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The Mediated City 50 Years in the Global Village LAMPS Proceedings Series 2 AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 2 Woodbury University; AMPS Los Angeles: 1-4 October, 2014 The Mediated City: Smart Cities – Political Cities EDITOR: Dr. Graham Cairns SERIES EDITOR: Dr. Graham Cairns PRODUCTION EDITOR: Eric An © AMPS C.I.O. AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 2. ISSN 2398-9467 INTRODUCTION The Mediated City: Smart Cities – Political Cities This publication is the product of the conference The Mediated City – 50 Years in the Global Village held in Los Angeles. Organised by the international research group AMPS, its scholarly journal Architecture_MPS and hosted by Woodbury University, it offered a platform for multiple and diverse examinations of the city and took as its starting point the 50th anniversary of the publication of Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media. As with all the events in this series, it brought together people from diverse backgrounds to fragment, multiply and reconfigure our readings of the city; to offer multiple and conflicting discipline perspectives. The intention was to share views of the city as physical entity, online community, film set, photographic backdrop, geographical map, sociological case study, political metaphor, digital or video game etc. to examine it as a mediated and shared phenomenon. The publication, and the conference which it documents, both form part of the broader Mediated City research programme run by AMPS which is headlined by a special Mediated City book series with Intellect Books. The series editor of both the Intellect series and this conference based series is Dr Graham Cairns. The papers collated in this volume represent a sample of the research discussed and explored at the Los Angeles event into the contemporary city in the digital age. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 FACTORY NOSTALGIA INDUSTRIAL AESTHETICS IN THE DIGITAL CITY 1 Nicholas Balaisis Chapter 2 INTERROGATING AFRICAN DIASPORA MEDIA THE CHANGING ROLE OF MEDIA IN A 10 NETWORKED WORLD Genevieve Bosah Chapter 3 LOCATING THE “REAL” CHINA 17 Stephen Brauer Chapter 4 THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT AND THE BROWN STONE SPIRE RADICALITY IN THE 28 ARCHITECTURE OF NIGHT VALE Alexandra Brown Chapter 5 ALLAN KAPROW’S FLUIDS: AN ARCHITECTURAL HAPPENING IN LOS ANGELES 36 Rebecca Choi Chapter 6 ADAPTIVE REUSE AND THE MARKETING OF DOWNTOWN LA LIVING: THE 47 CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW URBANITY Sébastien Darchen Chapter 7 IMITATION OF LIFE: THE SIMULATION OF THE EVERYDAY AS A POLITICAL EXPRESSION 57 David Franco Chapter 8 TIMES SQUARE'S STREET SECTION AND THE GHOSTED SILVER SCREEN 66 Lior Galili Chapter 9 DO WE HAVE TO STICK TO THE SCRIPT...CITIES, SURVEYS AND DESCRIPTING 75 Eric Haas Chapter 10 URBAN MEDIATIONS AS LAYERED TOPOGRAPHIES 82 Christos Hadjichristos Chapter 11 THE MEDIATING CITY A NEW INFRASTRUCTURAL ECOLOGY. 88 Gregory J Haley Chapter 12 PLANT IDENTIFICATION AND MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL AGE: HISTORICAL AND 93 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES Nathan Heavers Chapter 13 HERON-MAZY: THE MEDIATED RETROSPECTIVE. AN ARCHITECTURAL CINÉ ROMAN 101 (2003/2014) Roger Connah (Heron), J.P. Maruszczak (Mazy) Chapter 14 THE ‘HALLES’ REMODELLING PROJECT IN THE CENTRE OF PARIS: A CASE OF STUDY 113 OF A POLITICALLY MEDIATED METROPOLITAN OPERATION Anne Jarrigeon Chapter 15 RE-IMAGINING ETHNIC ENCLAVES CONTESTED IDENTITIES AND TRANSNATIONALISM IN 122 LOS ANGELES’ KOREATOWN Kristy H.A. Kang Chapter 16 WORKSHOP CITIES IM-MEDIATED THROUGH METALEPSIS 131 Don Kunze, Carolina Dayer Chapter 17 THE IN-BETWEEN-STATE 139 David Lee Chapter 18 URBAN UTOPICS AND THE NEW DIGITAL VIEW 152 Gavin Perin, Linda Matthews Chapter 19 EVOLVING LANDSCAPES AND CHANGING ARCHITECTURES IN MODERN JAPANESE 160 URBAN ENVIRONMENT Raffaele Pernice Chapter 20 (EM)BODIED PRIVATIZATION AND COMMUNIONATIVE ENCLOSURE IN MCLUHAN'S 167 GLOBAL VILLAGE MOBILE PARKING APPLICATIONS AND OTHER RESTRICTED PIECES OF THE DIGITAL STREET Graham Potts Chapter 21 THINKING MEDIATION THROUGH THE SPACES OF LOS ANGELES 175 Stephen Read, Jorick Beijer Chapter 22 RE-PRESENTING SCANDINAVIAN MODERNISM. THE GELLERUP PARK AND THE VISUAL 184 NEGOTIATION OF THE MODERNIST SUBURB. Niels Peter Skou Chapter 23 BUILDING PRIVILEGE: ARCHITECTURE AND THE PRIVACY FETISH 192 Rossen Ventzislavov The Mediated City: Smart Cities – Political Cities FACTORY NOSTALGIA: INDUSTRIAL AESTHETICS IN THE DIGITAL CITY Author: NICHOLAS BALAISIS Affiliation: UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO, CANADA INTRODUCTION Standing here, you are at the centre of a quiet but fundamental shift in the workings of Kitchener's economy. Let your imagination wander back to a time when Kitchener was an industrial powerhouse, shipping