Traverse II

san rocco . source

1. Pay-As-You-Go Urbanism

Bldg Blog posted this intriguing image in which a series of fences or “efficient technological devices” have been inserted to manage access to St. Mark’s, Venice. The image, and the series it belongs to [by San Rocco], are a tongue-in-cheek parry against a newly proposed legislation to limit the ability to protest in the country’s public spaces.

“Dear Friends,

On December 18, Italian Minister of the Interior Roberto Maroni officially supported a proposal by Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano to extend the anti-hooliganism police measure known as “Daspo” (an acronym for Divieto di accedere alle manifestazioni sportive, or prohibition of access to sporting events) to regulate access to public spaces on the occasion of political rallies.
The proposal was made on the heels of student demonstrations in Rome and has been enthusiastically supported by several of the Minister’s brilliant peers, such as the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, and Senator Maurizio Gasparri.
In the images below, San Rocco has envisioned a modest proposal of its own to introduce efficient technological devices to regulate access to public space.”

San Rocco, via Critical Grounds

Migropolis . source

2. Migropolis: Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation .  Wolfgang Scheppe

I came across a review of this text on the German site Hatje Cantz and immediately felt drawn to the concepts that are discussed and the structure of the book.

“In a map cleverly branching out into essays, visual arguments, data visualizations, and interviews, the globalized territory of Venice is microscopically dissected and defined as an urban metaphor: the city becomes an “atlas of a global situation.” ”

Hatje Cantz

The text is by Wolfgang Scheppe, from the IUAV, and features essays by Giorgio Agamben, Valeria Burgio, and Scheppe. The book, partly a document of work from a class on Politics of Representation run by Scheppe at the IUAV University in Venice, discusses that City’s positioning as “the junction of three migration corridors”, emerg[ing] as … an exemplary prototype of the increasingly globalized city in which a decimated inner-city population meets armies of tourists and a parallel economy supported by illegal immigrants.”

Sounds fascinating, yes?