There was a fair bit of chest-thumping around here when the Indian navy sunk what was initially called a “pirate mothership,” but later turned out to be a hijacked Thai fishing trawler.  Militarist machismo turned into semi-contrition and defensive, wounded pride.

But with the Somali pirates dominating news headlines all over the world, it should come as no surprise that the International Chamber of Commerce’s Commercial Crime Services division has come out with a real-time cartographic tool for keeping on eye on them.  Behold: the Live Piracy Map.

From Treehugger, a story on Margie Ziedler, who in the 1990s pioneered the conversion of old industrial buildings in Toronto into artist communities and centers for social innovation.  This is some good grist for the mill.  I can’t think of anything comparable going on here in Delhi, or indeed in urban India (although I’d love to hear about what I’m missing).  Perhaps the most interesting strand in this discussion for me is her contention that old, but not splendid and historic and (in the Delhi case) INTACH-worthy buildings, have a key role to play in the incubation of new ideas.  She says:

The required reading in my first year included Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. It blew me away, especially the chapter on old buildings — warehouses, factories, buildings that no longer served the purpose they once served. I’m not talking about museum-piece buildings, though they are beautiful and wonderful ingredients of any good city. I’m talking about old buildings whose owners are no longer worried about paying the mortgages, so they can provide cheap rents for people with low earning power — the writer, the inventor, the artist. These buildings are neat parts of the city. I remember reading that old ideas — banking, accounting and so on — can afford new buildings, but new ideas must use old buildings. Right away, I thought that could be a wonderful use for the old industrial buildings I love.”

Sometimes it seems as though public discussion on urban renovation and preservation in Delhi remains restricted to two polar extremes–the ASI-protected historic monument and the glittering new office building–with comfortable (albeit contested) domains carved out for each in a kind of tense, unwritten MoU. (There have been shocking breaches all the same).  Left out of this zero-sum discussion are the vast majority of neighborhoods, buildings and living spaces.  If it is too early for that discussion to start, then perhaps they should at least be protected somehow, for new ideas yet to come.

Any nominations for old industrial buildings that might fit the bill?

"Are times of recession good for art?" Jennifer Dalton, Mixed media (two gumball machines filled with plastic capsules with custom foil-wrapped chocolate coins inside), 2008.

You could probably map your coordinates on the relatively small landscape of the Indian contemporary art industry by taking a careful note of the way news of the “bottom dropping out” of the art market makes you feel.  Want to try it out?  There is no shortage:

Financial crisis hits Indian art market: “In among the first signs of a cooling in the art market, a high-profile auction of contemporary paintings in Kolkata on Saturday earned Rs4.7 crore for its organizers Emami Chisel Art gallery, one-third of original estimates of what the auction would bring in.  Around 50% of the 105 paintings on sale didn’t attract a single bidder. The response, said Emami Chisel Art’s director and a buyer, is a sign that the general environment of economic uncertainty has affected the art market, too.”

Sales drop by half in Christie’s Asian art sale in HK: “Half the lots in Christie’s evening sales of Asian contemporary and Chinese 20th century art went unsold on Sunday, reflecting the bleak global economic outlook and cooling Chinese art market.  Bidding was lackluster with many collectors and dealers not drawn to valuations seen as overpriced given the current market conditions. Only 56 percent of 32 lots of Asian Contemporary art sold, while 46 percent of Chinese 20th Century artwork was sold.”

Christie’s HK Asian sales miss target, crisis weighs: “Auction house Christie’s sold $146 million worth of Asian artwork in its Hong Kong autumn sales concluded Wednesday, around 35 percent below its pre-sale estimate as the financial crisis shrunk demand for Asian art.”

