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Unfinished Cities: Transmediale.07, Berlin
Saturday, 03 February, 2007 - 23:01
Unfinished Cities: a keynote with presentations from Orhan Esen, author of Self-Service Cities: Istanbul and AbduoMaliq Simone, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College. In keeping with the premise of this year's Transmediale theme of Unfinish they discussed aspects of the modern city and the tensions between formal and informal space, cities as works in progress or as 'finished' environments, and contrasts between urban cultures in Europe, the near East and Africa.
Orhan Esen presented a history he had constructed about the development of gated communities in Istanbul - specifically the North-Western development at Gokturk. Not only have gated communities arisen as a form of pre-built (and hence pre-finished) environment as a bulwark against the ephemeral nature of the city, but they arise as part of a substitution for failed ideologies. The informal city is rejected by middle classes who wish to aspire, and yet in places like Gokturk, members of gated community nevertheless are forced into contact with the 'old villagers' in order to engage in commerce. Places in gated communities are aggressively marketed using discourses of inner peace and a return to nature to attract those alienated from modernity; meanwhile applicants undergo a mutual interview process - it is not possible just to purchase apartments and houses in these communities - you must be 'negotiated into' the culture of the community you wish to enter, ensuring you find yourself among people who share your values, tastes and aspirations. The "excluding city" is a neo-liberal ideal.
AbdouMaliq Simone did not dwell on detail as did Esen, but spoke rather poetically, in the context of Urban Europe and Urban Africa, about the necessary hybridity of the city, pointing out that people will live anywhere regardless of risk if they have to in a post-colonial world... but against this is the very colonial sense of urban intensification and non-integration. The mobile and the immigrant populations enter into wilful anonymities, where 'misrecognition' is desirable, rather than to be avoided. "The poor and the strange must never stop proving their innocence". Simone talks about the technologies which turn every shop-front into a monument, and which introduce heterogenities into the urban spaces, but which also destabilise the environemnt and the social relationships within. There is a constant process of change, in which temporaneities and instability dominate. We must see possibilities, rather than simply condemn cities for their problems.
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