julio 31, 2008

Mexico City: Growth at a limit?

Around the globe cities are being confronted with the need to turn their attention to their expansion beyond their administrative boundaries, and to the formation of vast metropolitan regions. The consequence of this metropolitanisation is that local authorities are being outgrown, bringing about the inefficiency in urban governance and planning. Mexico City began its metropolitanisation process in the 1950s and its sustained growth has made it into one of the world’s largest metropolitan regions. Today, the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City is made up of the 16 boroughs of the Federal District, 58 municipalities of the State of Mexico, and one from the State of Hidalgo. Of the total population of over 18 million inhabitants, around 8.6 million live within the Federal District and 9.7million live in the State of Mexico.

For the last thirty years the governments of the State of Mexico and the Federal District have attempted to create coordinated measures to deal with the problem of metropolitanisation. The recognition of the need to create a comprehensive strategy for the metropolitan area by the different actors involved in the city is already a significant step forward. An example of such attempts was the establishment, in 1998, of the Executive Commission for Metropolitan Coordination. However, from the moment of its creation until its demise in 2000 the Commission held only three plenary meetings and adopted 30 agreements, which failed to integrate practical policies into a strategic metropolitan vision. A sign of political will and momentum is the reinstatement of the Commission in October 2005, led by the national Minister of the Interior, and the Governors of the State of Mexico and the Federal District.

The important advancements in democracy that are taking place in the country are adding to the complexity of the political setting of Mexico City and working as a further challenge to the governability of the city. The undoubtedly positive fact that the mayor of the Federal District is now directly elected, together with the expanded responsibilities given to its Executive and Legislative organs, have had the negative effect of making the relations between the State of Mexico and the Federal District increasingly complicated. An additional obstacle to the governability of the city is the fact that today the Federal District, the State of Mexico, and the Federal Government are led by the country’s three main opposing political parties. This complex political landscape adds salience to the argument that metropolitan governance cannot rely on a voluntaristic and contractual model as it has done in the past.

The greatest challenge posed to metropolitan governability and the main reason for urgent coordination is the shared use of services and infrastructure across administrative boundaries, which puts an unequal burden on the two governing entities. The infrastructure necessary for the metropolis to function well is, in practice, shared by the inhabitants of the Federal District and the State of Mexico. A significant number of people traverse the administrative boundaries which divide the two entities on a daily basis, thus adding to the pressure on the infrastructure in both political districts. The costs of this are absorbed separately by the two districts; investment and strategic planning of these infrastructures is not done in a coordinated fashion, although in practice they constitute a unified network

One of the biggest problems the metropolitan area of Mexico City is currently facing is the water crisis. For over three decades the Federal District has turned to the State of Mexico for the provision of water. The distribution of this resource, however, has been notably uneven both across the metropolitan region and within the Federal District itself. At present, the metropolitan region as a whole is facing a serious crisis as to how to cope with rising demand, when most of the nearby resources are drying out. Already today, disadvantaged areas are experiencing severe shortages, meaning that water is becoming an important factor for social and political confrontation.

The total population of the metropolitan area is almost equally divided between the Federal District and the State of Mexico. However, urban growth is now almost exclusive to the State of Mexico and the trend for the future is that population growth in the Federal District will stabilise, whereas that of the State of Mexico will steadily rise. Until today, this phenomenon has not been dealt with in a unified way by the bodies that constitute the metropolitan area, but rather localised policies have exacerbated this trend. An example of this is how the Federal District’s policy to densify the central boroughs, and to constrain growth beyond this area, has promoted the massive urbanisation of the State of Mexico. This not only means an increasing burden with regard to public investment, provision of services and infrastructure, but also that the population with lower incomes is concentrating in the State of Mexico, adding further complexity to the existing patterns of social inequality and segregation.

The Metropolitan Area of Mexico City continues to offer the highest levels of quality of life, and yet poverty and marginality are still lower here than in other areas of the country. It is the region that contributes most to the existing high levels of inequality. The historical divide within the Federal District between the affluent west and south and the poor north and east is being intensified by rising inequality and segregation between the Federal District and the municipalities of the State of Mexico that make up the metropolitan region.

Author: Iliana Ortega-Alcazar

http://www.urban-age.net/03_conferences/conf_mexicoCity.html

mayo 08, 2008

Gentrify this!!!



