From verifiable authenticity to verisimilar interventions: Xintiandi,Fuxing SOHO,and the alternatives to built heritage conservation in Shanghai

ABSTRACT

The introduction of contemporary architecture into historic urban environments creates an open heritage discussion that includes the underlying relationship between development and conservation. This discussion requires theoretical clarification, as heritage conservation is frequently mistaken for other architectural design approaches that, even though they may operate within the historic environment as their primary source, do not comply with the complex definition of heritage authenticity used today. This article aimed to contribute to this debate, offering a characterization of such architectural design strategies operating through principles of verisimilitude that target authentication for tourists and the creative classes in a global city like Shanghai. Comparative studies of Xintiandi (Ben Woods, 2001) and Fuxing SOHO (Von Gerkan, Marg und Partner, 2015) provided an insight into the concepts of historic re-creation and abstract inheritance, currently used as ways of interpreting the historic residential typology of the Shanghai lilong according to the economic and political aims of the entrepreneurial model of governance. This allowed a critical evaluation of the growing attention paid to heritage in Shanghai in the last 25 years, and whether the substitution of the principle of authenticity for authentication has solved the contradictions between urban conservation and development in contemporary China.     

Comparison between the Seismic Performance of Integral and Jointed Concrete Bridges

This article presents a probabilistic fragility analysis for two groups of integral and jointed concrete bridges, with varying length and column height. The results show that the integral bridges perform consistently better from a seismic perspective than the jointed bridges. Comparisons are also drawn between the seismic fragility of different geometric configurations. The results show that for integral bridges, the seismic vulnerability increases with an increase in bridge length and decreases with an increase in column height. For the jointed bridge, it was found that geometric variation in column height and bridge length does not significantly affect its seismic vulnerability.     

L’impossible Incarnation D’une Monarchie Une Crise de la Régence du Dernier Habsbourg d’Espagne (1668–1669)

Through the crisis of the regency of the last Habsburg, which triggered a “conflict of legitimation”, this article analyses the notion of legitimacy from the viewpoint of the action and from the viewpoint of the ideas that underlie the action. Our investigation shows the interactionist nature of the practices of legitimation and emphasises the limit of an explanation based on rhetoric. In a conflict that cannot be equated to the mere physics of confrontations, the key question is that of the incarnation of the sociopolitical body.     

Symbolic Violence and the Politics of Environmental Pollution Science: The Case of Coal Ash Pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract: Environmental justice movements often contest environmental knowledge by engaging in scientific debates, which implies accepting the predominance of scientific discourses over alternative forms of knowledge. Using Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, this paper warns that the engagement with hegemonic forms of knowledge production may reproduce, rather than challenge, existing social and environmental inequalities. The argument is developed with reference to a case study of coal ash pollution in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The case study shows that the construction of knowledge in a scientific project led to the exclusion of local definitions of the situation and the dismissal of their observations of environmental pollution. The case suggests that the capacity of different actors to put forward their interpretation of an environmental issue depends on the forms of symbolic violence that emerge within hegemonic discourses of the environment.     

The construction of an international: Debord,Jorn, and situationist praxis

Though the Situationist International (SI) was a network connecting artists and theorists across Europe, scholars have mainly focused on its Paris branch. Guy Debord, its leading French member, has been cast as the undisputed author of situationist praxis and his ‘Rapport sur la construction des situation’ (1957) understood as the SI’s launching manifesto. By situating Debord’s ‘Rapport’ in its original context, this paper argues that the ‘Rapport’ should be seen less as an articulation of the SI’s aesthetic project than as the conceptual basis for an incipient transnational co-operation between the movement’s branches. Engaging the thought of the Danish artist Asger Jorn, who organised the conference at which the ‘Rapport’ was first delivered, Debord started a conversation in which the non-French participants were invited to be critical interlocutors. Through their discussion, I suggest, these theorists and artists not only together brought the SI into existence as a continental formation but also, by moulding the ‘Rapport’s’ concepts to new ends, shaped its organisational praxis. I conclude by considering how this reading of the SI’s emergence recasts our understanding of later situationist developments and theory.