UFO+ "Strelka" = "City: between experience and theory"

The Publishing House of New Literary Review, the Institute of Media, Architecture and Design “Strelka” is invited to the International Interdisciplinary Conference “City: between experience and theory” - as part of the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the UFO Publishing House.

The problems of the development of cities are attracted not only by researchers from various disciplines, but also by ordinary residents of modern megacities. Celebrating his twentieth anniversary, the journal and publishing house "UFO" on January 27-28, 2012 holds together with the Institute of Media, Architecture and Design Strelka International Interdisciplinary Conference "City: Between experience and theory." The conference will present different approaches to the study of cities and options for interpretation of their past, present and future.

What are cities and how do they work? Are they only a background for people's activities? How does the "real" city space with the advent of new technologies change? How are the material and symbolic changes in cities woven into memory and experience of social and cultural groups? Why are the debates and conflicts associated with the determination of the directions of urban development rarely become the subject of new research? Do new technologies complicate, and above all the Internet, the representations of the townspeople about close and distant, about what is happening in the city and beyond?

Reports and discussions prepared by Urbanists and Slavists, cities and fashion theorists, cultural geographers and social anthropologists, planners and political activists will be devoted to these and other issues.

Conference participants: Irina Prokhorova (Russia), Elena Trubina (Russia), Steve Pyle (Great Britain), Harvey Milk (USA), Brand Yeo (Singapore), Caroline Schreder (Germany), Ludek Sikora (Czech Republic), Elizabeth Wilson (Great Britain), Sergey Ivanov (Russia), Viktor Vakhstein (Russia), Olga Weinstein (Russia), Olga Matich (USA), Ekaterina Lavrinets (Russia), Oksana Zaporozhets (Russia).

Information partners: Gazeta.ru, "Russia 24", Polit.ru, "Radio Liberty".

The conference will be held on January 27-28, 2012 in the premises of the Strelka Institute ( Bersenevskaya Nab., ​​14, building 5a).

Additional information: Publishing House New Literary Review-Sergey Stepanov Pr@nlo.magazine.ru , 8 (495) 229-91-08; Institute of Media, Architecture and Design "Strelka"-Maria Biryukova, bryukova@strelkainstite.com , 8 (495) 771-74-37.

PROGRAM

Friday, January 27, 2012

10:00 Opening the conference
Introductory word: Irina Prokhorova (magazine "New Literary Review", Russia)

Morning meeting: 10:30 - 14:00

The foundations of urban theory

Moderator: Irina Prokhorova (NLO magazine, Russia)

1. Ulf Hannerz (Stockholm University, Sweden)
City life and cultural formation

2. Harvey Molch (University of New York, USA)
City and things: everyday infrastructure as a threat and help

3 . Elena Trubina (Ural Federal University, Russia)
New conditions for producing knowledge as a challenge for urbanism

Coffee break: 14:00-15:00

Day meeting: 15:00 - 18:00

The daily creativity of the city

Moderator: Lyudmila Alyabyeva (magazine "Fashion Theory", Russia)

1. Elizabeth Wilson (professor, London University of Arts, Great Britain)
Cafe as the house of artists

2. Brand YEO (National University of Singapore)
Ways to cosmopolitanism? Migration of talent/labor/marriage in the city-state Singapore

3. Olga Weinstein (Russian State Humanitarian University, Russia)
Fashionable city bodies: definitions and limits

4. Oksana Zaporozhets (National Research University Higher School of Economics), Ekaterina Lavrinets (Vilnius Technical University named after Gediminas)
Lost, found and redundant things: emotionality of the scenography of everyday city

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Morning meeting: 11:00 - 14:00

City as a text

Moderator: Elena Trubina (Ural Federal University, Russia)

1. Olga Matich (University of Berkeley, USA)
Carting by St. Petersburg: modernism, cities, hypertext

2. Steve Pyle (Open University, Great Britain)
Cities, space and affect

3. Cergea Ivanov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia)
Ancient city in the mirror of an ancient guide

4. Irina Prokhorova (magazine "New Literary Review", Russia)
Inventing the city tradition: modern philanthropist as a European romantic of the 19th century

Coffee break: 14:00-15:00

Day meeting: 15:00 - 18:00

Virtual city

Moderator: Irina Prokhorova (magazine "New Literary Review", Russia)

