Below is some more information on the dual city here, taken from an article I've recently finished...
London and New York have undergone radical economic, social and political restructuring since the 1980s (see Castells 1991, Sassen 2001; 2006; Fainstein and Harloe 1992; 2003). During this period both cities emerged from their respective crises (see Thornley 1992; Tabb 1984) as strident global cities, successfully reversing the trends of population and employment loss that had predicated their respective declines in the 1970s (Fainstein and Harloe 2003: 157). The defining characteristic of a global city is the polarisation of occupational and wealth structures (Sassen 2001). This dynamic is the reason why many prefer to describe the global city as a ‘dual city’. The polarisation that has occurred in the last thirty years has been caused by the expansion of highly paid professional jobs, such as accountants, lawyers and merchant bankers; and conversely, low paid service jobs such as cleaners, security guards and waiting staff. Immigrants, especially female, arrive from a wide range of less developed countries to fill low-wage positions and may even work informally or in unregulated sectors with almost no protection at all (see Sassen 2001; 2003; Kwong 1997; McDowell et al 2009). The dual city thesis rests upon the idea that there exists in the metropolis two separate economies (formal and informal) and increasingly segregated neighbourhoods and social systems (Fainstein and Harloe 2003: 161). Yet these developments are very much related to the transformation- or colonisation- of the historical urban centre by capital as opposed to people. Lefebvre (1996: 81) argues that for ‘the old centralities, to the decomposition of centres, [the city] substitutes the centres of decision making’ (Lefebvre 1996: 81). Centres have also become sites of privilege premised on the ‘make-believe of the joy of living’ (ibid: 84), the ideology of consumption and more than ever concentrate the means of power, repression and persuasion (ibid: 85.
Mollenkopf and Castells (1991) chart the transformation of New York into a dualised global city. After the fiscal crisis of 1975, the city could no longer relied on an industrial base and transformed into a post-industrial financial and service based economy, a shift that mirrored the globalisation of capital. Berman (2007: 17) contrasts two decisions from the late 1970s that indicate how New York changed in pace with global capitalism. First was the closure of the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the city’s largest industrial facility, which employed a hundred thousand people at its peak and the second was the reorganization of investments around the enormous speculative real-estate enterprise of the World Trade Center. These changes were accompanied by a dramatic dissolution of New York’s blue-collar working class with immigrants providing the ‘casual labour’ needed to fill the few remaining manufacturing jobs. Although the city has become more ethnically diverse it has become increasingly polarised and segregated with the main contrast between a cohesive core of professionals in the advanced corporate services and a disorganised periphery fragmented by ‘race’, ethnicity and the spaces they occupy (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991: 402-3).
During the 1980s and 1990s London experienced the best and worst of times: ‘inner London […] was simultaneously host to the richest area in the European Union whilst containing the nation’s top three deprived boroughs’ (Butler with Robson 2003: 13; see also Hall 1998: 888-9). In describing the redevelopment of London’s Docklands Hall (2002: 398) explains how between 1981 and 1990 Docklands lost just over 20,000 jobs but gained 41,000 new ones, around half transferred from the City and half genuinely new. Yet ‘the lost jobs were very different from the new ones: port jobs disappeared, manufacturing stayed almost static, while the big gains were in advanced services, above all banking and finance […] and very few jobs […] went to local people’ (ibid). Hamnett (2003), however, offers a critique of Sassen’s polarisation thesis and argues there is no evidence of polarisation between low skilled and high skilled service jobs; rather only the professional and managerial occupations have grown, resulting in an overall upgrading or professionalization of London’s workforce. Sassen’s theory may apply to New York but for Hamnett it is less applicable to London where polarisation takes a different form, between the expanded middle class of professionals (see also Fainstein and Harloe 2003) and long term unemployed, retirees and discouraged workers who are exist effectively outside the labour force. For Hall (2009: 25) London is characterised, in apparent paradox, by both high unemployment and high immigration. Although Sassen and Hamnett disagree over the exact form that social polarisation takes their respective analyses concur that London and New York are subject to profound processes of widening income and wealth inequalities. As Fainstein and Harloe (2003: 163) conclude,
‘We can identify [in both cities] a close link between economic change and intensified poverty and deprivation, alongside soaring incomes for limited sectors of the population and a more ambiguous combination of costs and benefits for many more’.
