What Is the Urban? Registers of a World Interior

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The urban, long a popular topic of inquiry, has become an unavoidable condition for contemporary life. For many disciplines, it has become a primary locus of research, giving birth to families of subdisciplines bearing its name. Disciplines as varied as sociology, anthropology, geography, literature, art, design, economics, history and politics increasingly find themselves in contact with and shaped by the urban. And as more and more spaces of the world are urbanized, the ubiquity of this category as a site of scholarly research could be said to rest on the urgency we face in accommodating ourselves to its contradictions, imposed forms of violence, and the environmental fallout it has unleashed. From all scales, we encounter the urban, too: popularized notions like the anthropocene shed light on this category just as much as the problem of uneven development that characterizes our everyday experiences in its spaces. Yet for as much as it has opened itself to scholarly research, there is oddly scant reflection on the category itself. It appears instead as a background conditionthe unquestioned specification for the definition of other problems. The urban, it seems, is a given.

This symposium opens with a simple yet perplexing question: what is the urban? It brings together a range of internationally renowned scholars in an effort less to provide answers to this question than to frame a problem that has yet to be fully constituted. What language do we need to speak about the urban? What spaces and politics does it produce? Does the urban have a history of its own? An ontological specificity? If so, what lies outside of its domain? Can we speak of the modern ‘rural’—the deterritorialized pastoral spaces of agrarian life, reterritorialized as machines of resource production and circulation—as in fact already urbanized? How does a site like Iowa allow us to understand and reimagine the ontological contours of the urban?

What Is the Urban? Registers of a World Interior

Despite possible appearances, one must also be cautious not to reduce the urban to a totality—a spatiality without an outside, immune to agency, change or strategic repurposing toward other ends. Thus, just as much as the symposium is a provocation to speculate on what the urban is, it is also a solicitation to think through what it is not. What constitutes non- or extra-urban spaces and practices? What geographies, technologies, architectures or social practices resist their capture in ongoing processes of urbanization? What new spatial configurations have appeared that complicate what could otherwise be called ‘urban’? While cautious of any romance toward a return to more innocent, pastoral times or a myopic turn toward localist imaginaries, how instead can globalized urban topographies and topologies be repurposed toward more positive, post-urban forms? How can one avoid the reformist trap that nearly all ‘urbanisms’ have fallen victim to, whose strategies invariably reproduce the urban unchecked under the twin guises of benevolence and novelty? Indeed, by simply addressing the urban as a problem in and of itself, the symposium aims to open radically new apertures toward a world increasingly viewed through its endlessly urbanized space.

If Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of ‘world interior’ provides a potent historical understanding of global capitalism, how can such an idea be tested through a parallel interrogation of the urban? How can it help to describe new socio-spatial ontologies of this category that transgress the familiar urban/rural, center/periphery, and even global south/north divides that so often determine the way the urban is understood? How can other emerging concepts and imaginaries be useful for unfolding relations between the material, legal, social, political, spatial and phenomenological conditions of the urban today?

SESSIONS

URBAN AS INTERIORThis session considers the urban framed as a kind of ‘interior.’ While this notion may conjure up a broadly architectural imaginary, it speaks more to the experiences and relationships that manifest in a species increasingly interiorized in a constructed environment. From domesticity to the contemporary urbanization of the planet, interior asks us to consider how thresholds, boundaries and limits are produced today.

URBAN AS FACTORYTo what extents has contemporary capitalism transformed the nineteenth century factory into an unevenly distributed spatial system of labor, value, production and consumption that circulates around the globe? How can we look at the urban as both a space, process and diagram of capitalist logic akin to a factory? This session interrogates the complexities and contradictions of capitalist geographies that unfold across urban space and its organization.

URBAN AS STRATEGYUnderstanding the urban requires an investigation into the deeper logics and rationalities that give it measure: the urban as a spatial order. Here questions of political power, colonial diagrams and the ordering of the earth itself help to shed light on the tight relationship the urban shares with territory. This session will trace the urban in political configurations of landscape, agriculture, colonial geometries and rural hinterlands.

