Week II - III: The City & Global Economy

Ada Azania Umoja
Week II - The City

In Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, the authors discuss the lighting of Las Vegas, in particular the gambling room. Described as “always very dark” to ensure “privacy, protection, concentration, and control,” the gambling room and its relationship to darkness is presented in a manner that is both descriptive yet detached. If we were to expand on this notion of darkness ensuring privacy, protection, and control, my most central question would be to ask for whom? 

Historically, darkness has not offered the same levels of privacy, protection, or control to all people. For example, there are instances of darkness becoming the justification for the stripping away of privacy, as was the case for Black and Indigenous populations in 1700s New York City with the advent of the Lantern Laws (Brown). More recently, let us consider when darkness or nightfall signified the loss of protection, as was the case for Black bodies living in proximity to or traveling through sundown towns. Throughout a significant portion of the twentieth century, Black individuals and families were cautious of being caught outside past sundown in certain parts of the United States, for they could be subject to terrorization and death– a caution and survival tactic which persists to this day. This book was published in 1972– around the time when sundown towns were at their peaks, and Nevada adhered to several Jim Crow laws just a decade earlier. This historical context should lead us to examine who this gambling room is designed for and who is meant to occupy its space. 

Furthermore, how we, as a society, use light and darkness to codify the “legitimacy” or illicitness of certain actions intrigues me. Our society’s association with illegality and underground economic activity as shrouded in a cloak of darkness is pervasive in our collective narrative of understanding (or misunderstanding) of who benefits from darkness. Because from what I understand, Las Vegas gambling rooms are frequented by individuals from all economic classes. I am also curious about the role of artificial light in juxtaposition to the author’s description of the gambling room as “always dark.” The authors write, in describing the gambling room, “One loses track of where one is and when it is. Time is limitless because the light of noon and midnight are exactly the same. Space is limitless because the artificial light obscures rather than defines its boundaries.” In this case, the roles of light and dark are, in many ways, flipped. Typically, darkness is where one might lose track of themselves, or get lost, but in this scenario, it is the presence of constant artificial light that creates an environment that disorients and confuses the mind. One temporal result of the invention of artificial light was the extension of our workday, and it similarly extends an individual's ability to gamble. It seems that ever since humans developed control over light, we have weaponized it. In our studio, we have been discussing the emergence of artificial light and the weaponization of light as a tool for surveillance. And here, within the case of the gambling room, we find a space that is shrouded in darkness from the outside but artificially illuminated within to hyper surveil all activity that occurs within the space. Moving forward, I am not entirely certain how our perceptions of darkness have conditioned our built environment, but it is a topic that I would like to reflect more deeply on.  

“‘Everybody's Got a Little Light Under the Sun.’” Dark Matters on the Surveillance of Blackness, by Simone Browne, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 63–83.

Venturi, Robert, et al. Learning from Las Vegas. The MIT Press, 2017.

Soala Lolia Ajienka
Week III - Global Economy

As Saskia Sassen unravelled her argument on the identity and constituents of a Global City, I could not help but make associations drawn from personal experience. A set of these experiences are rooted in the territorialisation of petroleum extraction and the creation of situations within which the global is localised. There is an allusion here to the source implications of the culture of consumerism we discussed last week that necessitated a particular approach to design.

“Global cities are centres for servicing and financing international trade, investment, and headquarters operations. That is to say, the multiplicity of specialized activities present in global cities are crucial in the valorisation, indeed over-valorisation of  leading sectors of capital today.” (The Global City)