Monday 28 March 2011
Monday 7 March 2011
Crisis and Culture: The Emergence of the 'Dual City'
Below is a further extract from my book: "'Race', Culture and the Right to the City" which concerns the fiscal crisis and financial restructuring that led to the emergence of cities like New York and London as 'dual cities':
The fiscal crisis of the 1970s was critical to how New York’s inner city neighbourhoods and housing projects (not necessarily mutually exclusive) gained a reputation for lawlessness, yet it is also important to understand how the appropriation of urban culture emerging from the ruins unwittingly helped provide a ‘magical solution’ for the city’s crisis.
David Harvey’s (2005) analysis of New York’s fiscal crisis provides the framework for this analysis. Capitalist restructuring and deindustrialisation eroded the economic base of New York and suburbanisation had left much of the inner city impoverished. One of the most spectacular consequences was the social unrest that occurred first during the 1960s (ibid: 45). Exposure to police brutality and poverty plus impatience over progress in civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War converged to form an explosive mix of discontent (Abu-Lughod 2007: 23). New York was one of the first cities to experience ghetto revolts in the 1960s and the Harlem/Bedford-Stuyvesant riot of 1964 served as a precursor to revolts in many other cities throughout the US (ibid: 24). The plight of the predominantly African American inner cities was temporarily eased by the expansion of public employment and welfare provision (Harvey 2005: 45). Yet when President Nixon withdrew federal aid and jobs once again disappeared again and more people were forced to claim welfare, the gap between revenues and outlays in the New York City budget increased. Initially financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap, but by 1975 a powerful cabal of investment bankers refused to roll over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy (ibid). The ‘bail out’ eventually agreed between the city and the banks amounted for Harvey (ibid) ‘to a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City […]’. With the city on its knees the banks created new institutions such as the Financial Control Board to assume control of the city budget. Bondholders were paid off first and whatever was left paid for essential public services. Municipal unions were required to invest their pension funds in city bonds, which meant that workers became tied to the fortunes of the city- either unions moderated their demands or faced the prospect of losing their pension funds through city bankruptcy. As Harvey (ibid) explains, ‘the effect was to curb the aspirations of the city’s powerful municipal unions, to implement wage freezes and cutbacks in public employment and social provision (education, public health, transport services) […]’. This ‘fiscal compromise’ amounted to a regressive redistribution of income, wealth and power (Zevin 1977). New York was ‘saved’ by satisfying the investment bankers and diminishing the standard of living of most New Yorkers (Harvey 2005: 46).
Similar processes were also occurring in London and to a lesser extent Paris. The 1986 ‘big bang’ which de-regulated financial markets catapulted London into one of the world’s foremost global financial centres. This coincided with iconic developments such as the London’s Docklands (see Hall 1999; Foster 1997). Similarly the early 1980s saw the expansion of the purpose built La Défense financial centre in West Paris. These iconic developments helped signal that the centre of the city had been ‘reclaimed’, or in Paris’ case re-fortified.
