A semana numa imagem

A semana numa imagem esta semana será em duas imagens, embora com o mesmo tema, bem triste por sinal.

O Congo é um dos países mais massacrados pela guerra que dura já desde o Genocídio do Ruanda, em 1994. Desde esse triste incidente morreram milhões de pessoas, e outros tantos milhões estão hoje desalojados a viver em condições miseráveis.

Mas no último mês as forças rebeldes incrementaram o clima de instabilidade, acentuando ainda mais o terror numa terra que aos poucos vai perdendo a alma.

Esta última investida rebelde atirou de repente 250.000 pessoas para uma situação de desalojamento, apesar das tentativas sucessivas das N.U. que têm vindo a aumentar a sua presença no território, com quase 20.000 pessoas, civis e militares.

Na primeira imagem uma criança acaba de ser colocada num autocarro conjuntamente com muitas outras pessoas que tentam fugir do campo, onde o exército luta contra os rebeldes. Tentam atingir a capital de província Goma, capaz de lhes oferecer maior segurança.

E na segunda alguns orfãos descansam no centro Ngangi Dom Bosco, também em Goma.

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

In(visible) border

China - Great Wall

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

In(visible) border

...5th part

There is a tendency to expand the realm of freedom by providing the cities with more public spaces where strange people can meet and engage at least in a temporary interaction, talk to each other, sometimes strike a friendship and establish more or less durable relations with each other.

(...)There is a tendency towards keeping a distance, building walls, drawing borders, spatial separation. It is most pronounced in the United States of America, but visible more and more in European countries. A tendency to divide the city into a collection of voluntary and involuntary ghettos.

On the one hand, “gated communities”, where people who can afford it hide themselves in a closely guarded territory, surrounded by armed guards on the watch for twenty-four hours a day and keeping the strangers out. If you can’t afford to buy yourself into a gated community, at least you buy better locks to put on your door, burglar alarms and closed-circuit television to keep strangers away, or you join the local ‘neighbourhood watch’ vigilante group to keep strangers away.

And there are ever spreading involuntary ghettos, into which people are dumped without being asked, not because they want it but because they are not allowed to go out. When applied to some particularly ‘rough’ districts of the city, the expression “no go area” means different things to people outside and the people inside.

For the first, it means “I’d rather not go in”, “I’ll keep away”. But for the people who are inside “no go area” means “I can’t go out”, “I’m not allowed to get out from here”.

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

.... continues

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

In(visible) border

Ost Berlin - West Berlin

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

In(visible) border

...4th part

«Cities in which more than half of mankind live today, spend most of their lives, are the places on which the outcomes of the chaotic and uncontrolled globalisation processes converge. Three of the outcomes are particularly important in shaping the conditions of insecurity that mark contemporary life.

First, our cities are the dumping grounds for the globally produced problems: pollution of water or air, warming up of the planet, these are global products, side effects of the chaotic nature of the globalising process. But it is the municipal authorities and the city residents that have to worry about making air for breathing and water for drinking, and defend the living conditions in the city themselves against the dangers arising from climatic changes. The massive migration of people around the world, the rising numbers of homeless economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, is also a product of globalising processes; they all end up inside the city in their search for bearable life conditions, and providing such conditions becomes a task falling on the shoulders of the city and its residents.

Second, it is the city that turns into the principal battlefield where freedom and security, two paramount values indispensable in a life worth living, meet, struggle, and seek reconciliation. Third, city turns today into the main laboratory in which local solutions to global problems are sought, designed, experimented with and put to test; at the same time however, city offers the type of surrounding most conducive to the acquisition of skills, the arts, abilities and habits that may help enormously in confronting, tackling and possibly resolving those global issues exactly where they ought to be handled – on the global scene. Cities are laboratories where the ways and means of human peaceful cohabitation, cross-cultural dialogue and understanding are developed.

Cities were always the places where strangers lived together. It is in fact the definition of the city: the place where strangers live together permanently while keeping their differences and without stopping being strangers. Each time you walk from home to your working place or to a shop or a cinema, you meet hundreds of people who are complete strangers to you and who will remain strangers after your meeting. For this reason, city life always evoked contradictory sentiments. »

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

.... continues

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

In(visible) border

...3rd part

«Since the world out there is insecure and we cannot defuse the dangers it emanates, let us lock ourselves up and fence ourselves off its morbid impacts. Let us surround ourselves by closed-circuit television, by immigration officers on the borders, the specially trained dogs, which will put every moving person under suspicion and draw every passenger through the checks meant for criminals and terrorists. Let us buy and fix more secure locks for our doors. Let us hire more armed guards to guard the part of town where we live and keep strangers away.