URBAN AS BECOMINGThe urban is often described as a large and complex social space. But far from a background to social life, how can we understand it as a social technology? It is the pulsating space in which forms of life emerge, are destroyed, coalesce and atomize; it is the space in which emotion, affect and affection circle around one another in the constant process of becoming: becoming individual, becoming collective, becoming identical, becoming institutional, becoming inoperable...

MONDAY APRIL 4, 2016

9.30 am9.45 am

10.30 am

12.30pm

1.30 pm

3.30 pm

4.30 pm

5.00 pm

6.15 pm

Registration and CoffeeOpening Remarks

SESSION 1. URBAN AS INTERIORModerator: Barbara Ching. Iowa State University

Nikos Katsikis. Harvard GSD“Terra Urbis: Composite Geo-taxonomies for an Urbanization without an Outside”

Charles Rice. University of Technology Sydney“After the Street”

Antonio Petrov. University of Texas, San Antonio“Weltbauen: Territory and the Architectural Imaginary”

Break

SESSION 2. URBAN AS FACTORYModerator: Ross Exo Adams. Iowa State University

Max Viatori. Iowa State University“Ocean Internalities and Capitalism in Peru”

Design Earth: Rania Ghosn / El Hadi Jazairy. MIT/University of Michigan “Geographies of Trash”

Jane Rongerude. Iowa State University“Poverty Housing as Space and Process: Strategies of Making Do”

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Coffee Break

KEYNOTE ADDRESSAlbert Pope. Rice University“Airquake”

Evening Reception

SCHEDULETUESDAY APRIL 5, 2016

9.30 am10.00 am

10.15 am

12.15pm

1.30 pm

3.30 pm

3.45 pm

6.00 pm

Registration and CoffeeIntroduction

SESSION 3. URBAN AS STRATEGYModerator: Max Viatori. Iowa State University

Kenny Cupers. University of Basel“Planetary Ruralization”

Ayala Levin. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem“Where Is the Urban? The Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan, 1965”

Marwan Ghandour. Iowa State University“The Expansive Space of the State and its Global Limits”

Break

SESSION 4. URBAN AS BECOMINGModerator: Jane Rongerude. Iowa State University

AbdouMaliq Simone. Max Planck Inst/Goldsmiths College“Blackness and the Urban Inoperable”

Alice Randall. Vanderbilt University“Zagging with Ziggy: A novelist on writing the Autobiography of Ziggy Johnson”

Barbara Ching. Iowa State University“The College Campus as World Exterior: Creating a Critical Distance from the Contry and the City”

Coffee Break

PLENARY ROUNDTABLEChair: James C. Scott. Yale University

Evening Reception

ROSS EXO ADAMS is an architect, urbanist and writer whose research looks at the historical and political intersection of circulation and urbanization. He is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University. His writing has been published and presented widely on the relations between architectural practice, geography, political and legal theory and ecology. He has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, the Architectural Association and Brighton University in the UK and at the Berlage Institute in Rottedam. His work has been exhibited widely in venues such as the Venice Biennale and The Storefront for Art and Architecture. He holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Biomaterials Science (2000), a Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute (2006) and a Ph.D. from the London Consortium (2014), for which he was awarded the 2011 LKE Ozolins Studentship by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). He is presently working on a book, Circulation and Urbanization, to be published within the Society and Space series edited by Stuart Elden for Sage Publications, forthcoming in 2017.

BARBARA CHING is Chair of the Department of English at Iowa State University. She holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from New York University, and received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University. Her research explores the ways in which the distinctions between high and popular culture have been created, expressed, disputed, and changed. She is especially interested in the ways people recognize and express their own cultural tastes. We list our favorite songs, books, and movie to tell about who we are and to connect with others. How and why do we make meaning this way? She explored these questions in her book, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001) and in many articles. Her interest in Susan Sontag grows out of one of this major critic’s chief interests: the way mass media transformed European high culture, making movies and other easily-accessed texts and images important sources of meaning for millions of people.

KENNY CUPERS is Associate Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Basel. His work focused on the intersections of modernism, social life, and the politics of knowledge. Previously, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University at Buffalo, where he was the 2010–2011 Reyner Banham Fellow. His books include the monograph The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (2014); the edited anthology, Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (2013); and Spaces of Uncertainty, with co-author Markus Miessen (2002). He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2010.