The investment bankers who issued the bonds did not walk away from New York City. Rather they seized the opportunity to restructure the metropolis in ways that suited their own agenda. Of most importance was the creation of a ‘good business climate’ which involved using public resources to provide subsidies and tax incentives for enterprise. In addition the city’s elite institutions were mobilised to sell the image of the city as a cultural centre and a tourist destination, even inventing the now famous brand/logo: ‘I Heart NY’. An important part of the re-centring of the city involved the opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents: ‘The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture’ (ibid: 47). Even New York subway graffiti was incorporated within the hegemony of resurgence. Graffiti, once seen as a visible symptom of New York’s terminal decline lost its vitality and subcultural meaning as ‘pieces’ by approved writers began to go on sale in Manhattan galleries where they were devoured by city cognoscenti as examples of a wild ‘folk art’, as evidence of city’s vibrant street cultures (Cresswell 1996; Austin 2001). The irony was that graffiti writers from the forgotten corners of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island had always seen ‘themselves as embodying an (illegal) urban beautification and education programme for a fading city bent on denying it own magnificent cultural dynamics and destroying its own “local colour”, both figuratively and literally’ (Austin 2001: 4). Their art made no sense at all inside the art gallery where it had been stolen of its context. Corporate marketers even copied the style of graffiti and the wider hip-hop subculture in their own campaigns to offer a simulacrum of ‘authentic NYC’, what Alvelos (2004) calls the creation of a city of semiotic confusion. Harvey’s interpretation is that post-crisis restructuring amounted to the neoliberalization of culture, the moment where ‘Delirious New York’ (to use Rem Koolhaas’ phrase) erased all memory of democratic New York (Harvey 2005: 47). This is emblematic the more general shift towards entrepreneurialism in urban governance (see Harvey 2001).
Whilst some benefited enormously from the restructuring that arose from the ruins of crisis, and visible signs of ‘recovery’ such as the gentrification were celebrated, working class and ethnic-immigrant New York ‘was thrust back into the shadows, to be ravaged by racism and a crack cocaine epidemic’ (ibid: 47-8). For example, John Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells (1992: 3) explain how,
‘New York contestably remains a capital for capital, resplendent with luxury consumption and high society […] But New York also symbolises urban decay, the scourges of crack, AIDS and homelessness and the rise of a new underclass. Wall Street may make New York one of the nerve centres of the global capitalist system, but this dominant position has a dark side in the ghettos and barrios where a growing populations of poor people live’.
As Harvey explains (ibid: 48), New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani claimed worldwide fame by taking revenge on behalf of an increasingly affluent Manhattan that was becoming increasingly intolerant of the effects of such devastation on their doorstep/ As Neil Smith (1998: 1) claims Giuliani led a vendetta against the most oppressed groups in the city, those who had benefitted, or would stand to benefit from liberal urban policy- the ‘welfare mothers’, immigrants and gays, blacks, homeless and so on. For Smith ‘they are excoriated for having stolen New York from a white middle class that sees the city as its birth right’ (ibid).
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Boogie Down Production of Space
Below is an extract on hip-hop from my forthcoming book (summer, 2011) entitled ''Race', Culture and the Right to the City'
If the Harlem Renaissance belonged to the first half of the 20th century, the moment where the ‘public city’ was beginning to disassemble to become the ‘naked city,’ a further cultural flowering fifty years later belongs to the agonopolis. Perhaps the most important cultural product to emerge from the inner city in the last thirty years is hip-hop. This is a further example of the conviviality and political potency derived from the presence of a multicultural and multi-‘racial’ component within the inner city. The story of hip-hop’s rise from New York City’s South Bronx is a familiar tale, but it needs repeating here. Hip-hop did not spring forth magically (Forman 2002: 41); rather, it emerged from an economically and socially limiting context as a means of negotiating this immediate environment. The ‘city’, encompassing the physical and symbolic city is therefore central to the discussion of ‘race’, space and hip-hop. In the mid-1970s, the period when hip-hop surfaced, no place was held up more consistently as a symbol of America’s pitiful urban condition than the Bronx, particularly its southernmost section: ‘images of burned out buildings […] dominated the media’ (George 1998: 10). The South Bronx was a mythical wasteland that served as a nightmarish contradiction of suburban tranquillity and Manhattan affluence. Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities caricatured white New York’s worst fear- getting lost in the Bronx. Hollywood even capitalised on the ‘South Bronx as hell’ image in a number of exploitative films, The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979) and Fort Apache: The Bronx (Daniel Petrie, 1981). The dominant image of the Bronx, reinforced by photographs or television and movie footage, is one of poverty, disease, violence, and danger, ‘all coded as black’ (Forman 2002: 40). While the physical Bronx may have resembled ruins it was far from a cultural wasteland:
‘Behind the decay and neglect the place was a cauldron of vibrant and quite visionary creativity born of its racial mix and relative isolation. It was within its boundaries that the expressions we associate with hip-hop- graffiti art, break dancing, MCing and mixing- all have roots’ (George 1998: 10).
