Exhibition: Post-It City

13 March - 25 May 2008, CCCB, Barcelona.
For this exhibition Shiuan-Wen Chu and Ana Dzokic revisited their project Tokyo Houseless made in 1999 at the Berlage Institute. See label 'study', Tokyo Houseless.

The exhibition “POST-IT City” looks at different overlapping uses of urban territory, focusing on the viewpoints offered by architecture, town planning and the visual arts. It seeks to explore the phenomenon by means of the ephemeral cities that infect the everyday city with uncoded, temporary, anonymous uses, with an implicitly critical approach.

This project brings together a series of parameters that provide particularly interesting themes for contemporary culture: the need to create available spaces, the versatility of the recycling concept, the emergence of new forms of subjectivity, etc.

POST-IT City presents the cases of 78 cities as varied as Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Hanoi, Santiago de Chile, Bologna and Barcelona. POST-IT City seeks to explore the phenomenon of occasional urbanities like: an industrial estate that becomes a car racing track at weekends, the use of the city “under construction” for the adventures of explorer nerds, the squatter phenomenon, the use of waste land for occasional meetings (a traveller’s camp or a rave), the conversion of the daytime university city into an area for sexual transactions by night, etc.

POST-IT City exhibition is curated by Giovanni La Varra, Martí Peran, Filippo Poli and Federico Zanfi.

TU Delft architecture faculty burned to ashes

We are totally devastated. This happened on 13 May Tuesday from 9 o'clock in the morning. It started on the 7th floor due to leakage of water pipe causing electricity short circuit of a coffee machine.
All the books, manuscripts, achiefs, documents, models, collections... are burned to ashes. I used to teach on the 2nd and 5th floor during year 2004-2007.

Strange Things Seen from Above

Beijing, pattern on a construction site


Beijing, Siheyuan giving way to new gated community. Notice the walls and fragmentation.


Beijing, clash of morphology


Cape Town, 'public space'


Johannesburg, Modernism and new users


Johannesburg, Modernism and new users


Mumbai, clash of morphology


Mumbai, views to a small slum


Mumbai, clash of morphology

Rotterdam, colony of anarchists

Rotterdam, archaeological site

Rotterdam, car crash

Views to Cul-de-sacs

Diary: Joburg is not my home any more

Between 1991 and 1998, I lived with my family in Johannesburg. In 2001 we sold our house on Bryanston Drive to a retired British pilot, and since then I never returned to Joburg until August this year. When I saw it this time, 'our house' has been bulldozed, garden and trees erased, and swimming pool filled, to give way to new development of gated community.

So Said Uncle George #3

' “Only the paranoid survive”, so there’s only one kind of research that’s good: the kind of research that checks and counterchecks, beyond prejudice, beyond allegiances, beyond what you already know, beyond what you think you see and trust. We need facts and figures, hard dates. We torture the data until they confess.'

Mumbai: Aftertaste

In the most conspicuous sign yet of India's unprecedented prosperity, the country's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is building a new home in the financial hub of Mumbai: a 60-storey palace with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking. The building, named Antilla after a mythical island, will have a total floor area greater than Versailles and be home for Mr Ambani, his mother, wife, three children and 600 full-time staff.

Draped in hanging gardens, the building will have a floor for a home theatre, a glass-fronted apartment for guests, and a two-storey health club. As the ceilings are three times as high as a normal building's, the 173m tower will only have 27 floors. With property prices rocketing, the building is already worth more than £500m. It is expected to ready for the Ambanis to move in next year. The family currently live in a 14-storey building, Sea Wind. Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Group is India's largest private company, with interests in oil, retail and biotechnology. The 50-year-old became the country's first rupee trillionaire this week, taking his net worth to £14bn.

Urban planners say Mr Mukesh's home is part of a global rush for tall buildings that has seen skyscrapers spring up in Dubai, Shanghai and Seoul. In India, planning rules and a historic antipathy to unrestrained materialism has meant that this race to touch the sky has largely bypassed the cities, which are more notable for their shanty towns and dilapidated housing stock. But experts say the next wave of skyscraper proposals could come in India. (source: India's richest man builds 60-storey home, Thursday May 31, 2007, The Guardian, UK)

During my visit in Mumbai, at the entrance of a newly renovated shopping mall, a teenager was wearing a T-shirt with swastika sign. I asked him if he knows what that symbol means. He replied ‘yes, Hitler; we have democracy in India so I can do whatever I want’.

This is Mumbai today. Well-off citizens disrespect and abuse democracy. And Mumbai is a city that allows this to happen.

Mumbai: Mothers at night

What is it about Mumbai that makes me so sad? It is not about slums or it is run-down. It is about the mothers.

Mumbai is a city that lets her mothers beg on streets, sleep unprotected with her babies. Johannesburg is a city that lets her mothers raped and killed. When I finally could tell my mother something about Mumbai, I told her this, and I told her about Paris too. A Chinese prostitute in Paris worths 7 euros an hour; she is also a mother; she comes from Tieling. I thought about mothers and cities at night.

Mumbai: Sleep

Mumbai: Pride

Mumbai: Lock

Mumbai: People