Paco Gonzalez

Are we following culture approaches to urban themes?

This is an example of a question that I’m asking myself lately. I’m pointing out this because I think the “new” urban approach is evolving from culture practices roots. Here is an example of a media culture festival Next 5 Minutes 4 from… ¡September 2003!

The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 is structured along four core thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. These four thematic threads are:

• “The Reappearing of the Public” deals with the elusiveness of the public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining ‘the public’.
• “Deep Local (Growing Roots for the Global Village)”, which explores the ambiguities of connecting essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts.
• “The Tactics of Appropriation” questions who is appropriating whom? Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore lost?
• “The Tactical and the Technical” finally questions the deeply political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and constraining its tactical use.

The festival explores a variety of forms and formats, from low-tech to high-tech, from seminars and debates to performances and urban interventions, screenings, installations as well as sound projects and live media, a pitching session, a tool builders fair and open unmoderated spaces. Defining for tactical media is not the medium itself, but the attitude towards media.

Is new urbanism theories a remix from these kind of culture projects? I think they are , i.e. tactical urbanism approach.

What can we learn from other culture approaches which preceded the “new” urban approaches? What can we add and share to remix from urban approaches for others? How are we going to return to these commons what we are learning and practicing now from them?

Also if we learn how the cultural practices answered to these questions (and to other questions), then these new urban approaches will be a movement avoiding to be only a trend.