By Shveta Sarda

*Some questions*

- What are the different time scales of development, sites of erasures, sites of heritage, sites of contested memory, sites of nostalgia, sites of future projections, expansion?
- Sites of major projects (infrastructure, commerce, corporate offices, stadiums, housing, cultural centres, museums, common spaces)? (And the time scale of a process from design to aquisition to usage, eg of a mall)?
- Where do people live? (Marking the signs of occupation).
- Where are the waste dumps? (Structures of sewage management)
- What are the forms of water supply and power supply?
- Which are the areas of congestion and unwanted occupation?
- What is the distribution of labour (forms from professional/managerial, white collar/service, formal blue collar/factory, informal labour and unskilled labour)?

By Brett Neilson

While debates on migration often focus on culture and identity, there is a need to supplement these perspectives with an attention to changing labour regimes and the political meaning of controls on labour mobility. Research on the creative industries brings these fields of investigation into contact. The processes of production in this sector undoubtedly involve the deployment of cultural intelligence in the service of profit making activities. They also signal a number of important transitions in the organisation of work: the growth of cognitive or immaterial labour regimes, the growing reliance on service labour, the increasing insecurity of employment, job creation through unpaid work, friendships, social networking, etc. A focus on labour conditions cuts through much of the hype that surrounds creative industries discourse by turning attention to one of its most crucial conditions of possibility.

By Soenke Zehle

What I am most interested in in the context of this research platform is
the extent to which the debates on creativity and the economy of culture
resonate/link up with ecopolitical concerns, especially those developed
in the context of an (emergent) trans national network of organizing
around environmental and social justice issues in the global networks of
electronics production. This emphasis may sound odd, but it is the most
vital area of 'network culture' when it comes to broader ecopolitical
(or if you like Isabelle Stenger's term: cosmopolitical) concerns.

Given the fetishization of dematerialization-through-technology of an
earlier generation of cyberlibertarian theorizing about the network
society, I consider these efforts to have significance beyond the usual
environmental concerns about the toxicity of computers and the
implications of this toxicity to workers or users.

intro

It’s tempting to think about what destination China might reach in
20 years. Will it be a seething pot of nationalist hate? A rich,
super-large Singapore, warlike only in the board room? The common
conceit of most non-Chinese policy planners is that in 20
years China will be a “near peer” power, bumping up against the
United States in terms of economic and possibly military might.
Thus, this logic runs, the next 20 years must be devoted to either
engaging China to shape its rise or working to contain the country
so it doesn’t acquire more power than the current global power
leaders. But the fact is that no one knows what China will look
like in 20 years.

by

Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Partner in the office of
John L. Thornton, Senior Advisor to Goldman Sachs and professor
at Tsinghua University. Ramo’s advisory work focuses on
political, economic and business areas with a particular emphasis

Different media of expression make intelligible the creative industries in unforeseen and novel ways that depart from the self-referential script of policy discourse and its circumscribed ‘mapping’ exercises. It must be said, however, that all idioms and modes of expression are necessarily self-referential. This is how they obtain their distinct grammar and singularity. In this sense, modes of expression (media of communication) can be likened to the concept of genre.

International Invitation for an Exhibition of a Conceptual Design for New Xisi Bei Street, Beijing

Exhibition Period: June 16 – 19, 2007
Exhibition Place: National Library, 39 Baishiqiao Road, Beijing 100081, China

Republished with permission by Keru Feng, assistant curator

General Description of the Project

1．Project Location

This article was published in Commercial Real Estate #4 April/May
2007. Republished with permission.

For more information check Commercial Real Estate in China

Intro

The creative industries, which comprise of the arts, media, and
design, are among the fastest growing economic sectors globally. The
global market value of the creative cluster was estimated at more
than 1 trillion U.S. dollars last year. Since Richard Florida
published "The Rise of the Creative Class" (2002) it became a must-
implement for civic policymakers, city planners, developers, artists,
arts administrators and public officials. Recently the Chinese
government decided to invest more in the Creative Industries and its
effect can be felt. Besides being a concept, the creative industries
need a dynamic and stimulating urban and artistic environment from

[here's a paper I wrote from a couple of weeks ago that has some relevance for the bei-ci project]

Design Mai
Digitalability Symposium
Tools, Talents and Turnovers: New Technologies in Design
Berlin, 12-13 May, 2007
http://www.designmai.de

Session: Working Environment and New Business Models

'Can Organized Networks Make Money for Designers?'

Ned Rossiter

Mobile Research Laboratory, Beijing
28 May – 31 July, 2007
Coordinators: Ned Rossiter, Bert de Muynck, Mónica Carriço
contact: ned [at] nedrossiter [dot] org mobile: 13426113039

mailing list: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/bei-ci_listcultures.org