The Cineroleum: An Urban Takeover

This summer the site of a derelict petrol station in London has been reclaimed and reconsidered in an urban takeover that addresses a site in transition.  This former filling station on Clerkenwell Road fell out of use, and the site it occupied promised to be caught in a blank stasis until economic incentive and planning approval allowed for its redevelopment.  In the meantime, a group of young artists, designers and architects breathed new life into the physical fabric and public meaning of the site by converting it into a cinema, showing films from August 20 - September 12.  An efficient and inventive use of material meant using the existing roof structure as both the shelter and boundary area of the cinema.  The wooden chairs and shutters that provide enclosure were collected and assembled from recovered building materials.

This project demonstrates the benefits of collective action in the small-scale resilience of the urban fabric.  While top-down institutions of planning and economic development will eventually shape the site with a long term vision and more permanent built enclosure, this propositional design not only reclaims this valuable city space for greater public benefit, but it also ignites speculation as to the future of the site.  The wider idea of the functioning space also posits an interesting critique of the status quo.  Offering £5 tickets to carefully selected documentaries, classics and contemporary films in a unique atmosphere highly referential to the culture and history of cinema, why is paying £10-16 for a West End movie theatre a pervasive and dominant experience of moviegoing in London?

Perhaps the Cineroleum also tests the reclamation of the city in a post-petroleum landscape. Extrapolating this concept to all the vacant lots that would be produced by out-of-commission petrol stations provides an enticing palette of possibilities for the urban designer, the artist, and the citizen.  It is empowering to consider hundreds of sites re-entering the realm of the possible, to be shaped by a genuine right to the city - the power not only to access the city and its resources but to change them. 

Existing structure in its former use as a petrol station

Construction of cinema seating

Testing the enclosing curtains, isolating the space from the street for screening films

Credits: Image of 'Film 'er up!' from The Cineroleum. Photo of petrol station from Google Maps. All other photos by Andrew Wade.

Mainstreaming Gender in National Water Policies and Laws

This sixth post on the topic Gender and Water in the water and sanitation Program in which I am involved is about the role of Ecuador’s national government technicians in integrating a gender approach in national programs, policies and laws. Through the Program, Ecuador’s National Water Secretariat (SENAGUA) will be supporting local women leaders in influencing the management of watersheds. The Program is also inviting these women, as strategic allies, to watch the compliance of water-related rights in their localities. The Ministry of Urban Development and Housing (MIDUVI) will be creating precedents of community-run water utilities (JAAPs) that are exemplarily managed by empowered women. We also intend to strengthen women organizations with the aim of making social control of JAAPs and municipal utilities more effective. The Ministry of Public Health (MSP) will empower local women organizations and leaders so that most initiatives and measures of water quality control come from women.

In most countries there are laws, national policies, local ordinances and plans aimed at reducing gender inequalities. However, very few allocate the necessary resources, either human and/or financial, that are needed to bring about significant changes in the relations between men and women, from the household to the community and the economic and political life. The Program is itself an example of this limitation. The experience described in this series is an initiative of the regional office of UN-HABITAT and is funded mainly with resources not foreseen in the Program’s budget, despite that the Program has a strategy, specific indicators and some small direct actions supporting local women organizations. I do not expect national institutions to create a specific budget and professional team for mainstreaming gender in their plans and policies. However, this experience is setting a small precedent and it will open the eyes of some influencing professionals, hoping that in the future they will support mainstreaming gender initiatives in other national programs, policies and laws, with sufficient resources and specialized teams.

An extended version of this post will be published by CoLab Radio in the coming week.
 
Credits: Image of an indigenous woman watching a protected area in Ecuador's "paramos", the most important source of fresh water in the country, from luchaporelagua.com.