El pasado fin de semana se llevó a cabo en Londres el “Can Festival”, en el cual gente como Banksy, Jeff Aerosol y otros mavericks callejeros, se juntaron para regenerar, a través del arte urbano, un túnel abandonado de la estación de Waterloo.

Se pudieron ver enormes filas de asistentes para presenciar este evento al que algunos consideran "el evento más espectacular de arte callejero en un túnel de Waterloo". A la entrada de esta cavidad urbana se leía un cartel publicitario con la leyenda "Gentrify This", retando a la iniciativa privada y las autoridades a intentar recuperar el espacio a través de la destrucción y reubicación de la gente local, un proceso ya reconocido por su estupidez perceptiva de parte de las autoridades y por su absoluta falta de eficacia real.

marzo 26, 2008

Ciudad invisible, ciudad vigilada. Nestor García Canclini.

¿Cómo nos arreglamos para vivir a la vez en la ciudad real y la ciudad imaginada? Todas las ciudades presentan una tensión entre lo visible y lo invisible, entre lo que se sabe y lo que se sospecha, pero la distancia es mayor en las megalópolis.

La primera oscilación entre lo visible y lo invisible se muestra como tensión entre la ciudad experimentada físicamente y la ciudad imaginada. Nos damos cuenta de que vivimos en ciudades porque nos apropiamos de sus espacios: casas y parques, calles y viaductos. Pero no recorremos la ciudad sólo a través de medios de transporte sino también con los relatos e imágenes que confieren apariencia de realidad aun a lo invisible: los mapas que inventan y ordenan la trama urbana, los discursos que representan lo que ocurre o podría acontecer en la ciudad, según lo narran las novelas, películas y canciones, la prensa, la radio y la televisión.

La ciudad se vuelve más densa al cargarse con fantasías heterogéneas. La urbe programada para funcionar, diseñada en cuadrícula, se desborda y se multiplica en ficciones individuales y colectivas. Esta distancia entre los modos de habitar y los modos de imaginar se manifiesta en cualquier comportamiento urbano. Pero quizás es en los viajes donde irrumpe con más elocuencia el desajuste entre lo que se vive y lo que se imagina. Desde las descripciones de Hernán Cortés a las de Humboldt sobre la ciudad de México, desde las de empresarios norteamericanos hasta las de exiliados latinoamericanos, del discurso de las agencias turísticas hasta el de los medios masivos, sería posible indagar cómo se fue configurando un imaginario internacional sobre la capital mexicana.

Podríamos anticipar que viajar a la ciudad de México es para muchos extranjeros buscar el encuentro con la mayor ciudad latinoamericana de origen prehispánico, y a la vez con la más poblada y contaminada del mundo. Así como Rem Koolhaas ha dicho que Nueva York es “la estación terminal de la civilización occidental”, se piensa que México DF es el último puerto de los delirios de Occidente en su versión tercermundista. En realidad, México no es ni la más poblada ni la más contaminada, aunque se acerca a esos logros: Tokio tiene 25 millones de habitantes y Sao Paulo 18 millones.

En un estudio reciente, buscamos conocer los imaginarios que suscita la ciudad de México no a quienes viajan hasta ella, sino a quienes viajamos por ella diariamente. Partimos de la simple observación de que las ciudades no se hacen sólo para habitarlas, sino también para atravesar su espacio. En la ciudad de México varios millones de personas ocupan entre dos y cuatro horas diarias transportándose en metro, autobuses, taxis y coches particulares. Cuando se realizan 29 millones de viajes-persona por día, las travesías por la capital son formas importantes de apropiación del espacio urbano y lugares propicios para disparar imaginarios. Al recorrer las zonas que desconocemos, nos cruzamos con múltiples “otros” e imaginamos cómo viven en escenarios distintos de nuestros barrios y centros de trabajo.

