Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

Chair: Isaac-Leung

Stephanie DeBoer contribution is entitled Elemental LED from Drones to Kites: Scaling Practices for Nocturnal Skies. It asks what can the spatially adjacent practices of drone LED light shows and LED kites tell us about the tensions of what David Harvey once termed the simultaneously “crucial and problematic” matters of scale? LED (light emitting diodes) have become an elemental medium in the infrastructuring of the aspirational digital city. They are part and parcel of a recently unprecedented number of drone-choreographed occupations of nocturnal skies in spectacular performances of light. These wireless organizations of the nation or city’s aerial nightscapes – so often incorporated into macro-level systems of economy, policy, or tourism – are elsewhere also accompanied by more micro-level wired and stringed inhabitations of the nocturnal sky by kites clad in colorful light emitting diodes. Tethered to seasonal parks and people, such everyday LED practices are linked not only to a longer history of kite construction and mobilization, but also, here, to an adjacent trajectory of LED’s smaller-scaled formation. Here LED light and its nocturnal practices function as not only a form of aerial “architecture…[and]…new kind of building material,” but also, as Sandy Isenstadt has elsewhere suggested for electric lighting, “a set of evolving compositional practices, and a host of occupational strategies” over which we struggle to produce new places and ways to live, work, and create. Ka-ming Wu contribution is entitled Engage the City: Urban Infrastructures, urban rights and civic imaginations. It looks at the ways citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban spaces, improved city infrastructure, a tighter surveillance regime and emerging urban cultures. Many equate infrastructure investment in China with the country’s GDP or China’s geo-political power in Africa or Latin America. Fewer questions have been asked about how Chinese citizens connect to their changing urban environment, particularly regarding their political, social and cultural experiences to access spaces and services previously unavailable.  My talk examines the embodied experiences of mega-cities development, arguing that it is in the thick textures of everyday life, a potential site of arrangements, imaginations and contestations (de Certeau 1988, Lefebvre 1991), that citizens carve out distinct cultural, physical and gender spaces, identities, as well as imaginations that go in directions not intended by the party-state. In this talk, I share ethnographic fieldwork data of citizens who conducted volunteer services at various public spaces and how these practices shape micro-publics of change and alternative encounters in the dominant order of capital and state led urbanization. The talk is an inquiry into the power at play in the everyday experience of mega-cities. It reveals multiple ways citizens translate and negotiate a top-down mega-event urbanization into engaging the city’s temporal, social and spatial relations.