[CRIMESCAPES] Panorama, Urban Warfare Training Center, Tze’elim – Shai Kremer

The Urban Warfare Training Center is a mock city located in Israel’s Tze’elim military base in the Negev desert. Built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and funded largely through U.S. military aid, the 7.4-square-mile generic city consists of modules that can be reconfigured by mission planners to represent specific towns. Known as Baladia City-the Arabic word balad means village-it is used by the Israel Defense Forces as well as by the U.S. Army to prepare soldiers for urban warfare. The simulated city includes shops, a grand mosque, a hospital, a Kasbah quarter, and a cemetery that doubles as a soccer field, depending on the scenario. The facility is equipped with an audio system that simulates helicopters, mortar rounds, and prayer calls. During training exercises, Arabic music is played in the background.
Kremer’s panoramic photograph-part of larger body of work focusing on the impact of Israel’s ongoing military engagement on the natural landscape-captures and intensifies the haunting artifice of this simulated desert town.

Date: 2007

Medium: Chromogenic print

Dimensions: Image: 54.6 x 205.7 cm (21 1/2 x 81 in.) Frame: 74.6 x 229.9 cm (29 3/8 x 90 1/2 in.)

Classification: Photographs

Credit Line: Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2008
Accession Number: 2008.338

Fuente: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Zero-Ground of Politics: Musings on the Post-Political City – Erik Swyngedouw

“There is a shift form the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialisation that is certainly invested in a process of de-politicisation, which results in a strange zone where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public” (Agamben 2006).

The city offers a privileged scale for dissecting the social body, for rummaging throughthe innards of our most intimate fantasies, desires, and fears; for excavating the signs of the city’s political condition. As the ancient Greek polis was for Aristotle and Plato theexperimental site for the performance of civic and political life, the contemporary cityalso holds for us the key to unlocking the contours of the present political constellation.It is indeed unmistakably so that the city has undergone radical change over the past twodecades or so, most dramatically in its modes of urban governing and polic(y)ing (Rancière, 1995; Dikeç, 2007). We shall argue that, while the city is alive and thriving atleast in some of its spaces, the polis, conceived in the idealized Greek sense as the site for public political encounter and democratic negotiation, the spacing of (often radical)dissent, and disagreement, and the place where political subjectivation emerges andliterally takes place, seems moribund. (Erik Swyngedouw, 2012)

El artículo en Scribd aquí:

The Zero-Ground of Politics: Musings on the Post-Political City by petersigrist

Who do you think you are? – Richard Sennett

Al hilo de lo hablado esta mañana, dejo esta conferencia del sociólogo Richard Sennett sobre identidad y ciudad. En ella explica la diferencia que existe entre “boundaries” (límites) y “borders” (bordes) en la ciudad actual. Los primeros son inertes (pensemos en barreras de seguridad, comunidades cercadas) y los segundos constituyen un espacio liminal, un umbral donde la gente interactúa. Sennett argumenta que la mayor parte de la arquitectura y el urbanismo del siglo XX ha optado por crear límites, fronteras, en lugar de umbrales. Lo que la planificación urbana necesita, considera el sociólogo, es empezar a hacer lo contrario: “en lugar de intentar reforzar las comunidades… lo que queremos es reforzar la capacidad de experimentar diferentes tipos de identidad”, crear “umbrales habitables” en las ciudades, y no cápsulas inertes.

+info en este recomendable blog: http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/6824
Y aquí el vídeo completo.