Hip-hop sprang from the South Bronx, an ill-defined neighbourhood of the mind rather than the map, in the mid-1970s during spontaneous block parties and jams in public parks. In its formative years it truly was a street culture, practised in the public spaces of the city. The music itself was created on the turntables of innovative DJs including the enormously influential Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, all residents of the ‘boogie down’ Bronx. Through ‘mixing’ old soul, funk and disco records, often repeating just their drum breaks to create a whole new track, these pioneering DJs ‘staked out a loud, scratchy, in-your-face aesthetic that, to this day, still informs the culture […]’ (ibid: xi). Kool Herc employed a friend, Coke La Rock, as his ‘master of ceremonies’- someone to ‘hype’ his live mixes. Several of La Rock’s motivating slogans, such as ‘ya rock and ya don’t stop’ and ‘to the beat y’all’ became hip-hop staples (ibid: 17). In many respects he was the first hip-hop rapper. Afrika Bambaataa supplied extra ‘knowledge’ as a result of his prodigious record collection. He added lots of new breaks and brought a wider range of music, including elements such as Kraftwerk, into the hip-hop canon. Grandmaster Flash on the other hand was a showman; he mixed records and entertained at the same time. Flash also had an on-and-off relationship with a group of young MCs known as the Furious Five (ibid: 19).
It was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five who, in 1982, had hip-hop’s first great rap hit with ‘The Message’, which would later be regarded as a breakthrough for the whole genre. As Marshall Berman (2007: 28) explains, while the spirit of early raps was bawdy and shallow, ‘The Message’ was heavy, dark and deep. The song features rapper Melle Mel taking us on a tour of his neighbourhood:
‘Myriad horrors are packed into two minutes: aggressive rats, aggressive junkies, nice girls turned into addicts and whores; kids, burned out before the age of ten, who want to grow up to be drug dealers, because they are the only people they know who command respect […]’ (ibid: 28)
Berman (ibid) goes on to ask, so what is the message? His answer is that social disintegration and existential desperation can be sources of life and creative energy. Those growing up in poverty and ghetto isolation may have suffered great losses but they did not lose themselves; rather their suffering had created idealism. Despite the ignominy that came from growing up in ruins of the Bronx, the first hip-hop generation through DJing, MCing, breakdancing and writing graffiti were making a claim on a city that, during the fiscal crisis of the mid-to-late 1970s would rather they did not exist at all (see Austin 2001). Hip-hop announced its presence in the city, or rather of the city, through a variety of media- sound, word, image and motion. It was impossible to ignore and as Marshall Berman would explain to the New York Times (7/4/99), ‘a great burst of creativity emerged from the Bronx’s ruins, and it deserves remembrance and celebration’.
For Rose (1994) the city was much more than a backdrop to hip-hop’s formative years; rather it shaped the cultural terrain, access to space, materials and education for hip-hop’s earliest innovators. Hip-hop artists since the outset veered between realistic portrayals of their neighbourhood and a more knowing exploitation of the semiotic value of the Bronx or other ghettos and their cultural resonance within the public imagination. There is some debate regarding whether hip-hop can be viewed as an African-American musical form (see inter alia Gilroy 1987; Szwed 1999; Perry 2005). As George (1998: xiii) suggests, hip-hop chronicles a generation coming of age at a moment of extreme racial confusion. Although civil rights had won many gains, de facto segregation was increasing and economic marginality for the black working class was intensifying. In the Bronx there was also the important and often overlooked Puerto Rican influence, a result of the fact that a large Puerto-Rican population lived among blacks in the same Bronx neighbourhoods. As Flores (1994: 91) argues,
‘The beginnings of rap are connective not so much because they link black traditions and Puerto Rican traditions, but because they mark off one more step in a long and intricate black-and Puerto Rican tradition of popular culture, based primarily in the long standing black-and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods of New York City.
