notes at the seminar

over coffee. half of sonal, more of paul, some of pk das

blurry harvey on the dias

the university campus is dismal. it is sad that the potential for a great public space has been reduced to a series of mediocre inward looking rcc boxes with loose scruffy landscaping in between. the auditorium where the lectures were being held was somewhere on a sort of traffic circle in the middle of the campus.

the neil smith lecture today - something about scale. the city as the unit rather than the nation state. and then somewhere towards the end it all became very polemical. “the ruling classes are exploiting the working classes merely because they can.”

paul and me were talking about the role of architecture / urban designers / urban planners complicit in creating the landscapes of ‘dispossession’ and wondering about the fact that the relationships were so much more complex than simple binaries.

sassen yesterday replaced the idea of ‘class’ with the concept of ‘forces’ somehow displacing the political out of the body; and then brought it back in an abstract way by claiming that global capital has to land in tangible space. protest is somehow to be housed in the ironical stance and in the production of knowledge; as well as in filing cases against the powers that be.

harvey was at least for me the most accessible of the three - even though his narrative of the necessity for neoliberalism to create surplus and therefore growth, and the replication of class structures was as grand as the other two, he was able to make it about his everyday life and his experience of cities. most intelligent and brilliant as a speaker.

and here i might as well record the books i read over the past few days. ‘the anesthetics of architecture’ - neal leach, scathing about the obsession with surface and spectacle that seems to plague architectural production ( i know at least 15 architects who claim to be engaged in ‘critical practice who need to read it); ‘the ideology of the aesthetic’ – terry eagleton- a history of notions of what constitutes the category of the aesthetic over the history of western philosophy. a lot of the earlier stuff , kant, schiller, etc. went way above my head, i must say. it became more intelligible to me when i started reading about benjamin and others i had read in the original and was therefore able to understand the analysis of.