM AND NONVIOLENCE'

''...we must understand that nonviolence is not a strategy that we can use in a moment of crisis and discard in times of peace.Non violence is about personal attitudes, about becoming the change we wish to see in the world. Because, a nation's collective attitude is based on the attitude of the individual.

Nonviolence is about building positive relationships with all human beings - relationships that are based on love, compassion, respect, understanding, and appreciation. Nonviolence is also about not judging people as we perceive them to be - that is, a murderer is not born a murderer; a terrorist is not born a terrorist. People become murderers, robbers, and terrorists because of circumstances and experiences in life. Killing or confining murders, robbers, terrorists, or the like is not going to rid this world of them. For every one we kill or confine we create another hundred to take their place. What we need to do is to analyze dispassionately what are those circumstances that create such monsters and how can we help eliminate those circumstances, not the monsters. Justice should mean reformation and not revenge.''

manek.chawk_ahmedabad

a little boy somewhere in a slovakian village amidst the mountains - - -

on my trip to vienna last week, i met an old old friend...he told me about a little boy who shot himself in the head due to some stress he got from getting low grades at school...it was very disheartening to know/realise a little boy - 10 year old - shooting himself in a tiny slovakian village...somewhere in the mountains...where i hoped the stress of this world/this life hadnt reached...it is almost like the competitive stress that is associated with cities...

and then i wonder how remote are the remote villages? is there much difference there to our life of mental supremacy in the cities?

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Tactical Machines / City

(on going research : following is a very rough draft for an essay)


Tactics vs. Strategies:

“If it is true that the grid of “discipline” is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also “miniscule” and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to tell them, only to evade them and finally what “ways of operating” from the consumer’s (or “dominee’s”?) side of the mute processes that organise the establishment of socio-economic order.”[1]

This argument presented in Michel de Certeau’s ‘Practice of Everyday Life’ clearly suggests his position against Foucault’s thesis of all pervading power structures in his work discipline and punish. Contrary to Foucault’s book, Michel de Certeau’s book tries to bring to light the details of the forms taken by the “dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity of groups of individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline”. Pushed to their ideal limits, these people compose the network of an antidiscipline.”[2]

To explain these forms, Michel de Certeau proposes a thesis of tactics vs. strategies, where he says that strategies are the tools of the dominant elite while tactics work in the shadow of strategies and are ‘an art of the week’, which form mute processes that organise socio-economic order.

He gives much elaborate explanation of what are these strategies and tactics in his book.

To quote him,” I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment”. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (proper) and thus serves as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, “clienteles”, “targets”, or “objects” of research). Political economic and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.

I call a “tactic”, on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localisation), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.”[3]


Form of the cities:

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves – or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality”[4]

In most cities of developing world, there are many parallel micro-realities dwelling within one space of the city, which is an illusion of macro-reality. One finds these cities as a singular but multi-faceted image where many worlds coalesce into a singular space.

If one looks at any Indian city, there now exist parallel equivalents for all systems in the city – places and means of recreation, markets, techniques of construction, sources for supply of building material and different physical manifestations – the kutcha and pukka city [5]. These create a situation where different worlds exist in the same space but share, understand and use it differently. The economic relationship of exploitation and dependency is one of the most important factors that gives the different worlds in the city their distinct physical shapes and relative locations. One world is static, monumental in its presence and exploitative of the high spots in the city. The other sprawls along all the interstices or crevices it finds.

Such duality – or rather complexity of the city is result of constant negotiation between strategic and tactical practices described previously. One can say that strategic machines and tactical machines are responsible for these cities as we experience them. The strategic machines are related to institutional power and they manifest in a striated or metric space, where the tactical machines characterise ordinary practices and manifest smooth spaces. They appropriate space while working within the strategic apparatus. Thus the two kinds of machines are actually enacting two kinds of powers on the form of the city. The concern of this text is tactical machines, which are the machines working within the strategic frame but against its grain. These tactical machines are seen in various forms starting from networks of self-built settlements to a small vendor on the street corner. They exist anywhere where one can find a certain struggle between a higher controlling power and emerging resistance power.

