2. WHAT IS A CITY?
Most people in the world now live in
cities.
Cities are places of life, work, love,
play, creation, leisure, discovery,
pain, migration, exclusion, joy,
construction...etc..
different ways of inhabiting, and
using the city, dynamics of
migration, access, play work and
leisure, inequalities and exclusions,
separations and disappearances,
old and new…
2
3. COURSE OUTLINE
BLOG PLAN:
http://thecreativecityscm.wordpress.com/structure/
Week-by-week breakdowns
Lecture Slides online
Missions and Adventures
Meetings and Tours at various locations over the term
Creative Art Works
4. READ |WATCH | MAKE
ASSIGNMENTS
1 Inequality 20%
2 Work & Leisure 20%
3 Non-Human Time 20%
4 (Un)Official Histories 20%
Personal Map 10%
Presentation/Missions 10%
5. PERSONAL MAPS
Over the course, you will be creating your
personal map. This map will trace the
movements that you make in your particular
world.
The map should reflect what is important to
you, what is central to your journey through the
city streets and campus, perhaps even your
emotional world of friends, acquaintances,
family.
Your map will be like a reflective log of the term.
GPS coordinates for points on your map must be
somehow recorded, where available, so as to
link your map coordinated with others.
Each map will be plotted together at the end of
the course to create a global map of our
movements through the term.
10. SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (SI)
A philosophy of space &
political action
Formed in Italy 1957 through
the 1970s
Guy Debord, Michel de
Certeau, Henri Lefebvre
Student movement &
university movement in
France 1968
how could everyday life be
subverted radically 10
11. Psychogeography
Psychogeography is
"the study of the precise laws
and specific effects of the
geographical environment,
consciously organized or not,
on the emotions and behavior
of individuals.”
- Guy Debord
13. Dérive
Drift…”migrations undertaken with the intention of discovering new
perspectives on city life”
“a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances”
15. “The need for the dérive is necessitated,
according to situationist theory, by the
increasingly predictable and monotonous
experience of everyday life trudged through
by workers in advanced capitalism.”
“The dérive grants a rare instance of pure
chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and
authentic experience of the different
atmospheres and feelings generated by the
urban landscape.”
17. Autonomy & Power
The dérive held assumptions
of race, class, gender,
privilege — who could walk
freely, leisurely, curiously,
and where could they
walk…?
17
18. ART OF THE WEAK
“Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about,
shopping cooking etc.) are tactical in character if they
become independent from the rhetoric of power.”
-Miche de Certeau
“This was about describing how gestures of resistance
among the ‘disenfranchised’ or ‘the other’ give the
powerless a way to survive and, at times, even thrive
within or against dominant cultures.” Flanagan 190
18
26. As Henri Lefebvre argued, capitalist
spaces are systems of property relations,
surveillance, and consumption.
“It is through
everyday habits,
and through the
body, that people
experience urban
space”
The Production of Space (1991)
26
28. 28
“People have become divorced from authentic
experience, are passive spectators of their own
lives and no longer communicate or participate
in the society of the spectacle. The dominant form
of spectacular commodity production and
consumption ensures that people do not engage in
self-directed or autonomous activity, but answer the
needs of the spectacle.”
-Adam Barnard
“a discipline or method to study and experience the effects of environment and geography on emotion, thinking, processes and behaviour.”
Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. Art Institute of Chicago.
“formerly aristocratic walker was transformed into a conscious, political actor.”
(http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm)
like Foucault, de Certeau ‘works to outline the dynamics of power that lie hidden in the very act of recording such marginalized histories’. 190
“A stitch in Time at Coney Island” Weegee, The Naked City
http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/weegee-murder-my-business/naked-city
Hamish Fulton's Walk 2: Margate Sands: ‘Hundreds of individuals, and at the same time one line, a single body: it’s a walking definition of humanity.’ Photograph: Dan Bass Dan Bass /Public Domain
“For almost four decades he has covered between 30 and 50 miles a day, depending on the terrain, in all weathers. From Soho to Saskatchewan, from his home in Kent to the peaks of Nepal, he has trekked, hiked and trudged the world in solitude. His object is to unite two apparently incongruous activities: walking and art…. unlike Richard Long, with his exhibitions of stone circles and his celebrated mudworks, Fulton brings nothing back to the gallery.” Guardian
http://www.richardlong.org/
He has stated "If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art" and has summed up this way of thinking in the simple statement of intent: "no walk, no work".