Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

In Caracas, these two scenes lie side by side. The developers’ version of the city, and the people’s version: barrios built over 25-30 years, a flexible city that is constantly adapting itself to the growth of surroundings and families, plugging in to existing electricity and water supplies, and adding rooms and floors so that the mountain feels like one big house.

How important is the infrastructure in the informal city and how is it built?
People cut out parts of the mountain, and then put the land on the other side of the hole, creating a horizontal parcel which is used to make the first hut. Then later on a concrete structure is built ontop of these foundations. This unstable frame is later filled with the available block leaving steel rods poking out: a symbol for continued growth and construction.

As buildings are getting taller, the steel rods and concrete…

As previously posted, we are currently reading Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory. It has a sexy subtitle: Space | politics | affect, and having just come off of a quarter of tangling with Spinoza, thinking that everything is ‘political’ in general, and being in a program that is decidedly spatially oriented, what’s not to like? There are plenty of good things, to be sure. Some of it feels very familiar; but in many respects, he has a quietly political- political, not Political- message that is important to hear out. (We discussed in our last meeting that the chapters thus far seem to lack a critical, political stance, but perhaps this emerges in the third installment…) We are only a third of the way through the book, so I’m going focus on a particular chapter. Given that the chapters were written at different points as journal articles, and subsequently compiled together…

At the Antipode blog, Marijn Nieuwenhuis has an interesting post on Urban Geopolitics in the wake of the London Olympics. He mentions the Territorial Support Group’s ‘Total Policing’ map I linked to a few weeks back. Marijn discusses Foucault and Stephen Graham among others.

A subsequent piece at the Antipode blog provides some additional reading suggestions.