INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON
LOCATING THE CITY: THE IDEA, PLACE, POLITICS, AND EVERYDAY PRACTICE OF THE URBANInternational Conference by
MAY 3-6, 2001, BILKENT HOTEL, KEMER, ANTALYA,
TURKEY
Starting on the premise that there is no single definition of the "city," this
conference seeks to locate the city in lived experience, in textual mediums, political
interventions, territorial and spatial arrangements, ideas and ideals. Assuming that there
are as many "cities" as there are instances whereby the idea of the city is
evoked, this conference seeks to explore and locate different ways in which the city is
conjured up in political, spatial, ideational interventions as it becomes the locus of the
urban, the modern, the national, or the global. It addresses the ways in which modernity,
nations and nationalisms, colonial and postcolonial relations, the global and the
cosmopolitan have been intrinsically tied with cities and city life. It interrogates the
ways in which class, gender, race, ethnicity or religion have been interconnected with
cities and urban life in the making and contestations of modern, national, local, global,
postcolonial or cosmopolitan modes and forms.
SCHEDULE
May 3 - May 4 - May 5 - May
6
MAY 3, THURSDAY
Arrivals
18:30 - Welcome Reception / Introductions
- Güliz Ger, CRTS / Bilkent University
- Thomas Bender, ICAS / New York University
- Alev Çınar, CRTS / Bilkent University
- Camilla Fojas, Illinois Institute of Technology
21:00 - Exhibition/Presentation by Leo Rubinfein “Inventing a Poetry
of the Global City”
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MAY 4, FRIDAY
8:30 - 10:30 - Session 1: The City and Its Boundaries
Since cities are identified with place, place is often assumed to define their
boundaries. More and more, however, the city is understood as extending beyond the local,
beyond a particular place. Or at least, it is understood to be embedded in structures and
processes that are larger than it. This panel examines the relation of the city to its
larger context, to its changing boundaries or extensions. How is the city constituted in
relation to its exterior? How does the city contribute to the constitution of its larger
context, whether that other context is geographical, ethnic, economic, cultural,
political? What is the extended city’s relation to the national state and state system?
Questions of the definitions and relations of the “local,” “global,”
“cosmopolitan” are inevitably raised. In what way is the city present in the global
and the global in the urban?
- Margaret Cohen, Comparative Literature, New York University
"The City and the Sea"
- Camilla Fojas, Illinois Institute of Technology
"Splitting Image: Border Cinema and the Global City"
- Anthony King, Dept.of Art History, U.of Binghamton, SUNY
"City of Bits/Bits of Cities: Diasporas, Movement(s), Histories"
- Ethel Brooks, New York University
“Other Sites of Citizenship? Transnational protest, the mall, the and EPZ”
Moderator: Thomas Bender
10:30 -11:00 - Break
11:00-13:00 - Session 2: The Search for Particular Modernities
The urban experience often takes shape in relation to questions of belonging and
identification. This panel explores the ways in which the city becomes a site of
identification and the articulation of alternative visions of modernity. It explores the
image and identity of a city as it becomes the articulation of a particular modernity or
vision of a future wherein different groups seek a sense of belonging. How does the city
become the locus of identification that provides either a sense of belonging and
participation in modernity, or an estrangement from it?
- Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council, New York
“Amman is not a city: Ideology, Identity and Space in the making of Middle Eastern
Cities”
- Benglan Goh, National University of Singapore
“Southeast Asian Modernity Reconsidered”
- Beatriz Jaguaribe, ICAS, New York University
“Cities without Maps: representing the favela in Rio de Janeiro”
- Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague
“Cities and Architectures of Power”
Moderator: Alev Çınar
13:00 -14:30 - Lunch
14:30 -16:30 - Session 3: Ideational Representations of the City
This panel addresses questions relating to the idea and image of the city and the urban
as these representations become imbued with political meaning instigating change and
movement, the creation of the new and the ideal, the projection of ideal futures. How is
the City or the Urban imagined in relation to the future, to issues of change, advancement
and modernity? This panel will explore the political effects of such imaginations as they
operate through the popular media, literary texts, film or other mediums of
representation.
