The Crisis of Planetary Urbanization

David Harvey’s essay for the exhibition catalog of Uneven Growth Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities is published here on post to mark the opening of the exhibition. On the night of June 20, 2013, more than a million people in some 388 Brazilian cities took to the streets in a massive protest movement. The largest of these protests, comprising…

Hong Kong IS

What country is Hong Kong? Hong Kong was an island. Hong Kong will become part of China. MAP Office has decided to present Hong Kong is, with the intention of clearly addressing the specific characteristics of this unique city/territory, which is in a state of perpetual transition. Offering a platform to reveal a hidden urbanity, breaking…

All the Cities that Start with “B.” Notes from a Trip to Central Europe

In an influential account written in 1986, a prominent British historian Timothy Garton Ash described Central Europe as “territory where peoples, cultures, languages are fantastically intertwined, where every place has several names and men change their citizenship as often as their shoes, an enchanted wood full of wizards and witches”. This evocative characterization challenged the…

Urban Art in Megacities: São Paulo

In this seminar Nelson Brissac reviews artists’ interventions into the city of São Paulo as part of his Arte/Cidade project, and reveals some of the issues that characterize its inhabitants’ everyday experiences and perception. Touching upon the 2014 World Cup and Brazil’s widespread urban protests, Brissac introduces extraordinary artist projects by Vito Acconci, Rubens Mano,…

Tokyo Memories of Rauschenberg

These two texts, one by a well-known artist, the other by an eminent critic—both Tokyoites—, first appeared in Japanese in 1963 and 1968, respectively. Each provides a colorful account of interactions between artists from Tokyo and New York in the ’60s, and both present Japanese reflections on American art at that time. Here the texts…