2012-13 Issue (PDF Download)
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S t r e e t S i g n s Centre for Urban and Community Research 2012 / 13 CONTENTS Beijing Edge Lands: Beijing Edge Lands: Staying Ahead of the Bulldozers 1 Caroline Knowles Staying Ahead of the Bulldozers Caminando entre Narcos: Walking among Narcos 4 Christian von Wissel Caroline Knowles Welcome to Paradise 8 Sara Faridamin Around Hiroshima: Between the A-Bomb and the Everyday 10 Mark Rainey The latest official estimates put the population of Beijing at ‘village’ – just off Yuanmingyuan West Road, the busy 3 20 million. With its rising population the city is constantly lane highway that cuts the ‘village’ in two. The West side is The Marks of Stone and Living Statues 14 extending, its frayed edges inching inexorably outwards. being demolished – it lies in piles of rubble – the East Side, Claude St. Arroman Beijing is navigated through reference to its concentric ring not yet slated for demolition, is a lively dense residential- Inventory of an Aftermath 16 roads, with the first encircling the city’s centre and the fifth commercial scene where I was led by the local Party Sam Bailey being the point where the city pauses, where a gap appears Officer, a young woman in sparkly leggings and a leather which may be closed by the time you read this, as clusters jacket, whose permission I needed to do the research. I Mind the Social 17 of high rise apartment blocks take up the beat, extending want to know who lives here and why, what bigger journeys Erlend Hovdkinn the city’s edges still further. Is Greater Beijing really the brought them to this particular part of Beijing. With what Olympic Catalyst 19 same size as Belgium? If not is soon will be. implicit knowledge and skills do people migrate? Alexandra Baixinho To feel the rhythm of the edge lands beyond the fifth ring Beijing rents and real estate prices are as rampant at the Deptford High Street 20 road I am researching a Beijing-microcosm, a small block city itself. Property speculation and development have their Annita Strasser of two-storey concrete and brick housing and shops in own logics of accumulation. This means that young people, “Silence in the Train?” 23 the Xiao Jiahe Area – still sometimes referred to as a often graduates exploring Beijing’s opportunities – known Karla Berrens List Operator: An Account of a Public Space in Transition 24 Therese Henningsen The Dialectics of Deracinated Localism: Some Notes from the North 26 Steve Hanson Deluge: Regarding Obsolescence 30 Paul Halliday Deluge: Disembowelling Black Boxes 32 Francisco Calafate Farial Found Person: An experiment in Biography 34 Peter Coles Engaging Tactis: Experiments in Social Science’s Engagement 36 Christian von Wissel Creative Evaluation as Participatory Practice 39 David Kendall A Utopian City in the Sand 41 Victor Bedo and Katalin Halasz Not ‘the same old same old’: Beyond Bingo and the Blitz 42 Alison Rooke Extending Creative Practice: A European Encounter 46 Claire Levy List of Controbutors 48 edited by Alex Rhys-Taylor / Britt Hatzius / Caroline Knowles photograph on front cover by Asia Deri (p.41) photo credit: Lijie Zhang streetsigns · 2012 / 13 · page 1 as ‘ants’ - live in dormitories in the underpinning of tall Three things strike me about the migrants living in the of potential styles a customer might choose – it is also between rising rents and what her customers can pay for buildings or in subdivided apartments. The pressure of tiny capsule I investigated in Xiao Jiahe. They live in highly her living space. Our discussion about how she spends her hairdressing. The woman who ran the public bath told a new arrivals from rural areas, towns and cities with fewer compressed spaces, they are open and flexible about time confirms this – there is work and sleep – the salon similar story of the importance of keeping ahead of the opportunities than Beijing, presses on the edge lands. Xiao how they make a living and they are highly mobile. Sun Yi is open until midnight when she rolls out her fold-up bed. bulldozers. Life for poorer migrants in Beijing demands Jiahe was a village with fields and duck ponds in the 1980s is a good example of all three. A glamorous 50 year-old Kitchen and cooking utensils are integrated into the fabric high levels of mobility. before it was swallowed by the city. When I ask the party hairdresser with her own business she chats as she colours of the salon. Chairs for customers serve a double function official how many live there now she says 4,000. When I a middle-aged man’s graying hair back to black. in providing a