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Rebel Architecture: 6-Part Series on Global Guerilla Urbanism

23 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

architecture spider

In a series of six superb videos, Al Jazeera explores the gritty reality of architects and urban designers as activists in destinations from Vietnam and Nigeria to Pakistan and Brazil. Five of these 25-minute episodes are embedded in full as videos below, with summaries to let you see which you may wish to view – that said, each of the six is well worth watching!

abandoned warehouse spain

In Guerrilla Architect, Santiago Cirugeda, an architect from Seville who has dedicated his career to reclaiming urban spaces for the public, deals with difficult realities in “austerity-hit Spain, where the state has retreated and around 500,000 new buildings lie empty.”

Fortunately, he notes: “In times of crisis, people come together to find collective solutions.” One of his challenges, as covered in this mini-documentary, is converting an abandoned half-finished factory into a vibrant new cultural center.

architecture of violence

In The Architecture of Violence, Eyal Weizman “explains architecture’s key role in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the evolution of urban warfare.” He explains that “architecture and the built environment is a kind of a slow violence. The occupation is an environment that was conceived to strangulate Palestinian communities, villages and towns, to create an environment that would be unliveable for the people there.”

In this episode, local Israelis and Palestinians explain in candid interviews “how it feels to live in a landscape where everything, from walls and roads, terraces and sewage, to settlements and surveillance are designed to ensure the separation of the two peoples, while simultaneously maintaining control.”

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Rebel Architecture 6 Part Series On Global Guerilla Urbanism

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Posted in Creativity

Painting as Protest: Rainbow Stairs Spark Guerilla Reaction

30 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

painted steps art image

It started with a single person painting one public staircase, but when city workers of Istanbul, Turkey covered this brightly-colored street art with dull gray paint, citizen activists picked up brushes in rapid response. Thus escalated an isolated incident into a quiet but powerful city-wide campaign mixing politics, graffiti and beautification.

painted staircase silent protest

Aged 64,local retired engineer Huseyin Cetinel spend reportedly $ 800 on paint simply to make the steps in his area more attractive – he notes that nature is colorful, and suggests simply that cities can be as well.

painting stairs newspaper story

As images of his work began to go viral online, many viewers saw it as a call for equal rights – a political statement. When the municipality painted the original stairs over (then initially denied doing so, adding to the confusion), that act was perhaps inevitably interpreted through a polarizing lens as well.

painted steps reaction political

Twitter and Facebook were awash with calls to color other sets of stairs around the hilly city, and a quiet war fought with guerrilla art began … the city whitewashing (or gray-painting) newly-colored staircases as people kept on recoloring them, before finally agreeing to let the steps be painted as the citizens wished.

As interviewed by the New York Times, local financial adviser Nalan Ozgul sees a larger lesson in these events: “There has been some movement in the society, a social uprising together with the Gezi Park protests, and this is just an extension of that spirit. The fact that the government-run municipality first denied having painted over the stairs, then agreed to paint them back in color, shows how desperate and indecisive they are about their policies.”

painted art guerrila action

Alternatively, perhaps this strange story shows the everyday tensions between ordinary people and relentless bureaucracies as much as it says anything about the activist citizens and imposing governments of a particular time and place, but the effects are certainly colorful no matter how you look at them (Images via Instagram photographer sumrue and Twitter users @durmusbeyin, @demishevich, @verbikerem and @ozgelu)