Mumbai may only be India’s second city in size, but it is without a doubt the subcontinent’s capital of commerce, glamour, and endless aspirations. In many ways, it resembles New York, although the metropolis once called Bombay is, of course, twice as large. By mid-century, the self-declared Maximum City will swell to some 40 million inhabitants: the largest urban space on earth.
The German journalist and author Michael Braun Alexander wrote an articel about Mumbai for the hundredth edition of the Topos magazine, sharing insights into the life in the city, its infrastructure and development. For the last three-and-a-half years, he has divided his time between Berlin and India, where he has worked as a foreign correspondend for Welt am Sonntag and various other publications. He shows his personal impressions of Mumbai.
You find the whole article “Mumbai” by Michael Alexander Braun in the 100th copy of Topos Magazine!
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Climate change hangs like Damocles’ sword over metropolises around the globe. With torrential rains and floodings occurring almost on a daily basis, the menace has become omnipresent. Al Gore, former Vice President of the USA, has been fighting for many years to raise awareness of the dangers of global warming. As the front man of his own climate initiative he is viewed as one of the most influential non-political figures in the environmental arena. Despite scathing criticism, Gore never considered letting go of his mission. What keeps the man who was once ridiculed as the climate clown going? An encounter.
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Predictions become reality
Miami Beach has choked. On the waters of the Atlantic. The ocean has inundated the city knee-high on this bluer-than-blue summer day. Streets have become rivers, squares are now lakes. The sun is scorching and the air threatens to burst with humidity as streams of perspiration are running down mayor Philip Levine’s face. Together with Al Gore and a few others he is watching the pumps that were supposed to keep Miami Beach dry. They turned out to be completely useless. “With these new high tides that came in … you can’t do anything for it”, says Levine. It is the melting glaciers in Greenland and at the polar ice caps that cause these floods. Parts of the city will be moved to a higher, safer level. “What level of sea level rise is this designed to protect against?”, Al Gore wants to know. His rubber boots are overflowing with brackish water. “We are building in one foot of sea level rise”, one of the experts in the group says. “Kinda hard to pump the ocean,” Gore replies.
Al Gore presents An Inconvenient Sequel
In Berlin, former US Vice President turned full-time climate protector Al Gore has no need for rubber boots. Not a single cloud mars the sky spanning across the teeming crowds at the Brandenburg Gate. It is an uneventful day in Germany’s capital – quite different from only a few weeks ago when torrential rains flooded the streets and pulled the legs from under a number of pedestrians. Gore is in Berlin to present his new film, An Inconvenient Sequel – Truth to Power. The scene in Miami is taken from it. He will talk to journalists and politicians about the threats that come with climate change until far into the night.
Meeting the Nobel Laureate in Berlin
Al Gore has a pleasantly firm handshake and attentively looks into my face. His hair has thinned and taken a further turn towards white, his face has become more rotund than it was a few years back. He speaks articulately, with a deep, crispy voice which instantly draws one’s full attention. “I wish I had more time”, he says apologetically right away, pointing to his tight schedule. He is wearing cowboy boots – together with a suit. “They are 30 something years old. If I go on a long trip, they are the most comfortable footwear I have”, he says looking down to his creaking boots that give a strange kind of angular appearance to his strides. Gore’s jacket lapel sports a bright green ring, the size of a thumbnail – he wears it like a medal. It is the symbol of The Climate Reality Project that Gore founded shortly after the release of his first film, An Inconvenient Truth, in 2006. The organisation – with Gore as the front man – trains people across the world to become climate activists who after completing their training will teach others.
From slide show to Oscar
Before An Inconvenient Truth came out, Gore had been travelling across the US for years to warn against the fallout of the climate crisis as he calls it. With the film, he began reaching out to a mass audience. The documentary was based on a “slide show”, as it was mocked by some, that he had been using – and still uses – as he travelled from one lecture to the next (rumour has it that it now comprises a collection of more than 30,000 slides). The response to the documentary was huge even partially vicious: critics accused Gore of propaganda, claiming he was over-exaggerating. He was ridiculed as the climate clown – despite the fact that many scientists seemed to support Gore’s narrative. Gore himself, incidentally, was not at all convinced of his undertaking, as he later admitted in a Norwegian TV show. “When I was first approached with the idea of making the slide show into a movie, I thought it was a terrible idea. But there are some talented people in Hollywood who know what they are doing.”