The issue of the struggles between various power structures has been an important one in the contemporary philosophic and artistic discourse on the cities:

“The postmodern city, as distinguished from the modern city, is characterised by the growing erosion of the urban infrastructure; the loss of physical and social equilibrium; and increasingly complex social and physical layers which are barely contained by communication, transportation, and judicial networks. This evolution implicitly demanded that artist respond to the space of the city, whether psychological, temporal, or physical, and to do so in a way that was impossible with conventional forms of representation. The artists…do not paint the bright lights o the lively pedestrian-filled streets. Rather, they seek to analyse and articulate the sensations of vast spaces and of oppressive power structures felt by the urban wanderer.”[6]

As soja emphasizes workings of power in society and on space, “…power – and the specifically cultural politics that arise from its workings – is contextualised and made concrete, like all social relations, in the (social) production of (social) space.”[7]

Tactical machines:

Purpose: economic survival:

In the city of Ahmedabad, like many other cities in developing countries, there is a huge population of people living under poverty line, which are the so-called ‘marginal groups’. These people’s prime concern is to survive in the city. So, their actions, which fall in the category of tactics, are directed mainly by individual survival necessities. Thus, these people invent and re-invent new living as well economies and occupation tactics instrumentalising everything they can reach.

Field: city:

The very base of these tactical machines is on the existing cities and its rules. These machines get their most basic demands – or say the fuel to make them work – from the city itself. They depend on organised structure of the city and try to create niches within them to enact their powers.

These machines clash against the city’s space striated by money, work and capital. But the city also liberates some loopholes: vacant lots, the voids created by implementation of infrastructure, abandoned public spaces, spans between constructions, and lots of other spaces which can be used by the tactical machines to operate. Thus, There is a kind of relation or interdependence between these two forms of powers acting on and through the medium of the city.

In the current situation, a lot of middle-sized cities (on national scale) like Ahmedabad are in the state of being or becoming globalised. Such global restructuring processes turn the cities into an object of appropriation in a distinct way. Transnational economies generate new claims on the city. This gives a much complex form to the existing forms of claims on the city. Now the claims from both the global capital that uses the city as organisational base and the claims from excluded sectors operate in the city.

Logic: separation and connection:

As these machines are resultant of certain power struggles their primary logic is also based in the power struggles. Soja, while discussing issue of power suggests that subjugation by hegemonic power leaves any individual or group with two choices: either to accept the imposed differentiation/division and to make best of it or to struggle against it. If I observe the tactical machines, it would be difficult to say if they make use of just either one of the choices. In fact, they use both the directions in order to work and survive. Thus, they use logic of separation and connection, which could also be traced to its spatial manifestations.

For ex. The settlements of these marginal groups are unique in the sense that they are a world in itself within the city. One can feel a completely different life breathing in those settlements. The very fact of a certain kind of activity which happens in the settlement has to do with its choice of separation from the city. The distance is maintained in order to sustain certain qualities but connections are made to reach out to the city for certain other needs of economic survival as well recognition. There are very specific ways how these settlements relate or connect to the city by its edges and accesses as well as by the people who work in the city.

Logic: adaptive/opportunistic:

The tactical machines are by nature adaptive and opportunistic. They change according to changing socio-economic demands and scenarios. They are always producing survival instruments, which are done with the most diverse ideas, materials and techniques and which are highly flexible and mobile. For example organisation of temporary commercial markets which happens with its own self-organised logic and yet only modifies certain areas during certain time of the day and when it is over, situation is just normal as it was before the market.

Scales: L to XS

These machines operate from large scales of the city to very small scales.

Questions:

Role of (urban) designer:

It is a mixture of disappointment and shock to realise that conventional practice of architecture/urban planning falls into the category of strategic apparatus. These people make strategic devices to control or remove tactical spaces.

One should try and find ways in which one can adopt the principles of these tactical machines and try to use them in thinking and intervening in the cities. One needs to find ways to bring these tactical processes to mainstream discourse. Tactical ways are an attempt to bridge the gap between the dominant imagination and aspirations of the city. The learnings from them could be useful in intervening in the existing power structure of the city and to open the city to a larger public.




References:

Bombay: The Cities Within, Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Eminence Designs Pvt Ltd, Bombay, 1995

Notes on Foucault’s works from: http://www.angelfire.com/ar/corei/foucault.html

The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau, University of California Press, 1988

The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis, GUST (ed.), 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1999

Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Edward Soja, Blackwell Publishers, 1996

Urban Fragmentations and Constructions, GUST (ed.), 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002

[1] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1988, Xiv
[2] Ibid.,
[3] Ibid., Xix
[4] Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Penguin Books, 1995
[5] In Hindi, kutcha means not ripe, not done completely and pukka means completely done, ripened or finished; if the physical construction is with temporary materials and elements it is kutcha house and with permanent building material and elements its pukka house.
[6] Timothy Nye, Conceptual Art: A Spatial Perspective in ‘The Power of the City, The City of Power, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, II
[7] Edward Soja, Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell Publishers, 1996, 87

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