Urban anthropologist might find Michael Wolf’s photos interesting. He has amazing photographs of massive apartment buildings in Hong Kong, a very densely populated place. The photographs called ‘Architecture of Density’, give an idea about a-very- dense urban- lifestyle in Hong Kong. Wolf was born in Germany, grew up in the USA, and has lived in Hong Kong since 1994, and in these photographs he explores ‘the theme of the organic metropolis’. Here’s a quote from his website, a review by Rebecca Walker:
Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world and Wolf’s photographs seek out the human spirit in the urban jungle. The images in the book[he published the photos as a book] depict the highrises that shape the spatial experience of Hong Kong’s citizens. Since Wolf himself is one of those citizens (he has been a Hong Kong resident since 1994), his photographs have a distinctively personal essence.
I’ve often caught trains through Bangkok and wondered at the level of activity going on on both sides of the railway. I had never seen the scene from quite this angle though. The clip below shows the level of adaptation to the urban environment and pragmatism of some of Bangkok’s poorest inhabitants. One of the stereotypes about Thais is that they “bend with the breeze”. This clip would seem to support that generalisation.
The Jammed, an “independent thriller” about the trafficking of women into sex work in Australia, is having unexpected box-office success. It opened this week in Sydney’s Palace Cinemas. The film’s success highlights a curious phenomenon: combatting “human trafficking,” dubbed the world’s largest business, is an issue that everyone from left-wing feminists to the Christian Right agrees on. Yet is it really as organised an evil as it is described to be?
Research by Sverre Molland at Macquarie University’s anthropology on Lao sex workers in Thailand suggests that while there is undoubtedly coercion and deceit in the migration of sex workers, much of the migration is voluntary, many “traffickers” are sex workers who recruit their friends, and the business is very rarely connected to “transnational organised crime.” My own previous research on illegal Chinese migrants to Europe has suggested that migration brokers work more like the airline industry - everyone specializing in a particular service and in loose touch with those at other stages of the migration process - than as a crime syndicate. I suspect that the hype about “human trafficking” is connected to the general criminalization of migration in today’s “securitized” world.
Sverre found an interesting comment on the film’s website:
I’m a sex worker in Kings Cross, close friends with thai sex workers
happily on contract (ie “trafficked”). I am insulted by the ridiculous
mythologies so easily believed by those who want to paint us all as
victims. Margaret and David, you’ve dealt a cruel blow to asian sex
workers in Australia by getting sucked into this discriminatory and
racist narrative. The “help the trafficked” sector is an industry in
itself, and is much more harmful and dangerous to sex workers than sex
work itself. They only want to hear stories of woe, and to make money
by stereotyping us.
BoingBoing reports on a Wired photo essay on factories in China. It provides some interesting, if none-too-surprising, images of factory life and the urban landscape produced by China’s capitalist boom.
One of my favourite blogs is BoingBoing, not the least because a lot of the posts tickle my anthropological funnybone. A good example is a recent post on new architectural trends in China, where the emergent middle-class is being tempted to live in simulacra of historical Western cityscapes.
In Nanjing, there are Balinese retreats and Italian villas. In the southeastern city of Hangzhou, there are Venice and Zurich. In downtown Beijing, everything is about Manhattan, with Soho, Central Park and Park Avenue.
Seems that there is quite a bit of interest in producing replica of iconic structures from a usually Western “elsewhere”. Another BoingBoing article reports about the Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing, described as “basically a weird, Chinese clone of Disneyland”.
Perhaps more interesting than the phenomenon itself is why stories like this are so ticklish for people like me. What should “we Westerners” have a monopoly on consuming the exotic other? Various kinds of exotica have long been decorating Western homes, both inside and out, for a long time now. An example that springs to mind is the not uncommon practice of a few decades hence of placing concrete Aborigines, like indigenous garden gnomes, in front gardens. Can’t do that anymore though; the consumption of exotica these days must be done with requisite postmodern irony. And maybe that’s what’s so strange about these Chinese consumption patterns: they’re just dripping with pomo simulation, but without the ironic self-parodic attitude you’d expect in the West. Or maybe it’s the strange thrill of seeing changing power relations at work. Maybe it’s not so much the weirdness of the copying, but the fact that it’s being done to “us”. “We Westerners”, not the least anthropologists, have been accustomed to representing the other. So its strange to find “our” forms as exotic consumer items.
I’m just guessing here, of course. Good ethnographic work would provide some sense of why the Chinese middle class seem to be enjoying these kinds of consumption. Perhaps our resident China expert, Third Tone Devil, has something to say about this?
The story ‘How Walt Disney Changed Everything:The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America’ on the March issue of National Geographic http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0703/feature4/ might be of interest to urban anthropologists. It is the story of Orlando city in Florida, which has transformed ‘from swamp and sinkhole to 21st century metropolis’ with the decision of Walt Disney in 1963 to turn this agricultural region of
Florida into a tourism theme-park.
Saw this on an urban anthropology mailing list recently. An “Urban Village” is a planning game that is focused on a “real” Detroit neighbourhood. In essence, people get to put into action their thoughts and feelings on how to improve the city. They then find themselves confronted with the new reality they’ve created for themselves.
This quote is interesting:
Fred Goodman, a University of Michigan professor of education emeritus specializing in game design, defines Urban Village as “a cross between pin the tail on the donkey and playing school,” he says. “You’re playing city planner, and you can get dizzy trying for the best fit because it’s harder than you think. But this inspires you to think about the inconsistencies of your own set of assumptions, revealing your own values and biases.”
When the time came for me to move the blocks, I impulsively got rid of all liquor stores, the fast food joint, illegal dumping, and as many abandoned and burned houses as I could — even a couple of candy stores (I had no idea there were so many on Mack Avenue). Rather than banishing the panhandlers, I placed them near churches and shelters in the naive hope that churches — even those on Mack Avenue, which could be rip-offs or shuttered — would welcome the poor. The prostitute took a trip to the medical clinic, while the drug activity and stray dog were strategically maneuvered near the casino. I put vacant lots alongside community gardens because, naturally, gardens grow, and set up a nice little five-block area including houses, a school, a playground, coin laundry, mailbox, pizza joint, music store and bank. Which is why watching a friend take his turn and ruin my hard work made me mad.
Please,” he said. “Banks are total scams.” He picked up the wooden block with the Greek temple on it and moved it near the ones with the cute crack pipe and the burger and soda on them. I called him a radical, and that’s when he pointed out that I had banished a bar, thereby constructing a neighborhood even I wouldn’t want to live in. That’s when I realized: To reduce, to take away, is an easy process. Figuring out how to occupy the land you have and dealing with all the ramifications — coping with what you’ve got — is much more complex.
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Current and former students and staff of the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, write about the emergent trends in anthropology. In particular we are interested in discussing the ways in which the methods and insights of anthropology are being 'applied' in various settings, both within and beyond the academy.
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Posted by nursel guzeldeniz
One of my favourite blogs is 
