Author Archives: mshiva

Ferdowsi Market

Former Iranian Market Ferdowsi – To be Demolished

Ferdowsi Market is located on a small street that is named after the Persian poet, in the heart of Yerevan, near the central Republic Square. At tables placed on the street, beneath poor residential buildings, you can buy a variety of products – from household items to inexpensive clothing.

Clothing market is open from 9 untill 6.

The Ferdowsi market is one of the “on a budget” markets of Yerevan.

There are almost 600 outlets in the market.

The seller are afraid of becoming jobless after the demolishing of the market.

During the first years of Armenia’s independence, in the course of the Karabakh war, the country had to endure a heavy transport blockade. In those years, the southern border with Iran became a source of life for Armenia. Trucks with Iranian products were being unloaded directly on the central square, and, by coincidence, were being sold directly on a street with a “Persian” name, Ferdowsi.

In the beginning, traders were mostly Iranians. Then, over time, when they began to bring in goods from other countries, the demand for Iranian goods fell, and they left, and there gradually began to appear Armenian merchants, ” says Lilia, who has worked in the market for around 8 years.

Today, the market offers mostly goods from Turkey and China, and rarely from Iran. According to the traders, the market provides jobs of more than 600 people. Unlike other capital markets, traders are mainly buyers themselves and cannot afford to employ salespeople.

Former Iranian Market Ferdowsi – To Be Demolished

By Gayane Mirzoyan

Clothing market is open from 9 untill 6.

The Ferdowsi market is one of the “on a budget” markets of Yerevan.

There are almost 600 outlets in the market.

The seller are afraid of becoming jobless after the demolishing of the market.

City Noise

“City Noise”: Sound (Art) and Disaster

By Frans Ari Prasetyo

Published in the Journal of Sonic Studies

Introduction

My sonic work “City Noise” proposes both an artistic and a theoretical approach to the city-sound relationship. The default assumption about this relationship is that sounds reflect a one-to-one relationship between soundscape and landscape, both drawing upon and revealing the physical and social landscapes from which they originate. However, the question can be posed regarding whether there actually is a direct relationship between sound and place in our increasingly globalized world. Due to this globalization, the relation between the local and the global has become more fluid, and the relation between sounds and scapes has begun to blur.

Three short remarks about sound need to be made here:

Sound is an inherently spatial phenomenon. No matter what its point of origin, sound must navigate space before reaching our ears. Simultaneously, recent innovations in communication and digital technologies have created virtual networks, thus redefining the conception of space and presenting new possibilities for sound studies and sound art.
Sound is also a constitutive element in the formation of public life: in virtual spaces, the sharing of sound files are a structuring factor of public life, framed by and revealing shared tastes and ideologies. In “real” spaces, sound contributes to the policing of relative inclusion and exclusion, or constituting citizenship along axes of race, class, gender, and nationality.
One of the traditional assumptions about sonic art derived from field recordings is that it should be developed from an “authentic” or local sense of place, identity, community, or way of life. Contradictorily, sometimes the assumption is that the relationship between sound and city is fundamentally arbitrary. This makes clear that recorded sounds enter into a complex relational dynamic with the environment from which they are taken: they may be subjected to a multitude of transformations, e.g. amplification, distortion, reverberation, dissipation, etc.

“City Noise” affirms the need for aesthetic reflection that takes into consideration the profound transformations of city sounds occurring in the wake of a natural disaster; it thus attempts to present sound marks and sound signs that make a city more identifiable and historically grounded. The rationale is that sounds help us to understand specific public situations as lived, imagined, and sensed – “public” understood here as expansive, encompassing feelings, rituals, spaces and spheres, the networked, the transient, and the mediated. As such, “City Noise” joins the already rich discourse on sound and public life while amplifying issues of affect, sense, and materiality.

A further objective of “City Noise” is to underscore the significance of sound on memory recall in the city, how evocations of city spaces are achieved through sound, where memory and sound coalesce in the (recomposed) experience of the city; it emphasizes the capacity and role of sounds in creating, enhancing, complicating, or disintegrating the public sphere.

“City Noise” presents city spaces, in both a physical and social sense, as layers of natural and human-made sounds that together create a sonic network. The structure of the city resonates in the distant reverberations of passing trains, transmitted through the ground, woven with other sources of environmental and ambient sounds and including voices in a chaotic and disrupted urban environment. It presents not only the natural sounds of disasters in general (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and volcanic eruptions) but also the sounds of those affected (especially humans), responding directly and indirectly to and immersed within the atmosphere of a disaster.