Presentamos un conjunto de 52 fotos que muestran viajes diversos por la ciudad de México, desde la década de los cuarenta a la actualidad, a diez grupos de viajeros (repartidores de alimentos, vendedores ambulantes, vendedores de seguros, policías de tránsito, estudiantes y profesionales que viven lejos de sus lugares de trabajo) y les pedimos que describieran esas imágenes. No voy a repetir aquí los relatos y comentarios provocados por esas fotos que publicamos en el libro La ciudad de los viajeros, pero recuerdo cómo los viajes habituales por la ciudad -al alejarnos de los lugares conocidos- movilizan suposiciones, sospechas, “visiones” de los problemas urbanos y de la vida de los “otros” que se basan en unos pocos datos y en muchas fantasías. El viaje metropolitano como tensión entre los deseos y los miedos.

Un hecho llamativo son las perspectivas peculiares desde las cuales hablan los habitantes “comunes” sobre las dificultades de la megalópolis, distintas de las que manejan la bibliografía científica y la información periodística. La amenaza de la contaminación es inquietante para algunos, pero otros la relativizan con argumentos curiosos: el riesgo se atenúa si “lo podemos ver de esta forma: la contaminación, los alimentos, todo es una forma de intoxicación, y el sudarlo tantito es una forma de desintoxicarnos. Sí, recibimos algo de eso, pero lo que estamos sacando afuera es lo que nos hace sentirnos mejor”.

Las interpretaciones distorsionadas de varias fotos sugieren que aun lo que sucede en zonas céntricas puede ser desconcertante. Pero se inventan los datos de esos hechos desconocidos para coexistir “naturalmente” con ellos. Así, por ejemplo, un plantón de manifestantes en el Zócalo es interpretado como un conjunto de migrantes que se instala ahí porque no tiene dónde vivir. Los policías, ante la imagen de dos niños drogados en la glorieta donde se ve el David, exclaman: “¡Cómo van a estar ahí, junto a la Diana Cazadora!”

En el grupo de estudiantes, frente a la foto del Periférico, alguien dice que para él “más bien como que es una salida a provincia por los cerros. Me da la idea de que a veces todo el mundo quisiera fugarse de esta ciudad”. Como había dicho poco antes otro participante, en el mismo grupo: “cada quien construye su idea de viaje”.

Estas visiones fantasiosas son estimuladas por el carácter demasiado vasto y complejo de lo que sucede en la gran ciudad. Así como para alcanzar los objetivos de los viajes hay que usar desvíos o atajos, convivir con los problemas que parecen irresolubles incita a buscar rodeos del pensamiento, “resolver” en lo imaginario, para hacer sentir habitable un entorno hostil. Importa menos saber cómo funciona efectivamente la sociedad que imaginar algún tipo de coherencia que ayude a vivir en ella.

Leer texto completo

marzo 02, 2008

The Space Of Challenge: Reflections Upon The Relationship Between Public Space And Social Conflict In Contemporary Mumbai

It is a bit surprising even for old Mumbai dwellers to find out the origins of the open play grounds, or maidans, that cut a large swathe across the Fort district of downtown Mumbai. These grounds are the cradle of Mumbai’s cricketing tradition and also represent a welcome open space in a fairly dense urban fabric. Cricket, the colonial sport, incidentally appears to be the one truly national religion we do have in India. At any given time the maidans host a large number of cricket matches played and watched in right earnest, even as large numbers of people cut through these grounds to reach the other side of the district more quickly. It is therefore a bit surprising to discover that these open spaces were created by the British after a serious wave of insurgency to set up a free field of fire between the walled colonial city, or the Fort, and the native town beyond from which they feared attack. Today’s space of organized sport thus traces its roots back to a military strategy in anticipation of violence.

Of course, signs of conflict are not immediately visible in Mumbai’s public space. However, many important spaces like the maidans of South Mumbai and spatial markers like the Martyr’s Memorial at Flora Fountain, which is the symbolic center of South Mumbai, have some historically significant link with the inevitable conflicts that mark any large city. In this paper I wish to examine the ways in which the phenomenon of social conflict and the material reality of public space are related. I choose the concept of conflict as my prism because in the last ten years or so, the city has had more and more of it its public space than in the decades before that. Moreover, Mumbai, like every big city with a history of international trade and of inward migration from different cultures, is marked by differences in wealth, social status, cultural values and access to political power. Conflicts are inevitable in this situation, especially when globalisation is further jacking up the inequalities, and the capacity of city governments as well as of civil society to understand how the space of the city is involved in these conflicts will decide how well society as a whole responds to them. This is among the greatest challenges that the life of public spaces in the city poses to the city at large.

