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Where is the new urban frontier?

24/07/2015 admin 0

An international conference on Global capitalism and urban regeneration, as an homage to the great marxist geographer Neil Smith, that left us some years ago. Where do they hold it? At the MACBA, the Museum of contemporary art built in the Raval in the beginning of the 1990s. Like Columbia in Harlem, like La Sapienza in San Lorenzo, like the Centre Pompidou in Les Halles, and like many other cultural institution in neighborhoods “in regeneration”, the MACBA represented the beginning of the new urban colonization in the heart of Barcelona. As to say: when space says more than words, when the container quarrels with the contents. But at the same time, calling for the need to transcend the pain and remember the history at the same time. As Miquel Martí i Pol says: vam girar full temps ha, i alguns s’entesten / en llegir encara la mateixa plana (1980) [we turned the page some time ago, and there’s people who keep reading the same old page].

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On with more dichotomies!

11/07/2015 admin 0

A brief note on a recent debate within the field of radical geography, which opposed Simon Springer, anarchist, and David Harvey, marxist. Each one defends his own position: Simon maintains that radical geography must be anarchist; David answers it’s not true, that it should be (or can be) marxist; Simon replies that Harvey didn’t get the point. The debate is interesting, up to a point, and shows how there are mortgages of the past for which not even the PAH will get forgiveness. Anyway, it highlights that critical geography is in an interesting moment, and that some debates that were important are reproducing themselves in the studies of space. We hope that the shifting grounds of the present will help to make possible what nobody managed to do in the past.

Taking the occasion, we point out that the Seventh Congress in Critical Geography will be held in Ramallah, Palestine, from July 25th to 30th (2015), under the title of “Precarious radicalism in shifting grounds: towards a politics of possibility”.

  • Simon Springer “Why a radical geography must be anarchist”, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2014, 4:249-270. (here for members, or on academia)
  • David Harvey “Listen Anarchist”, 2015 (on his blog)
  • Simon Springer “The limits to Marx: David Harvey and the condition of postfraternity” (on academia)
  • Katherine Gibson “Thinking around what a radical geography ‘must be'”, forthcoming in Dialogues in Human Geography (on communityeconomies)
  • Webpage of Ramallah’s International Congress on Critical Geography (ICCG)!