DESIGN EARTH led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, is a collaborative practice that engages the geographic to open up a range of aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism. Literally ‘earth-writing’ from the Greek geo- (earth) and -graphia (writing), DESIGN EARTH’s geographic practice involves representing the earth and also projecting other possible worlds. DESIGN EARTH’s work has been recognized with several awards, including the 2015 Jacques Rougerie Foundation’s First Prize, and honorable mentions for their project entries in 2015 Dry Futures, 2014 Fairy Tales, 2014 London Organic Skyscraper, 2014 Unbelievable Challenge, and 2013 Rio City Vision competitions. They have lectured extensively across the USA and Canada, as well as Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Qatar, and Belgium. Ghosn and Jazairy hold Doctor of Design degrees from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where they were founding editors of the journal New Geographies and respectively editors of NG2: Landscapes of Energy and NG4: Scales of the Earth. They are authors of Geographies of Trash, recently published by Actar, and for which they received the 2014 ACSA Faculty Design

PANELISTS & MODERATORS

Award. Some of their recent work has been published in Journal of Architectural Education, MONU, San Rocco, Thresholds, Bracket, Perspecta, and Topos.

MARWAN GHANDOUR is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Iowa State University. He teaches studios in architectural and urban design, multi-disciplinary theory seminars and oversees thesis work in urban studies. Ghandour is a partner in the Beirut-based architectural firm Bawader Architects, with a practice in institutional architecture and urban design projects in Lebanon. His research and practice include collaborations with landscape architects, planners, graphic designers and transportation engineers. His work engages Iowa (and the Midwest), Beirut (and the Middle East), and more recently Kigali-Rwanda and Lima-Peru. Ghandour holds a B Arch from American University of Beirut and an M.S. in Building Design from Columbia University.

NIKOS KATSIKIS is an architect and urbanist, Doctor of Design candidate and Instructor in Urban Planning and Design at Harvard GSD. At the GSD he is also research associate in the New Geographies Lab, and in the Urban Theory Lab since their foundation, and has organized conferences on Urban Metabolism (2014), Regionalism and the Mediterranean (2013) and the Limits of the Urban (2012). Since 2012 he is on the editorial board of New Geographies journal and co-editor of New Geographies 06: Grounding Metabolism (Harvard University Press, 2014). Previously he has worked as a Teaching Fellow and Research Associate at the GSD and the National Technical University Athens. He holds a professional degree in Architecture with highest distinction (2006) and a Master in Architecture and Spatial Design (2009) from the National Technical University of Athens. His recent work includes contributions in MONU (2014), Implosions / Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (N. Brenner ed., Berlin: Jovis, 2013) and the forthcoming book with N. Brenner, Is the world urban? Towards a critique of geospatial ideology (Actar, 2016).

AYALA LEVIN holds a PhD in architectural history and theory from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and she is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the European Research Council project “Apartheid: The global Itinerary, South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation, 1948-1990” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her dissertation, which she is now turning into a book, Levin explores Israeli architectural development aid in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ethiopia in the 1960s-1970s. This research received the support of various grants and fellowships, including the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), Fulbright, and the Graduate Research Fellowship of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. Levin has taught at Columbia University and Pratt Institute School of Architecture, and she is a contributor to the Systems and the South project of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, as well as to the Global History of Architecture Teaching Collaborative. Her interests include north-south exchanges of knowledge production and dissemination, Third World and rural modernities, and the role of architecture in the mobilization of resources.

ANTONIO PETROV received his doctoral degree in the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, and cultural studies from Harvard University. He is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio. He is co-founder of the Harvard GSD publication New Geographies, founder and editor-in-chief of DOMA. In the past two years he also served as co-program director of the Expander at Archeworks in Chicago and Caudill visiting critic at

Rice University. His research emphasizes on processes of urban and regional restructuring in relation to questions of how architecture as an expanded and geographically inspired idea structures, shapes and produces complex territories. He recently published his research in MONU, Manifest, MAS-Context, edited New Geographies Volume 5 “The Mediterranean: Worlds, Regions, Cities, and Architectures,” and currently works on a manuscript titled “Between Immersion and Total Autonomy”, a book on “Hydrogeographies”, and a new volume of Archeworks Papers. He taught at Rice University, Harvard University, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Iowa State University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, and has received several other grants, fellowships, and won international prizes and competitions in architecture, planning and design.