In a memorable phrase, Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher, suggests that each society “secretes” its own space.1 In Mumbai, I could modify that phrase to suggest that the conflicts at the heart of Mumbai’s public space, whether expressed as such or not, are very directly secreted by the city as a social system into its very physical fabric. Understanding the ways in which this osmosis between societal and physical spaces is enacted in public space is, I feel, very important for our understanding of the city at large.

In what ways are public space and the phenomenon of social conflict related in Mumbai? From a review of a variety of situations of urban conflict between different social groups I propose the following as three significant ways in which space is involved in the story of urban conflict (and vice versa) in Mumbai. None of these different roles (or modes) need necessarily operate alone. In other words, these are not mutually exclusive categories of modes of interrelationship; particular situations may reveal more than one mode being in operation at the same time.

Public space as the object of conflict

Public space has always been first and foremost, the object of conflict over claims to its control and over the rights of occupation. These conflicts usually are about:

a) what uses and activities are acceptable in public space;
b) who (that is which sector of the “public”) has the greater right of occupation over different public spaces;
c) who should control, or make decisions about (and on what basis) the fate of public spaces and access to them.

Mumbai is a palimpsest of different cultures of producing city space, including ones which are pre-modern in origin. These cultures of producing space also harbour different protocols of imagining ownership of it, of occupying it and putting it to various uses, including economically productive ones. We thus have different visions of who public space belongs to and on what terms, that are often locked in conflict. As we shall see, the way different groups answer these questions decides how they answer the question “who is and is not a citizen?”

Thus the first kind of low grade conflict Å\which like low grade wars of attrition actually define the social climate of a spaceÅ\ has always been between the continuing culture of contingently regulated appropriation of public space for private and personal purposes which is as evident in the streets of Mumbai as of any other small town in India. This tradition encourages shopkeepers, householders and all other kind of space occupying interests to attempt to push the envelope of private space, just enough so that the bulge into the public space of the pavement does not bring the latter’s functioning to a complete halt. The state’s stated culture of spatial production, proceeds on a more modern and strict understanding of boundaries between private and public space. However, given the deeply entrenched nature of traditional attitudes towards occupying space, the breach of this vision of control is greater than compliance with it.

This long standing stalemate at the scale of the street may encourage us to think of the city as having no single dominant power, a situation in which what Lefebvre has called the “domination” of space by the state is defused to some extent by the “appropriations” (Lefebvre’s term again) of street side actors. However, recent actions of the state reveal this stalemate to have been more a waiting game.

Five years ago the state of Maharashtra (of which Mumbai is the capital), decided to build fifty flyovers (road over bridges flying over congested junctions) at different points in the city. This was ten times as many built in the previous fifty years and they were meant to be completed in five years. This project costing the equivalent of 300 million dollars, conceived as a major contribution to the transportation needs of a fast growing city, was wrongheaded for many reasons, especially in a cash strapped state. The main problem, of course, was that it encouraged private automobile ownership in a city where the majority commuted using a robust but unduly stretched public transport system. However, of greater interest here is what the flyovers did to the configuration of the city’s system of public space, as well as to the unacknowledged impact it had on many private spaces that happened to line the arterial roads. With efficiency that was simply shocking for an Indian city, major open spaces and gardens along the arterial roads had huge and ugly bridges going over them in no time. All of a sudden the remaining coherence of the urban form of the city was in the process of destruction. Moreover, across the city upper floor living spaces were, suddenly, exposed to the voyeurism of the fast lane passing sometimes only twenty feet away in the air.

This event revealed very clearly that in the matter of control over public space, in fact of ownership of it, when the state is determined, any conflict of interest with the public (or significant parts of it) is really a mismatch. The public almost doesn’t have a chance in deciding the fate of what nominally is its space.

But then, the “public” is itself not a unitary reality. The conflict over the right to public space is restaged within its own body among interest groups. In recent times, new citizens’ groups from the middle and upper classes of society have emerged in the city, effectively laying claim to public space as their space, and insisting on the removal of all those who would occupy it for functions which urban traditions in India have sanctioned but the law has not. This has usually meant the removal of the marginalized who, lacking access to expensive private spaces, need to use public space for private activities of dwelling, production and economic exchange.

