In collaboration with Stroom Den Haag, the Netherlands; 08, 10, 2021
Invited by Stroom Den Haag, Slutty Urbanism hosted our first-ever experimental walk in the POWER ENCLAVE of the Netherlands. Situated in one of the most diverse cities in the country, the royal palace, central governmental institutions, embassies, and offices of international organizations and corporations are closely clustered with private associations, wineries, galleries, jewelry, and antique shops in a small historical neighborhood. In the walk, we disclosed three layers of power and uncertainties in the power enclave: platform economy, political-economic power relations, and international power relations.
Part 1: Audio walk
The first part is the international power relation. There will be a voice from afar, playing near your ear, to tell you a story about a state-initiated Internet shutdown in a country east of the European Union that took place in the summer of 2020, while we walk through the international ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ center and the cluster of embassies. From here, we are walking toward the royal palace. While listening to stories, we would kindly ask you to open your eyes, to pay attention to what is on the street. Embassies, flags, what kind of shops? Are there bike deliveries? Why are they here? What does it mean? How do you feel about these things particularly clustering here?
Part 2: Walking with Slutty Urbanism Augmented Reality glasses
Manifesto in context I:
- The concept of the ‘slutty’ responds to the growing gap between ethical commitments that digital platforms should take, and the harsh forms of extraction and cultures of violence and indifference taking place in urban space around the world.
- The aim is to address entrepreneurial enclosures, legalistic bureaucracies and cleansed heritage ghettos, our answer should no longer be a constructive one: our counter strategies might be offensive and promiscuous.
- SU maps the untidy nexus of urban space abuse, opening up digital networks in order to insert subversive politics.
- We shall speak to power, we shall promote ethical production and consumption, and we shall speculate promiscuously about more emancipatory alternatives. After all, our digital urbanism is still under construction. Space wants to try out new things.
We invite you to wear on Slutty Urbanism Augmented Reality glasses. Seeing through the glasses with the following four hashtags, what do you observe from the walk? If you wish, you can use SU stickers on your hand to ‘slut shame’ certain buildings, boards and signs you found problematic though the walk, as our collective response to the power enclave of this country.
#PROMISCUOUS: pervert public-private partnership
#PATHOLOGOCAL:’cure for middle class’ data driven displacement
#SINFUL: betrays social reproduction and security
#AMORAL: promise for happiness for everyone
Manifesto in context II:
The power intestine
We play with sanitized literature that deals with digital platforms and urbanism, on the one hand, and the belief system of openness, on the other hand. Indeed, what is ‘open’? Open needs a door to be closed, welcoming some and making it harder to enter for others. Open demands a timetable arranging the lifestyles and temporalities of accessibility. The ‘openness’ is an exclusionary privilege that is promoted by commercial digital platforms. Therefore, SU deals with the interrelation between urban platforms, networks, and politics. The manifesto argues for the political (re)turn in geography to (re)focus the political as a central anchor in urban debates. The emerging digital turn calls attention to the way that urban space is digitally mediated, hence urges urban scholars to reconfigure understandings of digitally-mediated cities and the complex ways that the digital urbanism is produced by and through social, political and technological processes. We make an end to ambiguous urban regimes. That’s why they are slutty, they can play several roles, like enlighten policy makers, agents of transformation, sense makers through platforms. Schluss with the naïve apolitical labels such as smart city! Unlike them, we are the ethical sluts. We shall speak to power and do the slut-shaming with the aim to promote a new ethical production and consumption of digital urbanism-under- construction.
‘Slutty Urbanism’ tackles the openings and enclosures in the (digital) urban arena. It addresses issues of diversity, subjectivity, social responsibility and activism. Slutty Urbanism (SU) is a provocative concept. We make use of the metaphor of ‘slut’ in two ways. Symbolically, it expresses the harsh forms of extraction and extreme commodification of urban space through global digital platforms. It goes beyond the cultural-symbolic façade of sharing economy and technological determinism of smart city. Semantically, ‘sluttiness’ has been associated with major four epithets: pathology, sin, amorality and promiscuity. We look at each of them to talk about particular powerful actors reshaping urban space and access to cities in Amsterdam and other global cities.
Walking through backlanes, we passed by the private Society club, governmental buildings and embassies. We took turns at street corners with galleries, jewelries, wineries opened one next to each other. Money, power, luxurious objects are interwoven together in these intestine-like, colonial-embedded districts. Resources and information pass through these spaces, absorbed and exchanged by slutty money power players. What has been taken? What are leftovers? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? What has changed since the golden age? Or should we say the first colonial wave? What has not changed until today, the new wave of digital colonial wave? The hotel didn’t change. The streetscape didn’t change. They are here. Witness the digestion of power and money. Host the coffee meeting in fixing slutty business.
Closing statement
Urban platforms. Networks. Politics. These terms can no longer be tidily compartmentalised, but are interrelated, folding and slicing through one another. We argue for a (re)turn in geography to the political, placing it front and centre in the urban debate.We shall speak to power, we shall promote ethical production and consumption, and we shall speculate promiscuously about more emancipatory alternatives.