Public Space and Informal Mechanisms in Beirut

Life in a Street: How Informal Mechanisms Govern Scarce Public Spaces in Nabaa, Beirut

By Petra Samaha

Published in Jadaliyya

[Negotiations and invisible tactics: bargaining over space as well as prices. Image by Petra Samaha]

The informal mechanisms of organization in everyday public life have been at the core of concerns of many researchers and practitioners (e.g., Rukmana and Hegel in Indonesia, Mehrotra in India, and Nagati in Egypt). While examining these processes in different contexts, the focus was typically on their interplay with “formal” regulations or in relation to the private built environment. Few highlighted the significance of these informal arrangements per se and their importance in governing public shared spaces (Simone 2004 & 2009, Bayat 1998 & 2010). These mechanisms lend some sort of spatial flexibility to the street transforming it into much more than a space for circulation, but rather a holder of mixed uses, leading therefore to an altered definition of public life.

Perhaps the best known of all books addressing the topic of public life is Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities where the author described streets and their sidewalks as the main public places of a city–its most vital organs. Density, walkability, mixed uses, and human scale are described as main criteria for livable cities. Even though these concepts are usually used to define well-planned cities, they seem to also describe very well the lively streets in areas typically tagged as informal. Such vibrant streets are often the result of unplanned and complex processes that offer us many more interesting lessons when disentangled and understood.

Taking the case of Nabaa (Bourj Hammoud) I look into the ways in which the dwellers share the scarce public spaces of the neighborhood and highlight the importance of their efficient organization/management as mixed-use spaces[1]. There is a lot to learn from the informal mechanisms and practices that govern the space of the street and the sidewalk. Vibrancy in such spaces often stems from widespread economic activities and social life. However, over-crowdedness inevitably leads to conflicts whereby the better connected and the more powerful in the neighborhood’s social structure are able to make stronger claims over space and the more vulnerable (i.e., elderly, children, women, and migrants) learn to navigate their way and adapt through other self-devised alternatives. These multiple claims might seem chaotic or unorganized. However, a detailed investigation revealed they are ruled by a set of codes that aim at anticipating, mitigating, and resolving conflicts. What and how can we learn from these complex informal mechanisms of conflict resolution and space reallocation that street users in dense informal areas deploy in their everyday life?

Nabaa is a dense low-income neighborhood located immediately at the eastern edge of Beirut’s administrative boundary and houses a large percentage of vulnerable population groups including foreign migrant workers and refugees. The area offers a unique blend of religious, national, and ethnic mixity that is vividly reflected on the neighborhood streets through banners, street signs, graffiti and stencils but also storefronts and dress codes. The streets of Nabaa are rife with commercial and economic activities either happening on the ground floors of buildings or using the space of the street/sidewalk itself. Through direct observations, mapping and interviews, I looked into the ways in which the dwellers use the spaces of the neighborhood and manage the multiple claims over the scarce shared spaces.

Given the high population density and scarce open spaces, dwellers come up with ad-hoc solutions to fulfill their daily needs and, at the same time, improve the spaces of their neighborhood (i.e., greening, open space appropriation, and waste management). The space of the sidewalk/street acquires different meanings through time since dwellers assign functions to it through their own practices. The space is hence defined by social and economic processes rather than planned top-down schemes. It becomes hard to distinguish pre-set boundaries between public and private, sidewalk and street, inside and outside… Hence, conflicts are solved through deploying complex informal mechanisms that rely on the flexibility of both time and space. While I narrate the stories from the streets of Nabaa, I propose that the efficient, perhaps creative, management of the shared spaces of the city by the street users themselves can mitigate or even evade conflicts. The informal arrangements render the space of the street to be much more than a passage, but rather a holder of mixed uses increasing its effectiveness in responding to conflicting needs and pressing demands.

Dimensions of Space and Time

In order to understand how the multiple use and users coexist in Nabaa through space and time, I mapped the main commercial and social practices on a busy artery in Nabaa (Sis Street) while highlighting the dimensions of time and space. Hence, the patterns of use and meaning of space are in a constant shift over the course of a single day, sometimes hours.

The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens

An Uneasy Metamorphosis: The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens

Fabien Bellat

Abstract

If a failed hope could still have an afterlife, then what happened to the people who believed in constructivism? For these architects, professional survival was a top priority. Many—like Moisei Ginzburg, Ivan Leonidov, and Mikhaïl Korjev—tried to find a specialized niche wherein they could work according to their artistic convictions and become specialists in designing gardens. The abstract geometry of the Le Nôtre gardening school was for them a source of inspiration between the use of history and the modernization of that legacy. Strangely enough, the absolute Sun King gardener became in the USSR a model, organizing nature like a suprematist abstraction. Imitating Versailles became a way to satisfy the Stalinist USSR’s need for magnificence. Through gardens, the constructivists were still given a chance to experiment, changing the meanings of places. Meanwhile, they invented a daring aesthetic afterlife for constructivism, enabling a singular conceptual and political creation.