Port Harcourt, a city in Southern Nigeria although excluded in conversations on the global economy in favour of say Lagos, is undeniably a crucial piece of the jenga tower that is the global petroleum trade. As the centre of the crude oil industry in Nigeria, it is the focal point of ‘activity’ of the transnational oil companies with vested financial investments in the country, most especially Shell and Total. The ‘activity’ I refer to here, suggests layers of dynamic interactions at different scales that play out in residential and industrial enclaves, phenomena that involve the privatisation of urban space and thus the creation of insular pieces of urbanism within the city. They residential enclaves are gated communities with clearly defined boundaries and infrastructure such as road networks, water, electricity supply, waste disposal, independent of the rest of the city and developed solely for use by expatriates and their families, both Nigerian and foreign. There is an effort here to dissociate these spaces and their inhabitants from the local population, an attempt at remaining ‘international’, yet only associating with the local communities through informal employment in the domestic spaces of the enclaves. The experience of the city then, is cut off in parts by these insular urbanisms that “transform the linkages that connect people to territory”. As one steps through the gates of the Shell residential enclave, they live Nigeria behind and are in ‘Shell’, no longer in Nigeria or the Netherlands as a similar move into an embassy might imply, but a new geography that exists virtually in some way (Is there something here that can be unpacked further?). The delineation of the residential enclave makes it a clearly defined occupiable target for occupations and demonstrations, a prime location for activism as has happened over the years. The enclave as a seemingly non-political entity, becomes a “microenvironment with a global span”.

Sassen, S., 2008. The Global City, in  Nugent, D., Vincent, J. (ed.) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. New Jersey: Blackwell, pp. 168-178

Osodi, G., 2005. Residential Estate for Oil Company Workers. Reproduced in Osodi, G. 2011 Delta Nigeria: The Rape of Paradise. London: Trolley Books.

Image by George Osodi.

Tejumola Bayowa
Week III - Global Economy

In reading Rem’s and Sassen’s writing on globalization – and in part due to their Dutch nationality – I was reminded of the lustfully divergent joy and terror of vanitas style paintings that emanated from the beginnings of globalization in 16th century Holland. Vanitas paintings bombard the viewer with a sensory overload due to both the sheer chaos and detail in the image, and also in terms of the subliminal significations coded in each object/arrangement. Rem's description of the generic city and globalization illustrates a contemporary view of the city as a vanitas painting in written form.  The theme of vanitas brings to mind an image by the Dutch artist Jan Steen called The Dissolute Household. What I find most intriguing about the painting is the artist’s presence in the center of the scene, haunting the viewer with a sinister smirk. Similar to Jan Steen, I imagine Rem centered in this chaotic practice of globalization with the same guile expression. Beyond my agreement of the chaos which exists in the generic/global city, certain differences in my understanding of identity and history make Rem’s argument limited. His Cartesian notion of identity as a hegemonic conception of the self are the essential limitations I find in his articulation of the contemporary city. This unproductive understanding of identity as necessitating “an essence” (Generic City, 2) is what mistakenly produces ideas that “convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity” and that a “conscious movement away from difference toward similarity” and the downfall of character as essential to a global/generic city. (Generic City, 2) We can rebuff this argument through Sassen’s excellent research on the ways sub-national spaces operate with agency within the cracked openings of the global city. In her research, it is clear that the global/generic city does not necessitate the shedding of identity, rather, it can (and already does) foster transnational identities “for the transmigration of cultural forms, for the deterritorialization of ‘local’ subcultures.” (The Global City/Anthropology of Politics, 176)

As urban life continuously crosses over to “cyberspace” it remains visceral and veridical that the generic/global city is not “big enough for everybody” nor can it be a “city without history.” (Generic City, 4) The argument for forgetting history or abandoning identity is desensitized from the current weather that situates some lives “in the present tense of death” (In the Wake, 88) and attempts to erase “a past that is not past, a past that is with us still; a past that cannot and should not be pacified in its presentation.” (In the Wake, 62) Contrary to Rem’s notion of the generic city as a space that “has no layers” (Generic City, 15) I prefer the notion of Tout-Monde, a world of layers and entanglements that engenders new notions of collectivity and poetics of relation. The ability to recognize this All-world as already existing in the undercommons of the global/generic city and to pursue it at a global scale is for me the real fröhliches wissen.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. United Kingdom, Duke University Press, 2016.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City, in  Nugent, D., Vincent, J. (ed.) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. New Jersey: Blackwell, 2008. pp. 168-178.

