Reporting on the conference Capital, Culture and Power in Liverpool, Leo Singer and Clara Paillard crash the regeneration party and pose some difficult questions for its hosts

- Stuck in its glare we lose sight of structure

Roy Coleman speaking of Liverpool's urban patriotism

 

Pedro Costa's films belie both the cinematic exploitation of suffering and the documentary urge to record truth and fix recognition. Ana Balona de Oliveira sifts through the bones and ruins of Costa's Fontaínha trilogy, set in a disappearing Lisbon slum

¡Fuera Ulises!, is a new graphic interpretation of the events in Oaxaca from an antiauthoritarian and anarchist perspective.
The booklet is 6 pages in length, full color, and is a run down of the events of last year. The booklet is also very critical of the actions of ‘politicos’ within APPO to hijack the popular movement for it’s own ends.

From: http://www.collectivereinventions.org/

"Your apartments are nice and tidy, but the stairways are covered with shit. What can you call this but a cult of space?"

– some interesting reflections on space, ludic and insightful, from Chto Delat?/ What Is To Be Done.

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?Itemid=127&id=267&option=com_content&task=view

Reads very well with Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev's account of anti-privatisation/regen protests in St Petersburg elsewhere on metamute.org

B

Apparently it's not considered newsworthy beyond the local press, but a whole block of the Morningside Estate in Hackney Wick/Homerton, i.e.

Over the past couple of months We Are Bad's invectives against sport as class-cleansing have been appearing on the notorious blue fence that runs around the site of the London 2012 Olympic games. Mute made contact with this shadowy underground organisation and can now present the first in a series of specially commissioned posters, made available here in hi-res for home printing

The BBC's Live Sites 2012 program is set to roll out 60 big screens in urban centres around the UK by 2012. Considering the vague agenda currently guiding their use, Richard Wright asks whether these big screens will ever open themselves to creative use or simply remain giant TVs controlled by giants
 

'Walkabout' a poem submitted by Michael Hampton would have fitted excellently with the collection of verse published as part of our recent issue on credit, debt and financial crisis. As a late arrival it joins the site here and as part of our Ongoing accumulation of fiscal verse 

Walkabout

these cartographies bleed biographies

In an interesting intervention into the debate initiated by Claire Bishop [see http://www.metamute.org/en/exodus] on the social instrumentalisation of art, Building magazine has revealed plans for a dual (at least) purpose 'productivist' public sculpture to be sited at Stratford Station.

While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

Some US protests against sub-prime evictions in text and pictures

In the course of his life, Victor Gruen completed major urban interventions in the US and Western Europe that fundamentally altered the course of western urban development. Anette Baldauf describes how Gruen’s fame rests mostly on the insertion of commercial machines into the decentred US suburbs. These so-called ‘shopping towns’ were supposed to strengthen civic life and structure the amorphous, mono-functional agglomerations of suburban sprawl.

Saint Petersburg is besieged by elite-backed architectural mega-projects and micro-interventions. Dmitry Vorobyev and Thomas Campbell describe the dominant strains of 'renovation' and the popular resistance to them arguing that, in St. Petersburg, class conflict takes the form of opposed visions of urban renewal and historic preservation