Philosophy of the City update - April 2022

It has been a while... and some great videos came out. For example, here's a great clip about the MX3D bridge in Amsterdam:

The really, really important news is, of course, that there will be a Philosophy of the City conference: 20.–22.10.2022 Turin, Italy. You can find the CfP here and submit your abstract here. (We are still struggling with the Philosophy of the City website. Sorry!)

To be on the safe side: Let me repeat... Philosophy of the City. October 20-22, 2022. Turin, Italy.

Of course, there are also new things to read, like the wonderful special issue "Philosophy of the City" of the East Asian Journal of Philosophy (edited by Sanna Lehtinen and Tea Lobo).

Tea Lobo also was so kind to invite Sage Cammers-Goodwin and me for an interview for her vlog:

Shane Epting most likely also has a new book out. He did two last year. Hence, the writes books quicker than I do blogs ;) - Check out his publications on his super-cool new website with great pix.

Last, but not least, we will host a Datathon on May 13, 2022. The event is part of a small grant, which we received for a BRIDE legacy project from DesignLab. At the event, we would like to learn how people make sense of smart city-data. So, if you want to play with the data from our bridge and help Sage Cammers-Goodwin with the final part of her PhD project, feel free to register online.

That's all folks! I am sure that I overlooked something. Sorry!

 

Philosophy of the City Round-up (May 2019)

The deadline for the annual conference of the Philosophy of the City Research Group is approaching. Don't miss the opportunity to present and discuss your work in Detroit (Oct 3-6, 2019).

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to the Philosophy of the City Summer Colloquium in Lahti and Helsinki (17.–18.6.2019). You can find the amazing program here.

I am also received my copy of Philosophy and the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives. It's great to see, that the topic is gaining attention within Philosophy!

My paper on Urban Resilience and Distributive Justice just came. - Talking about "Resilience": I am co-organizing a session called "From the ethics of risk to the ethics of resilience - Integrating participatory approaches" with Samantha Copeland (TU Delft) at the DeSIRE conference (University of Twente, June 6-7, 2019).

 Finally, if there are any PotC related news, which you would like me to share my on this blog: Please, let me know.

Philosophy of the City Round-up

1. Philosophy of City 2019: We just published our Call for papers for the annual conference of the Philosophy of the City Research Group. You still have time to think about a cool subject for your brilliant talk. Abstracts are due in June 2019. But we expect you to come. OK?

2. Taylor Stone has defended his PhD thesis earlier this week. His pioneering doctoral thesis on Artifical Lightning is available online.

3. If you want to get an update on the BRIDE project: Kars Alfrink, who is working on the project at TUD, just posted an update on his blog.

4. Since we are talking about BRIDE: If you are around in Amsterdam on February 1, 2019, and have some time at 15:00 - we are looking for volunteers to interact with the 3D-printed IoT-enabled MX3D bridge to create our initial data set. Please, send me an email if you are interested.

5. Finally, as a reminder: the Call for the Philosophy of the City Summer Colloquium 2019 is still open and you may still join us for the Social Resilience in Diverse Societies workshop.

The haunting of cities

While Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) did not meet all of my expectations (but that might be due to my misplaced expectations), I enjoyed reading his introduction to Laura Oldfield’s Savage Messiah (2011). Fisher reminds us that the

„...struggle over space is also a struggle over time and who controls it. Resist neoliberal modernisation and (so we are told) you consign yourself to the past. … .Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium. Savage Messiah is about another kind of delirium: the releasing of the pressure to be yourself, the slow unravelling of biopolitical identity, a depersonalised journey out to the erotic city that exists alongside the business city. The eroticism here is not primarily to do with sexuality, although it sometimes includes it: it is an art of collective enjoyment, in which a world beyond work can – however briefly –be glimpsed and grasped. Fugitive time, lost afternoons, conversations that dilate and drift like smoke, walks that have no particular direction and go on for hours, free parties in old industrial spaces, still reverberating days later.“

The idea of „a spectral city“, „a London haunted by traces and remnants of rave, anarcho-punk scenes and hybrid subcultures at a time when all these incongruous urban regeneration schemes were happening“, strongly resonates with my own curiosity about how the past shapes our contemporary lifes in a city. To be more precise: I am wondering, if and how our lifes leave traces in the urban environments - and if and how cities could be understood as places of transmission (Debray). Is the haunting of cities something that is rooted in the (digital) memories? Or is it the atmosphere of a city (Boehme), which haunts us? To stay with the current example: Is it the explicit and shared knowledge about the past in Savage Messiah, which creates the past? Or are documents like Savage Messiah just articulations of something, which exists independently from memories made explicit?