Critical Connections
Demobilizing a Social Nonmovement: Cooptation and Repression in Zafertepe
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barry Ballinger
Since the failed promises of modernism, architects have sought an ethical framework to guide theory and practice. This goal has manifested itself in many ways; however, architects have not integrated knowledge of the relationship between space and social movements. The production of informal settlements in Turkey, called gecekondu, provided urban migrants with access to urban amenities and jobs. This process is described by Asef Bayat as a social nonmovement, or the quiet encroachment/claim-making through everyday activity. Through multiple regimes with varying economic models, the gecekondus have persevered. Currently the ruling Justice and Development Party has instating a zero gecekondu policy. The effect has been large scale demolition of gecekondu neighborhoods to be replaced with upscale apartment buildings and social housing. This has been met with some resistance, but that resistance seems to have been pacified throughout Ankara. To document the process of pacifying a social nonmovement, I spent nine months in Ankara, conducted semi-structured and informal interviews, observed daily interactions, and analyzed this data concurrently with spatial analysis. I found that the Turkish state uses counter mobilization mechanisms of cooptation and repression. Cooptation is done appealing to the ideology of residents, focusing on the exchange value of land, and appealing to local politicians. Repression is accomplished through demolition and suspending services. Architects who are concerned about promoting social justice in the built environment would benefit from understanding the impact of cooptation and repression in the lives gecekondu residents.
Lines Across the Desert: Communications Infrastructure and the Bighorn Sheep
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sophie Fitz Maurice
The shorthand we use to describe the apparatus of modern telecommunications invokes a clean, precise, and rationally ordered infrastructure. When we speak to somebody on the telephone, they are on the other end of “the line”; we also go “on-line” to browse “the net,” using computers powered by electricity that reaches our homes and businesses through “the grid.” Information is stored in “the cloud” – a less rectilinear but still inappropriate euphemism, given that the vast majority of Internet traffic is through underwater cables. My research looks beyond the flattening metaphors we use to describe telecommunications to instead consider electronic communication from a material and ecological perspective. Focusing primarily on the construction of telegraph and telephone networks in the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico, from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, I concentrate on the materiality of telecommunications construction, from the human and animal labor enrolled to bring thousands of wooden poles across mountains and deserts, to the mining of copper in Sonora, and the distillation of tar to coat wooden poles in order to stave off predation by woodpeckers and insects. In particular, I ask how an electrically-powered infrastructure of communication affected non-human forms of communication and movement; specifically, how migratory animals adapted to changes in the landscape introduced by modern communication apparatuses. In this paper, I focus on the desert bighorn sheep, a species whose ancestral knowledge of the geography of the US Southwest has been threatened by the construction of an infrastructure of human knowledge exchange.
Sharing A Global Culture: Social Impact Adjustments using Secular Philosophy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session William J Thompson
I start by defining the processing and production the body does in the world as the basis of a hermeneutic dialectic between body and world. I relate this to the six symbiotic behavioural outcomes; predatory, parasitic, commensalist, herbivorous, mutual, and competitive. I proceed to show how triangulation between two bodies and world can create language. I then show how triangulations proceed to create social groups including cultures; a “geodetic socialisation”; the way comforts produced by triangulations in common by many individuals developmentally “educates” a mob of individuals into a tradition in which “things” have become “objects” some of which have achieved a “sacred” status in what is by then adjusted to a “public perspective” dependent on individual opinions. Once achieved it is difficult to adjust individuals in that perspective back to the individual condition they had at birth, partly because of early years developmental learning. For this reason we need to grasp an understanding of the underlying basis for understandings, and in this paper I explain the way in which secular philosophy achieves an understanding of the underlying basis for human understandings, allowing a common understanding amongst a global public; a philosophical geodetic understanding as a mass persepective for the anthropocene. The global public understanding of all six symbiotic outcomes, rather than just one, is a necessary public challenge to the predatory monoculture of neo capitalism which is establishing an impoverishment of the human condition globally.