These sort of things, we hope against hope, may stop the oozing insecurity we so deeply feel at the outer border of our country or local community, at the threshold of our home, and prevent it from seeping inside. It’s, I repeat, a vain hope. It won’t stop companies and jobs from vanishing. It won’t stop our savings for old age suddenly disappearing. It won’t save demands for skills from evaporating. It won’t make human bonds stronger and more reliable.»

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

.... continues

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

In(visible) border

... 2nd part

«Our present obsession with borders is the product of the hopeless hope that we can actually insure ourselves against all sorts of risks and dangers, that we cut ourselves off from threats vague unnamed threats, with which the world we live in seems to be saturated. To put it in a nutshell, one could say that our obsession with borders today comes from the hopelessness of our hopes, from the fact that we are desperately trying to find local solutions to globally produced problems, though such solutions don’t exist and cannot be found. There can be only global solutions to global problems. But such global solutions are, thus far, beyond our reach.

All historically created tools of collective action are local. They reach as far as the borders of the nation state. We don’t have any effective tools of collective action above this level. The point, though, is that real power, power to do things and have them done, has evaporated from these local institutions. In our increasingly globalised world there is local politics without power and global power with no politics – politically unconstrained power. After two or three hundred years of modern history, of very close, sometimes friendly, sometimes stormy, cohabitation of power and politics inside the nation state, there has been a divorce. We are forced therefore to use the only tools of effective collective action we have, which are local tools, in the hope that they will somehow protect us from the uncontrolled, unbridled and impenetrable dangers from the global powers we do not control. We suffer uncertainty, fears, nightmares, which emanate from the processes over which we have no control, of which we have only very partial knowledge, and which we certainly are, we fear, too weak to master.

It all boils down to the vague feeling of insecurity.»

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

.... continues

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

In(visible) border

« “Many Cultures, One Humanity”.

It’s a beautiful frame for thinking in our contemporary liquid order and very complex, very difficult, very risky, very dangerous world. A frame where our thinking, our concern with our own lives and the lives of people around us is placed between these two extremes. Many cultures is the reality. One humanity is an ideal destination, purpose, task. Many cultures is the past; that is what we inherited from millennia of human history. One humanity is the future, first predicted by Immanuel Kant who wrote more than two hundred years ago about the universal unification of humankind. Few people read his predictions. Recently Kant’s little book about the future of mankind was rediscovered and suddenly everybody became interested, which is a very good sign because it shows the awareness, the consciousness that unity of mankind is on agenda. A topical issue, and growing in stature.

There is one invisible third element between many cultures on one side and one humanity on the other. Invisible but necessary. The middle element is the border. Border is what separates and at the same time connects cultures. These days, we are obsessed with borders. That’s a paradox, a logical paradox, but not psycho-logical. A logical paradox, because in our fast-globalising world borders become less and less effective. They lose their effectiveness and therefore their practical importance. But as they lose their importance, they acquire more and more significance and tend to be over-saturated with meaning. It doesn’t stand to reason… Psychologically, however, this is hardly paradoxical, since the less successful we are in keeping intact the borders we have drawn, the more obsessive we become in drawing them again and again. We are indeed obsessed today with drawing borders. The less they are effective, the more we are obsessed. Why? What is the reason? »

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

.... continues

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...

A China em 10 anos

Scroll down to read this text in English

Após ter visto a palestra de Norman Foster na DLD Conference em Munique, pus-me a fazer contas. Umas contas muito simples, mas daquelas que deixam qualquer um estarrecido.

Comecemos por comparar três das maiores potências mundiais – os E.U.A., a Federação da Rússia e a República Popular da China – em dois parâmetros, a sua população e o tamanho do seu território:

E.U.A.

População – 300 milhões de habitantes

Território - 9 629 091 km²

FEDERAÇÃO DA RÚSSIA

População - 152 milhões de habitantes

Território - 20 100 500 km²

República popular da China

População - 1,31 bilhão de habitantes

Território - 9.640.821 km²

Atentando ao facto de que, por razões diversas, apenas cerca de metade do território russo é realmente habitado, conseguimos uma base de comparação, ainda que teórica – as três potências estendem-se em territórios os quais, apesar de substancialmente diferentes, têm tamanhos semelhantes.

No que respeita à população, a Rússia detém cerca de metade dos habitantes do E.U.A., enquanto que a população chinesa é quase 4 vezes e meia superior à americana.

