YOU ARE INVITED!

WHEN: 20-24 September or 25-28 October 2011

WHERE: TBC

1^st PROPOSAL DEADLINE: 05 March 2012 (early applications welcome)

NOTIFICATIONS: 31 March 2012

FORMS: Online applications available January 2012 onwards. 

“There is no other event of this kind, anywhere!”

This Is Not A Gateway, an independent organisation that brings together critically engaged emerging urbanists, is seeking submissions for its 4th annual festival. Proposals are welcome from anybody whose point of reference is ‘the city’. Proposal Form can be found here.

The festival is independent, rigorous and productive - an open platform; an arena for criticality as well as propositions. As a result of the continuing actuate social, economic, democratic, environmental and spatial deficits/crisis’s and revolutions, we are seeking submissions from individuals, groups (and classes) from across the globe that are addressing the following topics:

• The Corporation - Financial Districts | The City | CBDs  
• Urban Industry and its Post-Critical Condition - more
• Who Dares Wins Urbanism  
• Design, Design, Design 
• The Legalities of Space 
• Language Frames Thought  
• Revolutionary Space 
• The Maid's Entrance
• Olympics

Submissions are sought from a lived knowledge/experience perspective, as well as from the widest range of disciplines. Previous formats have included exhibitions, roundtable discussions, soapboxes, films, walks, presentations, book and project launches. Previous festival programmes can be viewed here, here and here. Photographs from the previous three festivals can be viewed 2010, 2009 and 2008.

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The Maid's Entrance 

On the 10^th of May 2010 Athiraman Kannan took off his shoes, placed his diary beside them and then jumped to his death from the 147^th floor of world’s tallest building; the Burj Khalifa, the skyscraper he cleaned. It is understood he was denied access to his passport and holidays by the agency he worked for, preventing him from returning to India to visit his recently deceased brother’s family. Athiraman Kannan, lived on the outskirts of the city, in conditions that are described by NGO’s as a ‘camp’, where migrant workers live in extremely high density accommodation and are forced to share basic resources, including sanitary facilities. Often, reports Human Rights Watch and other NGO’s, workers take loans with employment agencies to secure and transport them to distant parts of the world in order to secure work and income for the families they leave behind. When they arrive the jobs are often paid significantly less than promised, passports taken, expenses such as food and housing arranged and pressure to pay debts increased. Was Athiraman Kannan’s jump from this spectacular tower, so soon after it opened, a desperate call for justice for the lives of tens of millions living in these bonded labour realities?

The title of the strand ‘Maid’s Entrance’ is as a result of the new urban landscape being conceived, designed and built to accommodate a property owner’s desire to separate entrances for maids, domestic servants and other bonded labour. This includes basements being dug out in the London Borough of Camden, in order to separate foreign domestic servants. Through investigating the housing conditions of migrant workers, there is the opportunity to propose new realities, to create a new union of workers? 

The Corporation - Financial Districts 

Since the decline of European communism twenty years ago Financial Districts have been built with rapid speed and noteworthy similarity across the globe. Desired, celebrated, ignored, distrusted or transformed into sites of protest and revolution – what can we learn about the most avant-garde spaces of modern capitalism? What does this mean for the future of how we might conceive of cities and our everyday lives? Are financial districts islands floating separate to the city, connected like an archipelago with other sites of finance rather than their locality? Why have they been the focus of protests?

The Urban Industry & its Post-Critical Condition

Is the latest apparatus of capitalists not just financialism and culture but the process of building, demolishing, re-building, management and promotion of cities? Following Adorno and Horkheimer's 20th Century Culture Industry and Bourdieu's Cultural Capital propositions, is it helpful to interrogate 21st century cities through the prism of both ideas brought together under the thesis of Urban Industry and its Post-Critical Condition?