In this way, hip-hop was not only a way of negotiating and reconfiguring a potentially alienating urban condition, it was also a democratic means with which to articulate complex, fluid and knowingly racialised identities as well as respond to white racism/s. The inner city provided the context from which this was possible; it supplied the materials as well as a stage or forum upon which the distinctive spatial practices of hip-hop could flourish and achieve recognition and eventually, ultimately worldwide acclaim.
If the Harlem Renaissance belonged to the first half of the 20th century, the moment where the ‘public city’ was beginning to disassemble to become the ‘naked city,’ a further cultural flowering fifty years later belongs to the agonopolis. Perhaps the most important cultural product to emerge from the inner city in the last thirty years is hip-hop. This is a further example of the conviviality and political potency derived from the presence of a multicultural and multi-‘racial’ component within the inner city. The story of hip-hop’s rise from New York City’s South Bronx is a familiar tale, but it needs repeating here. Hip-hop did not spring forth magically (Forman 2002: 41); rather, it emerged from an economically and socially limiting context as a means of negotiating this immediate environment. The ‘city’, encompassing the physical and symbolic city is therefore central to the discussion of ‘race’, space and hip-hop. In the mid-1970s, the period when hip-hop surfaced, no place was held up more consistently as a symbol of America’s pitiful urban condition than the Bronx, particularly its southernmost section: ‘images of burned out buildings […] dominated the media’ (George 1998: 10). The South Bronx was a mythical wasteland that served as a nightmarish contradiction of suburban tranquillity and Manhattan affluence. Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities caricatured white New York’s worst fear- getting lost in the Bronx. Hollywood even capitalised on the ‘South Bronx as hell’ image in a number of exploitative films, The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979) and Fort Apache: The Bronx (Daniel Petrie, 1981). The dominant image of the Bronx, reinforced by photographs or television and movie footage, is one of poverty, disease, violence, and danger, ‘all coded as black’ (Forman 2002: 40). While the physical Bronx may have resembled ruins it was far from a cultural wasteland:
‘Behind the decay and neglect the place was a cauldron of vibrant and quite visionary creativity born of its racial mix and relative isolation. It was within its boundaries that the expressions we associate with hip-hop- graffiti art, break dancing, MCing and mixing- all have roots’ (George 1998: 10).
Hip-hop sprang from the South Bronx, an ill-defined neighbourhood of the mind rather than the map, in the mid-1970s during spontaneous block parties and jams in public parks. In its formative years it truly was a street culture, practised in the public spaces of the city. The music itself was created on the turntables of innovative DJs including the enormously influential Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, all residents of the ‘boogie down’ Bronx. Through ‘mixing’ old soul, funk and disco records, often repeating just their drum breaks to create a whole new track, these pioneering DJs ‘staked out a loud, scratchy, in-your-face aesthetic that, to this day, still informs the culture […]’ (ibid: xi). Kool Herc employed a friend, Coke La Rock, as his ‘master of ceremonies’- someone to ‘hype’ his live mixes. Several of La Rock’s motivating slogans, such as ‘ya rock and ya don’t stop’ and ‘to the beat y’all’ became hip-hop staples (ibid: 17). In many respects he was the first hip-hop rapper. Afrika Bambaataa supplied extra ‘knowledge’ as a result of his prodigious record collection. He added lots of new breaks and brought a wider range of music, including elements such as Kraftwerk, into the hip-hop canon. Grandmaster Flash on the other hand was a showman; he mixed records and entertained at the same time. Flash also had an on-and-off relationship with a group of young MCs known as the Furious Five (ibid: 19).