So, how are you feeling?  A sense of dread, mingled with regret about the purchase of that Innova a few months back?  Perhaps you are an artist or dealer.  Schadenfreude, evil glee? Perhaps you are an art critic or a cynic or an “underappreciated” genius.  Total indifference?  Perhaps you are normal.  A sense of wounded national pride?  Perhaps you learn too much about art from the weekly supplements in India’s major newspapers.  Whoever you are: welcome.  Now, let’s make use of one of the best cliches ever, that old chestnut that the Chinese character for “crisis” also means “opportunity,” or something like that.  Let’s improve upon this opportunity to ask: does a down art market lead to better art?  And vice versa?

Two perspectives on the question, courtesy of the Guardian:

The artist Bob and Roberta Smith (who, bizarrely, is one man, but that’s art for you) reckons the greatest threat to art today is “young artists thinking the only way to be successful is through financial gain. Art should be brutally uncommercial and totally uncompromising.” So just as repression is said to be good for art (see eastern Europe in the 20th century), maybe recession is too. Novelist Hilary Mantel is doubtful. “We satirists prefer to work in times of plenty,” she says, “because it’s then that the baseness of people’s desires shows itself. Nothing is so funny as consumers indulging themselves, although maybe the City bonus crowd are beyond satire. I’m afraid war and hardship show the better side of humanity, which is never quite so funny.”

She also dismisses the idea that artists are at their best when they are broke. “I think the virtue of starving in a garret is romantic nonsense, and am convinced I’d be a better writer if a generous benefactor regularly wrote me large cheques. ”

One theory is that the best art comes not during a period of recession, but in its prosperous aftermath. “The great artists of abstract expressionism, such as Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, were young during the great depression, and that had a great influence in giving their work emotional depth,” says art critic Jonathan Jones. “Thomas Pynchon said in his novel V that, after the war, the depression went inside, and that is true of their work. They were producing art in a time of prosperity, but shaped by the depression. “

Along these lines there is a truly vituperative piece of polemic that I found myself nodding along with in the current Times Literary Supplement, by writer George Walden: “After the credit crunch - the arts crunch?” He excoriates what he sees as British arts boosterism and triumphalism, and the industry that has grown up around it. I couldn’t help but think about the Indian scene and how some of this may be gloomily relevant. A taste of the vitriol:

The background to the euphoria in the arts is important. Partly it reflects our economic success, much of it now exposed as hollow, partly a genuine quickening in cultural life, but mainly it was temperamental. For decades the puritanical British have been discovering sensuality in all its forms, and are mightily excited about it. Good things have come of this late maturation, and our loosening up would be an unqualified plus, were it not for our apparent conviction that in sex, food and the arts we are doing things no one has ever done before, at which the world will wonder five centuries from now.

No other construction can be put on Mr Purnell’s asinine comment, or on the Arts Council report that inspired it, whose author informed us that Britain was on the verge of producing “the greatest art yet created”. Contemporary art shows British boosterism at its most frenetic. What is sold as innovation to hedge funders, credulous widows or ageing critics pining for youthful credentials is in fact a prime instance of Britain’s endemic conservatism in art: it has taken us almost a century to get the Duchamp/Dada joke, and now that we’ve got it we massacre it in the retelling. Scuppering the claim that the popular work of today was based on yesterday’s most daring, esoteric art, the arch-modernist Clement Greenberg wrote: “Of course no such thing is true. What is meant is that when sufficient time has elapsed the new is looted for new twists, which are then watered down and served up as kitsch”. Greenberg’s observation holds good in much self-consciously “daring” British writing, theatre or opera production, as well as art. Hedge funders will now have the leisure to read him, contemplate their quirky video or tin of excrement, and take what solace they can.

It would require more space and a lot more knowledge than I possess to review, here, the state of the arts in Britain. The sad thing is that it is so rare to see it done honestly, by which I mean in non-boosterish fashion, by anyone in a position to do it. We are blessed with some keen-eyed critics, but ageism can be a problem. In a live-for-the-day economy, youth has its foot on the pedal, while older, more discerning critics can lack both independence of spirit (to be dismissed as a grump is professional death) and the means to exercise it. “F–k off money”, as the unattractive phrase goes, is not widely distributed among commentators on the arts. Frightened for their jobs, not a few bite the populist bullet to keep the broadcasting or reviewing mite coming.