Thus, the argument against the street vendors, or hawkers, is that they encroach on public space for conducting private business. In essence, they are criticized for blocking access to public space, while pursuing private ends. Strangely, however, when public open spaces in the city are cordoned off to develop joggers’ parks or ticketed gardens, the quiet exclusion of large numbers of the underprivileged from these spaces is not seen to be a cornering of public spaces for inadequately public purposes. This “privatization” of entire public gardens Å\where they become the preserve of those who can afford visiting themÅ\ is seen as a reasonable step by the state and the elite, even when it does not serve a life-and-death purpose. On the other hand the ephemeral occupation of small bits of pavements by hawkers who have only that space for earning their livelihood even as they provide a genuine service to the city at large, is considered deeply objectionable. Evidently, it is believed that some members of the public have a greater right to occupy public space for private ends than others. This has obvious implications for the imagination of citizenship. Thus the circle is completed with the conflict over physical space, resulting in a political conflict over the definition of citizenship as well as of the rights of the private individual vis-à-vis public goods.

Space as the setting of conflict

Apart from being the object of social conflict, the public space of the city also provides the very necessary setting for enactment of conflicts. This enactment can be in the form of uncontrolled violence or it could be the more democratic form of organized protest. That is space can be a setting for:

i) the direct enactment of conflict as violence, or for

ii) the public represention of conflict.

Intriguingly, again, as in the earlier mode, the state plays an important role in enacting conflict directly through violence. One example is the increased dependence of the police on “encounters” or shootouts in which serious gangsters are accosted and shot to death. The preference for this administration of justice by the police is a result of the perception among policemen of the spaces of legality Å\courtsÅ\ having failed to take the work of the police to its logical culmination.

The police have also been indicted for bias against minority populations in situations like the communal riots of 1992-93 in which Hindu and Muslim mobs (but Hindu mobs mainly) killed and burnt people and property belonging to the other side. The riots have been directly linked to the politics of hate that right wing Indian parties have successfully mobilized since the mid eighties all over the country. In many ways, Mumbai (or its middle and upper classes) which believed itself invulnerable to this politics of hate, lost its naivete with this event. Today, there is recognition that peaceful roads and markets can easily turn into riot sites and that the continuity of a space’s hospitable character over time cannot be taken for granted.

It is interesting that even as the possibility of violence in public space increases in Mumbai, the only alternative course in keeping with democratic traditions is being systematically suppressed by the state. A democracy promises its citizens the right to protest against the state, and this right implies also a promise to an appropriate space for protest. Over the last decade or so the state has debarred protesters and protest marches from most of the public space of South Mumbai, especially from the symbolic center of South Mumbai, which is the open space housing the Flora Fountain. Where once they could actually march up to the gates of the buildings housing the government, protesters today are restricted to one of the playgrounds in South Mumbai, which being off the path of the rushing city cannot have the same “publicity” as they had in the middle of the roads. By restricting the settings in which protest can be voiced, the state has clearly revealed its understanding of the strategic importance of particular public spaces for the management of power relations.

Space as the precipitate of social conflict

The power of certain spaces like the Flora Fountain area is reinforced by the fact that they house the precipitate of earlier conflicts with the state. In this space, there is the Martyr’s memorial which is dedicated to all those who lost their lives in the post independence struggle to keep Mumbai within the state of Maharashtra in 1961 when the central government had decided to transfer it to the neighbouring state.

Memorials may be considered as much the precipitates of conflicts as can be less direct spatial consequences of conflict situations. The maidans or open playgrounds of South Mumbai, which I mentioned at the beginning, are equally the precipitates of what was basically a strategic measure designed for a moment of conflict. Of course, in the course of time, the nature of occupation changed and today the space of the maidan is the space of play and unspecified leisure.

In discussing the precipitate of more recent conflicts we are also forced to reconsider what our notion of public space includes and what it leaves out. If we are to think of space mainly as a container separate from the social action in it we will probably find only certain kinds of spatial precipitates of conflict. However, if we consider public space as being indivisible from various social and psychological conditions that obtain within it, then the field of enquiry opens up. For instance, over the last ten years the quotient of “fear” that operates upon Mumbai’s public spaces may have increased marginally. This peaked dramatically after the riots, and again more intensely after a series of bomb blasts of 1993 allegedly inflicted as revenge by Muslim gangsters of Mumbai operating from foreign shores, for the killings of Muslims during the riots a few months before. The police presence on Mumbai’s streets is much greater in the last ten years than before, and this along with memories of the riots, the bomb blasts as well as of the ever possible outbreak of petty violence, has released a space of relatively greater anxiety and insecurity into the same old streets of Mumbai.