How has it been possible for firms to work for dictatorships? Is the Urban Industry is fostering an environment that rejects social critique and critical philosophy. What has the role of the Urban Industry been in perpetuating inequalities? Does the Urban Industry project its actions and approach as politically neutral or post-political, while in fact perpetuating the intrinsically political and partisan ideology underlying contemporary business practices and market techniques? Does a condition of post-criticality in the Urban Industry facilitate unquestioning acquiescence and contribution to the drivers of present-day spatial injustice?

More.

Who Dares Wins Urbanism

‘Who Dares Wins’ (Qui audet adipiscitur) is the motto for at  least nine Special Forces. Who Dares Wins propels notions of opportunism, expedience, realpolitik, advantage, high risk, even recklessness and a cutthroat attitude. Is it a prism, which could assist in understanding the conception, production and administration of cities? 

Are the ongoing attempts to enclose the commons an act of opportunism? Are the fires that destroy buildings standing in the way of new developments an act of expedience? Are projects like The Big Society a daring manoeuvre attempting to compel the poor to carry even more burdens for the rich?  Was the first claim to the concept of land and property ownership just a daring risk? Are wars a cutthroat attempt to re-boot the building industry? Are the planning laws in divided cities attempts at strategic advantage.

Language Frames Thought 

When did regeneration, renewal, community organising, planning and even radical, shift, becoming part of the lexicon of property developers, their pr’s and the policies of neo-liberal governments? How are lexicons colonised and re-appropriated? How are lexicons formed? Can a series of new lexicons be co-produced and subsequently released at the festival, re-orientating language, pulling again away once again from the colonisation from sponsored charities, corporations and governments? Can a new series of lexicons be forged that will reflect the current and future ambitions of a post-capitalist and just city?

This Is Not A Gateway will to bring a range of formal disciplines (linguists, social theorists, public relations etc) together with interested people who will be the end of the festival release the first edition of a new agitational urban lexicon.

Registration will open in August 2012.

Revolutionary Space 

The most recent people's revolutions (Tunisia, Egypt) seem to an outsider, to have speed up as a result of an intersection between internet information technologies (wikileaks, twitter, facebook, online news sites etc) and marches, demonstrations along with the occupation of city streets and symbolically important squares. What are the spatial dimensions to contemporary revolutions? Does the privatisation of the public realm aid or hinder the potential for revolution? Do these spaces need to be read through a post-colonial prism?

Design, Design, Design

This element of the programme is intended as an antidote to the London Design Festival by creating an arena for critical design thinkers and makers to come together and re-design design through interrogation, agitation and provocation.

Topics that could be explored might include; the history of 'city design', smart cities by corporations, the contemporary ontology of urban design lexicon, design festival as global branding mechanism and tourist destination, the colonisation of public galleries and space by design festivals, critiques of current trends such as sustainable design, the designer as genius, how the creative industries and their cultural hubs/quarters are ushering in a neo-colonialism via patents and intellectual property?

Importantly, if design could be re-designed, re-theorised, re-proposed for the 21st Century what could it be?

Legalities of Space

What today is law and the practice of law currently undertaking in and on cities? Is the city being understood as set of legal requirements and by-laws? How has neo-liberalism and capitalist state harnessed law, for example to occupy, produce, manage and redefine space whilst propelling concepts of private property? Should the legal system be considered as part of the Urban Industry? Does law have an urban bias? Urban based rights movements such as the votes for women, anti-colonial victories, civil rights in America, land reform, slave-led defiance and revolt, the battles for academic independence and freedoms of sexuality, the eating away from within of totalitarian communism etc transformed levels of inequalities once they became law. What propositions are there today for transformation of inequalities? What of critical law practice and the city today? Is there the potential for spatial justice (Soja 2010)? Might the memory, rituals and laws of the commons be re-booted?

Examples of topics & questions for Financial District thematic:   

• Critical insight into the planning of recent financial districts: Moscow City, Sandton - Johannesburg, Washington D.C, Canary Wharf - London, Barwa -Doha, La Défense – Paris, Santa Fe -Mexico City, Lagos Island, Tel Aviv, Beirut Central District, Costanera Center- Santiago, Panama Financial District, Seoul City, City of Makati – Manilla, Potsdamer Platz – Berlin, World Financial Centre – Shanghai.

