Uprising: Hip Hop & The LA Riots

Who has seen our lectures knows that Design as Politics is -just as Reyner Banham and Charles Jencks- fascinated by Los Angeles. The movies, the glamour, its rap culture and of course the Riots.

Now 20 years after the violent uprising that was triggered by the savage beating of Rodney King, filmmaker and former CNN staffer Mark Ford (known from his doc about N.W.A.) released the movie Uprising: Hip Hop & the LA Riots. The film –narrated by the one and only Snoop Dogg- revisits the riots in gripping detail and documents how hip hop forecasted –some say ignited– the worst civil unrest of the 20th century. It contains interviews with rappers, musicians, police officers and victims who lived through the 1992 riots and shows never-before-heard stories from Rodney King, John Singleton, Too Short, Big Boy, Sir Jinx, and even the L.A. Four. Check the trailer, but careful, it’s shocking.

New Building Design Column

Now online! Wouter Vanstiphout’s newest Building Design column on how the reactions to Mohamed Merah’s killing spree show the demonisation of the ghetto. How everybody needs ‘good’ neighbours. And how Toulousains gave up on their modernist suburb Le Mirail. You need a username to read it, just register, it’s for free!

Ill Manors

“I genuinely want to change things. This is just the first step. Let me make my point first and raise the issue, if anybody wants to talk to me about how I think we can change these things I’m ready.”

With this statement the British rapper Plan B released his latest track ill manors, persuading the audience that this is not about commerce. This is the real thing! For the guardian reason to honor it with the title ‘greatest British protest song in years’. For lovers of political music -like us- almost to good to be true.

The track, basted on Peter Fox’s Alles Neu, reflects the raging unease around the London riots of last summer, life on a council estate, the closure of community centers and the adverse impact of the 2012 Olympics on London’s poor. It has much in common with Public Enemy or the Clash. Music that addresses a riot and sound like a riot. How Plan B said: The song needs to get under people’s skin. Just like those horrible pictures we see on cigarette packets that are designed to shock us into being aware of our actions.”

The song is part of a bigger project. An album and film, both called Ill Manors, are set to follow, along with plans for social activism. Oi!

Exhibition by Malkit Shoshan

Who thinks about the Israeli Palestinian conflict does not directly pictures a zoo and two white donkeys dyed with stripes to look like zebras. Our PHD candidate Malkit Shoshan did, resulting in the exhibition ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism which is currently exposed in the NAiM / Bureau Europa. Her award-winning book ‘The Atlas of Conflict’ about the processes and mechanisms behind the shaping of Israel-Palestine during the past 100 years forms the base of this new project.

The exhibition starts with page 437 of the book and unfolds in a fascinating exploration of ideas, snapshots and associations that can be devised after seeing a white donkey, tied with a rope and covered with beige tape. A white donkey transformed into a zebra, to meet the desire for normality in Gaza. In this case, the possession of a zoo as space for urban recreation.

‘ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism’, is part of a research project to the relation between war and architecture that contains an archive, two books and an installation which is a mix between a house, a cage a UN-shelter and a zoo.

The exhibition runs until May 20^th in NAiM / Bureau Europa in Maastricht. To get the whole experience we recommend you to go in the weekend. There will be real donkeys.

The Special Economic Block

Now Online! Wouter Vanstiphout’s presentation on the Special Economic Block  during the Droog Design ‘WIJkonomie’ conference in the Netherlands Architecture Institute. You can read the text on our discourse page, but a video of the presentation by Wouter and the other speakers can be seen here. Also cool: the final discussion about self-hate and the criminalization of the poor. Sit back and watch!

Column by Wouter Vanstiphout on BD online

Check it out! Wouter Vanstiphout’s new column for Building Design ‘Just give them a glimpse of something’. He questions at what point architects stop responding to context by addressing the avant-garde underground identity of Diller Scofidio & Renfro. The office – famous for their high line park- presented their project Open House for Levittown (NYC) at a symposium on neighbourhood economy organised by Droog Design in Rotterdam. You’ll need a username to read it, just register, it’s for free!

NAI Symposium: Wijkonomie Tarwewijk

Tomorrow (Feb. 22^nd) the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) organizes the symposium: Wijkonomie Tarwewijk on how local entrepreneurship can strengthen both economic and social vitality of a neighbourhood and how design interventions and strategies can be more valuable in the long term?

