Theme: Multiplicities and Urban Textures
January’s Open Office for Words looks at the city and the urban environment in terms of how they can be read and understood by looking at modes of reading the city and the multiple uses and meanings of urban spaces.

Speakers:
Taina Rajanti (Doc. Pol. Sci, Head of Research at Pori School of Art and Media, Helsinki University of Art and Design) will talk about Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project now and in the last century. Rajanti will focus on the new arcades i.e the semi-public commercialized urban spaces, and people’s need to occupy those spaces, to use them and abuse them for their own practices, and how it is possible to introduce new meanings, ways of reading and uses to those spaces.

Frans-Willem Korsten (Prof. dr. Erasmus University, Leiden University) will talk about modes of reading the city, specifically the possibilities of broadening sensibility and the multiplication of worlds, instead of the vectorization of the urban world. In relation to this, Korsten will consider the principal difference between reading the urban environment as a narrative or as a poem.

You are cordially invited to search through your resources and to see whether you perhaps might have something to contribute to the above themes. Books, journals, research papers and images related, whether from the field of arts or science are all welcome, as are art-works, documentaries and interviews in a dvd-format.