FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| BOOKS Alphabet City Six: Open City, The cultural theory journal Alphabet City offers its current "investigation into the city" in book form. What do you get when you unleash an assortment of intellectuals, artist/activists (Toronto's October Group, Berlin's trailer-dwellers), literati (Lynn Crosbie, Catherine Bush) and grad students upon a question as multi-faceted as the city's future? You get a mixed bag of challenging ideas, arty-intellectual hipness and sometimes passionate engagement with real questions. Derrida's essay on Prague, by way of reflections on Kafka, proves the celebrated baffler of so many students is not just here for name value (but oh, there is that). He asks useful, comprehensible questions about what happens to politics when the polis, the city, no longer means what it once did. He thinks intriguingly about time and the city as a project spanning generations, like the Biblical tower of Babel. How do we live our own lives in it, leaving openings for those who come later and respecting those who came before? The image of Babel comes up in a few places, as does the idea of a "porous" or open way of designing parts of cities. Paul Virilio says the city that loses its external borders finds new borders within - witness gang turf wars in LA. Thus megacities are "Babel... and Babel is civil war!" How do people communicate in such multi-ethnic Babels? Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko addresses this issue, not with an idea, but with a thing. His "Alien Staff" is a strange artifact - a walking stick with a video monitor on the end of it - that looks like something a movie Moses might carry, but actually gets strangers talking to one another on city streets. Seems it's easier to deal with the video image of a stranger than with the real person. Speaking of real people (as opposed to intellectuals?), some of the most fascinating contributions come from mayors of actual cities, like Massimo Cacciari of Naples. The volume claims to be "stunningly designed." While well illustrated and pleasing enough, it doesn't stun. But it does provide plenty of material to stir up thought, dissent and reflection: all things a young city like Calgary can really use while teetering on the cusp of bigness. |