Key Words: Gorki Park, Landscape Architecture, Landscape Design, Russian Constructivism, Stalinist Landscapes

Metaphorically speaking, the attitude of the USSR toward its citizens often seemed like Kronos devouring his children. Or, perhaps another mythological image might be even more apt: Daphne’s metamorphosis into the laurel tree illustrates well the transformation of former constructivist architects into designers of Stalinist landscapes. In the 1920s and 30s, a number of architects who had served Soviet modernity were either put aside by the regime or had to envisage a radical adaptation to its new cultural context. Indeed, if a failed hope could still have an afterlife, then what happened to all those people who believed in constructivism?

Metamorphosis is indeed a keyword. Creating Soviet gardens demanded a reordering of nature, both at the level of the landscape itself and at the level of public perception and taste. However, landscape architecture is almost absent from political texts. If a number of essays considered the role of the city in the new socialist world, neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Bukharin said anything specific about the use of nature in the city center. According to Trotsky, “The man will be incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle. He will have a more harmonious body, more rhythmic movements, a more melodious voice; daily life will assume eminently theatrical forms” (Service 2011Service, R. 2011. Trotsky. Paris: Perrin. [Google Scholar]).¹1 All quotations in the essay were translated by the author.View all notes Yet to achieve such a goal presupposed building both sport and cultural facilities: stadiums, theaters, and gardens would be some of the architectural programs likely to enable this sovietization of habits. Using similar logic but with more practical words than the ostracized Trotsky, Anton Makarenko (2012Makarenko, A. 2012. Kommunisticeskoe vospitanie i povedenie. In La fabrique du soviétique dans les arts et la culture: Construire/déconstruire l’homme nouveau, ed. L.Kastler and S.Krylosova, 21. Paris: Institut d’Etudes Slaves. [Google Scholar]), an educator in labor communes, insisted on outside activities being a key ingredient for the education of a “new Soviet man.” These requirements asked for new constructions and landscaping without giving any guidelines regarding the forms that these constructions and landscaping should take. Actually, except for the requirement for fresh air and some public gardens near workers’ homes, architects had a free hand to choose what a Soviet garden should look like. In fact, the frontline was located elsewhere.

For constructivist architects, organizing their professional and artistic survival was indeed top priority. Finding programs where they could still work, in a fragile balance between their convictions and what was expected from them, led them to reconsider more carefully the design of parks. Since landscape architecture was now part of the milieu of the new Soviet citizen, parks of leisure and rest took on new importance as essential places for experimenting with political education and mastering propaganda.

Revolution and Landscaping

“The Russian revolutionary enthusiasm, combined with American efficiency, this is the essence of Leninism”; thus spoke Stalin (1939Stalin, J. 1939. Les questions du léninisme. Moscow: State Publications in Foreign Languages. [Google Scholar], 87). If such a sentence seems more like a slogan than a true guideline for artists in charge of creating Soviet facilities, the insistence on spirit, undergirded by U.S. efficiency, seemed likely to promote the creation of new forms supposed to embody the revolution. Consequently, the decree “On Reconstruction of the Way of Life,” signed by the Central Committee in May 1930, discussed the best blueprints to build a socialist way of life in conjunction with the Five-Year Plan. First of all, the party organization was supposed to help this movement and to direct it ideologically. Then, blaming hurried attempts to reconstruct a way of life in one leap, the decree urged for new rules guiding the construction of workers’ cities near great industrial centers, collective facilities, schools, and laundries.

Exploring Yerevan’s Oldest Neighborhood: History and Ethics of Heritage Preservation in Kond

By Karine Vann, a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. “She received her Master of Studies in Musicology from Jesus College, University of Oxford in 2014, where her dissertation examined the assimilation of jazz music in Soviet Armenia.
She writes about Armenian cultural heritage for Smithsonian.com.”

Published by Ajam Media Collective

“First things first… Kond might look like a ghetto. It’s not,” says Sevada Petrossian as a preface to our walking tour of Yerevan’s oldest neighborhood. Petrossian is an architect at a Yerevan-based firm called urbanlab.am, an organization that has spent the last five years working hard to garner attention for Kond. The firm has devoted many weekends to giving walking tours of this district to curious travelers, in hopes of highlighting its significance. According to Petrossian and his colleagues, Kond is uniquely situated in Yerevan’s urban fabric–both geographically and socially.

