Re-Imagining the City: Art, Globalization and Urban Spaces

Chapter 1

Situating Art, Urban Space and Globalization

Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp

RMIT University

Predictions and Questions

The prediction is that 70 per cent of the world’s population will be urban by 2050. What will this world be like and what kinds of spaces will humans be making for themselves? Is it possible to imagine such a future if the present reveals itself only partially and the past is soon forgotten? Can art and design play a role in defining the urban and identifying relationships with it? These questions and more inform this collection, which brings together diverse approaches to re-imagining what cities might be like, or are like, and how humans may inhabit such spaces in conditions of escalating urbanization. If the human subject has been undergoing transformations of identity as Homo economicus in rationalist forces of the global knowledge economy, or Homo digitus through economies of cyber-networks, then new questions need to be asked about being human in such a world and about the kinds of communities, identities and relationships that twenty-first-century urban and global conditions are inscribing. How does the human subject relate to time, space, place and being, now and in the urban future?

Re-imagining the City: Art, globalization and urban spaces raises these questions, and more, for discussion. It investigates art as an innovative, symbolic and material expression of global and urban conditions, and considers the critical disputes characterizing globalization and urbanization of the twenty-first century. It considers how contemporary processes of globalization are transforming cultural experiences in urban space, and how cultural productions in art, design, architecture and communications media may be contributing to the re-imagining of place and identity. Accounts of art forms, projects and events offer a way into understanding the micro-politics of local and global processes of urbanization through which cities may be finding their shape and distinctive characters.

In the economies of twenty-first-century globalization there is an emphasis on creativity as a key driver of innovative production. This suggests that different forms of art, architecture, design and media communications have a significant role to play in the way cities are imagined and inhabited. Analysis of this terrain shows that such creative enterprises carry the potential to activate spaces in which they are situated and these activations can, in turn, raise questions about the politics of place and its inhabitants.

Globalization

Over the past twenty or more years there have been many predictions about the passage and changes of globalization. Accounts of globalization provide different ways of understanding the economic, social and cultural changes and environmental benefits, or harms, of a global world. In 2006, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz predicted that ‘[m]aking globalization work will not be easy’. Stiglitz had just left the World Bank and had seen at first hand the uneven economic distributions and how poverty was increasing, and he was considering that the process of haphazard changes in response to global crises was not the best way to change the global system (Stiglitz 2006: xi). This raises the question of whether the global system is something that can be qualified and changed. Is it something that can be understood through providing organizing accounts and terms, such as deterritorialization and hybridization, as offered by Pieterse (2009) and Tomlinson (1999)? Or is it a more ‘abstract empire’ as George Soros had suggested (1998), a diffused condition that cannot be grasped as a whole and therefore cannot be fully realized, understood or regulated? However it may be articulated and envisaged, there can be no doubt that globalization is a contradictory term accompanied by a myriad of theoretical accounts and practical investigations to give it form and purpose.

The cultural processes of contemporary globalization are of particular interest in this collection. However, the cultural cannot be divorced from issues of the economy as today there is a conflation of economic and cultural frameworks by which the social is understood. Cultural production, including art, is inevitably connected to state and economic apparatus. Since the advent of the digital, the globalized world is an interconnected space of instant communications, consumer networks and financial patterns, in which local actions can have global effects. This brings the local and global into alliances unprecedented in previous centuries. In writing on cultural globalization in the late 1990s, globalization theorist John Tomlinson drew attention to the interlinking states that have come to characterize the twenty-first century:

A world of complex connectivity (a global market-place, international fashion codes, an international division of labour, a shared eco-system) thus links the myriad small everyday actions of millions with the fates of distant, unknown others and even with the possible fate of the planet. ... The way in which these ‘cultural actions’ become globally consequential is the prime sense in which culture matters for globalization.

(Tomlinson 1999: 25–26)

Thus local actions can have global effects and, likewise, the global system has an impact on the local – an important underlying theme in this book. The argument here is that art, architecture, landscape architecture, various forms of design, cultural events, media technologies and communication practices have a role to play in the making of place in these conditions. Further, the sense of belonging in urban space can be re-imagined through art in its widest form at the local level to raise questions of global significance for space, place and human habitation.

