Expo 67, or the Architecture of Late Modernity

The 1967 Universal and International Exhibition, the Montreal world's fair commonly known as Expo 67, produced both continuations of and crises in the emancipatory project of modern architecture. Like many world's fairs before it, Expo 67 was designed to mediate relations between peoples and things through its architecture. The origins of this work lay in the efforts of Daniel van Ginkel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, architects and town planners who, in remarkable reports, drawings, and architectural ideals advanced between 1962 and 1963, outlined the basis of a fundamentally new, though never fully realised, world's fair in the late twentieth century. Party to the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne and its influential prewar edicts on functionalist town planning as well as to groups like Team 10 and their opposition to diagrammatic generalisations by an emphasis on the personal, the particular, and the precise, the van Ginkels also drew on contemporary theories and practices of North American urban renewal when first conceiving Expo 67 as an instrument for redeveloping downtown Montreal. The resulting work, Man and the City, which officially secured the world's fair bid but remained unbuilt, carefully drew on the legacies of most great exhibitions, especially those of the nineteenth century, in order to conceive of sufficiently heroic structures making immanent novel forms of human interaction, social control, and the technical organisation of space. In 1967, this was to suggest a new world historical project - in a space existing for only six months but crowded with 50 million visitors - promoting senses of fraternal self-awareness through the unrelenting promise of progress. The resulting well-known Expo 67 theme, Man and His World, was a paean to contemporary humanism first used by the van Ginkels and their architect allies to reject the most enduring symbols of world exhibitions: the nation-state and its emblematic architecture. They imagined new kinds of architecture that could somehow engender new senses of political consciousness (inspired by, for example, UNESCO or the celebrated Family of Man photography exhibition of 1955) outside nationalist chauvinism. This was a vision of late modernity: a transitional form of political subjectivity still clinging to the shared passions of the citizen (thus for the polis) before being subsumed by mass culture - in other words, a moment during which nationalisms could still be channelled into alternative forms of political belonging free of narrow self-interest. The belief marked every aspect of the van Ginkels early plans and had half-lives in two consequential works: the theme pavilions Man the Producer and Habitat 67, which, with outward emphasis on the aesthetics and technics of innovative structures (and mass production), were seen as fulfilling the ambitions of the megastructural movement in the 1960s. As such, theses architectures of late modernity reflected a markedly modernist conviction of long duration: on the one hand, an abiding faith in technological salvation and, on the other hand, the sense of some liberative social mass giving rise to a new citizen of the world. At the very same moment, this universalism was fraught with ambiguity: on the one hand, any abiding faith in techno-scientific salvation was shaken in the aftermath of global war and the terror of nuclear holocaust; on the other hand, assumed geopolitical ideals were being upended, however temporarily, by, say, decolonisation and resulting alternative global alignments on a postwar world's fair). Expo 67, perhaps the most consequential twentieth-century world's fair in terms of utopian hopes of modern architecture, was prey to these and related desires to reinvigorate the modern project of uniting instrumental reason, mass edification, and popular spectacle in a genuinely new public realm. It would irrevocably shape the ways in which Canada, as a host nation purposely celebrating its centennial in the ambit of a world's fair, was to confront its collective sense of cultural representation and global belonging

Assembling Creative Cities in Seoul and Yokohama: Rebranding East Asian Urbanism

By investigating institutional and cultural practices as well as the consequences of the creative industry-led development policy in Yokohama, Japan and Seoul, South Korea, this dissertation critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy-driven urban development and considers social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within creative city policy discourses and practices. This dissertation intervenes in the conventional understandings, which consider the influx of neoliberalism as the key to explain the rapid global circulation of creative city policy, typically based on cities in the West. By considering the policy transfer as endless processes of “translation” from the viewpoint of Actor-Network Theory, rather than a linear replication process, it shows that specific institutional and cultural practices—such as the historical legacy of the East Asian developmental state and its relation to capital and civic society—are necessary not only for properly locating the meaning of neoliberalism but also for evaluating the complexity of neoliberal political projects in East Asia. By conceptualizing creative city policy as new urban governmental techniques , it argues that the creative cities of Japan and Korea are test sites not only for neoliberal creative economy but also for new forms of governing and being governed with significant implications for fostering certain types of subjectivities such as creative citizen and creative labor . Under this framework, ultimately this dissertation contributes to re-orient the current debates on the global creative city policy from a question of “How can we develop effective creative city policy?” implemented by urban planners, capitals and state officials to that of “How can we invent and share creative city politics?” raised by creative workers, activists and citizens