ALBERT POPE is the Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture at Rice University and director of the school’s Present/Future program. His work centers on the broad implications of post-war urban development. Current research considers the urban implications of climate change. Professor Pope is the recipient of numerous grants from agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts and Shell Center for Sustainability. He holds degrees from Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and Princeton University, and has taught at SCI-Arc and Yale University. His influential 1996 book Ladders, a study of the postwar American City, was recently reissued on Princeton Architectural Press (2015). Airquake.

ALICE RANDALL is a New York Times best-selling novelist, award-winning songwriter, and a popular essayist. She is the author of The Wind Done Gone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2001), Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2004), Rebel Yell (Bloomsbury 2009), and Ada’s Rules (Bloomsbury 2012). Her work is characterized by an interest in text and contexts where issues of race and identity and language and intimacy converge. Professor Randall holds a primary appointment in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University with a secondary appointment in English. She graduated from Harvard Universityin English and American Literature in 1981 and received an honorary doctorate from Fisk University in 2012.

CHARLES RICE is an architectural historian, theorist and critic, and Professor of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. His research addresses questions of the interior across art, architecture, and design. His first book, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (Routledge 2007) discussed the domestic interior as a category of the nineteenth century, charting its impact on key developments in architecture and design into the twentieth century. Professor Rice is coeditor of the Journal of Architecture (Routledge and RIBA), and has coedited several collections of essays. He is a 2015 recipient of a Graham Foundation grant for his forthcoming book, Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman, and Downtown America (Bloomsbury 2016). He studied at the University of Queensland, the London Consortium (University of London), and the University of New South Wales. From 2010 to 2014, he was head of the School of Art and Design History at Kingston University London. He has also taught at the University of New South Wales and the Architectural Association.

JANE RONGERUDE is Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Planning at Iowa State University. he received her BS in Environmental Studies from Portland State University and her PhD and MCP from University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests focus

on the redevelopment of public housing and urban systems of poverty management. She is especially interested in the institutional and spatial arrangements related to poverty management systems. Within these systems, she investigates how poverty is being dispersed, shifted and reformed within the urban landscape. As a result of these areas of inquiry, she has developed a strong foundation in the areas of revitalization, housing policy, and community development. Current projects include an investigation of San Francisco’s Hope SF project and the redevelopment of public housing in San Francisco, development of a special methodology for assessing the affordable housing inventory in Polk County, Iowa, and “Shifting the geographies of community development in Iowa: 30 years of the state CDBG program.

JAMES C. SCOTT is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology, and is the founder and Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. Among his influential publications are the books, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press 1986), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press 1998), The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press 2009), and Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton University Press 2012). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He holds a PhD from Yale and has also taught at the University of Wisconsin.

ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE is an urbanist and researcher whose work focuses on various powers, cultural expressions, governance and planning discourses, spaces and times in cities across the world. He is Research Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College and Visiting Professor at University of Cape Town. He holds research affiliations with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta and the University of Tarumanagara. Key publications include In Whose Image?: Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (University of Chicago Press 1994) and For the City Yet to Come: Changing Urban Life in Four African Cities (Duke University Press 2004), City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Routledge 2009) and Jakarta, Drawing the City Near (Minnesota 2014).

MAXIMILIAN VIATORI is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Iowa State University. His research explores ethnic, racial and class inequalities and their relationships to state politics, governance and the control of natural resources. He worked for many years on indigenous rights and social movements in Ecuador, which is the subject of his first book, One State, Many Nations: Indigenous Rights Struggles in Ecuador. He also conducted a multi-year project on race in Ecuadorian public discourse and another on conservation debates in Canada. Most recently, he has been studying artisanal fishers in Peru and their struggles to maintain access to productive marine resources and is writing a book manuscript on the subject.

This symposium is made possible through a generous grant from the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH) at Iowa State University.

Additional support is provided by the following departments and associations within Iowa State University: Architecture, English, Anthropology, Community and Regional Planning, History, Datum Journal of Architecture, The Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government),The Climate Science Program, Geological & Atmospheric Sciences, and The Global Resource Systems Programs.

April 4-5, 2016Iowa State University

Benton AuditoriumScheman BuildingIowa State CenterAmes, IA 50011