Comment est-il possible d’analyser un phénomène aussi complexe que la crise immobilière et du crédit aux États-Unis? La réponse de ce reportage visuel du Journal Le Monde offre un tableau ethnographique d’une situation très locale d’un quartier de Baltimore, de ses habitants et de ceux qui, soit restent, soit quittent leur quartier. Cette lecture individualisée d’histoires de maisons donne à voir les enjeux sociaux et urbains de la crise immobilière. Journalistique et hyper réaliste, cette illustration est pourtant peu représentative des analyses du phénomène de la crise, cherchant à en montrer son ampleur et son échelle.
The Department of Urban Studies and Planning had the pleasure to welcome Professor Marshall Ganz, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 for a lunch discussion sponsored by the seminar series "Spaces of Contention and Competing Citizenships" and the Housing, Community and Economic Development group.
Ganz was once a National Organizing Director of the United Farm Workers and is now a sought-after advisor to political campaigns, unions and NGOs. In 1968, Marshall Ganz dropped out of Harvard to join the civil rights movement, returned to his hometown of Bakersfield, California with "Mississippi Eyes" and was able to see for the first time the poverty, racism and injustice that had been around him his whole life. He then joined Ceasar Chavez as a farm worker organizer and was mentored by figures from Saul Alinksy's community organizing movement. He also helped organize a Get Out the Vote campaign in the 1968 California Primary for Robert Kennedy.
Since January, 2007, Marshall Ganz has worked as one of the lead organizers of the Obama campaign, training youth and other campaign volunteers around the country working for the election of Barack Obama. His talk in DUSP (Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT), "Organizing Obama: Leadership, Story and Strategy", focused specifically on how this grassroot campaigning and organizing work drew committed and continued support from a variety of volunteers and political activists united around the values and stories that Barack Obama developed during his campaign and how the Obama team worked to put an end to political campaigning centered on marketing and advertising towards voters as passive consumers. The team's goal was to create a long-lasting sense of purpose, action, and commitment around the volunteers who worked relentlessly around each State of the country towards and beyond the election of Barack Obama.
By crossing the borders between the United States, France and Mexico, as well as those between academic disciplines, this session will stress the use of comparisons as a tool for urban planners and scholars in the analysis of urban politics.
Today’s difficulty for specificity within urban comparisons in a global context can lead to misrepresentations. By crossing disciplines as well as national borders, an interdisciplinary perspective will highlight the uses and abuses of global comparisons and recognize its potentials in urban research and planning.
The panellists participating in this session on Comparative Urban Politics animating a discussion among faculty and students are:
Diane Davis: Professor of Political Sociology, head of the International Development Group.
Aseem Inam: Visiting Lecturer & urban designer.
Phillip Thompson: Associate Professor of Urban Politics
Thomas Watkin: PhD candidate in Sociology, EHESS (Visiting PhD at DUSP with the support from the Tec de Monterrey)
>> Une présentation du jury du concours House Redux face aux projets de la 'future maison blanche'. Malgré les ambitions tant attendues du concours, les propos du jury font preuve de peu d’enthousiasme. On y fait référence aux projets des années 60, aux images ré éditées depuis « plusieurs décennies », où ici l’imaginaire et l’utopie ne porteraient aucune volonté politique. Voit-on alors les limites du discours politique que doit susciter un rendu de projet architectural? Est-ce vraiment par le biais d’un concours que l’on pourrait exprimer synthétiquement l’acte politique de l’architecture ?
"During a year-long residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, designer Damon Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), surveyed the darkening realm of real estate markets: foreclosures, pro-formas, chains of title, block busting, exploding ARMs, and the obscure history of the mortgage, Old French for death vow.
In the resulting installation, the head of Frederick Babcock, pioneer appraiser, gazes over a scattered field of diminished Detroit houses, still showing damage from 1960s real estate scandals. Looming behind Babcock, the flicker of a neon sign – BUY LOW SELL HIGH – reveals the spikes and troughs of a wall cut by the 20th century’s prime rate, the sharp line between lenders and borrowers. Projected videos haunt the gallery with the apparitions of financial engineers, federal regulators, and anti-foreclosure activists.
Today, what has become known as the Subprime Meltdown continues to spread, pushing people out of homes, wasting neighborhoods, bankrupting institutions, and threatening global economic crisis. Red Lines aims to broaden and enrich the urgent conversation about how our society finances its living environments." >> full text [source]
>> The exhibition ' Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosure, Risk Structures: Architecture of Finance from the the Great Depression to the Subprime Meltdown' is an exhibition curated by Damon Rich and the Center for Urban Pedagogy commissioned by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the MIT.The MIT Lawrence project participated actively in the show. [see video below]