The Promenades of Paris. Alphand and the Urbanization of Garden Art, 1852-1871

This study investigates a formative episode in the history of modern landscape architecture and public space design: the rapid creation of public parks, squares, and tree-lined thoroughfares in Paris between 1852 and 1870, the period of the French Second Empire, to form a series of interconnecting “promenades.” It seeks to identify continuities and innovations with respect to traditions of garden art, urban art, and engineering in France. It asks how a multi-disciplinary team of public servants, led by the engineer Alphand, responded to the simultaneous demands of cultural and utilitarian necessities, and how the public received the new gardens. The research method consists primarily in interpretive analysis of archival and historic texts, design drawings, popular media accounts, art and literature, and physical landscapes. Of particular interest is Alphand’s treatise, Les Promenades de Paris (1867-73), which points back to a lineage of earlier texts, but also forward to an age in which environment and infrastructure are fundamental to the urban landscape. The record shows that Parisians had mixed reactions to the growth of the city and to the new vegetated spaces that would supposedly improve public health via fresh air. The promenades of Paris also show an intriguing ambiguity in defining the public good as collective health and/or collective pleasure. Alphand and his collaborators in the Service des Promenades et Plantations, or parks department—including Barillet-Deschamps, Davioud, Belgrand, Darcel, and André—forged a systematic approach that accommodated practical necessities, difficult sites, and a wide range of scales. Their work was bound by an ethics of purposefulness and respect for the limits of a given situation. Nonetheless they pursued an artistic and decorative agenda, reflecting a desire to ennoble the public sphere. The landscapes that they designed are marked by a frequent divergence between visible and invisible elements, the latter encompassing both buried infrastructures and intangible metaphors. Categories of true and false natures gave way to questions of what urban landscapes do, in relation to their surroundings, and what people do in them

Lusofonia in Musidanças. Governance, discourse and performance

Esta dissertação explora paisagens sonoras lusófonas em Lisboa em perspetivas sincrónica e diacrónica. Centra-se na governância de um festival de música na capital de Portugal: Musidanças, organizado pelo músico Português-angolano Firmino Pascoal desde 2001. Relaciona agentes culturais que têm evocado a noção ambivalente da lusofonia. Baseando-me em trabalho de campo in loco e virtual, analiso teias musicais de interesses em jogo em contextos de fluidez lusófona, e procuro perceber como é que produtores de música locais e seus produtos têm representado lusofonia em eventos festivos, outros locais e gravações. Aponto modos pelos quais Firmino Pascoal verbaliza proveniências nacionais dos músicos e categorias musicais performadas. Apesar de estudos existentes mencionarem referências históricas de mistura intercultural, só recentemente se abordam tabus. Este estudo etnomusicológico do caso Musidanças, implicando estratégias de Análise de Discurso, revela relações entre música e mudança social, pensa além das narrativas de origens e foca representações de sensibilização e intervenção intercultural.This dissertation explores lusophone soundscapes in Lisbon in synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It focuses on the governance of a music festival in the capital of Portugal: Musidanças, organized by the Portuguese-Angolan musician Firmino Pascoal since 2001. It relates cultural agents that have evoked the ambivalent notion of lusofonia. Drawing from in loco and virtual fieldwork, I analyze musical webs of interest into play in contexts of lusophone fluidity, and seek to understand how local music producers and their products represent lusofonia in festive events, other venues and recordings. I point out ways in which Firmino Pascoal has voiced national provenances of musicians and music categories performed. Although existing studies mention historical references of intercultural mixture, only recently related taboos are approached. This Ethnomusicology study case of Musidanças, implying strategies of Discourse Analysis unveils relations between music and social change, thinks beyond narratives of origins and focuses on representations of intercultural awareness and intervention