Featured Artist: Arden Bendler Browning

As part of our "featured artists" series, we're gradually building a collection of work that might be interesting to see in cities. In the case of Arden Bendler Browning, I also enjoy seeing cities through her work. She shatters urban settings into hurricane frames, exposing false divisions between the human and natural world. As she explains in a few passages from her artist's statement...

"The urban environment is a sea of fluctuating boundaries arguing claim to the demarcation of space as 'wild,' 'inhabited,' 'private,' 'public,' 'forbidden,' and 'open.' I make sprawling wall-sized and room-sized paintings on Tyvek as a direct response to this environment. My imagery is derived from actual and virtual meandering throughout fringe neighborhoods within Philadelphia."

"When I am walking with my young twin daughters, my attention is directed at the minutiae that they find so wondrous (often a bit of trash), while also darting ahead half a block to check on the faster, more energetic child, and periodically looking behind for the more attentive, slower paced child. I have chosen to live in a city precisely because it means that I access (and bypass) a rich variety of neighborhoods and environments each day, via the different levels of attention of my role as driver, passenger in car or on train, or pedestrian. I am acutely aware of the fact that by pursuing one path to get from one point to another, I am traversing a forest with multiple perspectives and paths."

"Cities have attracted me for their density, activity, variety, their layered contradictions…there is never enough to give me a definite understanding of my immediate environment."

I find it interesting that Browning emphasizes cities when describing her work. I love the part about experiencing places in new ways through the wonder and excitement of kids. This reminds me of an unexpected meeting a few days ago with two high-school classmates. I was trying to identify plants in a small courtyard, when two ecstatic kids with big eyes and curly hair came sprinting through the trees. For some reason they looked vaguely familiar. A few seconds later I found my classmates along the path, just within view of their children.

In mentioning Arden Bendler Browning, besides adding a talented artist to the archive, I hope to become similarly aware of my environment, relating with it thoughtfully and playfully.  

Credits: Image of Browning's Empire (2010) from ardenbendlerbrowning.com.

A Street in New York City

I haven’t found the debate around Park 51 (dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque”) particularly interesting or compelling. In general, I’ve been disturbed and pretty shocked by my fellow New Yorkers display of intolerance and misunderstanding of what the impact of a community center would have on the neighborhood around the World Trade Center site. However, the debate has generated some interesting discussion around urban planning in general. One interesting and compelling urban planning argument is the high density level of southern Manhattan and the amazing diversity of architecture, cultures and types of buildings that exist in the few block radius of the World Trade Center site. Daryl Lang posted some great photos on a blog of the variety of buildings and types of institutions around the site. These images could be any block in New York City, which I guess is part of the point. I won’t get into the whole debate - the photos are interesting and fun, and the discussions of the impact of one building, community center, culture or activity on a dense block of a city is an interesting concept.









Credits: Image of the streets around the World Trade Center site from http://daryllang.com/blog/4421.

Shantyism in 20th-Century Barcelona

While it is surprising for many to hear that there are still slums in Spain, as Jordi wrote about on Polis last November, it is also difficult to imagine that over 100,000 people lived in slums in the beginning of the 1960s in Barcelona. Particularly challenging is to envisage ‘slums’ stretched across Montjuïc, the main site of the 1992 Olympics, or on the city’s beaches that are now strewn with tourists, areas that were known as el Somorrostro and el Camp de la Bota, as seen in the images below.

The growth of Barcelona’s slums began in the 1920s and steadily increased until peaking in the 1960s, driven by significant immigration from those drawn to the promise of work in Barcelona’s growing industrial sector and later escaping misery and repression (often unsuccessfully) in rural areas after the war. Yet in the city they found no place to live except in fragile, improvised housing, under very poor conditions (no water, no electricity, no sewer system), in fear of housing demolitions by the authorities or storms from the sea that would tear down their shacks along the seafront. People speaking about their experiences living in the slums discuss the struggles of their day-to-day life in terms of schooling, work, services, living together, control and repression, and organising for in-situ relocation. I found the similarity between accounts I have heard from Barcelona's former shanty dwellers and slum dwellers I have had the opportunity to speak with in other countries about their social experience of living in slums fascinating. There are parallels in their descriptions, decades apart and in different continents of the world, of a vivid, lively social life full of mutual aid and solidarity where people shared, were united and everyone collaborated as best they could.