• Interrogation of the urban design principles and accepted logic of forthcoming financial districts: King Abdullah Financial District- Riyadh, Gujarat International Finance Tec-City – Ahmedabad, Abdali New Downtown – Amman, Yeouido – Seoul, Almaty Financial District – Kazakhstan, Istanbul International Financial Center – Istanbul.

• New perspectives, geographies and mappings of historical centres of finance – Uruk, Ur, Athens, London, Detroit, Hamburg etc.

• Projects investigating the logic of the ‘global cities race’ – insight into the competition to be at the centre of these new organising and political structures, which are predicted to outmaneuver nation states. 

• Research that highlights the unique legal-spatial framework in which many financial districts operate - along with the distinctive legal structures of the corporations themselves.

• Insights into labour. Mapping who works in these districts, in which jobs, what are the pay scales? Where do these people live and how do they get into their workplace? Who runs the city after 9pm? What are their day (night) lives like? What kind of spaces do they occupy? How is the City used differently at night?

• Evaluations and critique of philanthropic projects, people and institutions (past and present) undertaken by the institutions of financial districts. Perspectives on patronage, giving and trickle-down theory in cities.

• Insight into art, commerce and culture. What are the policies for buying and collecting art? Tours of the remarkable art collections housed in the offices. Evaluations of company lead and sponsored cultural projects.

• Office design – the psychology underpinning contemporary office layout; Japanese office layout and office ladies, hot-desking utilised by business consultant companies, ‘at their office’ pioneered by accountancy companies, the location of the ‘ejection seat’, in house cafes and break out spaces, the use glass to create notions of ‘The Transparent City’.

• Sites of violence, suicide and murder. A pre-eminent target for terrorists, including the recent destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, the death of Ian Tomlinson killed at the G20 Protests by City of London Police in 2009, ‘Financial Suicide’ – the use of tall buildings (often the same ones) in busy financial centres to assist suicide.

• Interrogation of the pre-eminent ideas/themes/logics/emotions driving the development and ongoing policy support of Financial Districts– for example: Liberty by economics, There Is No Alternative, Aesop’s The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs, economic Darwinism, The Market, Wealth Creation, Creative Destruction, Trickle down, transactional humanity and contractual relations, Masters of the Universe, Advantage, Creative Clusters and The Edifice Complex.

• Representations of ‘downtowns’ in film, literature, visual art and popular culture.

• Cultural studies and ‘the city’. How contemporary, queer, post-colonial, geographic, psychoanalytic and feminist discourses can inform our thinking of these districts.

• Guided official and alternate historic and contemporary tours of financial districts.

• The emptiness, abandonment and rural-like feel of Financial Districts – on weekends and after 7pm weekdays. Is there a secret life in the city? Underground clubs a weekday worker wouldn’t know about?

• Projects deciphering/re-interpreting the lexicon and codes used by people who work in Financial Districts.

• Financial District as ongoing site of protest, rebellion, micro-resistance, revolution and potential. 

• Work that draws out the peculiarities of these spaces; Streets designed so waiting ‘drivers’ can polish their cars, taxi’s with engines and metres running for hours, the epidemic of men wearing pink shirts and pink ties, the security guards that wear replica police uniforms, the coded names of modern bars.

• Financial Districts as the creator of fringes or as the edge space of cities themselves. CDBs as ‘a cliff’ or as ‘a precipice’; The City as ‘a peak’ to navigate around. Investigations of what it means to look up/down and into/over.

 • Presentation of corporations/business ‘family trees’ located in a CBD and  ‘organisational family trees’ of the developers building any particular city’s CBD.

• Archaeology of underground spaces – the spaces in which computer servers, power stations, isolated Internet cables and freelance financial algorithm engineers and developers inhabit.

• Projects, theories and ideologies that propose new understandings, logics, references and uses for these unique spatial districts recognisable around the world.

. . .