- Anne Norton, Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
“The City Built, The City Performed: the Enactment and Subversion of Modernism”
- Margarita Gutman, New York University
“The Power of Anticipation: Building Metropolitan Society and Space”
- Abidin Kusno, Metropolitan Studies, New York University
“Colonial Cities and Consciousness Change: "Shanghai," "Amsterdam"
and "Jakarta" in Tan Malaka's Autobiography”
- Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu, Dept.of Internal Design, Bilkent University
“Spectral Returns of Domesti(city)”
Moderator: Camilla Fojas
17:00 - Film - Christine Choy, "Ha, Ha Shanghai,”
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MAY 5, SATURDAY
8:30 - 10:30 - Session 4: The City and the Nation
This panel examines the ways in which cities and city spaces become the main sites from
which national identities are forged and nations are built. It explores the ways in which
the city becomes implicated in the consolidation of the nation-state and the articulation
of contending notions of nation-hood. It addresses questions related to nation-building,
including citizenship, territorial consolidation, centralization of power or contestations
of these as they take shape in relation to and through cities and city spaces.
- Maha Yayha, Department of Architecture, MIT
“Suspended Urbanities: Architectural Narratives and Postwar Building in Beirut”
- Srirupa Roy, Political Science, U.of Massachusetts/Amherst
“Outside the city: Representation, absence, and the Indian constituent assembly
debates”
- Alev Çınar, Political Science, Bilkent University
“Imagining the Nation, Making the City: Spatial Articulations of Secular Nationalism in
Ankara and Istanbul”
- Jordana Dym, Department of History, Skidmore College
“City, State, and Nation in Central America, 1821-1839: From Pueblos to Pueblo, Creating
the National State”
Moderator: Fuat Keyman, CRTS Bilkent University
10:30 - 11:00 - Break
11:00-13:00 Session 5: The Urban as a Partial Experience
Is a city experienced in its totality and impartially? How meaningful is it to talk
about the city as a single place where there is a characteristic urban experience? Does
not position and condition produce discrepancies among city dwellers? How does the
politics of the city (institutional and discursive) privilege certain positions and
identities and marginalize others? What resources are available to those privileged and
those marginalized? This panel explores the partial experiences of the city from the
positions of various subjectivities and resources, particularly those positions and
experiences conditioned by dominant hierarchies of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and
sexual orientation.
- Sukhdev Sandhu, ICAS, New York University
“Hope in a Darkened Heart: Black Artists and the Future of Archaeology of Greenwich”
- Benton Jay Komins and Özlem Sandıkcı, Bilkent University
“A Topography of Difference: İstanbul's Beyoğlu”
- Zhang Zhen, Cinema Studies, New York University
“Worldly Shanghai, Metropolitan Film Spectatorship”
- Nayan Shah, History Dept., University of California at San Diego
“Race, Public Health, and Citizenship”
Moderator: Ayşe Öncü, Sociology, Boğaziçi University
13:00 -14:30 - Lunch
14:30 -16:30 - Session 6: Negotiating Integration
As the locus of modernity and nationalism, the city becomes the site for the
negotiation of what is to be included into the making of the modern and the national, and
what is to be excluded. This negotiation is often articulated as a question of integration
and/or resistance of the particular and historical to the new and modern, the local to the
national, the marginal to the center, the rural and suburban to the urban. This panel
explores various instances whereby such negotiations of integration are articulated
spatially, architecturally and geographically.
- AbdouMaliq Simone, Columbia University
“Building New Platforms for Collective Urban Politics in African Cities”
- Smriti Srinivas, Comparative Studies, Ohio State University
“Cities of the Past and Cities of the Future: Theorizing the Indian Metropolis of
Bangalore”
- Peter Carroll, Department of History, Northwestern University
“The Modernist Chinese City and the Disrupture of Modern Civicness”
- Mark Levine, Jean Monnet Fellow, European Univ. Institute
“Peace in Old-New Jaffa: The Architecture of Israeli and Palestinian Identitites in a
Post-Conflict City”
Moderator: Deniz Yükseker
16:30 -17:00 - Break
17:00-18:00 - Special Session: The City in Practice and Policy
- Michael Cohen, New York University
“Urban Scholarship, Urban Practice, and Urban Aid: Evaluating Results”
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MAY 6, SUNDAY
9:00-10:30 - Closing Session
Concluding Remarks and Discussion
- Thomas Bender, International Center for Advanced Studies, NYU
Organizer and Coordinator: Alev Çınar, Bilkent University
Contact and information: Alev Çınar, alevc@bilkent.edu.tr
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