by Renard Teipelke
It has always been an issue in urban politics: Should alcohol consumption in public be prohibited or allowed? For various reasons concerning a place’s safety, tidiness, and peace, many actors in different countries have become outspoken advocates for this ‘public prohibition.’ Having experienced the US-American and European cases, I would like to draw some conclusions from my observations.
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by Ares Kalandides
The latest news is that German economy has reached pre-crisis growth levels for the first time and that what we are experiencing is close to a new Wirtschaftswunder. Indeed that seems to be the case if you only look at the national economy. Yet, the eye of the geographer is trained to distinguish why this is only part of the truth: because it ignores the growing regional (and class) inequality of that growth. Not only has the alleged growing profit of the German industry not been shared among society at large, but it also has a very strong regional concentration. Income in Germany has stagnated for almost 20 years now and the map shows how unequally growth has been shared across space. Continue reading
Tunja, Colombia
by Ares Kalandides
During the closing panel of the 2nd International Place Branding Conference in Bogotá, we had a rather long discussion on the relationship between practitioners and academics. The controversy was triggered by a statement of mine that we should think about a conference without “communication practitioners”. A few days after the conference, Efe Sevin, more or less declared the academics quite a nuisance and asked for more cases and less criticism. I didn’t answer then, but I should now.
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Monuments are often used to promote the uniqueness of places. Here the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin
by Ares Kalandides
(read part 1 here)
Läpple proposes the following four constitutive elements of space, which can help us think about what we need to look for:
First, the material-physical substrate of social relations, as the material external form of social space. This socially produced substrate consists both of place-bounded artefacts and of the human body. It also functions as crystallized history and materializes collective memory. Continue reading
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Monuments are often used to promote the uniqueness of places. Here the Acropolis of Athens
by Ares Kalandides
The other day Mihalis Kavaratzis made a very interesting point about the uniqueness of places (read Mihalis’ article here). He observed that while city promotion campaigns try to create difference, what they actually do is produce homogeneity. Cities are thus easily perceived as interchangeable. But how are we supposed to catch the unique city? His answer is twofold: On the one hand that ‘the whole is larger than the sum of its elements’, i.e. that it is not enough to look at the different characteristics, sum them up and promote them. On the other hand, that the city is an atmosphere more than materiality, and that this atmosphere is created in everyday practices. I want to take these arguments a step further and think both of ways to conceptualize them and to approach them methodologically. Continue reading
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by Mareike Forßbohm
NEMONA – Network for fashion designers and seamstresses / tailors in Berlin-Neukölln
NeMona is a pilot project in the field of fashion and production in Berlin-Neukölln and it is aimed at fashion designers and seamstresses. The aim is to promote the partnership networking between these two groups for new sources of jobs and to develop business models.
NeMoNa will develop further the existing Fashion Network Neukölln in order to support and strengthen designers as future employers of seamstresses and tailors. Continue reading
Filed under pick of the day
by Ares Kalandides
I was browsing through the site of the Institute of Place Management to understand how they define it and found the following definiton (which I re-write in my own words): Continue reading
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