News
March 29, 2013

NCR-09 [Economy]: The Disruptive Innovation of Peer-to-Peer International Trade


Gwendolyn Floyd’s text for NCR-09 [Economy]

In emerging economies around the world, hundreds of millions of small-scale producers are currently making valuable goods. However, these producers cannot access the worldwide consumer demand for their unique, low-cost, largely handmade products because they, like over 70% of the world’s population, are living and working on the other side of the digital divide, unable to benefit from the innovation and economic opportunities provided by the Internet.

Women, who account for over 70% of the world’s poor, also make up the majority of these small-scale producers. Over 85% of women in sub-Saharan Africa are self-employed in the informal economy. Many turn to the production of crafts and handmade goods to earn or supplement meagre incomes. Their sales, however, are limited to the local economy, with inconsistent demand and high personal costs for transportation and marketing of their goods. From another perspective, however, the costly and inaccessible export supply for developing world goods is fertile ground for disruptive innovation that could open up this enormous untapped market of high-quality goods to the global marketplace.

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March 28, 2013

NCR-09 [Economy]: Currencies


Here is Leander Bindewald’s text for the 9th issue of the New City Reader [Economy]:

When talking about changing the world, an increasingly mainstream notion posits that the economy is a good place to start. When talking about changing the economy, furthermore, it is no longer an “insider” idea to begin with our monetary regimes. From this point onwards, two basic strategies are being pursued. One is to figure out the problem with the way money is created and distributed today, and to lobby for smarter ways to do so (that is, through monetary reforms). This approach promises massive positive impact and widespread instantaneous changes for all walks of life. Another strategy, confronting headfirst the vested interests of the establishment and suitable for both pro- and anti-political temperaments, is to redesign our approach to money and economy altogether. This means building new monetary subsystems at the fringes of current feasibility and allowing them to grow into viable alternatives that cannot be predicted from inside the box. Such initiatives find a common ground in engineering completely new currencies, subsumed by the terms complementary and community.

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March 26, 2013

New City Reader’s 9th Issue Economy Is Out!

Guest edited by Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen(UNFOLD) the 9th issue of the New City Raeder is out on the streets of Istanbul! The issue contributors are Leander Bindewald, Gwendolyn Floyd, Erdem Üngür, Işık Gülkaynak, Freek Lomme and Vincent Schipper. Check the map to the right or enter the article for a list of locations.

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March 21, 2013

New Director Appointed to Istanbul Design Biennial

Özlem Yalım Özkaraoğlu who has been the Director of Istanbul Design Biennial since 2010, will continue to contribute to the biennial as consultant and a member of the Istanbul Design Biennial Advisory Board, while pursuing her own projects in the field of design. Deniz Ova, who has worked for İKSV since 2007, has been appointed as the new director of the biennial.

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March 6, 2013

NCR-08 [Architecture]: Last Instructions


NCR Rotterdam’da bir türk mahallesinde, Brendan Cormier

How to make your own New City Reader by Kazys Varnelis

Instructions
1. Identify a city.
2. Identify the newspaper most crucial to that city. What is its format (such as tabloid or broadsheet) or a type of newspaper (a free weekly paper on cultural events, a free newspaper devoted to classifieds for sex workers, government newspaper, a newspaper that exists for purely legal purpos-es such as to announce marriages, name changes, and the formation of corporations?)? Examine the format of the newspaper and identify a strategy by which it could be appropriated for hanging throughout the city. How will language work? Can your paper be published in English? If not, how will you reach out beyond your local milieu? Decide how the paper will appear on the Web.
3. Secure funding. Anticipate that you will fall short. That’s what your own pocket is for. Secure sites for hanging the paper. Closely examine local laws that might impact its public display, and most importantly if organized crime controls the display of posted materials in your city. Find an editorial staff, a press, and individuals willing to post the paper in public.
4. Decide how your paper will be published. Should it be composed of a series of sections (e.g. politics, sports, weather, culture?) or should it come out weekly. Assign editors for individual sections or issues. Develop a repeatable workflow by which issue editors will propose their topic to you, solicit articles from contributors, and pass these to your editorial team for editing and layout. This is a newspaper. Deadlines matter. Everything will be last minute and endlessly in crisis.
5. Launch.

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March 5, 2013

NCR-08 [Architecture]:Instructions

Adhocracy participants reveal their projects as a set of instructions for the “Architecture” issue guest edited by Fake Industries Architectural Agonism.
Occupy for a Self-Shaped City, Open Structures, Ik Zoek Asiel. How to Seek Asylum in the Netherlands, How to start your own Stratigraphic Manufactury?


New City Reader at Urbanrise Workshop- Athens

Occupy for a Self-Shaped City by Lorenza Baroncelli
La Bodega is the only occupied space in Colombia. Inhabited by unpredictable and traditionally hidden subjectivities, it is a disputed space in the pre-existing urban fabric of Bogotá that hosts instances and projects experimenting new models for the city. The story of La Bodega demonstrates how the experience of occupation is possible and replicable; it is the story of its inhabitants and illuminates how occupation can spark more than urban transformation, becoming an opportunity for change and growth of single individuals. It’s also the story of the abandoned buildings in the center of Bogotá, and how they can be re-opened and transformed.

Five instructions to occupy a building
1. Search an abandoned building in a part of your town that you consider interesting.
2. Make a first visit (possibly overnight) to check the condition of the building and verify at the land registry who is the owner of the building.
3. Change the lock of the door a few days before you come in and never admit to have changed it.
4. Set a date and move inside (it is your decision to publicize it or not), and be extremely careful not to let the police enter.
5. Use the space to intercept the changing needs in the area and use your creativity to invent unexpected and innovative solutions. Don’t shut yourself in the building but look, learn and nurture the energies in the territory. Tell the people you interact with that they can do the same.