This graph, an aggregate of a whole set of historical data on human impacts on the environment, makes for some scary graph-reading.  A more detailed visual breakdown of this, from the same special issue in the New Scientist:

Yikes.  This brings up an uncomfortable question: are high rates of economic growth destroying the earth?  Guardian columnist George Monbiot has controversially made this case, but as far as I know it has yet to enter public discussion in any significant way in India.  Typically, reporting on the country’s economic growth rate and its self-evident ecological crisis are kept separate.  These graphs, along with the accompanying article, make a strong case against the separation.

The developing financial crisis, and its global impact on economies and growth rates, makes this a particularly opportune moment to raise the issue. But, as the issue’s lead article puts it, this may not be entirely welcome in certain circles:

A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us that if we are serious about saving Earth, we must reshape our economy.

This, of course, is economic heresy. Growth to most economists is as essential as the air we breathe: it is, they claim, the only force capable of lifting the poor out of poverty, feeding the world’s growing population, meeting the costs of rising public spending and stimulating technological development - not to mention funding increasingly expensive lifestyles. They see no limits to that growth, ever.

In recent weeks it has become clear just how terrified governments are of anything that threatens growth, as they pour billions of public money into a failing financial system. Amid the confusion, any challenge to the growth dogma needs to be looked at very carefully. This one is built on a long-standing question: how do we square Earth’s finite resources with the fact that as the economy grows, the amount of natural resources needed to sustain that activity must grow too? It has taken all of human history for the economy to reach its current size. On current form it will take just two decades to double.

That’s all fine and good for developed countries, you might say, but what about for India and China, aren’t high rates of economic growth lifting people out of poverty, and isn’t that worth some short-term damage to the environment? Not so, argues Andrew Simms:

THE last line of defence for advocates of indefinite global economic growth is that it is needed to eradicate poverty. This argument is at best disingenuous. By any reasonable assessment it is claiming the impossible.

Here’s why. During the 1980s, for every $100 added to the value of the global economy, around $2.20 found its way to those living below the World Bank’s absolute poverty line. During the 1990s, that share shrank to just 60 cents. This inequity in income distribution - more like a flood up than a trickle down - means that for the poor to get slightly less poor, the rich have to get very much richer. It would take around $166 worth of global growth to generate $1 extra for people living on below $1 a day.

Fair enough, you might think, it’s worth it. But consider the resources it would require. The measure known as the “ecological footprint” compares what we harvest from the biosphere, and return to it as waste, with the biosphere’s ability to absorb this and regenerate. It reveals whether we are living within our means or eating into our ecological capital.

Humanity has been overshooting the biosphere’s capacity to sustain our activities every year since the mid-1980s, and each year we do it sooner. In 2008, we had consumed the ration for the year by 23 September, five days earlier than the previous year. It would take at least three Earths to sustain us if everyone had the lifestyle of people in the UK; five if we all lived like Americans.

Perversely, under the current economic system, reducing poverty by a tiny amount will necessitate huge extra consumption by those who are already rich. To get the poorest onto an income of just $3 per day would require an impossible 15 planets’ worth of biocapacity. In other words, we will have made Earth uninhabitable long before poverty is eradicated. If we are serious about helping the poor rather than the rich, we need a new development model.

What would the new model look like?  Visit 2020 with the New Scientist in this piece of speculative futurism.  Can India afford a lower economic growth rate?  Do high rates of growth mask even faster growing rates of inequality?

Finally, an article in the Encyclopedia of the Earth on the Evolution of the human-environment relationship has an even more intense graph that I will link to rather than include in this post. If you are into graphs, this is a must-see.

