But the outrage is harder to find among the thousands of poor families who live in the ramshackle collection of gray brick houses topped with wavy roof tiles. “Tear the whole place down,” said Zhou Meihua, 72, who shares a 20-square-foot pair of rooms with three generations of family members. “If we get enough compensation, we’ll happily move out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/world/asia/21beijing.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimes
Government officials tend to stoke such sentiments by failing to update old neighborhoods in a way that preserves their existing fabric.
Instead, they seize property in parts of the city they deem “unhygienic and unsafe,” rezone much of it as commercial property and sell it for huge profits. The concession to history often consists of a few new buildings with upturned eaves and garishly painted timber slapped on concrete facades.
Local officials often claim that the need to renew old areas requires their destruction, critics say.
Beijing Journal: Bulldozers Meet Historic Quarters in Beijing, to Mixed Reaction http://nyti.ms/cEgy8w
nytimes
Locally-proposed comprehensive Four Rivers alternatives
”As the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project is directly connected to the lives of local residents, the central government should negotiate with the local governments.”
The "holistic" opposition to the "Four rivers project" in korea.
“We cannot understand why a large-scale project, from which our natural environment is unlikely to be able to recover, must be pushed forward so urgently, even going so far as to circumvent law and procedure, without any citizen consensus.”
Empty safes labeled “bankruptcy of the local governments,” and shovels and bulldozers representing the Lee Myung-bak administration’s widespread construction projects lie on a desolate sandy beach as high-rise buildings on the brink of collapse due to the plummeting real estate sector dot the landscape.
Migrant Workers in Shanghai
As China’s economy turns to globalisation, at home the issue of a floating workforce is becoming more intense and complex. In Shanghai, low-skilled migrants are subject to economic and social segregation. This comes with a social stigma and restricts the migrants to particular economic sectors within a fragmented labour market. Nonetheless, the itineraries the migrants follow allow them to acquire certain skills and resources. Their survival strategies produce what have been called “situations of affiliation and disaffiliation” within an overall situation of general insecurity.
Interviews for the documentary on the shift of korean urban development. Video: Park Jung Sin.
Material Commonalities
The term ‘material commonalities’ is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s language of things; as we develop new forms of mapping human and non-human actors, questions of representation remain central and continue to take their inspiration from multiple practices of visualization.
condos go green!
In New Jersey, a community garden with 72 plots is being sectioned off near the community dog run. Starting this month, residents can ride down the elevator, grab tools from the shed, and grow their own.
New Media Workers Across Asia and Europe
A Research Platform for Interregional Collaboration
Shanghai, 8-11 July 2010
Organized by HBK Saar and the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, the Shanghai platform is the first of three research platforms (Kolkata 2011, Sydney 2012) in the ARC project ‘Culture in Transition: Creative Labour and Social Mobilities in the Asian Century’.