I shall conclude with some thoughts on some of the implications of the line of thought explored in this paper.

Concluding reflections (Challenges in imagining the reality of public space)

Firstly, the multiple modes of relation between public space and one social process or condition Å\conflict, in this caseÅ\ give us more reason to suspect that space cannot be viewed as a neutral container of social practices. This view is reinforced by the difficulty of restricting any account of particular spaces to any one of the three modes outlined above. It is, thus, clear that space is not separable as a reality (even though it may be useful to think of it analytically as a category) from the practices that produce it, among them being the processes of conflict. Believing that these conflicts are essentially external to the space and that they can be “managed” without reference to the space of the city and its distribution would be disastrous wishful thinking.

This conclusion has particularly problematic implications for those like me involved with architecture, urban design and planning. For these disciplines do not have dependable methods of representing the complex reality of space apart from its objective or objectal form. One result of this is that the problem of space is viewed as a technical problem, best approached in a neutral technical manner free of political concerns. Politics, in this view is a dirty word. In India, planners and architects do not have the kind of direct influence that they may have in the west. However, being concerned with space, they are increasingly active in the civil society movements even on the side of social practice and in fact do play a role in the conflicts over public space in the city. More and more, the state has begun to trust them and other technocrats from civil society in its decisions regarding the fate of public spaces. In this situation, we see that the apolitical technicist approach is more likely to ignore inconvenient social realities like conflicts of interest in its activism. We see, in Mumbai today, well meaning solutions forwarded by architects and planners outside the state that are patently unjust, because the technicist imagination that conceives of them is actually trapped in middle and upper class paradigms of public space which often have no room for the messiness of other more marginalized but traditional Indian paradigms.



It is clear, by implication, also that conflict needs to be approached as the necessary matrix from within which the space of a city is produced. Currently, the tendency in a democracy like India, unfortunately, is to seek to bypass, or to suppress social and political conflict through the use of force. Such an approach needs omnipresent policing to be successful even for a while. Instead if the multiplicity of unacknowledged interests is acknowledged in the city, we may well be able to find a path towards spaces that simultaneously address multiple interests and concerns, spaces which hold strong the tensions that are thought to be characteristic more of problems than of solutions.

(Conference lectured at the symposium “(In)visible Cities. Spaces of Hope, Spaces of Citizenship”, Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, 25-27 July 2003)

Notes:
1. Lefebvre, H. (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith), The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford 1991.
2.

febrero 04, 2008

Somos hombres de maíz.


El maíz es un elemento primordial en nuestra alimentación, y parte fundamental del axis mundi cultural y cosmogónico en México. Su domesticación genética, llevada a cabo a lo largo de miles de años por nuestros grupos ancestrales, corre riesgo de ser neutralizada con la entrada del maíz transgénico a nuestro país.
Une tu voz y tu intención para defenderlo.

Corn is a primordial element in our alimentation, and a fundamental part of the axis of the cultural and cosmic world in Mexico. Its genetic domestication, carried on through thousands of years by our ancesters, runs the risk of being neutralized with the entrance of transgenic corn into our country.
Speak out and defend it.

Bitter but blue butter


Laredo, Condesa, D.F., México, 2007

febrero 02, 2008

El Pescador, Diego García, 2004.

Cortometraje presentado en la función del Zócalo de Cine de Luna, en junio del 2007

Short film screened in the open air projection of Cine de Luna, on the Zócalo the 16/06/07.

enero 11, 2008

Hakim Bey,Taz

Poetic Terrorism

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.

Go naked for a sign.

Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.

Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...

The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.

PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.

Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.

Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz1.html#labelPoeticTerrorism

Para explorar...

Terrestrial and virtual research into new ways of making and listening to music.
http://www.musicforbodies.net/

This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.
http://www.woostercollective.com/

Radical fiction from Italy since the 20th century. Slightly more than expected from a band of novelists. Designed, upkept and constantly revamped by the authors of Q and 54.
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/