It was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five who, in 1982, had hip-hop’s first great rap hit with ‘The Message’, which would later be regarded as a breakthrough for the whole genre. As Marshall Berman (2007: 28) explains, while the spirit of early raps was bawdy and shallow, ‘The Message’ was heavy, dark and deep. The song features rapper Melle Mel taking us on a tour of his neighbourhood:
‘Myriad horrors are packed into two minutes: aggressive rats, aggressive junkies, nice girls turned into addicts and whores; kids, burned out before the age of ten, who want to grow up to be drug dealers, because they are the only people they know who command respect […]’ (ibid: 28)
Berman (ibid) goes on to ask, so what is the message? His answer is that social disintegration and existential desperation can be sources of life and creative energy. Those growing up in poverty and ghetto isolation may have suffered great losses but they did not lose themselves; rather their suffering had created idealism. Despite the ignominy that came from growing up in ruins of the Bronx, the first hip-hop generation through DJing, MCing, breakdancing and writing graffiti were making a claim on a city that, during the fiscal crisis of the mid-to-late 1970s would rather they did not exist at all (see Austin 2001). Hip-hop announced its presence in the city, or rather of the city, through a variety of media- sound, word, image and motion. It was impossible to ignore and as Marshall Berman would explain to the New York Times (7/4/99), ‘a great burst of creativity emerged from the Bronx’s ruins, and it deserves remembrance and celebration’.
For Rose (1994) the city was much more than a backdrop to hip-hop’s formative years; rather it shaped the cultural terrain, access to space, materials and education for hip-hop’s earliest innovators. Hip-hop artists since the outset veered between realistic portrayals of their neighbourhood and a more knowing exploitation of the semiotic value of the Bronx or other ghettos and their cultural resonance within the public imagination. There is some debate regarding whether hip-hop can be viewed as an African-American musical form (see inter alia Gilroy 1987; Szwed 1999; Perry 2005). As George (1998: xiii) suggests, hip-hop chronicles a generation coming of age at a moment of extreme racial confusion. Although civil rights had won many gains, de facto segregation was increasing and economic marginality for the black working class was intensifying. In the Bronx there was also the important and often overlooked Puerto Rican influence, a result of the fact that a large Puerto-Rican population lived among blacks in the same Bronx neighbourhoods. As Flores (1994: 91) argues,
‘The beginnings of rap are connective not so much because they link black traditions and Puerto Rican traditions, but because they mark off one more step in a long and intricate black-and Puerto Rican tradition of popular culture, based primarily in the long standing black-and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods of New York City.
In this way, hip-hop was not only a way of negotiating and reconfiguring a potentially alienating urban condition, it was also a democratic means with which to articulate complex, fluid and knowingly racialised identities as well as respond to white racism/s. The inner city provided the context from which this was possible; it supplied the materials as well as a stage or forum upon which the distinctive spatial practices of hip-hop could flourish and achieve recognition and eventually, ultimately worldwide acclaim.
Monday 10 January 2011
The Noir City: A Darkness More Than Night
'The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance' Michael Connolly, A Darkness More Than Night
I'll begin this year's blog entries with a brilliant passage from Michael Connolly's Harry Bosch series crime novel A Darkness More Than Night. It is an evocative introduction to the first topic film noir which begins next week. For me it also encapsulates some of the key themes of the module- the dialectic of control and disorder, of dark and light, life and death and justice and injustice. It also captures the ambiguous relationship between the individual and the city- here detective Harry Bosch is repelled by the city yet drawn to it's promises- rebirth, the second chance, freedom.
Wednesday 17 March 2010
Breathe In- Breathe Out
I hope you enjoyed the song that I used to start the seminar on monday. For me, it is really atmospheric, thought provoking and soulful in the tradition of the very best music inspired by the urban environment. Black Star are Brooklyn rappers Mos Def and Talib Kweli and their only album ' Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star' was released in 1998. The title is a reference to the Black Star Line, a shipping line founded by Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. Many respected lists rightfully have it as an all-time classic of hip-hop. Watch the video of the sing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeTnog5RRQo
I think you'll agree it does the song justice.