Wouter Vanstiphout -on behalf of Crimson Architectural Historians- together with Maxwan A+U have developed one of the contributions: a top down strategy to allow for a bottom up transformation of Tarwewijk, Rotterdam South, and, potentially, many lower income communities.

Based on the statement that the major strategic error of Dutch and other urban renewal policies is that they focus only on certain communities, serving to create mono-cultural, dependent, poor neighbourhoods resulting in a 20% vacancy rate in Tarwewijk, they propose to turn this vacancy into an advantage by transforming completely vacated thirties blocks into a ‘Special Economic Block’, a safe zone from the municipal policy on the environment, branding, building and housing, urban renewal, the creative economy and standard commercial regulations.

The blocks are cut into large lots that are then free for development for entrepreneurs who issue both a strong business plan and a rebuilding plan as an investment commitment to the area. Here they are inspired by the highly successful Rotterdam Klushuis initiative, but apply the principle not to new house buyers, but to small and medium sized aspiring businesses. The strategy aims that the combination of the strong urban structure of the blocks, the proven entrepreneurial spirit of the participants, the liberation of administrative barriers to entrepreneurship and the taboo-free guidance of the architectural transformation, will lead to a bottom-up commercial building, and an inner city Special Economic Zone, or a Special Economic Block

This event is organized by Droog in collaboration with Kosmopolis Rotterdam, Jan Konings and the Netherlands Architecture Institute and is supported by DOEN Foundation. It starts at 19:30h. and  costs € 5,- (only € 3 for students). You can Register here

Avoid Ghetto App

There is no such thing as bad publicity, right? Well Microsoft will probably disagree. Their recently registered patent for a new GPS feature was nicknamed the ‘avoid ghetto app’.

This new software for smartphones and other portable GPS devices is intentionally meant to help travelers avoiding bad weather, tough terrain and unsafe neighborhoods. It uses a combination of information from maps, weather reports, crime statistics and demographics to determine the most effective route to their final destination. Sounds harmless and even useful, but Steve Ballmer (Here in Nova Collegetour) and friends are now being accused of potential racism and reinforcing stereotypical views of certain ethnicities and socio-economic classes.

Might be true, but even more alarming is its possible influence on cities. Dividing them into save and unsafe areas will chop the city in two, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by further isolation of already weak areas and marking whole communities as ghetto or no-go zones. The social and economic impact can be huge and many fear that a Ghetto mark will lead to abandonment, disinvestment and degradation of areas. Microsoft refused to comment.

This post accompanies part two of the Blame the Architect lecture series. This week we’ll discuss the 1967 Race Riots in Detroit; extra material for those who are interested or otherwise unoccupied can be found below.

Firstly, please watch this before you do anything else Detroit-related: it’s made by Julien Temple and it’s an absolutely brilliant (8.0 says IMDB)  portrait of present-day Detroit. Yes, that’s a dodgy looking Russian website we refer you to, but unfortunately the documentary is pretty hard to find (or buy, for that matter). For those who like their documentaries sponsored by a shoe brand and featuring celebrities-through-self-mutilation, Palladium had Johnny Knoxville walk around some ruins actually make a very interesting portrait of the city. And this looks interesting too.

Then there is this gem of public broadcasting: Detroit on the Move has mayor Jerome Cavanagh paint a bright and prosperous future for the city of Detroit, just two years before the riots would tear the city apart.

On a lighter note though, besides urban decline and violence Detroit also means cars and music of course. And more music. And even more music. And some more cars (caution: Australian accents). O, and great songs too. The Supremes were born here, by the way –  and Eddie Murphy’s claymation series the PJ’s was set there as well.

He (three-part-documentary) not only renamed a country and most of its cities; he even forced its residents to change their identity. He not just embezzled an estimated 5 billion dollars while in power; he actually managed to become one of the world’s richest people while completely destroying a nation’s economy. He simultaneously was a CIA-backed anti-communist and a close friend of Nicolae Ceausescu. He not only had an ideology named after him; he also came up with linguistic gems like zaïrianisation for the main elements of this doctrine.

Mobutu Sese Seko not only built a hydro-electric dam, a Concorde-proof airport and a nuclear shelter at Gbadolite, his hometown (Google Maps); he also had three enormous palaces erected there. It’s amazing to see what controlling the world’s largest diamond deposits gets people – and how fast all of that can fall apart.