The Art of Crafting Formal-Informal Linkages: On the Enduring Appeal of Belo Horizonte’s Hippie Fair

Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer explore the accelerating hybridization of formal and informal economic practices underway at one of Latin America’s largest open-air markets, Belo Horizonte’s “Hippie Fair,” officially called the Feira de Arte, Artesanato e Produtores de Variedades da Avenida Afonso Pena. Belying its uniform and ordered appearance, the fair’s multi-actor structure highlights the proliferation of formal-informal linkages that affect not only street vendors, manufacturers, and administrative bodies, but also large segments of the city’s population. The authors argue that two decades of globalization, in conjunction with the recent economic crisis and emerging forms of self-organized economies, have substantially altered the relationship between the informal and formal sectors, both conceptually and practically. They show the importance and ambivalence of the ongoing spatial transformation of informal markets in generating new economic climates that, in some cases, create alternative socioeconomic places, and in others, an expansion of capitalist markets

Introduction: Data is not a property but a relation

+ Data is not a property but a relation + Beyond data anxiety + Data citizens: emerging socialities and sovereignties + The rise and enclosure of user-generated publics + Dispossessing data + Dataism and the legitimacy of claim

Visual Cultures as Opportunity

Assemblies, gathering places, and agora-like situations have become popular sites for contemporary art. At the heart of these arenas is the search for new ways to counter the crisis-ridden experience of homo economicus—the pervasive and alienating marketization of all aspects of our lives. A great deal of hope is being placed on the potential of social formations enabled by new technologies of connectivity and exchange. Artists and cultural producers are at the forefront of testing the viability of transgressive actions such as coworking, crowdfunding, and open-source provisions. At the same time, it is apparent that global capitalism is expanding into multipolar constellations of top-down and bottom-up economic governance. In this volume, the fourth in the series Visual Cultures as..., Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck analyze the networked spaces of global informal markets, the cultural frontiers of speculative investments, and recent urban protests, and discuss crucial shifts in the process of collective articulation within today’s “crowd economy.

Blendende Werte: Die globale Zirkulation von Architektur- Kapital

The globalization of real estate markets of the past twenty years has stylized architecture as a highly valued and rapidly traded commodity, in the design of which questions of exchange value have far outweighed those of utility value. Moreover, architecture has become a means of manufacturing and expanding investment markets in these processes, in which their assets of symbolic and material meaning - as architectural capital - are primarily used for the rapid “building” of profit. Process control gains the upper hand over questions of the concrete impact on the built and social environment. However, it is precisely the different effects of materiality and symbolism that result in the impossibility of capturing architecture’s crises in a timely manner. As spaces of crisis, speculative architectures mask a permanent struggle for impending material and symbolic losses

Urban frontiers in the global struggle for capital gains

This article examines different ways in which finance models have become the ruling mode of spatializing relationships, arguing that the ongoing convergence of economic and spatial investment has transformed our environments into heavily contested ‘financescapes’. First, it reflects upon architecture’s capacity to give both material and symbolic form to these processes and considers the impacts this has on the emergence of novel kinds of urban investment frontiers, including luxury brand real estate, free zones, private cities, and urban innovation hubs. Focusing on speculative urban developments in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, the article then highlights the performative dimension of such building programs: how architectural capital is put to work by actively performing the frontiers of future development. Physically staking out future financial gains, this mode of operation is today becoming increasingly manifested in urban crowdfunding schemes. We argue that, far from promoting new models of civic participation, such schemes are functioning as a testbed for speculation around new patterns of spatial production in which architecture acts less as the flagstaff of capital than as a capital system in itself

Trading Indeterminacy – Informal Markets in Europe

Informal markets generate sites of counter-globalisation based on a deterritorialisation of cultures. Many of these markets are hubs of migratory routes whose idiosyncratic complexity reflects the tension between traditional economies, black markets and the new conditions of deregulated and liberalised capital markets. The dynamics of these sites highlight the network character of the radicalised and deregulated flows of people, capital and goods worldwide. One of the effects this network phenomenon creates is an increased transnationalisation and hybridisation of cultural claims and expressions. In view of growing cultural homogenisation, this brings to the fore one of the most potent traits of informal markets: the sprawl of a myriad of indeterminate parallel worlds existing next to each other or literally within the same place. Along a set of case studies carried out by the EU funded research project, Networked Cultures (www.networkedcultures.org), this text looks at three different informal markets as micro-sites of paradoxical and indeterminate cultural production: Izmailovo Market Moscow, Istanbul Topkapi and Arizona Market BrČko (BaH

Andere Märkte: Zur Architektur der informellen Ökonomie

Globally, half of all economic activity is informal. In times of global insecurity, more and more importance is being placed on integrating the productive energy of this informality, in order to ensure economic growth and social cohesion. Informal marketplaces and the numerous conflicts around their edges form both the location and guiding factors of this development. From markets of the survival economy to staged economic alterity, this book traces the discourses, actors, contradictions and potentials which these new forms of informality promote