1. Karolin Schroeder (Technical University of Berlin, Germany)
Combining urban studies and Web 2.0

2. Ludek Sikora (Karlov University, Prague)
Real cities in virtual realities

3. Viktor Vakhstein (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences)
The everyday life of the utopia. Relationship of utopian imagination and everyday world

Conference Languages: Russian, English

Abstracts

The foundations of urban theory

City life and cultural formation
Ulf Hannerz (Stockholm University, Sweden)
Recently, more than half of humanity live in cities. There are many types of cities, and in cities - various habitats and types of citizens. In different periods of the history of mankind, special forms of urbanism arose, so it is necessary to build generalizations about cities and city life with great caution. However, some characteristics are invariably repeated. Citizens must interact with strangers. The accommodation of a large number of people in limited space contributes to the development of greater cultural diversity. Cities also connect people of different origin. These simple facts are enough for anthropologists and other scientists to begin serious scientific research. This report is devoted to urban cultural theory, varieties of cosmopolitanism and concepts of urban danger.

City and things: everyday infrastructure as a threat and help
Harvey Molch (University of New York, USA)
Based on their research on the New York subway, airport security systems, public toilets and other city venues, I will show how the features of public artifacts either help or prevent people from living their usual (and sometimes unusual) lives.

New conditions for producing knowledge as a challenge for urbanism
Elena Trubina (Ural Federal University, Russia)
How do new conditions for the production and spread of knowledge affect our understanding of fundamental urban science? What is its significance and how it is taught today, when not only cities and universities, but theories themselves compete serious for visibility? The message is built on the reinterpretation of the fact that the cultural geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Trift are called "the excitement of the introduction of theoretical ordering." I will offer a number of theoretical considerations about the updated role of urban theory and describe various options for using urbanism within several approaches. I will emphasize the possible mediating role of urban theory, including the location of the intersection between the features of academic theorizing and applied skills, the formation of which students and employers insist.

The daily creativity of the city

Cafe as the house of artists
Elizabeth Wilson (Professor, London University of Arts, Great Britain)
With the beginning of urbanization and industrialization of Western societies, French, and after them other European artists began to flock to new centers of commerce and creativity. The city has become an antithesis of provincial life, and the genius and novelty - antipodes of conformism and stagnation.
Beginning artists of all stripes found themselves in a completely new economic situation, since the just formed art market rapidly replaced the old forms of philanthropy. Thus, the stereotype of the poor genius, sung, for example, in the opera of Puccini Bohemia, was born.
The cafe quickly became the central place of the meeting for this new generation of artists and remained so throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In my report, I will see the evolution of such artistic, or bohemian cafes from the 1830s to the 1930s.

Ways to cosmopolitanism? Migration of talent/labor/marriage in the city-state Singapore
Brand YEO (National University of Singapore)
In many globalized cities of Asia, migration today has become a key way to solve the problems of lack of labor, aging of the population and economic competitiveness. Modern Cingor is an example of a city -state that in its stubborn desire to become cosmopolis, i.e. To occupy an important place in a globalized economy is increasingly dependent on highly and low-skilled labor migration, as well as on the migration of marriage. The report considers a complex system of relations between the state and civil society, to varying degrees and in different ways that open up opportunities or imposing restrictions on the emergence of cosmopolitanism. Although the history of migration and the multi-ore heritage of Singapore laid a potential basis for the cosmopolitan worldview, as the city-state forms its globalized future, more and more contradictions arise along this path.

Fashionable city bodies: definitions and limits.
Olga Weinstein (Russian State Humanitarian University, Russia)
The report will talk about determining the new bodily canon in fashion. The influence of new technologies will be considered-the interaction of the body with modern mobile phones, computers and ai-pods and, respectively, the problems of "cyborgization" of a person. In this regard, there is a change in the usual boundaries of the body and gesture system. New media (Internet, street fashion blogs) also contribute to the expansion of normative ideas about bodily. The influence of the ideology of “diverse” and tolerance is no less significant: before our eyes, the former glamorous bodily canon and the invasion of new “abnormitative” bodies: full, elderly, disabled people are performed.

