Archive for Site Tags
heterotopia – sylvia’s place (NYC LGBTQ Youth Shelte)
by ran
(Photo: Lucky S. Michaels)
Sylvia’s Place is an emergency overnight shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth, which is run by the Metropolitan Community Church of New York. People who come to this shelter are mostly kicked out from their ‘home’ because of their sexualities.
This place could be an example of “heteropias of deviation,” because their homosexuality or cross gender behaviors were considered to be out of the social norm in their families and communities. As Foucault illuminates, eliminating “abnomality” from the society inevitably creates “other place,” “heterotopia.”
Atlantic Avenue Tunnel (terrain vague)
by ran
Atlantic Avenue Tunnel (http://www.controlgeek.net/)
Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, the world’s oldest subway tunnel, was built in 1844. It was used only until 1861 due to LIRR’s bankrupt and became forgotten in people’s memory. Fortunately, it was ‘discovered’ by a 19 year old Pratt student Bob Diamond in 1980.
(The Brooklyn Historic Railway Association http://www.brooklynrail.net/proj_aatunnel.html)
You can also view some photos and historic explanation from the video below.
Beneath Atlantic Avenue from Brooklyn Ink on Vimeo.
Atlantic Avenue Tunnel was literally abandoned for about 80 years, “exist[ing] outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures.” (Davidson, 120) It was a “vague” place for a longtime, unoccupied. However, interestingly enough, this strange place stimulates many people’s interest these days.
A film screening event in Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. (Image from http://www.gothamfilm.com)
As Davidson points out, “Art’s reaction (…) is to preserve these alternative, strange spaces, strangers to the productive efficiency of the city” (122) and I think Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is a perfect example.
terrains vagues – to use or not to use?
by cindy
i really enjoyed the christensen reading/documentation about big box reuse. apart from the general distress i felt when thinking about the impact of these stores on our landscapes, spaces, economies, culture, and sense of aesthetics, i did find it inspiring that reuse very often involved solutions that somehow strengthened the notion of community, spirituality and/or learning in some way.
it got me thinking about all of the terrain vagues across the U.S. that are not actively being used for whatever reason. detroit has long been held up as urban decay’s cautionary tale – what happens to an urban ecosystem when decentralized spraw renders the center a ghetto and no manner of re-use or gentrification can find a solution (i think the most recent solution proposed by detroit’s urban planners is to simply reclaim all of the terrains vagues by plowing them under and re-introducing giant green spaces to the center of the city.)
meanwhile, documentation of this urban decay is very popular with photographers. many strangely beautiful, sometimes almost fetishised images are the result.
some images by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre:
and a few images by photographer andrew moore:
more strange urban heterotopias
by cindy
new york city is filled with strange enclosed spaces designed to offer some form of health or wellness retreat from the modern challenges of “normal urban” spaces.
behold the nap heterotopia on the 22nd floor of the empire state building.
www.metronaps.com/mn/store/nap_center
and in chelsea, a series of therapeutic salt caves.
amazing!
A floating trash heterotopia – barge not required.
by cindy
Foucault’s nautical heterotopia meets Lynch wasted space in the now infamous Garbage barge:
In 1987, a barge of trash bound for a landfill on the eastern seaboard found itself unable to land anywhere. Interesting story (illustrates mafias involvement with waste removal, the politics of waste removal, a whole host of topics we’re discussing.
For a short time, it became a political, social and cultural phenomenon.
but today, barges or boats are no longer required to create floating waste heterotopias. we’ve learned that discarded waste will – through a process of tidal entropy – form its own structure free floating heterotopia in the middle of the pacific ocean, known as the great pacific garbage patch.
Hart Island — Potter’s Field
An example of the ‘unwanted’ being hidden on the margins of the city and society, inaccessible and unknown.
This small island in the Long Island Sound, near Riker’s and City Island, has, since the 1860’s when it was bought by the city, been home to a prison, several hospitals, a workhouse, a Nike missile site launch in the 50’s, and lastly, Phoenix House, a drug and alcohol re-hab facility, which closed in 1976. Since 1869, it has been the city’s Potter’s Field with over 750,000 buried in mass graves — the unknown and unclaimed, as well as the bodies of the those whose families could not afford a private burial, including thousands of still-born children.
Melinda Hunt has been working to make the cemetary’s history open and to help families find where their relatives have been buried.
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/hart.html
The island is managed by the Department of Corrections which handles all burials and is completely off-limits unless you are a family member.
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urban media lab: waste 
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