goods around the world: leather products, furniture, buttons, luggage, felt, rubber boots, hockey skates, tires, televisions sets ... Perhaps you can hear the sound of the plants clustered along this strip, cranking out their daily quotas. Notes from industrial walking tour of Kitchener, Ontario.1 While environments as such have a strange power to elude perception, the preceding ones acquire an almost nostalgic fascination when surrounded by the new. Marshall McLuhan2 MATERIAL CITIES/ SYMBOLIC CITIES Cities are material and symbolic entities. Cities are built and re-built. Office towers and condominiums sprout up in former industrial sites, spurred by foreign and local investment. Roads and pipes – the city’s material infrastructure – age and crack and are repaired, upgraded, or in some cases, left to decay for lack of finances or political will. Cities are more than just matter, however, but are symbolic as well, occupying the private and collective imaginaries of citizens. They are image- symbols and increasingly, identifiable and marketable brands. As former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg famously put it, Manhattan is a high-end luxury product.3 In Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City, he argues that the city is not a thing itself, but an object of collective perception, a product of “being perceived by its inhabitants.”4 The city produces “imageability:” the quality in a physical object that renders the object memorable and notable in the mind of the viewer.5 The idea of the city as image has been echoed elsewhere. Michel de Certeau famously described Manhattan from the perch of the World Trade Centre, noting the way that the city comes to view as a coherent object from above. The height “makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.”6 For de Certeau, viewing the city from above provides an imaginary anchor making the city legible as a concrete image that presents the fiction of seeing and knowing the city like a “voyeur-god.” More recently, Janine Marchessault and Michael Darroch argue that even though cities are not images, “they are images before they are cities.”7 Images and metaphors of cities, therefore, are crucial in shaping the material life of cities. Ben Highmore makes a similar claim arguing that the metaphors we 1 use to imagine cities are not “a poetic substitute to a more fundamental reality, or a veil of symbolism that we can poke through to get to a real reality behind it, but [are] part of the material stuff Page AMPS | Woodbury University The Mediated City: Smart Cities – Political Cities constituting the real city.”8 Metaphors become material in Highmore’s formulation. This is evident in the circulation of global city brands that serve as models for design in other cities: “New York style lofts” are advertised in Berlin, South Beach condominiums are promoted without irony in Toronto, and most dramatically, replicas of famous European towns and cities are rapidly built in China.9 Nearly seventy years after the first planned suburbs in Levittown, New York and the realization of the economic and environmental costs of urban sprawl, images of nature, the country, and the fantasy of a less hurried life continue to drive the suburban expansion of cities. Images and symbols thus drive much of the material life of cities but they also give us clues to the psychology of cities. A city’s insecurity with itself may drive the appeal to model itself on more robust global icons, or to puff up its own local histories and landmarks, or build towering skyscrapers to compete in an increasingly competitive marketplace of cities. Examining the prominent images and metaphors can thus be a way of mapping the history and future of cities. My concern in this paper is with the industrial as a symbolic motif in design strategies for urban renewal projects. In a number of cities across Europe and North America, now-defunct manufacturing sites and industrial areas in cities have been re-imagined as trendy live and workspaces. In many cases, these former industrial hubs house workspaces and workers in the post-industrial or information economy.10 While there is a global dimension to the industrial image in new urban design, my particular focus here is on the Canadian cities of Kitchener-Waterloo. The small “twin cities” are interesting case studies as they have recently shifted from an industrial economy to a predominantly post-industrial, information economy and have endeavored to further expand their digital and high-tech industries. Amidst this transition, the two cities have taken significant steps to re-appropriate former industrial sites for the projected new media enterprises and start-up companies. Within many new urban design projects, the industrial history and aesthetics of these former spaces has been stressed in graphic and nostalgic ways. The industrial thus serves as an important symbol in