Mécanismes d'une crise

Une vision schématique de la crise financière et immobilière aux Etats-Unis: Des subprimes à la chute des Bourses, les mécanismes de la crise financière
LEMONDE.FR | 22.10.08

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Crossing the "borders" of urban politics: USA, France & Mexico

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)

Tasteless America?

>> 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 ?

Exhibiting the housing crisis

"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]

Precision of making

How They Built Houses in Japan from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Housing & transportation

“The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index is an innovative mapping tool that measures the true affordability of housing by estimating not just the cost of the housing itself, but also the costs of transportation. Using this index you can compare neighborhoods you may be considering based on both housing and transportation costs.”

>> http://htaindex.cnt.org/