Aims and Approaches

This book is considering the role of creative practices and their potential for opening new understandings of urban space. Art is discussed in an expanded, aesthetic field to include fine art, architecture, design, cultural events and media communications. These aesthetic processes have the potential to activate and imagine the human subject and its relationship to place. The aim is to bring recognition to place as a physical environment or a set of social or cultural relationships, as well as a perceptual and personal space. A re-imagining process can be at work which can be identifying more than the immediate surroundings. Place in this sense can be more than spatial. This process may open new awareness and understanding of place as a personal or political site or set of conditions. Place can be equally psychic, historical, emotional, geographical or physical (Cresswell 2005). Artworks are therefore important signs and signifiers in and of place (Kwon 2004; Lippard 1998). As discussed in a book on contemporary jewellery (Baines et al. 2010), place is the topos of human habitation in which perceptions of the human subject in relation to local and global issues can be activated, with the artwork acting as a trigger point for new ways of seeing, relating and experiencing.

Through a series of narratives, and innovative accounts, underpinned by theoretical and philosophical commentary, this book investigates and re-casts how art and other forms of cultural production can work in relation to the urban, and how cities can be understood in this rapidly urbanizing world of today. Through a series of empirical examples, the city emerges as a multifaceted and diverse space. While attention is drawn to the specificity of these examples, the commonalities that exist between contemporary urban spaces are also evident. Terms such as ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ are no longer useful, if they ever were, for understanding the complex relations between local, urban sites and global interactions. Contemporary cities are undergoing significant transformations and growth, and new frameworks are required in order to understand these changes: new more flexible understandings of place (Massey 1994) and global/local relationships (Robertson 1992). The concept of ‘cities’ also requires reconsideration to take account of their different lineages and different histories, particularly in light of the different characteristics of cities in the regions of Asia-Pacific and Europe, from which this book draws its material and finds its critical edge. Cities that were based previously on manufacturing are characterized now by informational, service and creative industries. It could be said that where they were once grey and bleak, filled with factories and dark smoke stacks, they become vibrant and alive with colourful communities. However, this description may be too simplistic for it can be said also that where they were once alive with local culture, they become globally repetitive, sterile and one-dimensional. Furthermore, in lieu of factory smoke, escalating forms of environmental pollution by way of plastic and polystyrene, the by-products of the new creative cultures, increasingly mar the edges of idealistic dreams of progress or betterment.

The concern is to identify, understand and re-imagine these urban configurations better and, through the re-imagining processes, to articulate how creative enterprises operate in the urban, and how new forms of knowledge, perceptions and understandings about cities and their environs may arise. The nature of cultural production is such that as much as it can shape and contribute to the discourse and aesthetic and cultural experience of cities, it is simultaneously shaped through the social, political and economic contours of the urban condition. The proposition is that diverse forms of cultural and creative production have a key role to play in identifying processes, and in the interrogation of the conditions in which cultural production occurs. Such forms can aid the formation and transference of knowledge in urban spaces; and through these forms of cultural production processes of urbanization may be better understood. The aim is to explore the shaping powers of aesthetic production and aesthetic knowing and modes of being in the rapidly-urbanizing world of the twenty-first century.

The book grew from a symposium on Art and Globalization: Urban Futures and Aesthetic Relations, which was held at RMIT University, Melbourne, in August 2009. The symposium was organized by the School of Art in association with the RMIT Global Cities Research Institute, Globalization and Culture programme, and convened by Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp, the two editors of this book. The aim of the symposium was to investigate the impacts of globalization by focusing on aesthetic relations as a key conduit for the expression of, and contribution to, the transformations of cities in context of twenty-first-century globalization. The papers presented at the symposium came from a range of research interests including fine art, art history, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, urban geography, media communications, design, landscape architecture, built environment and planning. Similar transdisciplinary research is informing this present book, which draws together diverse disciplines and project examples to highlight the complex interactions in contemporary processes of globalization as experienced in the urban context.