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January 23, 2013

NCR-08 [Architecture]: Adhocracy Projects

More Adhocracy projects with instructions: How to curate an extemporary show of Yona Friedman in the city of Istanbul, Re-reading Giancarlo De Carlo, How to build your own House in six Steps, Immanent Testimony

How to curate an extemporary show of Yona Friedman in the city of Istanbul by Maurizzio Bortolotti
The following instructions are for building an exhibition of the architect Yona Friedman’s work, regarding two of its main concepts:
1- The idea of the production of architecture/art by people.
2- The idea of art/architecture as unpredictable processes, in which creativity and social communication are connected to each other, enabling inhabitants to dwell and live the contemporary city. Therefore, if art and architecture express an idea of contemporary culture, Yona Friedman’s idea of the production of culture is though participation.

Instructions
1. Find a public passage or a small square.
2. Look around for very simple materials like cardboard, wire or plywood.
3. Look at Yona Friedman’s drawings published on the web (especially from his book Pro domo).
4. Set up a display or show looking at the pictures and using these materials to build unpredictable architecture made by people.
5. Invite street artists to make their interventions inside these unpredictable architectures and you’ll have a Street Museum.

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January 17, 2013

NCR-08 [Architecture]: Adhocracy Architecture, An Obituary

More Adhocracy projects with instructions: Virus Plug, Open Urban, The Retired City, TOKİ Dwellers, How to Set up a Popup Restaurant

Virus Plug In by Makerlab

The Virus Plug-in is an object that will use a public structure as its own. It will grow around itself, almost self-replicating, and will give a new sense and value to its location, one decided by citizens.
We hope that by introducing objects to the street and telling people how they can be made, we initiate a viral action, were people feel able, allowed and encouraged by their peers to hack the public space. This is not, in itself, the change. The change depends very much on the willingness of people to get involved. It is not an action to impose a new concept—it is designed to invite reflection. And if just one person is inspired to do something, whatever that might be, we will have succeeded in spreading this virus.
Allowing for different interpretations of what a virus plug-in might look like, thus showing people a wider spectrum of what is possible, meant that we had to find a common language that unifies the project and help people connect the different plug-ins, sparking their curiosity.

Instructions
1. Take pictures of the public structure that you want to use for the plug in.
2. Upload pictures to 123D. Catch to make a 3D scan of the structure. If you have an I-Phone you can upload directly as you take the pictures.
3. Import the file to a 3D modeling program. You can use free software like Sketch Up, or any other surface modeling program.
4. Model your plug in around it. In this way you will have an almost perfect fit. But still have to deal with how it will be connect to it!
5. Import your 3D model to 123Make, and select interlocking slices.
6. Save files and Laser cut them.
7. Put it together.
8. Place it in the public space.
Click here for more information

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January 16, 2013

NCR-08 [Architecture]: You are on your own!

Participants of Adhocracy describe their installations in the form of a set of instructions for NCR08[Architecture]. Here are some of those projects: Mapping Identity, Hotel Bus / DIY Bed and Breakfast Complex, The Barley Field and Live Load.

Mapping Identity by Antonio Ottomanelli

The Istanbul Design Biennial was the occasion to continue the Mapping research, which is a practice always organized in three steps, referred to a collective intimacy biography:
1—survey (investigation)
2—story (registration)
3—monumentalization
PANORAMIO analogic is an open Mapping workshop experiences set up in an attempt to orient through artistic practice, a critical two-way query on the question of identity, intended as consciousness of historical forces that determine a particular condition of existence and certain structures of social relations. This kind of project is an important moment of reflection and work on “libertarians and independent” models of investigation, which constitute the study of forms of language representation and the construction of a precise information program.
All the laboratory projects developed so far, keep behind the need to tell—starting from below and in the most immediately transmittable way—cultural issues hardly translatable with traditional tools and techniques. The desire to humanly describe what we do not understand.

Instructions
What You Need
1 An all-aged and all-social class group of people coming from different part of the city.
2 Tell to all the people that will participate to bring old photos from their family albums that can show the story of their families.
3 A simple touristic map of Istanbul on a white wall.
4 Divide the map into different rectangles, each rectangle will belong to a person.
Knowing Each Other
5 Take the time to know each person involved in the project.
take the time to listen to their story, and watch together to their photos.
6 Try with them to find their intimate monuments, their capital confession.
The Video Set
7 Built your easel and put on it a 50x40cm rectangle glass.
Video Recording
8 Interview and video record from the opposite side each person while drawing – face toward you – behind the glass, speaking, and attaching the family albums photos on the glass.
PANORAMIO
9 Project on the wall map, in the same time and in the correct city rectangle, all the videos you’ve recorded.
10 Fulfill the map with all the drawings and the pictures that the participants were speaking about.

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January 4, 2013

8th issue of the New City Reader “Architecture” is out!

Guest edited by Fake Industries, Architectural Agonism, Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau, the 8th issue of the New City Raeder “Architecture” is out on the streets of Istanbul. The issues contributers are: Superpool, Basurama, Walter Nicolino, Carlo Ratti, Unfold, Ben Landau, Thomas Lomme, Lorenza Baroncelli, Rot Ellen Berg, HS Mimarlık, Autlab, Maurizio Bortolotti, Ravintolapaiva, Boğaçhan Dündaralp, Lale Ceylan, İpek Kay, Paul Faus, Openurban.com, Frank Abruzzese, Zuloark, Maker Lab, Aristide Anotonas, Antonio Ottomanelli, Pelin Tan, Ethel Baraona Pohl and Kazys Varnelis. Read the rest of the article for the editorial text and check our website regularly for updates of the issue.

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