Lost, found and redundant things: emotionality of the scenography of everyday city
Oksana Zaporozhets (National Research University Higher School of Economics), Ekaterina Lavrinets (Vilnius Technical University named after Gediminas)
Everyday creativity - many situations that turn citizens into active interpreters of existing scenarios of urban life and communication, creators of new scenarios of interaction. The method of considering urban creativity - a microoptic - focuses on significant details that form urban experience, allows us to “open” a network of practices, discourses, and materiality of the city.
“Lost things” is one of the most influential discourses of the modern city, the foundation of urban anxiety and anxiety, suspicion and social distance, legitimizing actions and the very need for numerous control professionals. At the same time, lost things suggest not only strengthening of power scenarios, but also give the townspeople the opportunity to go beyond the control limits established by the boundaries of interactions. Finding things by citizens is a way of its symbolic and material “return” into the system of urban relations, the logic of which is developed in the joint actions of the townspeople. Operations with a thing (for example, its placement in the entourage, emphasizing the loss) and communication regarding the thing (practice practice) contribute to interaction, forming temporary networks of mutual assistance.
The scenarios of the return of things arise both spontaneously and purposefully, taking into account the scenography of urban space and the features of urban communication, constituting the space of the divided experience, saturated with emotions (bitterness from loss, joy from the find, pride for a perfect good deed). Thus, the loss and finding of a thing violate urban indifference and depersonification, contributing to the formation of new proximity and emotionality, provoked by the not experience of a divided life of a traditional community, but the acuteness and coherence of experiences, a change of roles in the process of searching - turning from an indifferent passerby into a sympathetic assistant, creating scenarios of joint actions.

City as a text

Carting by St. Petersburg: modernism, cities, hypertext
Olga Matich (University of Berkeley, USA)
Website is mapping Petersburg ( Mapping Petersburg ), created at the Berkeley University, is a tandem with the book “Petersburg/Petersburg: Roman and city. 1900 - 1921 ". Representing a series of interactive intersecting travels in St. Petersburg of the beginning of the twentieth century, the Website explores the little -known aspects of everyday life, material, political and literary cultures of the imperial capital. In this presentation, the website demonstration will be accompanied by a discussion of hypertext, modernism and narratives in their connection with St. Petersburg of the Modern period and the theories of critics of the twentieth century dedicated to it.

Cities, space and affect
Steve Pyle (Open University, Great Britain)
In this report, I will consider the connection between the city, the experience of the people in city places and the affect. The cities, as you know, to the same extent - the state of consciousness in which they are governmental, infrastructure and economic formations. Attempts to understand the city as a subjective state often consisted of urban discourses, representations and imaginary, which was accompanied by an understanding of the city as a text that can be “read” as a forest of signs and symbols. On the contrary, the “turn to affect” in the social sciences called for taking into account the non -represented aspects of urban life and experience. One aspect of an non -reporting approach is a focus on the materiality of cities, the other (and partly related to the first) - increased attention to affect. Enough attempts to look for affect in everyday experience, interactions and etiquette of urban life (as Zimmel wanted) are quite accepted.
In my report, I would like to look at city life and experience from a slightly different angle: by analyzing the film “Boy in Las Vegas” (The Hangover, 2009). The film talks about three men trying to remember how they spent the previous night. The film actively uses the reputation of Las Vegas as a city of sin, in which everything can happen anything, but in which everything that happened becomes the norm, because "what will happen in Las Vegas will remain there." The question is, is it really - contrary to this statement - the film says something about the real city experience of people and their emotional, affective life. In particular, the film emphasizes the daily surrealism of urban life, but to no less the need for the reconstruction of various city experiments contrary to our pessimistic idea of ​​their absurdity and our inability to determine what really happened.

Ancient city in the mirror of an ancient guide
Cergea Ivanov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia)
To our time, two almost identical guide to Rome from the second quarter of the 4th century have been preserved. N.E. They seem to be intended for people, with the city of unfamiliar ones, and contain elements that would look quite appropriate in any modern guide. Nevertheless, a huge number of information both in “Notation” and in “Curiosum” cannot be understood by the outsider: they are too immersed in the intra -city discourse. A hundred years later, a similar guide was created for the new capital, Constantinople. What will be the ratio between the information that are focused on the alien from the outside, and those that reflect the background knowledge of the townspeople themselves, an slurred alien?

