Public Still-Life, or Life in a Still Public…

Foong P. Chan, Culture in Urban Spaces Conference

Macau-SAR – 2019.04.12

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 Mural at the “Belvedere” (a low-income rental apartment) portrays two long-time
residents who were evicted shortly after the Mural Festival

introduction 2
 Who is the Gritty Urban designed for?

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 But… how can we informally plan?

Laneway Living Room…

Reterritorialising dirty spaces for an urban still-life

introduction 4
 … to proceed…
(1) Ways to control dirt
(2) Finding life in the stillest public realm

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 PART 1

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 What does Gritty Urbanism permit?

A homeless man walks by the Mural Festival’s Youthful energy…

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 Gritty urbanism’s succeeds by it incorporating
counter-arguments into its own body.
… modulating itself, real estate
increases its own capacity to act…

City of Vancouver, Artist Impression of Laneway Living Room (2017) The planner’s regulating of “dirt” is complicit in solidifying hierarchies.

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 PART 2

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 Power relations are mobile; they can be modified.
Michel Foucault
Ethics

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 Communities, which make language, culture, and thus
architecture their modes of existence and expression,
come into being not through the recognition,
generation, or establishment of common interests,
values, and needs, and the establishment of universal,
neutral laws and conventions that bind and enforce
them (as social contractarians proclaim), but through
the remainders they cast out, the figures they reject,
the terms that they consider unassimilable, that they
attempt to sacrifice, revile, and expel.
Elizabeth Grosz
Architecture from the Outside

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 Theorising is a practice of articulating new
relations among forces vested in a project.
… physical, socioeconomic, textual,
geological, climatic, historical and
spatial forces…

Texts and images that constitute theory are the materials for
a city’s remobilisation rather than a city’s ideal form.

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 Compromises are, of course, also possible; they are part
and parcel of politics; but they should be seen as
temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation.
Chantal Mouffe
Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism

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 [Ethics is] a question of knowing whether relations (and
which ones) can compound to form new, more extensive
relation, of whether capacities can compound directly to
constitute a more intense capacity or power.
Gilles Deleuze
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

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 Hypotheses and research questions as
conceptual-textual forces.
… form not as cause but as product
of the experimenting process…

Astra Howard, Surveillance with Public Intent Vehicle (2007) Experiments bring into shape those potential movements
that already exists in the stillest public space

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part 2 16
 To plan is not to limit, but to set
the scope for questions.
… when is it for one party to gain more power
to act and speak, when must it be less…

A place of commerce – a shopping centre – is temporarily muted

for the murmurs of an arts community to establish new territories.

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 All there are, the spaces between terms. It is
how these spaces knot and curve to produce
new expressions that matters ethically.
… an in-formal plan’s form is the experiment that
lies in the space between the terms…

Chinese Dish “Fat Choy (a rhizome) with Meat Stew” A judgment of a space’s usefulness to fill one’s taste-buds and belly is often not reducible to just one
ingredient. Sauces weave into the meats’ crevices, Cabbages wrap like a slightly burnt skin to a Chinese
sausage. This dish’s olfactory judgment is always based on the “space” between the ingredients..

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 How can Planning love its fate to
encounter the recurring stillness
of the gritty urbanism, each time
to remake anew territories?

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