The song that I played- 'Respiration'- also features Chicago rapper Common. I previously played two of his tracks in class, 'The Corner' and 'I Used to Love H.E.R.'. Why use hip-hop in an academic context? Surely academia is about 'high culture' and hip-hop is base, popular or 'low culture'? Not at all. Well, first hip-hop is an example of what Paul Gilroy, in his famous text The Black Atlantic calls 'expressive culture', creative acts that communicate socio-cultural, ideological, political, aesthetic and personal aspects of living. In other words, hip-hop offers access to the experience of groups that we may not be able to access otherwise, often because these are groups that tend to be 'spoken for' rather than heard speaking for themselves. Hip-hop offers a counter culture to that of modernity, it supplies for its intended audience some of the courage needed to go on living in the present. Hip-hop stars like Mos Def can be said to act like 'organic intellectuals'. This is a notion used by Antonio Gramsci to describe working class intellectuals who, unlike bourgeois intellectuals, maintain links with local issues and struggles that connect to the people and their experiences. They also use their grounded positionality to cultivate strategies for helping their communities to develop a self-inspired, organic consciousness. Second, and this is a related point, the best hip-hop lyrics can be used to reinforce aspects of academic theory and they can also be used to get us to think about academic ideas in a new light. The main refrain of the song, that evokes a living, breathing city- 'breath in, breath out' is fascinating and can be thought of against many academic understandings of the city- dual city, bulimic city, centripetal/ centrifugal space etc. The hip-hop lyrics offer a more poetic reading of the city that demands reflection. Try for yourself!
Obsessed With Gloom? Urbex and the other city
I certainly don't wish to base all my entries on articles that have appeared in the Evening Standard but there was a fantastic piece on monday about urban exploration, or 'urbex' for short.
Urbex is the art of accessing or trespassing parts of the city that are 'off limits'. Very often this involves entering abandoned industrial sites such as factories, decaying prisons, hospitals or lunatic asylums and below ground sites such as catacombs, tunnels or 'ghost' tube stations (stations that are no longer in service). Urban explorers are often interested in photography and they attempt to capture the full beauty of decrepitude in their photos (the amazing photo above is of Essex County Lunatic Asylum at Warley and was taken by Simon Cornwell).
Urban exploring often involves trespassing but rarely breaking and entering. Urbexers don't believe in vandalising the buildings, they simply want to preserve the decay they find in the hidden histories of the city. However, it can be a dangerous hobby as many old buildings have rotting floors, asbestos and faulty electrics.
If you're interested, check out this website: http://www.simoncornwell.com/urbex/frames.htm
Or this forum:
For an academic analysis of fascination for urban ruins look at Tim Edensor's excellent book, 'Industrial Ruins'
I guess an interest in the hidden or secret history of the city is very much a result of people's growing boredom with the gentrified, ordered, pacified spaces of consumption that characterise so much of the modern metropolis. There is always the other city, no matter how hard we try to repress it.
Tuesday 2 March 2010
Dual City- London's Dispossessed
Next week we begin topic four which links together the notion that 'global cities' such as London and New York are increasingly divided between the very, very rich and very, very poor with street crime and corporate crime. In preparation for this I suggest that you follow the Evening Standard this week as they are running a 5-day special on 'the dispossessed'. The tag line for yesterday's first instalment was: 'London is a shameful tale of two cities. In the richest capital in Europe almost half our children live below the poverty line. These families are cut off from the life most Londoners take for granted. They are the dispossessed'. Yesterday's issue had a feature on modern day pauper's graves (harking back to Victorian London- those who went on the walk will remember this) and single mum who who lives on an estate in Southwark just four stops from the financial centre of Canary Wharf although she has never seen it up close. While people in London's reviralised Docklands bring home huge salaries and live in multi-million pound apartments, she cannot afford a cot for her baby.
It promises to be an interesting series of reports... every night this week in the Evening Standard.
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