If you’ve ever wondered how to describe the sprawling areas on the outskirts of Delhi, torn between urban, exurban and suburban, allow me to introduce you to another term: periurban.  Who knows who coined it, but the webpage for a periurban research project in Melbourne gives a very concise definition:

Peri-urban areas form belts of non-urban land fringing metropolitan centres. They are often neither fully urban nor rural but form a mosaic of often incompatible and unplanned uses. They usually contain important natural resources, remnant biodiversity and significant landscapes, often remain important for agriculture and recreation, and attract diverse populations of people. These areas are under increasing worldwide threat from development and overuse.

A more fulsome and interesting discussion of periurbanism and the challenge it presents to urban theory and the study of the developing world in particular can be found in this interview with gadfly academic Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz (1990), Planet of Slums (2006) and about a hundred other works too numerous to mention.  The interview appears on the BLDG blog, here’s a relevant excerpt:

BLDGBLOG: I’m curious about the vocabulary that you use to describe this new “post-urban geography” of global slums: regional corridors, polycentric webs, diffuse urbanism, etc. I’m wondering if you’ve found any consistent forms or structures now arising, as cities turn away from centralized, geographically obvious locations, becoming fractal, slum-like sprawl.

Davis: First of all, the language with which we talk about metropolitan entities and larger-scale urban systems is already eclectic because urban geographers avidly debate these issues. I think there’s little consensus at all about the morphology of what lies beyond the classical city.

The most important debates really arose through discussions of urbanization in southern China, Indonesia, and southeast Asia – and that was about the nature of peri-urbanization on the dynamic periphery of large Third World cities.

BLDGBLOG: And “peri-urbanization” means what?

Davis: It’s where the city and the countryside interpenetrate. The question is: are you, in fact, looking at a snapshot of a very dynamic or perhaps chaotic process? Or will this kind of hybrid quality be preserved over any length of time? These are really open questions.

There are several different discussions here: one on larger-order urban systems – similar to the Atlantic seaboard or Tokyo-Yokohama, where metropolitan areas are linked in continuous physical systems. But then there’s this second debate about the spill-over into the countryside, this new peri-urban reality, where you have very complex mixtures of slums – of poverty – crossed with dumping grounds for people expelled from the center – refugees. Yet amidst all this you have small, middle class enclaves, often new and often gated. You find rural laborers trapped by urban sweatshops, at the same time that urban settlers commute to work in agricultural industries.

This, in a way, is the most interesting – and least-understood – dynamic of global urbanization. As I try to explain in Planet of Slums, peri-urbanism exists in a kind of epistemological fog because it’s not well-studied. The census data and social statistics are notoriously incomplete.

Here’s my question for you: if we loosely define the “public” as comprising a set of individuals and institutions that are neither the State nor the Market (in other words, if we follow old Habermas at least this far), then should “public” art be here in the city center, or out in the periurban halo that surrounds it?  Or both?

An interesting new study has been published in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review Letters.  The authors crunched data from some 300 cities around the world, including Delhi, looking at the physics behind urban street patterns.  A short synopsis of their surprising results has been published in the New Scientist.  An excerpt:

French and US physicists have shown that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism despite significant cultural and historical differences. The resulting patterns are much like the veins of a leaf.

The similarity that these road networks show is accounted for by a process that the authors describe as “local optimization” and results in networks with a consistent patterning.  This suggests that top-down models of urban planning only go so far:

The study’s results might be important for understanding urban growth and “sprawl” says Barthélemy. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a proportion that continues to increase.

“The approach could even help city planners to better predict how some street networks will evolve and to plan accordingly,” he adds.

Previous models of urban development assumed that efficient transport across the entire network motivated the system’s growth - as if planned from the top down. Focussing instead on the structure of local connections seems truer to real life, says Flammini.