Tomando em consideração os factos apresentados, juntemos agora aqueles que são talvez a mais importante infra-estrutura das sociedades da comunicação – os aeroportos. Actualmente, os E.U.A têm cerca de 10.000, a Rússia 1.500 e a China cerca de 150. De ordens de grandeza diferentes, os números espelham bem sociedades também muito díspares.

Mas a grande notícia, e simplesmente por não me ter apercebido disso antes, foi dada por Norman Foster há poucos dias em Munique. Disse o Arquitecto que, na próxima década, a China irá construir 400 (sim quatrocentos) novos aeroportos no seu território. Quarenta por ano, três por mês…e poderemos continuar a fazer contas…

O quer isto dizer? Bom, assim dito provoca tanta admiração que diremos logo que os valores orbitam noutra escala. É certo que a China representa, per se, outra escala, outra economia, outra força, e até outra cultura, mas num esforço comparativo das diferentes potências mundiais, o que significa construir 400 novos aeroportos num espaço temporal tão curto?

Pela discussão tão acesa que estamos a ter por causa do nosso (modesto) novo aeroporto, depreende-se que a construção de uma infra-estrutura tão importante, prende-se com factores como a localização, o tamanho, o desenho, as implicações económicas, urbanas e ambientais, o espaço aéreo e os seus fluxos, as acessibilidades e, no fundo, todas as dinâmicas evolutivas territoriais. A sua construção deve ser cautelosa e a pergunta que se impõe é a de como será possível gerir tanta informação, não para um, mas para 400 novos espaços destes.

Norman Foster, cujo gabinete tem estudado algumas destas novas catedrais em território chinês, termina este raciocínio perguntando-se que forma deverão ter os novos espaços. Penso que a pergunta é muito mais vasta e profunda. Que alterações provocarão estes novos espaços, implementados de forma tão autoritária, do ponto de vista social, ambiental, económico e urbano. E, sendo os aeroportos, espaços para as pessoas, terão sido as pessoas consideradas no seu processo de desenvolvimento que é, no fundo, o processo de desenvolvimento de toda a China?

China, 10 years from now

After having seen Norman Foster’s lecture at the Munich DLD Conference, I started making some calculations. Simple as these calculations may have been, they left me quite overwhelmed.

Let’s start by comparing three of the world’s most powerful nations, the U.S.A, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, taking two key factors into account, their population and the size of their territories:

U.S.A.

Population – 300 million

Territory - 9 629 091 km²

RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Population - 152 million

Territory - 20 100 500 km²

people’s Republic of china

Population - 1,31 billion

Territory - 9.640.821 km²

Considering the fact that, for a number of reasons, only about half of the Russian territory is inhabited, we manage to come up with a basis for comparison, even if only theoretical – these three nations are built upon territories that, apart from their obvious differences, have similar sizes.

When it comes to the population count, Russia has about half the number of inhabitants of the U.S., while China’s is the quadruple of the American populus.

Having shed the light on these facts, we now turn to consider those that are seen as possibly the most important infrastructures of the so-called communication societies – airports. Presently, the U.S. have about 10.000 airports, Russia has 1.500 and China a mere 150. The numbers speak for themselves when it comes to exposing the differences in these three societies.

But the big news, quite simply because I just became aware of it, was given by Norman Foster a few days ago, in Munich. The arquitect stated that, in the next decade, China will build 400 (yes, four hundred) new airports on its territory. Forty per year, three per month... and so on...

What exactly does this mean? Well, put this way it causes such bewilderment that we immediately believe these values are, to say the least, out of the ordinary. It’s true that China represents, per se, a different scale, a different economy, a different force, and even a different culture, but in a comparative effort of the different powerful nations what exactly does the construction of 400 new airports in such little time mean?

Considering the all too discussed matter of where the new Portuguese airport is to be built, we can understand that for such an important infrastructure, conditions such as location, size, design, economical, urban and environmental implications, air space and traffic, accessibility and all the possible territorial evolutions, must be taken into account. Such an ordeal must be cautiously planned and the question that imposes itself is that which asks how it will be possible to manage so much information, not for one but for 400 of these new spaces.

Norman Foster, whose office has been studying some of these new cathedrals in Chinese territory, ends this thought asking himself what form these new spaces are to adopt. I believe it is a much deeper, pressing question. What changes will these new spaces bring, imposed in such a totalitarian manner, from the social, environmental, economical and urban points of view? And, being airports spaces for the people, have they really been even thought of in this process of development, which is, in truth, the process of growth of China itself?

translated by Manuel Costa Campos

Leia o post Completo...

Ver sumário...