It isn’t clear how long Kond has been inhabited, says Petrossian, but the current layout has remained almost intact since the seventeenth century, back when Yerevan was a cosmopolitan crossroads at the intersection of different religions and ethnicities. The district’s name in Turkish was Tapabashi, meaning “hill top” and the word ‘Kond’ literally translates to “long” or “round” hill in Armenian. Its location on a hill has created a geographical barrier between the district and the rest of the city for centuries. On a map, Kond’s outline resembles a teardrop. caressing the western exterior of the circular main downtown area.

Map of Yerevan, outlining Kond. Photo courtesy of Google Maps.

The deterioration from decades of neglect has taken its toll on the surrounding environment. Streets are crumbling, buildings appear to be sinking from their own weight, and residents’ living conditions are deplorable. It isn’t clear how long Kond has been inhabited, says Petrossian, but the current urban fabric has remained almost intact since the seventeenth century.

Despite the rough exterior, this structural neglect has actually played an important role in preserving the centuries of history in Kond. It is the reason most old buildings have miraculously avoided demolition. In stark contrast to the rest of Yerevan, Kond has not undergone any fundamental or radical architectural modifications in over three hundred years. Today, Kond hosts the most diverse array of architecture in the city.

Islamic Paradox? – Gender in Baku

Islamic Paradox? – Gender in Baku

By Heather D. DeHaan
In western popular consciousness, Islam is a faith that rigidly patrols its boundaries. In this conception of Islam, the “House of Islam” combats the world of unbelief, religious infidelity is punished by the state, and uncovered women are banned from public space. The only boundary that the West might wish to introduce–a religious/secular divide–is staunchly rejected. Given such an understanding of Islam, the western public cannot quite fathom Islam’s variability or the fact that “flexible” Islam exists.

Living in the secular Shia state of Azerbaijan made me consider anew the question of Islam, for Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet Islam offers a paradox: a distinct “male” gendering of public space, despite the presence of “liberated” women in European cuts of fashion. Unlike Russia, where the figure of the babushka (the Russian grandmother) dominates public space, public space in Azerbaijan is distinctly male. Here, there is no sign of the male emasculation associated with Soviet-era repression (in which the state usurped the role of father) or with post-Soviet unemployment (which left men unable to provide). Indeed, neither Soviet nor post-Soviet economic struggles appear to have limited the size or cohesion of the Azerbaijani family, and Azerbaijani men remain central to family life. While not unaffected by Soviet life, Azerbaijani traditional culture remains exceptionally strong.

As a westerner, this vitality might not be immediately visible, for Azerbaijani streets tend to be filled with small groups of men who have apparently nothing to do. They gather at the junctions of streets, on the edges of the dvor, and around metro entrances. Shifting restlessly, but not with any sense of haste or impatience, they engage in long conversation marked by few words and multiple drags on a cigaret. Some of them are taxi drivers waiting for a customer to appear. Others appear to be arranging a deal of some sorts–a swap, a trade, or something else. Some are surely pensioners, while others are probably unemployed. High unemployment alone cannot explain this phenomenon, however, for in places such as Russia or Georgia, similar post-Soviet unemployment rates failed to produce this male-dominated street scene. The men on Azerbaijani streets signal something else–namely, that public space is coded male.

This gender coding is unmistakable. For every woman in the metro after dark, there are at least a dozen men. In the heart of Baku, men and women together remain out late, but this does not change the overall gender imbalance on the street after dark. Males dominate the night, and to some extent they even dominate the day, for they are the ones responsible for public errands as opposed to domestic chores. Azerbaijani teahouses are purely male “hang outs,” and even public parks seem to privilege men, who gather there to play chess, dominoes, and backgammon, or perhaps just sit.

More Here

Do-it-yourself urbanism: vertical building extensions in the urban landscapes of Skopje and Tbilisi

Do-it-yourself urbanism: vertical building extensions in the urban landscapes of Skopje and Tbilisi

Abstract
The architectural and social landscapes of many post-socialist cities have been transformed by an emergent urban phenomenon: the construction of vertical building extensions (VBEs) on the balconies and façades of multi-storey residential buildings.

While such structures are often of a makeshift, improvised character, many of them possess reinforced concrete frame constructions that often parallel the ‘host’ building in terms of size and function.

