Subversive Urbanism

Making, Taking and Losing Public Space in Kaliningrad

What is public space? Is it just something that was there before us and will still be there after we’ve left? Or is it a more dynamic thing, that can come and go and that we have to work at if we want to retain?

In western Europe we are getting a little less complacent about who can do what where, and who can monitor and regulate it, but essentially we take our public space for granted. It’s only when you move out of this bubble you appreciate for others the stakes are rather higher. Three separate experiences in the Russian city of Kaliningrad brought this home to me recently.

After all, it’s not every day of the week that you find yourself in a newly created public space that used to be the private home of a KGB censor!

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Lviv – myths, memories and heroes

Do walls store secrets and memories even though their owners are long gone and forgotten? If they do then in Lviv they must almost be the mortar that holds the stones together. That this Ukrainian city exudes meaning from every manhole cover and window frame is, for me, beyond question. The place has taken the brunt of many of Europe’s most significant and traumatic upheavals of the last few centuries. It has at least 8 different names, testament to the variety of people who have either dominated it or called it home.  That’s no particular surprise you might say, as few cities in central Europe have been spared occupation by conquering armies and imperial masters. But Lviv’s experience, it seems to me, is of a different order entirely.  It has, after all undergone the equivalent of a demographic and cultural blood transfusion.

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Finding your space in Mexico City, part 1

The pen is mightier than the sword, we’re told, but what about the battle between the gear stick and the paint brush?

“So you say in England you have streets with three lanes of traffic? Here we have streets with seven, and we’re going to cross one now.” “He’s exaggerating”, I thought as Salvador Ramirez Medina led me though the Coyoacán district of Mexico City. “So how are we going to get over it Salvador? Fly?” “No, I’ve made arrangements, you’ll see”.

We arrived and, sure enough, he was right. Seven lines of growling, fuming, impatient traffic, aching to roar into the main highway but tamed and restrained, for a minute at least, by a thin white zebra crossing, which pedestrians gratefully scuttled across.

“Up to last year there were no facilities at all for pedestrians in this area – you risked your life everyday just to go to the shops. Of course people had been pleading with the city to do something about it, but nothing ever happened. So we decided to take matters into our own hands. One early morning I went out there and painted the zebra crossing myself”.

“No way?” I said, “And how did the drivers treat it next day?” “They stopped and, as you see, it’s become a habit.” “Any problems?” I asked. “Well, because we could only afford cheap paint, it very quickly wore out. But before I had chance to get out there and repaint it, the City came along and did it for me. They’ve adopted it as their own now.”

I call that a result.

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A transcendental alternative to Balkan reality: Bogdan Bogdanović

You know how, occasionally, you idly click onto a website or a blog and the images seem to jump out and burn themselves into your subconscious? That happened to me last year with a blog called Crack Two which had lovingly gathered images of “25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they’re from the Future”

I know, you’re probably thinking to yourself “I can quite happily live my life without knowing anything about Yugoslav war memorials, thank you”. But you’d be wrong. Take a quick peek at the images here and you’ll surely agree that something pretty special was going on this country that is no more. I’m not asking you to love them or even like them but you surely can’t deny that they make a statement (like the memorial to the victims of Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia – pictured above - I’ve just visited) and one that doesn’t deserve to be buried with the other redundant paraphernalia of the former socialist republic of Yugoslavia.

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The city that’s selling its soul

When is a city not a city? When you have to buy a ticket to enter it, maybe. Like Pompeii or Petra – dead cities, you mean? No like Dubrovnik in Croatia. Excuse me but I didn’t know Dubrovnik had died. Well it hasn’t… yet. But read on.

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How do people in the Balkans greet a stranger?

“Come back again. Don’t forget us. Don’t leave us on a desert island. Do not put us aside – we are yours and you are ours.”

This poignant plea was one of many messages people left for me as part of a social experiment I ran as I toured the Balkans on my two-week CORNERS Xpedition. I asked the question “Kako biste pozdravili stranca?” (How do you greet a stranger?) Not all of them were as warm and heartfelt as this, but most were hospitable to me and to other strangers.

