Over the past week, big changes have occurred in the little virtual world of Deliberately Considered. We have put up a changed format that has been on the drawing boards for months. You will note that while now the text of only the most recent post is to be found on the home page, the titles and images of many more posts can be viewed and easily accessed. We have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but rushed this week to get it going in response to events just south of my New School office in lower Manhattan, in Zuccotti Park and its neighborhood. We are part of the neighborhood and seek to have neighborly discussions.

The new format provides easier access to more of the unfolding reports, analyses and debates on our site, and allows us to bring forward posts past that continue to address pressing problems, particularly in the editors picks.  And most important now, it will permit us to highlight more intensive investigations of pressing political issues, hoping to inform debate about those issues. Thus, now you will find the continuing posts on Occupy Wall Street.

Elzbieta Matynia and I find the occupation movement to be of great interest. For her, it is a case where her ideas of performative democracy apply. For me, the occupation is a clear case of the power of the politics of small things. We proposed and are now coordinating the Flying Seminar with our intellectual interests  and our previous work together on the Democracy Seminar in East and Central Europe and beyond in mind. As we have already reported, it is off to a quick and extraordinary start. Occupy Wall Street and Shiroto no Ran on Tuesday, Adam Michnik on Saturday. And Deliberately Considered now has a space for the announcement of upcoming sessions of the seminar, for reports on the seminar sessions, including videos of the events, and for what I hope will be sustained ongoing discussions about the issues discussed in the seminar.

And please note how the everyday posting will quite often inform the discussions in the Flying Seminar and, I hope, the discussions and debates in various groups in OWS. This week, in addition to the posts that have directly related to the occupation, Malgorzata Bakalarz reflected on the problem of curatorial practice as it attempts to address large public issues, in her case what she calls nine-elevenism. How we remember 9/11 is key to how a social movement in lower Manhattan is understood. The need to “re-remember” (as Toni Morrison put it in Beloved) the attack of September 11^th may be one of the reasons why OWS is so powerful. Malgo is dissatisfied with how an art exhibition dealt with the problem. I sometimes think that the greatest significance of OWS is that it is a much more successful exhibition. And Anette Baldauf thought about her film on the tragedy of Victor Gruen, a progressive architect and urban planner who designed the shopping mall. He hoped to “combine commercial and civic spaces and counter the a-geography of the suburbscape with a cultural and social center” and instead he “integrated living into shopping.” As she walked downtown through Soho, an art center turned urban shopping mall, on her way to visit the occupation, she imagined the city where this tragedy is overturned, where “people come before profit.”

Deliberately Considered is still a place for informed reflection on the events of the day. Now, I hope, we are moving in the direction where we can deepen the reflection and get closer to the events.

Last Saturday afternoon, as I was walking through Soho, I imagined the people marching on the street carrying cardboard signs instead of shopping bags. For a moment, the signs of this massive procession did not read “H&M”, “Gap” and “Uniclo” but “People, before profit,” “We are the 99 percent” or “I’d rather be working.” The rush and urgency in their expression did not concern the next bargain, but the future of America. I was on my way to the Tribeca Architecture and Design Film Festival, where our documentary film was going to be screened. “The Gruen Effect” is the story of the Austrian born architect Victor Gruen, who attempted to recreate Vienna’s urbanity in the sprawling suburbs of postwar America and invented the shopping mall.

Already in the late thirties Gruen and his then wife, Elsie Krummeck, promoted the building of “shopping towns,” which promised to combine commercial and civic spaces and counter the a-geography of the suburbscape with a cultural and social center. They claimed that the complexes would ease women’s lives, and integrate shopping into living. But as de-industrialization proceeded, the power of consumption began to drive the US economy, and shopping prepared the path to post-industrialism. The shopping mall became a blueprint for inner city re-development and an engine of the post-industrial economy. It integrated living into shopping. Looking back upon the translation errors and ironies of his life, Gruen argued at the end of his life that developers had high-jacked his concept of the shopping town. He “disclaimed paternity once and for all” and refused to “pay alimony to those bastard developments.” (Film on Gruen embedded below.)

Walking along Broadway and watching the crowd moving in and out of stores, I realized again how much the film was a story about the city of New York. I wished the voices from Zuccotti Park, located only a few blocks south of the movie theater, would be loud enough to inspire the discussion after the screening. With these insights into the making of the commerce driven mall-city on display in Soho, what can we claim for the future of urban development? What, I asked myself, would it mean if we came to an understanding that architecture and city planning are not only tools to mark distinction, exclusion and corporate omnipotence (see Ground Zero), but can also be means of radical redistribution? What if we see architecture and urban planning as technologies of social justice? What if we think of a truly alternative usage of the nation’s empty shopping spaces, estimated to be the size of the city of Miami? What if the dead and suffering malls would be retrofitted not as churches or fake local storefronts, but as massive think tanks for the grand remodeling of the US economy? What kind of public spaces would we be able to create, and how could they support our growing social movement?

The Gruen Effect: Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall,
by Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner,
A 2010, 54 min, Co-production: pooldoks – ORF/RTR/FFW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8LHgUfBdzM