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Also, a lot of [cartographers] don’t want to acknowledge any complicity with the way things are, and maps have a huge deal to do with the way things are. They want to pretend their hands are clean: maps are just a tool. But you can do bad things with a tool and you can go good things with a tool. I’ve been suggesting to the hardest-edged people of all that they could put their epistemological and ontological arguments on a really firm foundation by simply acknowledging the fact that they are making the world. And they recoil from that, viscerally and instinctively, as they continue to make the software that enables them to make the world. In explicit terms, some of the most brilliant analyses of how maps do what they do have been carried out by these people who are basically building machines to make maps. When someone drops a bomb on something and kills a bunch of kids, and they do that using a map that you made, you either accept the responsibility for it—a kind of well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs responsibility—or you say, “Damn it, I can’t do this anymore.”

Claiming a RttC has not merely been a “way to respond to neoliberal urbanism” (Purcell 2002: 99) but a way to escape an apparent inability to influence agendas on the national or international scale; think, here, of the largely reactionary climate in the US under Reagan and UK under Thatcher in the 1980s. Claiming the RttC was to claim asylum away from neoliberal national agendas of the time; an exodus that came as a necessity. Or even think of the later claim of RttC as pacification: “a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfil urban dreams” (Harvey 2009: 323).

By now there is a fact: (neo)Nazis and the ultra-conservative, authoritarian and neoliberal governments following the dictate of the EU, IMF and ECB in Greece have both chosen a scale of intervention that was, until recently, almost monopolised by voices of the social antagonist movement and critical Left: the urban scale.

A second option — essentially, the only one viable—  would be for us to use this unprecedented attack as an opportunity, an opportunity to define solidly what in this particular scale of intervention (the urban) is politically alluring and fertile for the broader movement of social and human emancipation.

'Site-writing' examines how writing art criticism can be understood as a form of situated practice where the writing responds to those site suggested by the artwork: those that are there as well as here, those that exist in the memories and imaginations of the artist and critic as well as in the tangible present, those connected to the sites of the work's production as well as reception.This workshop asks you to remake one site in relation to another, specifically to explore the potential of writing as a way of making relations between sites. Writing here includes not only as script but also as text, which might include visual images, and/or words as images, and also words as they are spoken and performed.

Which brings me to an annual event which illustrates the failings of real estate journalism more than any other situation: the publication of a piece of self-serving propaganda called the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

This document is political posturing by vested interests and should never be featured by any media outlet in Australia. It is published by a lobby group that campaigns for the end of government regulations that restrict the activities of land developers. The group argues that regulation causes prices to rise and makes homes unaffordable. It has created a political document masquerading as research to support their views.

“Artists have the capacity, when we gather, to do what nobody else in the world can do. We can make out of a series of nothings, a series of abandoned buildings… things that people would discard. Artists have a way of connecting belief and ability and a willing to work at a thing longer than mosts would and create heat… wherever there’s heat, people want to be around it, and what we found is that people wanted to be wherever artists work. If artists could manage some of the cultural capital that we had, artists could be the real transformers of communities.”