In Edifice, photographer Karol Palka documents the faded grandeur of surviving communist-era buildings in his native Poland and neighbouring Eastern Bloc countries. Interested in the relationship between power and architecture, he visited places of grand ambitions — such as Poland's largest iron and steel industry complex, the Nowa Huta Steelworks in Kraków. Formerly known as the Vladimir Lenin Steelworks, this industrial colossus and the surrounding Nowa Huta district were intended to be Poland’s model communist city when built in the 1950s. Today, the Nowa Huta communist tour remains one of Kraków’s most popular attractions. The series also features lesser known buildings such as Hotel Polana, a retreat built for communist party leaders by the old Czechoslovak government in the Tatras mountain range. Other 1970s retreats built in Poland and the former Czechoslovakia now function as alpine spa hotels, offering peace, quiet and original communist decor. Despite the absence of people in Palka’s photos, the interiors that make up the series suggest a more symbolic presence: that of a regime that no longer exists.
7 January 2018
The Atlantic: Macron’s War on 'Fake News'
In a Wednesday address to journalists at the Élysée Palace, the French president announced his plan to introduce legislation that would curb the spread of misinformation during the country’s future election campaigns—a lofty goal he said would be made possible by enforcing more media transparency and blocking offending sites. “Thousands of propaganda accounts on social networks are spreading all over the world, in all languages, lies invented to tarnish political officials, personalities, public figures, journalists,” Macron said, adding that “if we want to protect liberal democracies, we must have strong legislation.”
Though the exact details of the proposed bill are not yet known, Macron said the law—which would apply only during campaigns—would boost transparency online by mandating that social media platforms must reveal who is paying for sponsored content, as well as impose a cap on how much can be spent. He said judges would be empowered to take down false content and even block access to websites where such content appears. The country’s media watchdog, the CSA, would be given additional powers to “fight any destabilization attempt by television channels controlled or influenced by foreign states.” [...]
France, like the United States and others, has laws that protect freedom of speech. In fact, Article 11 of the country’s Declaration of Human and Civic Rights guarantees that all citizens “may speak, write, print freely, except what is tantamount to the abuse of this liberty in the cases determined by Law.” Still, some critics fear the proposed law could represent a violation. Bruno Retailleau, a senior conservative senator, warned that “in a democracy, misinformation is better than state information,” adding that “only authoritarian regimes claim to control the truth.” Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front and Macron’s former presidential election opponent, called the proposal “very disturbing,” adding: “Who will decide if the information is false?”
CityLab: Madrid Prepares for Its Greenest Year Yet
The first major change actually started last month, albeit more with a whimper than a bang. Just as it did last year, Madrid closed its main drag—the broad, often car-filled avenue Gran Vía—to cars at the beginning of December. By now, this is a well embedded tool for making holiday shopping more pleasant—but this time, it will never quite end. Cars will return on January 7, but the streets won’t be the same for long. Later in the month, Madrid plans to start doubling the street’s sidewalks, taking space from car lanes to give pedestrians an extra 58,000 square feet of space, plus a segregated bike lane down its busiest stretch.
While this will reduce car space on a very busy thoroughfare, Gran Vía will soon be one of the few parts of central Madrid that admits non-local cars at all. In June, Madrid will debut its Zero Emissions Zone, which will only allow local residents, people with limited mobility, or zero-emissions vehicles to drive into most of the old city. Between June and 2020, people who own or rent one of the few central parking spots will also be allowed access, but from 2020 on they will only be allowed to park there if they have a zero-emissions vehicle. [...]
Madrid is clearly hoping that at least some of these drivers will switch to cycling. The city is doubling its number of bikeshare bikes and extending docking stations for the first time beyond the M30 beltway. The beltway itself, meanwhile, will be facing measures to reduce its emissions. Currently, the city introduces a 70 kilometer per hour (43 mph) speed limit during pollution peaks, one of several measures it takes to help clear the dirty air that often sits like a pall over the city during the colder months. By the end of the year, this 70 kph speed limit will be made permanent, significantly reducing the speed—and thus the emissions—of traffic circulating around the city’s edge.
Jacobin Magazine: In Praise of White Elephants
But that constant maintenance is only one of the problems with Calatrava’s work. For a trained engineer, he has notoriously little interest in economy of structure. As a rule, since the mid nineteenth century, the aim in bridge design has been to achieve the greatest structural feats with the scarcest of means — to do “more with less,” in Buckminster Fuller’s phrase. That line probably reached its peak in recent years with Norman Foster’s Millau Viaduct, which spans a vast canyon with little more than thin spindles of concrete and steel. For Calatrava, though, organic metaphor trumps all, and the structural purpose of his bridges — in Dublin, Salford, Dallas, Venice and elsewhere — is subordinated to their rhetorical purpose, as sweeping statements of the transformation of industrial docks and canals into showpieces of real-estate speculation. They must billow, swoop, and spiral, because otherwise they wouldn’t be eye-catching as advertisements. The preference for shiny cladding leads to some literal pitfalls — his bridges in Venice and Bilbao both have tiles which, it’s been claimed, are too slippery to walk on. The resultant lack of interest in economy is now rebounding on the architect, although he could fairly plead this is what he was hired for. [...]
Most of them were at least partly funded by the National Lottery, and a tax on the poor to fund the arts is not admirable. Many, if not all of them, are as architecturally vacuous as Calatrava — one-line architectural blipverts. Some, like Sheffield’s “pop centre,” were abandoned within a couple of years of their opening. Others, like Urbis or The Public, are shifting their functions toward something less arty. Though there’s truth to the argument that this money could have been better put toward, say, an industrial policy, or research and development, rather than buildings that offer few tangible benefits to the towns in question other than jobs serving coffee and “outreach” to local schools, it is conservatives who see no reason why provincial cities should have arts centers in the first place. Such things are for London — why should the plebes want to see installations? [...]
The Left should be very careful here, as this is an austerity argument — an argument against public space and the public good. An argument, essentially, that we cannot have nice things — that bridges, railway stations, and art galleries are somehow dubious means of spending “taxpayers’ money.” The twisted right-wing mutation of social democracy that dominated Europe during the boom seldom had the public interest at heart, and every concession to it had to be balanced by something profit-making. But for its conservative successors, the public interest is entirely nonexistent.
Politico: Latvia, a disappearing nation
In 2000, Latvia’s population stood at 2.38 million. At the start of this year, it was 1.95 million. No other country has had a more precipitous fall in population — 18.2 percent according to U.N. statistics. Only Latvia’s similarly fast-shriveling neighbor, Lithuania, with a 17.5 percent decrease, and Georgia, with a 17.2 percent drop, come close. [...]
To be sure, economic migration is not the only reason for the country’s declining population. The small Baltic republic’s comparatively low birth rate and high mortality rate are also contributing factors. [...]
While insisting wages would rise, he conceded they were currently low. “Also,” he continued, referring to the war games that both NATO and Russia have conducted in the region over the last year, “all this talk of war, real or not, doesn’t make things especially attractive for people to stay.” It also discourages foreign investment, he added.
There are some signs that while the tide may not be turning, it is losing strength. According to the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, the number of emigres returning to the homeland in 2016 was about 40 percent of those who left. That compares with a figure of 26-37 percent during the previous three years.
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