You find the whole article “The Al Gore Rhythm” by Tanja Braemer in the 100th copy of Topos Magazine.
The city is a matrix that cannot be apprehended in its entirety at once. You cannot visit more than one place at a time. Circumventing this limitation, the French architect and photographer Jérémie Dru found a way to perceive the city – in his case Paris, his hometown – from more than just one point of view. He freezes the city’s moments and overlays them. By that, Dru puts the observer between two places and into a dimension where time and space seem to have no meaning at all.
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In the current copy of Topos – Time, Jérémie Dru shows his art work “Un voyageur incertain”. As a photographer, he practices with the intuition that there are elusive realities intrinsic to the city. One of the oldest conceptions of the city, one by which civilization has sought to explain itself to itself, is to see it as a reduction of the cosmos to the human scale. Thus he explores the urban space in search of those faces that are imperceptible to our eyes, as did the artists of surrealism or the New Vision in the early twentieth century. They considered the analogue camera as a way to perfect and complete our eyes. In his book Peinture, photographie, film et autres écrits sur la photographie, László Moholy-Nagy says: “The camera leads us to truths that we cannot see with our eyes, which cannot be observed and become visible with the camera.” Photography, in other words, gives us access to truths that cannot be perceived relying on the perceptual apparatus of the human body alone.
Transforming the space
His approach consists not only in overprinting two images, but in confusing the lines and vanishing points that compose them. The two images become inseparable from one another, and they are governed by one perspective. In this way, the architecture of the place is transformed. By folding architectural lines on themselves, they recompose urban spaces-times with multiple properties, sometimes paradoxical. A ceiling can be the sky, the mineral can also be vegetal. The architecture of the places deceives the traveller, and the city takes on aspects of a labyrinth. Photography makes it possible to build worlds on the border between fiction and reality. It shows the hidden complexity of the world and the cosmos, inscribed in the city and in architecture.
Vita
Jérémie Dru is an architect with a passion for photography. He started research into the perception of urban spaces on completing his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Paris in 2012. Find more of his work here: http://jeremiedru.com
You find the whole article “A City close up” by Jérémie Dru the 100th copy of Topos Magazine!
Time. This is the topic of Topos 100. In layers, time overlies landscapes and cities. Historical structures meet with pop-up stores. Topos 100 analyses and reflects the meaning of time as a factor for building and planning the environment of yesterday and tomorrow. Very special this time: We spoke with the former Vice President Al Gore, who has been fighting for many years to raise awareness of the dangers of climate change. Take a peek!
The Al Gore Rhythm
Climate change hangs like Damocles’ sword over metropolises around the globe. With torrential rains and floodings occurring almost on a daily basis, the menace has become omnipresent. Al Gore, former Vice President of the USA, has been fighting for many years to raise awareness of the dangers of global warming. As the front man of his own climate initiative he is viewed as one of the most influential non-political figures in the environmental arena. Despite persistent, often scathing criticism, Gore never considered letting go of his mission. What keeps the man who was once ridiculed as the climate clown going? An encounter.
Seismographs of Time
Graffiti and street art oscillate in a fleeting space between illegality and establishment, between social criticism and artistic aesthetics. They make the city a gallery of current events, render façades into political canvases and turn public spaces into the Agora. In 2010, Banksy proclaimed that graffiti is the art that turbo capitalism had earned. This inevitably raises the question: What type of urban art are we entitled to today? And what can it give to our cities and their residents? A plea.
War and Peace
September 11, 2001 is a date that is part of global memory. Most adults clearly remember where they were when the incomprehensible happened, but for New Yorkers, the tragedy of the attack was very personal, interrupting countless lives and changing the city forever. The 9/11 Memorial encourages a discourse about global memory, individual grief, and political agendas in the urban context.
Tradition meets Modernity
China is debating the significance of cultural identity and relevant modes of integration of its centuries-old traditions into modern society. The contry’s urban renewal projects are a reflection of this debate. The rejuvenation of the Yongqing Fang neighborhood in Guangzhou makes a statement for the inclusiveness and richness of urban life by celebrating its multiple layers of time.
Further Articles:
City Close Up – Jeremie Dru
Urban Time Frames – Ali Madanipour
City as Palimpsest – Paul Knox
The new Aesthetes – Theresa Ramisch