Context and Literature

The research in this collection both complements and enlarges previous literature in the field of art and the urban. In devising and selecting themes for this book, the editors were mindful of the range of literature in specific fields of urbanization, and globalization, as they set out to reposition art, place and the city in the light of discourses of both urbanization and globalization.

Urbanization, in the context of globalization, is an expanding area of research in the humanities. However, the focus is rarely around art practice in urban spaces, notable exceptions being work by Malcolm Miles such as Cities and Cultures (2007) and Art, Space and the City (1997), and Miles’ work with Tim Hall, Interventions (2005). Other texts introduce art practice in context of globalization, but not specifically in the urban context. These include, for example, Globalization and Contemporary Art, Jonathan Harris (2011); Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, Marsha Meskimmon (2010); Art and Globalization, James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska and Alice Kim (2010); Belonging and Globalisation: Critical essays in contemporary art and culture, Kamal Boullata (2008); and Over Here: International perspectives on art and culture, Gerardo Mosquero and Jean Fisher (2007). Re-imagining the City takes the theme of urbanization further through attention to aesthetic production in relation to the urban.

A seminal text for researchers concerned with space and place is Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991); and on aesthetics, the much cited work by Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (2002). Then there are books written specifically on the politics of aesthetics and design, such as Tony Fry’s Design as Politics (2011); and those collating research on the transformations of urban settings, such as Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne’s urban waterfront, Kim Dovey (2005), or locally-produced books profiling specific city regeneration projects, such as, NewcastleGateshead: The making of a cultural capital, Whetstone et al. (2009). These, and more, raise important questions to do with city regeneration, cultural capital and aesthetics and the way forward for twenty-first-century urban planning and design.

Academic research institutions have proliferated over the past decade, focusing on changes to the urban environment in a global context. RMIT University, Melbourne, has two such research institutes, the Global Cities Research Institute and the Design Research Institute. These institutes support a wide range of global and transdisciplinary research projects, which lead to events and publications exploring the role of art, culture and design in urban environments. Examples include Outer Site: The intercultural projects of RMIT Art in Public Space, Geoff Hogg and Kristen Sharp (2010) profiling public art projects in international, educational settings; and Urban Aesthetics, Elizabeth Grierson (forthcoming), applying Heidegger’s philosophies to urban dwelling. Re-imagining the City extends themes raised in those books, by focusing on a range of examples and dialogues between art and the city.

The field of globalization is rich with literature giving accounts of globalization and global studies, many of which have informed the writers in this collection. Most notably, there is the work by Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political ideologies from the French Revolution to the War on Terror (2008) and Globalism: The new market ideology (2002); Paul James, Globalization and Culture, Vols.1-4 (2010), Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing theory back in (2006), and with Tom Nairn, Global Matrix: Nationalism, globalism and state-terrorism (2005); and Joseph Stiglitz, who brings an economic perspective to issues of globalization with his Making Globalization Work (2006) and Globalization and its Discontents (2002).

Despite these diverse accounts of globalization, the emphasis has been on the economic and political dimensions of global processes. The cultural dimensions of globalization have been relatively minimal. Critical exceptions include, Understanding Cultural Globalization by Paul Hopper (2007), Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s Globalization and Culture: Global mélange (2009), Globalization and Culture by John Tomlinson (1999) and Jan Aart Sholte’s Globalization: A critical introduction (2000). In these, the emphasis is largely on European and North American perspectives. Re-imagining the City allows for a multi-faceted exploration of the diverse interactions of globalization through a range of examples from the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, alongside Europe.

From the 1990s, some seminal texts on globalization appeared, most notably Anthony Giddens’ series on BBC, Globalisation (1999); The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open society endangered by George Soros (1998); Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (1996); Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson’s Globalization in Question: The international economy and the possibilities of governance (1996); The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells (1996); Roland Robertson’s Globalization, Social Theory and Global Culture (1992); and works by Mike Featherstone, including, Undoing Culture: Globalization, postmodernism and identity (1995), Cultural Theory and Cultural Change (1992) and Global Culture: Nationalism, globalization & modernity (1990).