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Cetinje – beauty and the beasts

I took a walk in one of the world’s smallest capital cities today. Indeed, up to the First World War Cetinje was the smallest of them all, but this pint-sized powerhouse has obviously never felt any sense of inferiority as its elegantly laid-out boulevards are dripping with embassies, ministries, museums and royal/presidential palaces. Okay, I know, Podgorica is where the mundane business of running the republic of Montenegro goes on, but for romantics (which evidently includes current President Filip Vujanović), this former royal capital of under 14,000 people is where the symbolism of power lies.

But this is going to be one of those “city of contrast” stories - Cetinje subverts conventional notions of what a capital city should be at every turn. After Yugoslavia became a kingdom, and gobbled up Montenegro, Centinje languished. Then, after the Second World War it seems to have been deliberately insulted and humiliated by Tito’s socialist regime with the construction of massive factories for footware and refrigerators in amongst the Beaux Art and Jugendstil. These are now trashed and empty making for some stark juxtapositions.

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Urban exploration in Serbia

This is the story of a donkey that thought it was a space-ship.

There was a time in socialist eastern Europe when every city of any significance would have its grand central hotel. Along with Communist Party headquarters and the war memorial these were the urban icons of power and progress. For most of these pleasure palaces, their glory days were short lived. They were badly built from shoddy materials and inadequately maintained, and time and climate treated them unkindly. My first experiences of these bombastic follies were in the 80s, when they were already past their sell-by date. After the fall the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the old system, things went from bad to worse, and with no capital investment and little revenue for staff wages they slowly rotted. Everyone has a personal horror story of a night spent in one of these hulks. I’ll personally not forget having to barricade my room against marauding prostitutes in Moscow; or the place in Macedonia which was in almost complete darkness and where, when I pulled the plug out of my bath, the whole room flooded.

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Corners of Europe

For the next 2 weeks SubversiveUrbanism is going to be blogging whilst moving around the Western Balkans as part of the CORNERS Xpedition to Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania http://cornersofeurope.org/xpedition-balkans, in a group of 25 international artists and researchers.

In several locations along the way SubversiveUrbanism will be making its own ‘urban intervention’, an experiment in public space to explore the reaction of people to ‘the stranger’. There will be regular blogs on this, as well as the activities of other members of the expedition, and our encounters and interactions with local people.

Zagreb – the right to the city

Readers of this blog up to now might note that whilst it has been undoubtedly urban, its examples of subversion have been quite subtle and discrete. So, to redress the balance, and because I’m heading back to Zagreb this weekend, I present to you Pravo na Grad – Zagreb’s Right to the City Movement, which is one of the most explicitly subversive examples of urban activism you could ever wish to find.

It will become apparent very quickly that I absolutely love this campaign and have enormous admiration for the people who have organised and participated in it over the last 5 years or so. Indeed in many ways it sets the standard for what I mean by subversive urbanism. The key ingredients are that Pravo na Grad:

#   Was concerned with protecting public space against commercial and political incursion.

#   Transformed righteous anger into cool, effective action.

#   Employed wit, humour, originality and creativity in its methods.

#   Avoided aggression or direct confrontation with the forces of oppression.

#   Successfully scaled-up its constituency from a hard core of committed actors to a mass movement.

#   Appealed on different levels to a broad cross section of people.

#   Had real impact and led to real change.

Pravo na Grad (PNG) grew out of the concern of people in Zagreb, and other parts of Croatia, that they could no longer trust their politicians to act in the interests of the public good, in the management of important pieces of urban and rural land and infrastructure.  Most Croatians were prepared to cynically accept this, shrug their shoulders, keep their heads down and get on with living their lives. What else could they do? The wonderful thing about PNG is that it didn’t just point out all the things that were bad about Croatia and complain about them. It’s not even that they managed to turn some of these negatives around, although they did. It’s wonderful because it put into the hands and heads of a mass of people both hope and the power to change not just the political figureheads but the system. Over a period of five years they succeeded in changing the public mood, the political climate and, ultimately the law in Croatia, but it started from very humble beginnings and could at any stage have gone horribly wrong.

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