This evolution of slums in the city is excellently documented in English on the Museum of History in Barcelona’s website from a past exhibition called Shanties: the Informal City. Definitely worth checking out, as well as this documentary if you can get your hands on it: Barraques: la ciudad olvidada.

Credits: Two images of Barcelona oceanfront Somorrostro and Camp de la Bota shanty towns from Fotos Antigues de Barcelona Facebook group. Image of women in a communal clothes washing area in Camp de la Bota from Museu d'Hisòria de Barcelona website.

Urban Undercurrents: Securing Canada’s Northern Sovereignty - Part II

In the latest attempt to exert Canada’s claim to its northern lands and waters, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has completed a five-day tour through several northern communities. In an era of speculative resource economics, flexing one’s sovereign muscle in the contested North has become more of an issue of economic security than that of militaristic advantage or nationalism. Harper’s latest trip to the North has reopened an age-old conversation that has existed in one form or another since the Hudson’s Bay Company took its root almost 350 years ago.

Sitting beneath the debate on what Canada’s future will hold for the North are the citizens that have lived, worked, and struggled in the demanding climate, unstable economy, and socially chaotic communities that scatter the country’s vast and mostly empty northern territories.

In a bid to bolster northern support, Harper’s trip focused on the generation of jobs through the exploitation of Canada’s enormous and largely untouched natural resources. Alongside hard sovereign measures to increase military presence in the region, the Conservative government has proposed that a series of new natural resource maps will ‘boost arctic sovereignty’. Although this has left Albertan oil barons ecstatic, individuals who live in the North are less sure of the implications of such exploration.

I find myself once again travelling through the Canadian North, currently visiting the town of Fort Smith, which is located along the 60th parallel north. The talk of the town has been centred on a controversial study that was released yesterday, confirming that Oilsands mining has been linked to high levels of toxic pollutants in the nearby Athabasca River. Local citizens, First Nations & Inuit communities, and transient workers are all too aware of the implications of the findings, as much of the local economy relies heavily on the health of the local environment.

Naturally, Harper’s agenda sits heavily on communities like Fort Smith. With many downstream northern residents already dealing with inconsistent health problems potentially related to Oilsands mining, the idea of further oil-related development is accompanied by great concern. Bringing economic development and prosperity to the North is something that many residents welcome, but few have faith that their interests are being considered.

The Wilderness Downtown: Nostalgia in the Modern Web Browser

I've had the good fortune of being a part of an unusual and innovative project led by visualization maestro Aaron Koblin from the Google Creative Lab and writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire. Called "The Wilderness Downtown", the project crafts a unique and deeply personal experience for each viewer as you virtually run down the streets where you used to live. (All this is set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait” off their newly released album “The Suburbs" -- the song evokes a nostalgic atmosphere that is fitting of the experience).

The premise of this project is predicated on the realization that truly profound experiences with media (think: the last movie or music video you cried at) can become more emotionally powerful in the era of modern web technologies -- you no longer consume the same piece of media that a few million others do, but instead experience something that is entirely tailored to you. On the backend of "The Wilderness Downtown", the team used HTML5 technologies mashed up with the Google Maps API including Streetview to deliver that personalized experience. Wired Magazine runs an insightful article of what modern web technologies and browsers bring to experiences like this one, and possibilities for the future.

In the context of cities, experiences like "The Wilderness Downtown" provoke us to approach the very cities we live in (or used to) -- ones we may be inured to -- with fresh eyes. What would it be like to take on a swooping bird's eye view into the rooftops of buildings that we're familiar with but don't recognize from a satellite perspective? Have you stopped in the middle of a weary thoroughfare to take a look around and immortalize this very street in memory?

