industryterm:real estate development

  • See the World Through the Eyes of the One Percent
    https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/chris-anderson.jpg?quality=75&strip=color&w=745

    Edward Steichen’s monumental 1955 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man, was in essence about inclusivity. The 503 photographs by 273 prominent and unknown artists included in the show were curated from two million images, depicting life at its various moments to create a bigger picture of the human experience.

    “That exhibit was a seminal work in the history of the medium,” says Myles Little, a #TIME associate photo editor and the curator of a new traveling exhibition, One Percent: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality. “It would be impossible for me to do something equal to it.”

    Still, Steichen’s show became a stepping-stone for Little’s exhibit, which takes a stab at exposing the ecosystem of the rich through a more exclusive photographic journey. “I studied Family of Man, and wrote down what I saw as its themes: family, religion, work, and so on. Then I found images that speak to those themes, but in the world of privilege,” says Little.

    Born in Ireland and raised in Charleston, S.C., Little’s experience working and living in New York City has inevitably exposed him to the jarring gap between the rich and the poor. “I catch little glimpses of both appalling poverty and breathtaking wealth,” he says. “Meanwhile, I see a lot of regular people in America celebrating the wealthy and referring to celebrities by their first names—as if they are friends. We over-identify with this group of people we don’t know and with whom we do not share common interests.”
    https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/chris-anderson.jpg?quality=75&strip=color&w=745
    After an inspiring conversation with Mexican-American curator Daniel Brena, Little spent two years curating the show, sifting through images online such as the archives of Magnum Photos, VII Photo and NOOR. To achieve a “visual cohesiveness” and “mirror the luxurious spirit of the show”, he eventually narrowed his 2,000-image selection down to 30 well-crafted medium format color photographs.

    Some of them so blatantly point out the stark contrast of inequality, such as Juliana Sohn’s photograph of a gray-haired, legless man kneeling on the floor, shining a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Some are more ambiguous, such as Jesse Chehak’s image of the High Line Park, built partially thanks to the contributions of wealthy New York patrons, which inadvertently spurred real estate development and brought tremendous value spike to the neighborhood that forced many to leave.

    The exhibition goes beyond the boundaries of America as the Promised Land, examining how inequality and globalization have helped cripple developing countries. In Tanzania, as gold emerged as the country’s most valuable export, David Chancellor shows the image of an armed soldier guarding the North Mara mine from villagers living in the country’s most impoverished region. “The idea behind the project is to shine a light on an incredibly powerful, but often invisible or misunderstood, segment of the population,” says Little .

    Introduced by Noble Prize-winning economist, inequality expert, Joseph Stiglitz, and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author, Geoff Dyer, the exhibition will be traveling to China, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, Wales, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, beginning in September. Little is also raising funds on Kickstarter to publish the photographs with German publisher Hatje Cantz.

    http://time.com/3968148/wealth-one-percent-inequality

    #photographie #exposition #

  • The Real Reason Turkey Is Building So Many Mosques
    http://www.buzzfeed.com/borzoudaragahi/the-real-reason-turkey-is-building-so-many-mosques

    The new global Turkey also finances Ottoman-style mosques, with their distinctive domes and minarets, around the world, including in Gaza, and a controversial one in Bucharest. It is in part an architectural and ideological competition with Saudi Arabia, whose austere Wahhabi mosques have been popping up across the globe in the thousands, promoting a version of Islam that Turkey’s leadership considers extreme and intolerant. In Cuba, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are competing to build a mosque in Havana. Iran, too, seeks to spread its ornate, Safavid-style mosques to other countries, including Lebanon and Iraq but also western countries like Denmark. All three regional powers are seeking to promote their versions of Islam, with Turkey emerging as a player in the decades-long rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh.

    […]

    But mosques are also a way for a new ostentatiously rich class of AKP supporters to give back, to show their piety even as they grow ever more wealthy and powerful and take on the accoutrements of the global elite.

    […]

    The mosques and other vast public projects are also part of a political machine that uses public and private resources to reshape Turkey. Once devoted solely to financing low- and medium-income housing projects, TOKI has grown into an all-encompassing entity that oversees many of the highest-profile infrastructure projects in the country. It rewards contractors with public land to build real estate developments and earns a percentage of profits. It spends its revenues, totaling $1.73 billion in 2014, on public infrastructure projects such as hospitals, mosques, and stadiums, which are granted to well-connected construction companies. (TOKI did not respond to requests for comment.)

  • Beirut’s character crumbles under the weight of new real estate projects
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/beirut%E2%80%99s-character-crumbles-under-weight-new-real-estate-

    What the residents of the Tayyah Building are facing is not an individual case separate from what is happening elsewhere in the Lebanese capital. Beirut is witnessing a barrage of new real estate developments that are erasing its history and burying its heritage and archaeological remains. In the 1950s, Gemmayze was more like a “village.” Some of the “orphaned” historic buildings and the quaint street signs are living proof. Jamal, a resident on Pasteur Street, still laments the old tree that adorned the neighborhood. I remember I cried when they uprooted it and so did my son Jad who asked me to stop them.” She ached at the sight of the birds fleeing with every strike. “It took them three days to uproot it,” Jamal says, alluding to the tree’s big size.

