MRM Curates # 3
Artist: Kristan Kennedy, Sofia Leiby, and Israel Lund
Curated by MRM
(via unbuiltroads)
MRM Curates # 3
Artist: Kristan Kennedy, Sofia Leiby, and Israel Lund
Curated by MRM
(via unbuiltroads)
Full Stop founding editor Max Rivlin-Nadler interviewed social theorist David Harvey over at Salon today. Here’s an excerpt:
How has free-market urbanization destroyed the city as a social, political and livable commons?
Without romanticizing what the city was about in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a relatively compact concentration of urban population with governance by a political machine — a concentrated, effective political power. Over time we’ve been dispersed through suburbanization, so we have a spread city. You’ve dispersed what’s termed “the ghetto” more and more, so low-income communities are no longer highly concentrated enough to organize themselves. There’s been moments where they’ve been able to come together, like in Los Angeles with Rodney King.
I think the spreading out of the city, and the creation of the suburbs, and the creation of gated communities, fragments the possibility of a coherent political life and this idea of a communal political project. It leads to a lot of Not in My Backyard politics. People don’t want to live near people who look different, don’t want migrants hanging around – so sociality has changed. I always think of the political subjectivity that has been created by the suburbs, the gated communities, and of course it’s a fragmented subjectivity in which no one is going to be able to take in the totality of the city, and the totality of the urban process as something that they should be concerned about. They’re just concerned with their piece of it. To reconstruct a body politic of the city on the ruins of this capitalization process is what I believe the political project needs to be about.