Sam Wolk 
Week III - Global Economy

"Air Conditioning has launched the endless building [...] Air conditioning sustains our cathedrals [...] All architects may be working on the same building, so far separate, but with hidden receptors that will eventually make it cohere [...] Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole. Junskpace is additive, layered [...] Instead of development, it offers entropy. "

— Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace

Koolhaas' Junkspace is a fundamentally thermodynamic and geological phenomenon concerned with the reorganization of matter, a single, giant, convective substrate. On the surface it appears hyperspatial: a collapsing of reality into a topologically connected network of air conditioned nodes. Bodies don't move of their own volition: they are sucked up and filtered through grate(r)s in the wall, malleable meat sliced and diced from the bone, and propelled at great speeds through the HVAC system, a pneumatic package to be delivered and resynthesized as a new subject at the next node. The roulette wheel gambler paying tithes at the altar of the Real New God (aka the Random Number Generator aka chaos) in Egypt (Luxor Hotel) is reconstituted as the prison guard panoptically surveilling the simulated lives of reality television from their hotel room in Venice (the Venetian) is reconstituted as Gregory Peck strolling through Rome with Audrey Hepburn (the Bellagio) is reconstituted as a database entry in a freight network (McCarran Airport) is reconstituted as soft marble in Michelangelo's studio (the rhinoplasty operating table) is reconstituted as Ishmael on the Pequod (Royal Caribbean Adventure of the Seas). The body is a gaseous fluid funneled and dispersed through a global HVAC network, filling up the form of the Junkspace which it is flatulently ejected into. The pump providing the negative pressure which drives the pneumatic suction force is the reproductive tendency of capital to grow its tentacles outward and cohere into a single agglomerative mass. Junkspace is an organ of the body capital, a series of intestines which slowly envelops the world in its folds and extracts nutrients from the meat passing through it. The surface area for nutrient uptake (capital extraction) is maximized by this reflexive folding and layering of more and more extraction space. This intestinal junk space emerged as an effective method of slowly but surely concentrating capital through the construction of gradients, i.e. intensive properties which allow capital to flow from one position to another like a ball down a hill. It is through the growth of these networks of intestinal folds that Junkspace becomes geological. The process of unfolding the earth, burrowing, tunneling, drilling, digging, excavating, cracking, fracking, harvesting, hollowing, pitting its skin to bring the subcutaneous carbon, iron, and copper is necessary for the materialization of more folds: another steel beam, another barrel of oil, another circuit board, another cruise ship, another Burj Khalifa, another Disneyland, another iPhone, another General Atomics MQ-9 Predator B, another GTX 3080 blade proving work in a cryptofarm, another kilowatt-hour. The Earth becomes another organ spliced into a network of resource extraction, its solidity dissolving into easily transportable granules as it is subjected to the same liquefaction as the human body, shuttled from one side of the globe to another in a hull flying a flag from the Seychelles owned by a Greek consortium incorporated in Panama backed by Chinese money manned by indentured Turkish labor, until the granules are eventually sedimented into urban barnacles. The Earth is even complicit, acting as high pressure catagenic refinery converting Jurassic plankton into the fuel of the Anthropocene through the eternal grinding of tectonic plates and stratified pressure of rocky history. Junkspace is the combustor in a giant engine, where the energy from humans-and-plankton-as-fuel is harvested and translated into a propulsive movement of capital across forms, ultimately ending up as electron spins on a hard drive in a server farm representing a ledger, centuries-old-paint on a canvas in an air conditioned warehouse, a deed in an air conditioned bank vault, an entry in a database. Like the solution to the apparent paradox of Laplace's demon, this local re-organization of matter in the construction of Junkspace and the generation of capital growth is only made possible by the simultaneous-but-spatially displaced production of disorder, i.e. the teleology of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. Hot air ejected from the HVAC system, toxic chemicals slithering into the drinking supply, CO2 diffusing from the tailpipe, crude flowing into the bay... Just as information loses structure and tends toward noise when it goes through recursive iterations of compression (photocopies of photocopies of readings degrading with each pass, architectural discourse being regurgitated from one generation of grad students to the next, a re-creation of a re-creation of a Charli XCX TikTok @harris, a great big game of telephone, "no more form, only proliferation... regurgitation is the new creativity"), then so too does the Earth lose its own structure and identity: Junkspace induces geologic peristalsis in its viral growth, i.e. the regurgitation of the Earth's own materiality so that Junkspaces can fold the vomit back onto itself over and over, compressing it, derezzing it, and molding it into another air conditioned infinite corridor.

Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace,” Content (Taschen, 2004), pp. 162–171.