In the bookshelf

Bruno de Meulder, Kelly Shannon

A clear, grounded and critical overview on the human settlements discipline over the last 60 years, its consolidation as a field of practices in the 1970es and its intellectual and practice-oriented evolution until today. The main object of interest is hereby urbanism, whose capacity to integrate a science of and action upon the city comes to the fore in the human settlements practice. In urbanism, the specificity of design connects with non-specific issues such as social exclusion, poverty, unsustainable construction and urban growth. The selection of keystone urbanistic interventions in the 60es-80es exemplifies how different practitioners handled these issues and interpreted this relationship, at the same time delineating changing paradigms in the discipline. The third session presents contemporary approaches to human settlements that contextualise the “lessons learnt” but also mirror the ongoing discussions and different positions in the field.

de Meulder/Shannon (eds.), Human Settlements: Formulations and (re)Calibrations. UFO series 2, Amsterdam: OSA/SUN architecture Publishers 2010.

Jonas Bendiksen

Led by questions such as “how do people dwell and live in the poorest urban areas of the world, how is their habitation like, of what are they proud and which are the problems they face everyday?”, the MAGNUM photographer Jonas Bendiksen lived for various months in slums of Nairobi, Mumbai, Jakarta and Caracas. In the book documenting a worldwide exhibited installation, his 360° portrays succeed in bringing us into these home spaces and everyday life experiences, described by their inhabitants in short comments. They shed light on everyday hardship and violence, but also on solidarity and functioning social networks.

Jonas Bendiksen, The places we live. New York: Aperture 2008.

www.theplaceswelive.com

Elisa T. Bertuzzo

Within three decades, Bangladesh's capital city passed from a population of one million to twelve million people. This confronts its inhabitants, observers as well as planners with contradictions that ask for redefining our ways of living in and thinking about the city. In particular, Western conceptions of public space and “urbanity”, challenged by a symptomatic fragmentation, apparently need to be overcome. Drawing on ethnographic methods, this empirical study observes Dhaka's spaces and situations and describes the production of enriched spaces through everyday life practices. Appropriation and adaptation processes carried out by inhabitants are hereby showed to provide, in certain cases, hints for sustainable mixed forms of urban development via-à-vis lacking or bad administration.
For the first time, Henri Lefebvre's theory of production of space is applied with all of its implications to an empirical study. City and urbanity emerge then as the result of three continuously interacting and interdependent space production processes: physical, mental and social.

Elisa T. Bertuzzo, Fragmented Dhaka. Analysing everyday life with Henri Lefebvre's theory of production of space. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2009.

Interview [German] on FSK Hamburg, 19.11.2010 [mp3, 67 MB]

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

In her intervention into the “Asian Century”, Spivak re-thinks Asia in its political and cultural complexity within debates on the “Global South”, modernity and urbanisation. The collected essays present deep-going reflections e.g. on Afghanistan's historical and engendered narrative, on de-localisation and diaspora, on the limits of “theory” vis-à-vis everyday hegemonial structures in Bangladesh, on Bangalore's cyberliteracy , as well as on the turbulent “present” of the Caucasus. With their passionate and irreducible critique of pre-formulated identities, they contribute to a pluralised, non-generalised idea of Asia and set the basis for the development of a “continental pedagogy” that never evades singularity.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias. Malden/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell Publishing 2005.

Ottmar Ette

Instead of engaging with movement and dislocation, philologists often followed a narrow interpretation of the spatial turn, which led their efforts to “fix”, or determine, emerging literary spaces in a literary cartography. In contrast to this, Ette suggests that vectorisation and fractalisation of literature and the spaces it represents are giving birth to transcultural, translingual and transareal patterns of and for movements. Such emergent type of literature, of “writing-between-worlds”, is produced while moving (physically, mentally, emotionally...); its essential transitoriness eludes any attempt of localisation in a cartographic image. Hence, Ette launches the fascinating challenge to forge a poetic of movement for transareal studies. His own search leads him from Ulysses' return in a foreign homeland to the Shoah narrative, from a digression on translation to the issue of writing in a language other than the mother-tongue, from the multilingual world of the Caribbean islands to the relationship between Arabic and American literatures.

Ottmar Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz. Berlin: Kadmos 2005.

Henri Lefebvre

This book, which due to Lefebvre's characteristically “erratic” writing style should be read in its original French version, marked the spatial turn and provided its most extensive, rich and inspiring conceptualisation. Incorporating the socio-historical experiences and writings of the 1950es and 60es, his thought is here concentrated and projected towards a highly complex theorisation of city and urban life as ultimative end of human development and at the same time product of continuously interacting processes of physical/material, mental/ideological and social production of space in everyday life.

Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos 1999.