Wishful Thinking In Government

Some of our colleagues in the business of providing unsolicited consulting services to government agencies, the Institute for Wishful Thinking, have been seeking proposals from artists, designers, architects, educators and community leaders.
We have offered our ongoing work in Northeast Florida's Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, and there are some other great proposals to browse, including the National TLC Service (Toxic Land/Labor Conservation)!
Their call for proposals is open for another 6 days, until May 8, so get your wishful thinking on.

Architectural Hot Zones

A recent Citiwire editorial by Roberta Brandes Gratz takes up a critique of the bio-science industry that we dealt with in our tour of the Chicago Technology Park. Brandes Gratz's piece takes on initiatives to construct a BioDistrict in New Orleans's Mid-City Neighborhood. We tried to understand the spatial impacts of the biotech industry through the metaphor of "spatial eugenics," a metaphor that looks like it might be equally, if not more so, applicable in NOLA.
The NOLA Defender has a short piece on the clearing of the land that has occurred there, along with a photo essay. The Christian Science Monitor has a more detailed story from December.
Image above from the NOLA Defender's Kat Arnold.

Underground Migration

So, when we proposed an underground walkway for visitors to be taken from a contaminated lot at Fifth and Hill in Champaign, IL to our proposed mMigration Research and Recreation Center, we couldn't have imagined that an underground pipe leaving the site was already present. Thanks to investigations by the Champaign County Health Care Consumers, a pipe once used to transport toxic coal tar from a coal-to-gas manufacturing plant into a local creek was found. From the CCHCC press release:

Yesterday, we released the environmental test results from samples of a pipe (and the soil around it) at Boneyard Creek. The pipe is one that belonged to the former manufactured gas plant at Fifth and Hill Streets in Champaign, which is now the Ameren toxic site. Our concern has been that this pipe could be an ongoing source of toxic contamination into the Boneyard Creek, and along the 5-block stretch of the neighborhood where the pipe runs, til it ends at Boneyard Creek.
When the plant was in operation, from the late 1880s until the late 1950s, the pipe was used to dump tons of coal tar and other petroleum-based wastes into the Boneyard Creek. The environmental experts working with the 5th & Hill Neighborhood Rights Campaign learned about the existence of this pipe after only one day of conducting background research. The pipe and the gas plant's use of the pipe to dump coal tar was detailed in a 1915 report by Ralph Hilscher. The environmental experts working with us asked the IL EPA and Ameren to investigate the existence of this pipe, because of its potential threat to human health, the environment, and Boneyard Creek.
The IL EPA refused to investigate, saying there was no evidence for the existence of the pipe. It should be noted that in the 15 years that IL Power/Ameren have "investigated" the toxic site, they apparently never found evidence of this pipe.

Stories in Reserve Events in New York, February 9

If you're in New York on February 9, we are presenting the first volume of Stories in Reserve at two venues and we welcome you to come and meet the contributors and check out the book if you haven't already.
The first event will be at The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY from 2-4 pm. It will feature  presentations by the Temporary Travel Office and all 5 contributors to the book: Sarah Kanouse, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Ryan Griffis, Lize Mogel, and Sarah Ross. Attendees will be treated to behind-the-scenes virtual tours of three distinct social ecosystems.
Following that, at 7pm, will be a book launch at the great Bluestockings bookstore, where a more informal and intimate discussion of critical tourism and the specific tours in the book will take place.
We hope to see you there!

Touring Protest, Or Maps of Protest

Following some of the reporting on the protests in Egypt by Aljazeera, we came acrossthis story that portrays the protests through maps.
Without getting into the problematics of this form of mapping and its rendering of space-time relationships as flat and simultaneous, we'd like to just think about the image of the map we are presented with. While maps have probably always included iconography as part of their pictorial funtion, the ability for the map's readers to change the scale of the map makes the role of virtual map pins (like those in Google Earth) more visible... maybe. At what scale is the location in question identified by the map pin? The image below suggests that an event took place in the middle of a street, perhaps at the scale of a building. If you zoom back enough, however, the whole city is on fire.

Can one understand the spatial distribution of protest by locating where its most visible events erupt? Is protest simply the events where direct confrontation occurs? And how does this kind of mapping portray the role of the state in such confrontations?
So, we've set this up as if we have answers, but we don't. Instead, we'll continue playing the tour guide and point to a few other places to look.
The image of a city on fire, depicted from space, immediately recalled Mike Davis's description of the 1992 LA uprisings as "seen" by satellite. Davis made the observation that, from space, the difference between a "natural disaster" like a forest fire and a political one, like the LA uprisings, is difficult to discern. The point being, not that the events of April 1992 should be considered "natural", but that so-called "natural disasters" facing Southern California should be considered political.
In the book Mapping Tourism, cultural geographer Rob Shields, discusses the role of mapping in creating an imaginary of protest and dissent, using the 2001 protests during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec.
And finally, media scholar Lisa Parks dissects the role of tools like Google Earth in portraying geopolitical events like the "Crisis in Darfur".

Taking in the Sights

Dean MacCannell's "The Ethics of Sightseeing" will be out later this year, and the University of California Press website has the first chapter available for preview.
It seems MacCannell will take on the relative shallowness of most "tourism studies":

Few assessments have been made more often or contested less than "tourism is the world's largest industry." Several recent empirical studies qualify this statement, finding most trips classed as tourism began as family visits. If that is true, it would be no less accurate or more absurd to say "family is the world's largest industry."

We know little more today about tourist experience and tourist subjectivity than we did thirty years ago. Tourism researchers conduct surveys, form and test hypotheses, undertake ethnographic field studies, and make mathematical models. They seem to assume, in Goffman's words, "If you go through the motions attributable to science, then science will result."

MacCannell also seems to be offering a challenge for the practice of tourism, along with furthering his analysis:

Sightseeing can shift the foundations of existence and, as Stendhal never fails to remind us, establish new possibilities for shared subjectivity. This sharing is not limited to exchanges between tourists and their hosts. It extends to every relationship an ethical tourist will ever have.

This, of course, reminds us of one of our early influences, Gregory Ulmer and the Florida Research Ensemble. Here's a video of Ulmer discussing some of those initial concepts.

Rendering the Diaspora

declare The New York Times has an interesting visualization of detainees released from the US "prison" at Guantánamo Bay. It maps where the 599 living (6 died in custody) former prisoners are currently—although they may still be prisoners in the new host countries. Unfortunately, these individuals are rendered as cubes that are stacked and configured as so many cargo containers in an international shipping logistics map.

(img above from NY Times)

Closer to home, they have a couple of articles addressing the continued disavowal by Southern states of slavery as a primary instigator in their 19th Century secession from the Union. In preparation for the upcoming 150th anniversary of the US Civil War, many states are apparently planning celebrations of the "glory days of the secession." With the continued rise of right-wing political nostalgia, this kind of revisionist historical tourism should be troubling. 

Author and historian Adam Goodheart gives an anecdotal account of Harriet Tubman's last missions on the Underground Railroad as the war approached. In the current climate, where contemporary white Southern leaders are celebrating their states' rights to secede in order to keep people as property, the existence of the Underground Railroad and the many people who made it work is important to remember.