Blogs

Guijing migrant village


Brett Neilson September 15, 2010

Angela Melitopoulos

Images by Angela Melitopoulos

 

Borders are no longer only geographical lines or filters between states. Rather than existing solely at territory's edge, they have emerged as mobile control technologies strung across the world's infrastructures, circuits, cities and bodies. In China one of the most important borders is that between the urban and the rural. The movement of people between these spaces is deeply shaping Chinese society and its interactions with the state. Events such as the Shanghai Expo 2010 offer a hypermodern and green vision of the city. The migrant villages that have sprung up on the fringes of China's metropolises present a very different image: bleak, polluted and poor. These villages are sites of multiple borders, where the subjectivity of migrants is produced at the interface with governmental, nongovernmental and commercial actors.

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@ Baoshan Electronics Market


Shveta Sarda September 15, 2010

kirk lau

Shanghai 10 July 2010, Shveta Sarda, Delhi

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Shanghai Expo: seeing the world in small


Tim Winter September 14, 2010

Tim Winter

For six months in 2010 the city of Shanghai is hosting the largest, most spectacular and most expensive World’s Fair ever. Held just two years after the Beijing Olympics, the Shanghai Expo is expected to attract a staggering 70 million visitors by the time it closes in October. At a cost of around US$45 billion dollars, and involving the relocation of 18,000 families and 270 factories, the Expo will permanently transform large areas of central Shanghai. Perhaps more significantly, the Expo, with its theme of Better City, Better Life, is being held in a country currently experiencing a level of urban growth unparalleled in history. With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, many of which face uncertain futures, this mega event also confronts some of the key challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century.

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Monitoring particles and populations


Mauricio Corbalan September 14, 2010

mauricio corbalan

Monitoring Particles and Populations: Expo-Urbanism and the Rise of Eco-Governance Regimes

Mauricio Corbalan and Soenke Zehle

 

These notes are the provisional outcome of several conversations we shared during our stay at Shanghai in June/July 2010 and were developed through many online meetings after that. While there, we made alternatively two fieldtrips: one to the recently open World Expo and another to the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center. The management of the expo as a didactical urban enclave and the control of its environmental conditions by agreements with translocal agencies, were a subtle coincidence to begin to explore what we are calling 'regimes of eco-governance'.

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