Re-imagining the City draws from this literature to situate art practices in global urban spaces and, thus, contribute to a re-thinking of identity in the context of global dynamics. The cities examined here include Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Auckland, Port Moresby, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Osaka, Jogjakarta, El Paso-Juarez, Liverpool, London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. While there are not many books with a combined focus on art, globalization and urbanism, those published particularly in the 1990s and earlier 2000s tend to focus on the trans-Atlantic region. This book determines to work through wider transdisciplinary examples and interpretations of aesthetic and cultural concerns in urban environments of other regions.

Themes and Structure

There are a number of recurring themes in this collection situating discourses of globalization, urbanization, aesthetics, meaning-making, place and processes of re-imagining. From this starting point the book is intended to enliven and bring together discourses of the global knowledge economy and aesthetic interventions in public spaces in an understandable fashion.

Throughout there is a concern for the ways art and aesthetics may function in the quotidian spaces of urban dwelling. Cities can be considered as mediating spaces with the theme of aesthetics drawing attention to the value of knowing ourselves and the world through perceptual relations. Through art works and projects, specific responses in the present may come into close relations with historical precedents and possible futures. Thus, to know aesthetically is to perceive and understand, through the senses, the shaping contexts of our experiences of time and place, self and world. Taking the concept of aesthetics into proximity with domains of cultural practice in the social sphere is a way of bringing together the kinds of experience, attitudes, ideas and products that are considered politically to be connected with the arts, creativity and innovation as drivers of contemporary global economies. The concern for such drivers is something that the writers in this collection investigate in a range of ways, with particular interest in aesthetics as an activating force and a way of bringing attention to processes of place-making.

The book is organized thematically. It starts with a foreword authored by Manfred Steger, Professor of Global Studies and Director of the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne, followed by this chapter, Situating Art, Urban Space and Globalization by Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp, which serves to introduce and situate key themes and approaches positioning the collection in context of other literature to show how it both complements and adds to research in the field. This is followed by twelve invited chapters, and a concluding account by cultural theorist, Chris Hudson, responding to the collection as a whole.

The twelve chapters following the introduction are organized into four sections in order to highlight key themes. The first thematic section is ‘Art and Urban Place’, followed by ‘Transforming Spaces and Experiences of the City’, then ‘Exchange and Transaction’ and finally ‘Interventions in Public Space’. The contributors are experienced writers and researchers in the art, design, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, and media communications fields. Through the perspectives of different disciplinary experiences, their accounts deal in diverse ways with processes of re-imagining the city. Some draw from sustained engagement with urban-based, cultural research, others from practice-led fields of art, design, architecture and communications, and others through a more philosophical lens. Together they bring new focus on pressing issues facing the rapidly-urbanizing world of today.

The contributors canvass contemporary examples and experiences, thus lending immediacy to the writing. It is to be hoped that this will appeal to a range of readers. The projects demonstrate the interconnections between local and global concerns, and this, in turn, provides a lens for considering how art events and artefacts can contribute towards a re-thinking process in order to re-imagine what urban spaces may be like in the future.

The first section, ‘Art and Urban Place’ groups together the work of Malcolm Miles, Tom Barker and Larissa Hjorth, to focus on different ways of positioning art as a creative and philosophical enterprise in city spaces. It starts with Malcolm Miles’ ‘Art and Culture: The global turn’, which in some ways sets the scene for many of the chapters to follow. Miles reconsiders the relations between art and globalization through the rise of culturally-led strategies for urban renewal from the 1980s to the 2000s. He reconsiders the conditions leading to the financial-services crisis of 2008, and the interconnectedness of culturally-led urban renewal and expanding global markets, which saw a re-coding of cities as cultural destinations. Miles raises important questions to do with property and power in the rise of corporate spaces in what he calls ‘the more brutal environment of urban change post-crash’, and art’s role in the gentrification processes. He focuses on the work of Park Fiction, an artist-squatter group in the St Pauli district of Hamburg, Germany, to ask about a new role for resistant and activist art, or at least a reclaiming of something of the spirit of a former, radical, avant-garde, but in newly-theorized and socially-grounded ways.

