Regeneration Songs by Anna Minton

Regeneration Songs by Anna Minton

Author:Anna Minton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media


Figs 13 and 14: Random images of colonial buildings and pieces of architecture on the banners around a working site in Shanghai (top). The depicted buildings, belonging to the Bund, have nothing to share with the location of the redevelopment. In the bottom picture, the promotion of the “Heritage App” in the Battersea Power Station area.

Where the use of “harmony” is concerned, it is worth recalling that “Confucian harmony is not ‘immediate harmony’; it is not the kind of harmony in which Adam and Eve find themselves in their natural state. Confucian harmony is reflective and mediated”,21 a process that requires time and debate. Globalisation by contrast entails the homogenisation of the built environment through processes that neither take time, nor entail debate.

The journey of a building “from desire, to model, to construction, and to occupancy has compressed”,22 eventually occupying a double spread of a brochure. We sell and live a purified image of the city, risk of conflict is discarded, and happiness presented as a given. Here culture is no more than an asset, easy to reproduce, defend, and advertise to feed the real estate market. Global cities work on this logic, and the transnational use of culture is now more than ever a driver of redevelopment able to simultaneously create consent and value.

Endnotes

1 Confucian classic Zuo Zhuan (Chapter Shaogong 20). Cited in: Chenyang Li, “The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism”, Philosophy Compass, 3:3, 2008, pp. 423-435. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00141.x/pdf (Accessed 15 June 2017)

2 Saskia Sassen, “Who Owns Our Cities and Why This Urban Takeover Should Concern Us All”, the Guardian (24th November 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/24/who-owns-our-cities-and-why-this-urban-takeover-should-concern-us-all (Accessed 15 January 2018)

3 On this topic see also Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Blackwell, 1995); Franco Bianchini, “Rethinking the relationship between culture and urban planning”, in François Matarasso and Steven Halls (eds), The Art of Regeneration (March 1996 Conference Papers (Comedia, 1996); A. Whyatt, The Creative Capital: Cultural Industries, Young People and Regeneration in London (Trafalgar Square, 2000).

4 On this topic see also Jean Baudrillard, Il delitto perfetto, Italian edition, trans. Gabriele Piana (Raffello Cortina Editore, 1996); Vilem Flusser, Per una filosofia della fotografia, Italian edition (2006) trans. Chantal Marazia (Mondadori, 2006).

5 “President Xi and the Chinese Dream”, narrated by David Aaronovitch, The Briefing Room, BBC Radio4 (19 October 2017), http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098nfg4 (Accessed 27 October 2017)

6 Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (Boomsbury, 2016)

7 Dallas Rogers, The Geopolitics of Real Estate. Reconfiguring Property, Capital and Rights, (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016)

8 Xuan Wang, Kasper Juffermans and Caixia Du, “Harmony As Language Policy in China: An Internet Perspective”, Language Policy, 15(3), 2015, pp. 299-321. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10993-015-9374-y (Accessed 5 June 2017)

9 Ibid.

10 Li, “The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism”

11 On the way “degenerated utopias” dissimulate oppositions see also Louis Marin, “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia”, in Sam Weber and Henry Sussman (eds) Glyph One (John Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 50-66.

12 Bin Yu, “China’s Harmonious World: Beyond Cultural Interpretations”, Journal of Chinese Political Science, 13:2, 2008, pp.



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