Donald, S. H., & Lindner, C. (2014). Inert cities: Globalization, mobility and suspension in visual culture. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Book can be accessed at publisher's website: Bloomberg
We usually associate contemporary urban life with movement and speed. But what about those instances when the forms of mobility associated with globalized cities – the flow of capital, people, labor and information – freeze, or decelerate? How can we assess the value of interruption in a city? What does valuing stillness mean in regards to the forward march of globalization? When does inertia presage decay – and when does it promise immanence and rebirth?
Bringing together original contributions by international specialists from the fields of architecture, photography, film, sociology and cultural analysis, this cutting-edge book considers the poetics and politics of inertia in cities ranging from Amsterdam, Berlin, Beirut and Paris, to Beijing, New York, Sydney and Tokyo. Chapters explore what happens when photography, film, mixed media works, architecture and design intervene in public spaces and urban communities to disrupt speed and growth, both intellectually and/or practically; and question the degree to which mobility is aspirational or imaginary, absolute or transient. Together, they encourage a re-assessment of what it means to be urban in an unevenly globalizing world, to live in cities built around mythologies of perpetual progress.
Donald, S. H., & Lindner, C. (2014). Inert cities: Globalization, mobility and suspension in visual culture. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Book can be accessed at publisher's website: Bloomberg
Global Garbage examines the ways in which garbage, in its diverse forms, is being produced, managed, experienced, imagined, circulated, concealed, and aestheticized in contemporary urban environments and across different creative and cultural practices. The book explores the increasingly complex relationship between globalization and garbage in locations such as Beirut, Detroit, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Manchester, Naples, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Tehran. In particular, the book examines how, and under what conditions, contemporary imaginaries of excess, waste, and abandonment perpetuate – but also sometimes counter – the imbalances of power that are frequently associated with the global metropolitan condition. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to the fields of anthropology, architecture, film and media studies, geography, urban studies, sociology, and cultural analysis.
Lindner, C., & Meissner, M. (Eds.). (2015). Global Garbage: Urban imaginaries of waste, excess, and abandonment. Routledge.
This paper details the contribution of mobile devices to capturing commemoration in action. It investigates the incorporation of audio and sound recording devices, observation, and note-taking into a mobile (auto)ethnographic research methodology, to research a large-scale commemorative event in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. On May 4, 2016, the sounds of a Silent March—through the streets of Amsterdam to Dam Square—were recorded and complemented by video grabs of the march’s participants and onlookers. We discuss how the mixed method enabled a multilevel analysis across visual, textual, and aural layers of the commemorative atmosphere. Our visual data aided in our evaluation of the construction of collective spectacle, while the audio data necessitated that we venture into new analytic territory. Using Sonic Visualiser, we uncovered alternative methods of “reading” landscape by identifying different sound signatures in the acoustic environment. Together, this aural and visual representation of the May 4 events enabled the identification of spatial markers and the temporal unfolding of the Silent March and the national 2 minutes’ silence in Amsterdam’s Dam Square.
Carolyn Birdsall and Danielle Drozdzewski in Mobile Media & Communication (2017): 1-19.
From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized.
Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies — From Hong Kong’s streets to Rio’s favelas, from Sydney’s suburbs to London’s street markets, and from Damascus’ war-torn streets to Istanbul’s sidewalks — and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.
Dibazar, P., & Naeff, J. (2018). Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City (p. 224). Amsterdam University Press.
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DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv9hvqjh
Book can be downloaded from JSTOR
This article examines the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to two recent photography exhibitions – one held in Amsterdam and the other in New York City – which were designed as transatlantic mirror events to celebrate the 400-year anniversary of the Dutch ‘discovery’ of Manhattan. Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the exhibitions invited a group of New York artists to photograph Amsterdam and a group of Dutch artists to photograph New York. Both exhibitions claimed that seeing the city from these outsider perspectives enabled new and surprising photographs capable of challenging established images of both cities. Interrogating this claim, the article analyses individual artworks and artists, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibitions, and the urban branding campaigns with which the events were associated.
Lindner, C. (2013). Amsterdam – New York: Transnational photographic exchange in the era of globalization. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2), 151–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912452484
The paper investigates airport design, using the example of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, from the point of view of managers, architects and designers. It is argued that existing accounts of the airport as a space of transit as well as a place for shopping and entertainment have underrated the complexity and interdependency of the interests at stake in the airport design, as well the value of an airport terminal as an urban design exercise. This is particularly relevant in the discussion of the transformation of spaces of mobility, such as airports or railway stations, into multifunctional public spaces and may also be valid for urban spaces where mobilities are becoming increasingly important. The paper analyses the challenges and opportunities that arise in such design situations, tracing the recent transformations of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol from the perspective of professionals who have played a key role in this process.
Anna Nikolaeva in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 103.5 (2012): 542-554.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2012.00740.x
From 2007 until today an intricate set of events has been unsettling the global financial markets. The naming of these incidents has been multifold, varying between a general rhetoric of economic downturn (‘crash’, ‘crunch’, ‘meltdown’, ‘hangover’) and more descriptive terminologies indicating the reasons, geographic involvements, and historic time-span of the developments at hand such as: ‘US subprime mortgage crisis’, ‘European sovereign-debt crisis’, and ‘late 2000s financial crisis’. From the outset, the media played a key role in communicating and interpreting these market developments. In this essay I will focus on the role of cities in attempts to picture the GFC. Central to my analysis is the thesis that, by showing specific images and staging the urban experience of different cities (above all London and New York), the inconsistencies pervading the GFC have been indicated, interrelated, and rendered iconographic.
Miriam Meissner in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 1.1. (2012)
Access the full article here
Cities Interrupted explores the potential of visual culture – in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media – to strategically interrupt processes of globalization in contemporary urban spaces.
Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, the book brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of 'interruption' in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today's rapidly transforming urban environments.
The idea of 'interruption' addressed in this book refers to deliberate interventions in the spaces and communities of contemporary cities – interventions that seek to disrupt or destabilize the experience of everyday urban life through creative practice. Interruption is used as an analytic and conceptual tool to challenge – and explore alternatives to – the narratives of speed, hyper-mobility, rapid growth, and incessant exchange and flow that have dominated critical thinking on global cities.
Bringing art and creative practice into the centre of discussions about the future of cities, alongside discussions of development, design, justice, health, sustainability, technology, and citizenship, this book is essential reading for anyone working at the intersections of a range of urban, cultural and visual fields, including urban studies, urban design and architecture, visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, and social and cultural geography.
Jordan, S., & Lindner, C. (Eds.). (2016). Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space. Bloomsbury Publishing.
More details are available on the publisher’s website.
Global cities have been studied predominantly in terms of speed and movement, acceleration and circulation. This article examines the relationship between globalization and cities in terms that run counter to such emphases, focusing instead on slowness as a condition in contemporary urban life. Drawing on Jamie Peck’s critique of the creativity syndrome in urban policy, we analyze a series of street photography projects in the city of Amsterdam in order to examine the role of “slow art” in neoliberal urbanization and city profiling. In its capacity to interrupt movement and redirect visual attention, slow art resists both the acceleration of everyday life and the rapid transformation of social space in the global city. Yet, exploited by urban creativity policies, slow art can simultaneously contribute to the gentrification and commodification of cities. We argue that slowness and creativity are deeply implicated in contemporary reshapings of urban social space and that their interrelations merit closer study.
Lindner, C., & Meissner, M. (2015). Slow Art in the Creative City: Amsterdam, Street Photography, and Urban Renewal. Space and Culture, 18(1), 4–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331213509914
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