Tom Barker in Chapter 3, ‘Catalysing our Cities: Architecture as the new alchemy for creative enterprise’, considers urban design for cities arguing for the need to create the conditions for cultural meaning and value rather than trying to pre-determine those conditions. In particular he focuses on the opportunities for architecture in the creative economies of globalization to embrace innovative notions of practice and production, drawing on a concept of alchemy. He sees architectural design as a catalyst for the sustainability of future cities and, thus, in effect, he is offering architecture the opportunity to be the new alchemy of enterprise, situated between art, craft and science. Barker argues for small-scale, creative interventions that can have a significant and positive impact on urban spaces at a neighbourhood level enabling urban vibrancy through cultural production. He argues for a greater understanding of the role of architecture to leverage design for creative enterprise. This will go beyond the tradition of consultancy practice to activate an urban vibrancy in the present and future state of rapid urbanization.

This section concludes with Larissa Hjorth, Chapter 4, ‘The Place of the Urban: Intersections between mobile and game cultures’, which investigates the way notions of the urban are contested through the advent of cyberspace and new forms of mobility emerging through mobile media and gaming technology. Hjorth examines how mobile gaming creates the potentiality of play as an art form that transforms urban spaces into play places, while reinforcing the significance of place in cultural knowledge and production. By contextualizing the rise of urban mobile gaming in relation to urban theory and spatial experience, and a case study of second generation, or gamification, of LBS games in Shanghai, China, the chapter maps how mobile technologies re-define the ways in which urban place and locality are experienced.

The next section, ‘Transforming Spaces and Experiences of the City’ includes chapters by Kristen Sharp, Ashley Perry and Maggie McCormick which focus on mediating processes of art in experiencing and re-imagining the urban. The section begins with Chapter 5 by Kristen Sharp, ‘Driving the Sonic City’, which explores embodied experiences of the city and the multiple and complex spatial interactions that define urban spaces. These processes are mediated by technologies, such as the car. The chapter focuses on the work of Rogues’ Gallery, two Japanese sound artists who create interactive performances for audiences while driving a car. The work of Rogues’ Gallery amplifies the sonic, visual, and embodied experiences of urban space to create an enhanced encounter with the city. In doing so, art is revealed as a transformative practice that enables a re-imagining of the everyday spaces of the city through a locative experience of place encountered in and through the body. This provides an important way to understand how space can be produced and imaginatively re-conceived through the everyday experience of driving.

Also on a theme of understanding the city via driving in the enclosed spaces of the car, Ashley Perry’s ‘ The Vacant Hotel: Site-specific public art and the experience of driving the semi-privatized geographies of Melbourne’s EastLink Tollway’, Chapter 6, examines a series of site-specific public artworks located beside a semi-privatized motorway on the south-eastern edge of metropolitan Melbourne. It explores how urban art embodies the imaginative, generic and symbolic spaces characterizing local/global relations in contemporary cities. The aesthetic mediations are located in context of neo-liberal conditions of political and economic urbanization and globalization, and suburban commuting patterns characteristic of many contemporary cities. By mapping the dynamic relationship between artwork and motorist this chapter unlocks the complex, discursive and visual qualities of art in relation to the site of the motorway.

In Chapter 7, ‘The Transient City: The city as urbaness’, Maggie McCormick focuses in particular on China’s rapid urbanization in the twenty-first century, configured as the first urban century. She examines urban consciousness, imagining oneself as urban, through re-interpreting Henri Lefebvre’s writings on the role of rhythm in understanding the city. She argues that arrhythmia and transience are key factors in processes of re-imagining the city in terms of urban identity. To discuss this further she turns to the art practice of Ai Weiwei and curator Hou Hanru to examine their ways of reflecting, creating and clarifying a consciousness shift towards the urban. Through attention to their work and the politics surrounding it, she argues for an increasingly connected mind space, which she calls a mindscape, embracing the exacerbated difference of arrhythmia seen today as accelerated transience. There are indications here of re-imagining the city in these conditions. The study identifies challenges to paradigms, understandings and parallel backlash to processes of re-imagining the city that is currently underway in the twenty-first-century global condition.