This paper examines the social and spatial underpinnings of such extensions, with the aid of a field study based in Skopje and Tbilisi – the capitals of, respectively, Macedonia and Georgia. We highlight the embeddedness of this phenomenon in a set of policy decisions and economic practices specific to the post-socialist period, as well as their complex implications for the

present and future use of urban space. One of our key arguments is that VBEs ‘spatialize’ coping strategies in post socialism, embodying a kind of ‘DIY urbanism’ that has deeply transformed the conduct of everyday life in the city.

Article:
https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:185402&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-NON-PUBLISHERS.PDF

Tblisi’s Modernisms and Mobilities

Harsha Ram: “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, Regional, National, Local”

Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkeley) held this lecture on “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, Regional, National, Local” during the Annual Conference “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetics”, 5 – 7 November 2015, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The Conference was organized by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and convened by Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices.

Harsha Ram: “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, Regional, National, Local” from ForumundMaxWeber on Vimeo.

Harsha Ram. Photo: Art Histories/Luise Illigen under CC BY SA 4.0

One of the principal challenges facing the study of global modernisms, as of any properly supranational cultural phenomenon, is the question of scale. Current theories of world modernism, generally neo-Marxist or Wallersteinian in inspiration, assume a vision of the world as “one and unequal” (Franco Moretti). In tracing the convergences of the global and the local, prevalent theories of world literature assume a model of hierarchical mediation, based on an initially posited spatial distance between core and periphery which is then mitigated through contiguous contact and infrastructural support. Alternatively, the dialectic of the global and the local is mapped onto the competing spatial logics of the marketplace and the nation-state. Both approaches have the genuine merit of acknowledging the operative inequalities of the modern world system, from the nineteenth-century imperial division of the globe to the resistances engendered by anti-colonial nationalism and socialist internationalism. Nevertheless, these theories can and have been faulted for their linear historicism (reducing modernity to modernization) and their spatial diffusionism, whereby the West is seen as the sole motor of cultural change. The explanatory power of theories of world literature, then, derives in large part from the perceived capacity of the Western metropole to impose the territorial logic of the nation and the deterritorializing logic of market exchange onto the rest of the world. Can other stories be told?

In this lecture Harsha Ram seeks to examine both core/periphery and circulatory models of world modernism, while insisting on the local (urban) and the transregional as alternative models by which to conceive modernist cultural practice. He focuses on the city of Tiflis (Tbilisi) in “Russian” Transcaucasia during the Russian revolution. With the collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the peoples of the South Caucasus were able briefly to overcome their peripheral status, insisting at once on political emancipation and cultural modernization while tapping into older regional legacies that predate the modern world system.

Harsha Ram is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary fields of specialization are Russian and European literature, comparative romanticisms and modernisms. His theoretical interests encompass historical poetics, world literature, crosscultural encounter, and the problem of situating cultural production between the local (urban), the national, the imperial, and the cosmopolitan. He is the author of The Imperial Sublime. A Russian Poetics of Empire (2003), and is currently completing a second book entitled City of Crossroads. Tiflis Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Encounter.

Quasi-quantitative mapping with scarce resources

From LSE Field Research Methods Labs

Quasi-quantitative Mapping with Scarce Resources

The methodological design I used to map fearscapes is fourfold. First, selection of the spatial entities to be included in the maps. I identified six categories, broad enough to keep flexibility to accommodate the variety of actual spatial entities:

An Argument for Seeing in Urban Social Science

Jerome Krase

An Argument for Seeing in Urban Social Science

Ethnographic and other qualitative researches are often relegated to a lesser status despite significant contributions to social science. However, ethnography as a research best practice is firmly anchored in theory, method, and subject matter. This essay synthesizes ways of looking at immigrant and gentrified urban neighborhoods in global cities as visible expressions of cultural and class changes that are expressed in vernacular landscapes.

Keywords: Visual, vernacular, global, methods, theory

Introduction

“When we first pass through local spaces in global cities we are like tourists using our eyes to decipher the clues and cues to which we are exposed. Is this a safe or a dangerous place? Am I welcome here or should I leave before it is too late? What kind of neighborhood is it? Are the local residents rich or poor? What is their race, ethnicity, or religion and how (or why) does it matter? Some things are easy to tell on a street, such as there things for sale here? Legitimate merchants make it obvious that they are seeking customers with signs that compete for attention, but for the sale of illicit goods, the signs are subtler. Yet it seems that for the knowledgeable purchaser they are still there in plain view. This reading the “street signs” so to speak is not merely an aesthetic exercise. What we see makes a difference in how we respond to the places and the people we find in our increasingly complex and changing urban surroundings.‟ …(continue below)

(Krase 2012: 1)

Article:

An Argument for Seeing in Urban Social Science