place to rest. The TV is on all day. Like Sun Yi the other migrants I spoke to had come to question her further she tells me there are also 40,000 Xiao Jiahe because it was cheaper than other parts of the migrants. She points to an important distinction, between Sun Yi is a farmer from Wuhu village in Anhui Province, who This is Sun Yi’s fourth hairdressing salon. She first lived in city. The cheapest place to live in Beijing is the next place ‘residents’ who have Beijing residence permits and the moved to Beijing once her children had grown up. While she the Xidan area of Beijing from where she worked as a maid. to be demolished. Like her, many of them had moved from entitlements to health care and education this brings moved with her husband, he isn’t very flexible in embracing When that area was demolished and she had reviewed her other, more central parts of the city as their housing and and migrants who do not. The official apparatus of the city life in Beijing and soon moves back to the village where prospects in the city, she took a hairdressing course along shops were demolished: staying one jump ahead of the state struggles with the waves of migrants that arrive daily she visits him infrequently. I am intrigued by her move with her son and then opened her first salon in the Haidian bulldozers is a way of living more cheaply in the city. Cities putting pressure on living and commercial space and raising from farming to hairdressing – what gave here the idea to area. When Haidian was demolished she moved her salon are always being made. As Beijing extends so it extends the rents. Locals, the original villagers who own the land, rent make such an abrupt move? She is nonchalant – she says to Baitasi. When that was demolished she moved to Yi lives, skills, ingenuity, opportunities and living costs of its out their apartments subdivided into single rooms in which it’s a much easier skill to learn than others, than machine Heyuan, which was also later demolished to make way for migrant-citizens. a couple or an entire family may live and rent tiny live-in sewing for example. As I look around the salon it becomes a new subway line causing her to move once more, with commercial premises to migrants. clear that although it is very much a salon – hairdryers, 100 other migrant households to Xiao Jiahe. She expects basins for washing hair, combs, hair colour, photographs this will be demolished soon too. Her rent has already risen from 1000 Yuan a month to 1400. She is squeezed photo credit: Lijie Zhang photo credit: Lijie Zhang page 2 · streetsigns · 2012 / 13 streetsigns · 2012 / 13 · page 3 Caminando entre Narcos Walking among Narcos Christian von Wissel The invitation was to participate at a social sciences are fortifying their borderline north of the city, for the start with how to honour the dead and reach all the way demands is not to look away but to construct a public seminar on The Making of Cities from the Perspective of inhabitants of Monterrey this frontier between the ‘first’ down to the need to re-assess the safety issues that alter discourse – and this public discourse must also be a visual the Street in Monterrey. An industrial metropolis of four and the ‘third world’ has long felt to be somewhere south ones possibilities to do fieldwork and to live ones life. You one – capable to counter the power of the narco images. million inhabitants in the northeast of Mexico – and a city of their city: more or less at the height of the desert town need time to come to turns with these irruptions of narco On our way to and from the seminar venue we pass several whose streets have witnessed a thunderstorm of violence of Matehuala, at about two hours distance. Now, with reality and the research process suddenly acquires almost of the more recent sites of narco activity. The traces are devastating its public life and self-esteem. the narco take-over of Monterrey and of Monterrey’s self- psychoanalytic qualities (2). subtle and one has to know what to look for… “Do you esteem, a subliminal discussion is dividing the city’s civil see the little holes in the wall to your right? That was Within the last few years, the city has been overrun by society regarding who they are and why such a narco This process of ‘coming to turns’ with the violence is last week when they gunned down one of them right the narcos, by competing and extremely violent groups of invasion was able to infiltrate the wealthy, firmly catholic multiple and, in any case, it is not at all easy. But people here outside the bar. We used to go a lot to this place Mexican/international organised crime.