Inventing the city tradition: modern philanthropist as a European romantic of the 19th century
Irina Prokhorova (magazine "New Literary Review", Russia)
Attempts to raise the depressive industrial regions that we got from the Soviet past are prompted for great obstacles, the main of which is the lack of urban cultural mythology, and with it the local identity of the inhabitants of these odious urbanized territories. The message will be devoted to how an attempt by one charitable foundation to develop a cultural support program in the Norilsk polar city resulted in anthropological field research and involved its experts in the quasi-literary activity of the aspirations of European romantics at the beginning of the 19th century. They took up the invention of tradition, i.e. The creation of local folklore and cultural history, on the basis of which the humanization of urban space and the consolidation of the local community became possible.

Virtual city
Combining urban studies and Web 2.0
Caroline Schreder (Technical University of Berlin, Germany)
Virtual social media, thanks to the web 2.0 tools, in principle, open more broad access to information and participation in various areas of life. In the practice of urban planning, this is manifested in the virtual presence of many municipal and other managerial networks in which professional information circulates and where it is almost widespread standard, discussion forums, blogs, Twitter tapes, photo and videos, sites of social networks. All this makes the activities and solutions of experts visual. In addition to this, Web 2.0 also allows you to collect information from, for example, users or citizens for further use in urban work, replenishing these information of the database of digital (auto) biographical archives and Internet research. The third possible option for using Web 2.0 is the unification of all interested parties, citizens, representatives of various age and social groups, as well as researchers for a collective and interactive way of discussing plans and making decisions.

In the field of urban studies, similar processes are observed. Since many urban disciplines (geography, sociology, political sciences, economics, psychology, anthropology, urban planning, ecology) are exploring social networks, places, innovative processes, as well as communication and civic activity, they began to collect and disseminate information, as well as combine various audiences within their research projects using new forms of interactive and feedback. The most noticeable areas of use of Web 2.0 tools in the study are GIS, or virtual models of cities used for imitation and visualization, as well as virtual social activity (Eparticipation), and various tools for the interaction of various communities, including researchers and managers.

Although the Web 2.0 applications have made many Internet tools and technologies available to large groups of users, they changed both the professional and amateur perception of the city, locus and a specific place. Today, the main subject of research is not so much network technologies as various possible options for using Web 2.0. And when the Web 2.0 tools were included in research projects, the research itself changed. In quantitative urban studies, new and disparate data can be analyzed as geustration tools tie people and types of activity to their specific location. In high -quality urban studies, the web 2.0 tools have not yet been studied. In the scientific literature, single descriptions of Case Studies are most often found with the practical use of Web 2.0 tools, but systematic approaches are almost absent. Even fewer examples of integration of Web 2.0 applications into research projects. At the same time, such new research methods have developed as digital stories, online focus groups and a reasonable theory (Grounded Theory) using the Atlas Ti program. New disciplines have been formed, such as: virtual anthropology and E-planning.

In the report, I prove that integrating Web 2.0 applications into research plans is useful for urban studies (including planning). I will also discuss their consequences for urban studies and theoretical developments.

Real cities in virtual realities
Ludek Sikora (Karlov University, Prague)
Understanding of cities is due to a set of ideas, concepts and theories formulated on the basis of urban experience of specific cities, rooted in specific geographical, historical and cultural contexts. The Chicago School of Social Ecology and the Los Angeles School of Critical and Cultural City Studies play a noticeable role in the study of paradigmatic symbolic representations of urban processes and structures. They offer virtual socially designed reality, on the basis of which urbanists explore real city life in its development. How useful are these schools for understanding modern urban development in other social contexts? Are they able to explain changes in the cities of former socialist countries? Do these theories/models of growth and restructuring of cities take into account those new challenges that are associated with the globalization of social relations and representations, the folding of multiple identities and parallel city worlds? Can they describe the dialectical connection between the virtual realities of the representations of cities and the materiality of real urban life?

The everyday life of the utopia. Relationship of utopian imagination and everyday world
Victor Vakhstein (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences)
For a resident of Moscow, the problem of utopia is the problem of everyday life. Although the “utopia” etymologically involves the initial unrealistic of the project (a place that is not, but which could be called “me-topopi”), the history of mankind is a series of attempts to implement utopian plans. Today's Moscow does not live at the "junction of utopia and history", but at the intersection of partially implemented utopian projects.
What happens to utopia when a rational plan is faced with everyday social practices? How the initial “code” of the utopian imagination is transformed, plunging into the viscous environment of non -reflexive actions (called the “supreme reality” called William James). And how are our ways of thinking about the everyday world associated with the initial influence of the utopian imagination on the language of social science? We will try to answer these questions during our report.