To launch the experience, check out www.thewildernessdowntown.com. (For the best viewing experience given extensive use of HTML5 technologies, you'll need to view it in the browser Google Chrome or a fully HTML5-compliant browser). And if you'd like to learn more about how it was made, go to www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.  

Credits: Images from the Official Google Blog, Google LatLong Blog, and Google Chrome Blog
Full disclosure: I currently work for the Google Chrome team

Door in/to Cities: Merced

During the last decade, the real estate boom reached an unsustainable pace, leaving behind irresponsible developments. The suburbs in the California Central Valley and Delta rolled outward from the core cities in a rush of new developments only to be suddenly arrested.

In places like Merced, CA, the weeds have taken over the abandoned suburban lawns, while the houses sit unfinished--no doors needed.

Credits: Image of Merced foreclosures from Natalia Echeverri.

Doors in/to Cities: Kiev

The fruits of consumer capitalism adorn many of the openings in Kiev's historic center, a place of majestic boulevards and hidden gems amidst some of the bloodiest and most contested history in all of urbania.

For someone raised in the bosom of the computer age on the edge of the fog belt, the good life in Kiev consisted not of affordable Korean televisions, but of people watching in one of the city's numerous parks on a warm summer night, astride a cold beer and a well worn park bench under the bronze gaze of a long dead poet.

Credits: Image of Kiev by Alex Schafran.

Doors in/to Cities: Berkeley

You might assume that a house is taken over by nature gradually--from the cracks and edges inward, the places we trample the least. (Alan Weisman describes something like this in The World Without Us) But this house, one I pass on the way to the market some days, shows an apparently sudden, if somewhat violent instance of nature's reoccupation. It's as if the vine (a ficus?) knew that the clearest statement of victory and the most efficient use of its strangulating energy would be to go straight for the the threshold, the heart, the utmost demarcation of inside and out.

Image of Berkeley by Ivan.

Doors in/to Cities: Paris

Photographed while ambling through the Marais District in Paris.

The inclusion of the Medusa motif harkens back to its role as a warder of evil from Ancient Rome.

Credits: Images of Paris from Ali Madad.

Doors in/to Cities: Fort Smith

Fort Smith is a gateway that welcomes travelers from the South to Canada’s Northern frontier. A region famous for its natural beauty and incredible views, it is also known for its isolation, social turbulence, and economic instability. A population of 2,046 (2009) makes Fort Smith the fourth largest 'urban centre' in the Northwest Territories.

With an average yearly growth rate of -0.3, Fort Smith is also an emergency exit to the South, providing an opening to the more prosperous, oil-rich communities in Alberta.

Credits: Images of Fort Smith from George Carothers.

Doors in/to Cities: Hong Kong

An inconspicuous make-shift door carved into a corrugated wall: a setting for two boys engaged in make-believe on a hot weekend afternoon --

Vis-a-vis an elaborately crafted door into a place of worship, proclaimed by golden words of wisdom and well-wishing, and enunciated by the luck of the color red.

Both provide some hint of a rich, perhaps unexpected, imagined world within.

Credits: Photos from the author

Doors in/to Cities: Palma de Mallorca

Similar to most medieval cities, Palma de Mallorca was traditionally surrounded by walls, most of which were destroyed in the late 19th century to enable the city's expansion. Yet a section of the Renaissance sea wall built in the 1500s, Dalt Murada, still remains intact, although the Mediterranean no longer laps up to its edge - the space immediately in front has been reclaimed for a seaside walk, a ring road and the Parc de la Mar (of which you can see the edge, below right). Although traditionally an entrance to those arriving to the city by sea, now the doors are likely most traveled by the millions of tourists arriving by plane or on a cruise ship stop in Palma's port for the day.



Credits: Photos by Melissa Garcia Lamarca.