The third section, ‘Exchange and Transaction’ features chapters by Pamela Zeplin, Les Morgan and Kevin Murray. This section offers different forms of exchange that are inscribing new and often unheralded cartographies of difference in discourses of art and cultural representations, technologies, labouring, identity and belonging across urban and global spaces. Chapter 8, ‘The Liquid Continent: Globalization, urbanization, contemporary Pacific art and Australia’ by Pamela Zeplin, considers what it means to be Pacific, and what Pacific cities are, or might be, like in the rapidly urbanizing conditions of a global world. Zeplin problematizes the prevalent habit of overlooking the South Pacific/Oceania region as a site of serious cultural research, except as evidence of a backwash of globalization. She shows how Pacific arts from across the Pacific Islands, and in New Zealand and Australian urban locations, are often presented as stereotypes. However, she argues that in fact they reveal fluid, complex and constantly-negotiated practices. Although Oceania’s histories of cultural renewal may be appreciated in different ways in New Zealand and Australia, she proposes that these practices can contribute to more inclusive discourses concerning art, globalization and the urban.

This is followed by Chapter 9, Les Morgan’s ‘Abdul Abdullah: Art, marginality and identity’. Morgan addresses issues of ‘otherness’ with regard to processes of marginalization and the othering of those who are not from the historically-dominant culture of Australia. He analyses the art of Abdul-Hamid Bin Ibrahim Bin Abdullah, a young Muslim artist from West Australia, as an indicator of, and reaction to these conditions. He illustrates aptly the constructed ambivalence in the artist’s work to show the wider politics of transnational relations in the context of urbanization and the dominant culture. Morgan’s claim is that Abdullah negotiates his identity as a racialized and spatialized subject in the location of Australian cities. Through the politics of representation he is able to draw attention to the social, cultural and political fragmentation characterizing urban spaces, and through engaging with discourses of Australian multiculturalism he shows how artworks can offer a critique of it.

In Chapter 10, ‘The Visible Hand: An urban accord for outsourced craft’, Kevin Murray discusses the increasing distance between consumers and sources of production that is occurring in a rapidly-urbanizing world. He raises questions of inequalities between what he calls the global North and global South with specific reference to the production of craft goods. He considers the global trend of outsourcing and off-shoring craft labour as a potential means of re-connecting city and village as he interrogates the exodus of manufacturing and service industries from the First to Third World. To exemplify the social relationship between craft and design, he examines three specific models of partnerships between designers and artisans, identified as developmental, romantic and dialogical. In the developmental model, the use of technology ‘liberates’ the producer; the romantic model positions design as a form of commodification hiding the reality of production; the dialogical contextualizes design and craft as separate but interlocking domains. Comparing the models, he offers examples of craft workers who exemplify creative approaches to the means of production bringing acknowledgement to the relations of the city and the world around it.

The fourth section, ‘Interventions in Public Space’ features the work of SueAnne Ware, Elizabeth Grierson and Zara Stanhope. This group brings the focus to art’s capacity to intervene in known social, cultural, economic and political conditions. Through reviewing customary habits and politics these writers show the potential of renewing awareness and attitudes to do with local issues in global conditions. It starts with Chapter 11, SueAnne Ware’s ‘Border Memorials: When the local rejects the global’. Ware raises political issues of borders, immigration and migration and crucial questions to do with memorials to commemorate humanitarian disasters, along with public responses to such processes of memorialization. The chapter examines two anti-memorials: one concerning the fate of illegal refugees travelling to Australia, The Siev X Memorial Project (Canberra 2007); and the other, considering deaths of undocumented workers crossing into the