Ok now everyone get over to Google Earth and see how well this works for your neighborhood…

Stay posted to this page for daily updates, ramblings, observations, opinion and most importantly conversations on what promises to be a truly epochal affair: 8 sites around the city, 25 international artists (or 26, depending on whether you count Samit Basu and Sarnath Banerjee separately), bus rides and bicycle tours, an introduction to the metro system for a lot of people around here who I know have never been on it, a whole set of something called EcoTalks (there will be many such neologisms by the time this is through, like it or not), a performance by the radical Swiss dance allegorists Da Motus!, a concert by the inevitable Indian Ocean, and EcoFilms films films.  The 48c blog is intended to be an open space, with room for discussion, photographs and vituperative name-calling.  Just kidding about the last one.

This must be the most ambitious public art project the city has ever seen (those strangely spermatazoid stainless steel sculptures that sprouted up one dark night by the AIIMS flyover don’t count), and it addresses a key issue that affects us all: the pressing ecological crisis that looms larger with each passing smog-filled winter morning.  But what can art do about it?  The first issue to be resolved by deep-thinking readers of this blog: what is the “public” in the 48c subtitle: “public.art.ecology”  Are we to understand that “art” is the hapless mediator, stuck between two opposing terms, caught between the human sphere of the “public” and the nonhuman sphere of “ecology”?  a buffer zone between politics and nature?  Or does “art” somehow have the potential to act as a solvent for the loosening of the distinction, creating space for the emergence of something different, for a politics of nature?

Pooja Sood includes, in her curatorial note on the project (available here), a quote from critic Lucy Lippard that is as good a place to start as any:

From the 1960s through most of the 1990s, the Left considered environmentalism to be ‘soft politics’. While the bold action of Greenpeace and the extremes of ‘eco-terrorism’ had to be acknowledged, for the most part those who supposedly cared more for the earth and its creatures/creations than for people’s revolutions were perceived as acting from a kind of political surburbia. Today, sparked by indisputable proof of human agency in climate change, the environment is in the centre foreground. It has become the radical edge.

And so we find that the simple distinction between human and nonhuman worlds–the very foundation for a humanist perspective, going back to Aristotle–has, like so many of the myths of modernity, started to fracture and come apart, or better yet, the two categories it once separated have started to collapse.  The contempt that revolutionaries of yore felt for the “suburban” environmentalists, as described by Lippard, is one born of a sense that politics in its most important sense is a human affair, that the sphere of politics and the sphere of nature are intrinsically separate.  The fact that the environment has become such a key site of political contestation, whether at the (romanticized) “radical edge” or at the boring old middle, is a sign of a significant shift–a move towards a politics that takes in nonhumans as well as humans.  What accounts for this shift?  Again, Pooja Sood:

While concern for Delhi‟s ecology receives fragmented attention, usually following infrastructure-related civic crises, and periodic lip service from city agencies, the meshed social issues of environmental access, control and distribution continue to be a serious and exponentially growing problem. Imbalances arising from the unthinking abuse, brutal overuse and relentless degradation of urban environmental services has almost compelled an overlap in the calibration of natural and manmade ecological disasters.

To borrow from Gayatri Spivak, we have to ask: can the nonhuman speak?  And if so, how in the world are we to understand?  If not, how do we prevent the nonhuman from becoming yet another ventriloquist dummy, another sorry stooge for the man behind the curtain to speak through and for?  The problem here is obviously of a piece with the central problem in strictly human politics, that is to say it is a problem of representation.  The modern contract holds that the world of nature consists of things, while the human world consists of agents; and that scientists speak with certainty concerning, and on behalf of, the objective facts of nonhuman nature, while politicians speak subjectively concerning, and on behalf of, the political aspirations and contestations of their human constituents.  But the fragility of the distinction is apparent: the scientists’ facts are increasingly contested, disputed and rendered uncertain–politicized; the politicians’ agency and decisions increasingly find themselves pushed back upon, resisted, shifted, answered by the nonhuman world–naturalized.  How do (should?) we consciously bring nonhumans into the arena of political representation?  And what can public art do to intervene in that process?  Who and what is included in the “public”?

Any thoughts?