    […]

    Beirut’s character crumbles under the weight of new real estate projects | Al Akhbar English
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/beirut%E2%80%99s-character-crumbles-under-weight-new-real-estate-

    Architect Rahif Fayyad says that article 16 of the new construction law is skewed in favor of large real estate holdings and buildings with no height restrictions. It allows exceptions in the floor area ratio, which is the number of floors in relation to the height of a building. All these exceptions are allowed on one condition, the availability of the needed space, which is 4,000 square meters (43,056 square feet) in Beirut and the provincial centers and 20,000 square meters in other areas. The article does not identify the function of these complexes which might require special equipment and it does not point to their place in the urban fabric or outside of it in the countryside or in natural locations. He points out that “increasing the floor area ratio, even indirectly, will automatically lead in to an increase in the price of land. Perhaps this increase is one of the main goals for those who authored this law.”

  • New Texts Out Now : Pascal Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh : Oil, Urbanism, and Revolt
    http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18310/new-texts-out-now_pascal-menoret-joyriding-in-riya
    Très stimulant entretien ! Je viens d’acheter le livre...

    Joyriding in Riyadh is the first book in English that analyzes contemporary Riyadh. With more than six million inhabitants, Riyadh is the third most populated Arab city; it is also the capital of the wealthiest state in the region. The book looks at the recent history of the city from the conflicted points of view of its princes, planners, developers, realtors, and joyriders. In the 1960s, the princes didn’t want a big city, with its problems and its dangers, but rural migration contributed to creating a huge metropolis. The Greek urbanists didn’t really understand the growth of Riyadh (nobody did), and sort of blind-planned the city. Realtors started with modest projects, but the 1973 oil bonanza exceeded all their hopes. They unexpectedly became the actual makers of the city as we know it today. All these characters’ expectations about the city were trumped by the logics of urbanization and real estate development.

    Joyriders belong in majority to migrant communities who left the Saudi countryside to seek opportunities in the capital. They are the product of the massive rural migration that fueled urban growth since the 1960s. If a few migrants managed to attain wealth and influence, most of them were betrayed by the city’s exclusive economy. Often dropouts and jobless, the youngest migrants or sons of migrants run amok in those areas where real estate development is raging: they steal cars and destroy them on freshly asphalted roads in the midst of new developments, where no police force is yet able to stop them. Their road revolt feeds off the two channels of rent distribution: real estate and consumer good import.
    [...]
    espite having the highest Twitter penetration rate in the world, Saudi Arabia hasn’t undergone the kind of political change that we’re told was triggered by social media. Joyriding in Riyadh shows that there is something else to the story of mobilization than virtual connections, and that physical infrastructure plays a vital role in providing opportunities for the emergence of class consciousness and activism. Marx noted that it took centuries for the burgers of the Middle Ages to develop class consciousness, whereas railroads allowed the proletariat to swiftly understand both its predicament and its collective power. Railroads were at once the epitome of industrial capitalism and the best way to connect isolated work forces. Today’s roads are as ambiguous. As one of my interviewees put it, car-possessing local elites benefited from the roads that were supposed to bring “development” to the people. Roads created huge investment opportunities for the clients of the royal family, and carried state power and nepotism deep into Saudi society. Joyriding in Riyadh shows how western experts, Saudi investors, and Riyadh youth have turned these instruments of authoritarianism into tools of anarchism and disorder.

    What does the study of urban spaces in Saudi add to our understanding of the Arab uprisings? There is a vague sense among those who study the region that the heart of the Middle East lies on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and that the south of the Arab world, from Mauritania to Upper Egypt to the Gulf, is peripheral. Scholarship on the 2011 uprisings tends to reinforce that stereotypical geography: the action seems to happen around the Mediterranean, from Tunis to Cairo to Benghazi to Damascus, while many would probably contend that the hinterland personifies political reaction.

    It is true that Saudi Arabia didn’t experience an uprising of the scale of those which dethroned Ben Ali, Mubarak, or Qaddafi. Yet labeling the country as counterrevolutionary would be misleading: if the Al Saud helped repress the Bahraini revolution and supported field marshal El-Sisi’s coup in Egypt, they welcomed change in Libya and supported the Syrian insurgency. Treating Saudi Arabia as the epicenter of the counter-revolution would also be unfair to those who, from Jeddah to Riyadh to Qatif, courageously protested corruption, economic inequality, and repression. Demonstrations took place, people immolated themselves in several towns, women came out to protest repression.

    Yet the Saudi revolution didn’t take place. The Saudi system of power, often described as vernacular, “Islamic,” or exceptional, relies in reality on transnational networks, arms sales, corruption, and on the creation at home of an economy that is both connected to and insulated from international dynamics. The country’s economic importance generates enough resources to not only silence a large part of the population, but also turn it into an active promoter of authoritarian government. Contrary to widespread stereotypes, the Saudi opposition is highly vocal, articulate and transnational (think of Osama bin Laden or Salman al-’Awda). It scares the state, which has the means to sustain an impressive array of repressive tools. The level of political violence that Saudis experience is extremely high, and largely explains the stability of government in the country.

    But there is more to this story than forced acquiescence. Saudis resent the system almost as much as they benefit from it, and this mix of protest and acquiescence is one of the topics of Joyriding in Riyadh. The book shows that physical infrastructures, produced at the intersection of global networks and local powers, became targets and symbols for popular uprisings. “Roads bring invaders,” as Arabian Peninsula leaders would say a century ago. They now bring state power and economic violence to the sprawling suburbs of Riyadh. In a system where the state itself is out of reach, it is roads, cars, and cops that are everyday targets of car riots against infrastructures, commoditization, and trade monopolies. Pedestrian demonstrations may be rare in Riyadh, but for more than three decades, car demonstrations occurred on a daily basis in those very places where financial investments and royal power reshape the cityscape.

    #Riyadh #Arabie_Saoudite #Pascal_Menoret