This is Tomorrow? Urban Utopia – Dystopia – Heterotopia

October 20, 2008
‘The Right to the City’

Speakers:
Shuddhabrata Sengupta,
Philippe Rekacewicz

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is a member of Raqs Media Collective and Sarai.net, New Delhi, India, co-curator of manifesta7, Bolzano, Italy. Philippe Rekacewicz is a geographer and cartographer for Le Monde Diplomatique, France.
This is the third in a cross-disciplinary lecture series hosted by the MIT Visual Arts Program that includes speakers from art, architecture, urbanism and related research fields from around the world. These speakers will pose questions in order to start a discussion about imagining tomorrow’s urban ‘everyday life’- a topic that calls for a discourse beyond just formal disciplines. The series is free and open to the public. Mondays 7 – 9 p.m.

How does a series of anxiety-producing events and incidents play out in urban situations in the course of the perpetration of ‘terror’ that claims not only bodies but biographies as well? Can it be said that the discourse about ‘terrorism’ also makes claims on those same bodies and biographies? How can we read images and media narratives about this topic from the city of Delhi?

What is the relationship between cartography and art, between science and politics? How does this influence the use and manipulation of maps as a propaganda tool?

Series Schedule

September 29: ‘Imagining Communities’
Ute Meta Bauer, Director MIT Visual Arts Program; Yvonne P. Doderer, architect and urban researcher, MIT Visiting Professor in Visual Arts; Jesko Fezer, architect, collaborator with the Institute of Applied Urbanism in Berlin, Germany, and coeditor of AnArchitektur.

October 6: ‘Urban Utopia?’
Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University; Pia Maria Ahlback, Lecturer and Researcher in Comparative literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland.

October 20: ‘The Right to the City’
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, member of Raqs Media Collective and Sarai.net, New Delhi, India, co-curator of manifesta7, Bolzano, Italy; Philippe Rekacewicz, geographer and cartographer for Le Monde Diplomatique, France.

October 27: ‘What City? Whose City?’
Regina Bittner, curator and coordinator of the Bauhaus Kolleg at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany; Stefano Boeri, Editor-in-Chief of Abitare, Milan, Italy, teaches at the Milan Polytechnic and is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, USA; Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, curator, Italy and editor of ‘The (Un)Common Place: Art, Public Space and Urban Aesthetics in Europe.’

November 3: ‘Mobile Life, Ghost Towns’
Lukas Feireiss, curator, and editor of ‘Architecture of Change: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment’; AbdouMaliq Simone, Professor in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmith University of London, UK.

November 17: ‘Remote Habitats’
Lucy Orta, Studio-Orta, Paris, France and Professor for Art, Fashion and the Environment, London College of Fashion, UK; Nicholas Makris Professor of Engineering and Director of the MIT Laboratory of Undersea Remote Sensing; Armin Linke, photographer and film maker, Milan, Italy and guest professor at the HFG Karlruhe, Germany.

MIT Visual Arts Program Lecture Series
265 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Bldg N51-337, 3rd floor
Adjacent to the MIT Museum
(Entrance is on Front Street)
Phone: +1 617-253-5229
Contact: Visual Arts Program
vap@mit.edu

urbanutopias.mit.edu