Luxury brands like Louis Vuitton did record business this year, as did luxury car sales. This is the bottom line of our current economic system. Draw your own conclusions. But think twice before suggesting Occupiers don’t have clear demands or don’t know what they’re talking about. When someone says “Occupy Wall Street has no clear demands what I hear is “I hope no one is listening to those kids at Occupy Wall Street.”
The sign above bears a quote from philosopher Bertrand Russell: “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principle of liberty, which can be embodied in one maxim, “the fortunate must not be restrained in their tyranny over the unfortunate”.”
Occupy Vancouver had a promising start on a warm, beautiful fall day. More than 5000 people came out, making it the largest Occupy gathering in Canada (or so we were told). The mood was peaceful but determined.
On Day 1 of Occupy Vancouver there was only brief mention that the Occupy movement actually began here. For those who don’t know, Occupy Wall Street was initiated by a twitter hashtag proposed by Adbusters magazine—#OccupyWallStreet—followed with the magazine’s now legendary poster of a serene ballerina on Wall Street’s bull market brass bull. The dancer is surrounded by runners in gas masks, and above her floats the question “What is our one demand?” The hashtag was almost certainly the spark that moved protestors to Zucotti Park.
Adbusters is a 22-year-old Vancouver publication. Greenpeace was also invented in Vancouver, which begs the question whether our main export, after raw logs of course, is resistance. The Vancouver Sun just ran another story on the Occupy movement’s Vancouver origin.
See pre-protest statements from Mayor of Vancouver (nervous after the recent hockey riot, though needlessly) and from the leader of the provincial opposition party, and some commentary from Rabble.ca. To read more about Occupy Wall Street, see the previous post which contains useful links. The full set of photos is here. The photo below was shot by Vancouver reporter Jennifer Palma from a hotel across the street.
Above, Donald Sutherland at Occupy Vancouver. Photo by Jazmin Miranda Photography. Click on photo for more info, and there’s another shot of him here.
Above is an archival Vancouver photo courtesty of a friend. “Before the days of internet and facebook, this is how social movements in Vancouver invited the broader public to meetings in the 1930′s…”
Below is my Uncle Bob, who (to my amazement) was first on the speaker list. I had no idea he was planning to do this. And he was brilliant! See his speech here (shaky picture, sorry).
“And speaking of City Caucus, it – like The Province – is concerned that Occupy Vancouver has cost the city more than $500,000 since it began last Saturday. While they conveniently don’t mention oh, say the cost of each Canucks Game/UFC fight/Fireworks, the real irony is that, as free-market fundamentalists they’re the ones who write off expenditures like social and environmental costs as externalities. If there was any sense to things, this protest would be marked in black ink and not red. Instead, because the Occupy campers aren’t “moving units” that contribute to the economy, they are an inefficiency. You know, like childbirth.”
Most of the photos here were taken by a friend of mine, Canadian filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, at Occupy Wall Street. Reproduced here with permission. See his whole gallery of Occupy Wall Street photos.
I would like to nominate the protest sign—all the protest signs of this year’s worldwide uprisings, in general—as the pre-eminent design object of 2011. Most newsworthy, most useful, most creative, and it gives “mass-produced” a new meaning.
Vancouver begins its own Occupy protest on October 15, in solidarity as well as in protest against the wealth divide here at home. The gap between rich and poor in Canada is at its historic widest, and it’s nowhere wider than in British Columbia where more than a decade of rightwing policies and cuts have produced, among other tragedies, the worst child poverty rate in the country, and by a wide margin. Accelerating corporate ownership of our political process creates problems here too. Even if Canada’s greater regulation of banking has saved us from some of the catastrophes facing the US, the rapidly widening income gap means we are heading for trouble.
Those who mock or dismiss Occupy Wall Street—if anyone is still doing that—will probably regret it later.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
Below, by an unknown phographer, a shot of a US veteran at the protest. (Please tell me if you know who shot this.) Sign should win a prize for best ever use of black electrical tape. “2nd time I’ve fought for my country – 1st time I’ve known my enemy.”
And from CNN‘s article ”Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it”:
Update: a new photo of the sign at top, which now seems to be going viral:
This blog is a long, meandering photo essay on design, both of objects and cities. More on its rationale and bias is below. To read about me, click here.
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To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few seem to know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and more sustainable cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN-Habitat, an agency that was subsequently built around a document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year. It's a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how cities around the world began to view themselves differently in the wake of the first oil crisis.
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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on design. I started it because I wanted to restore to a sense of history to design, if only for myself. History can be fugitive, particularly in the New World. Everything is so decontextualized in the current stream of commodities; don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest.
As far as design goes, I prefer the modern and the ancient to the eras that lie in between. I've never really liked cathedrals; I find them garish and oppressive. I prefer the space-age, the futurist and the rustic, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, the green, the possibly-not-entirely-lost promise of the 1960s and 70s, the creative, the practical, the ingenious, the mixed, the unorthodox, and the way people actually live in real spaces. I am interested in bricolage, in making do, and in the way necessity mothers invention.
I like the sheer level of cultural borrowing evident in design, the actual impurity of design traditions long considered pure, and just generally the wild miscegenation of everything.
This is not to say that all mixing is good. I'm definitely not talking about the faux-historification of our cities, the demolition of our actual past followed by its replacement with a faux nineteenth-century 'originality'. That's when you get elements of the past and the future, combining to make something not quite as good as either.
Because design is never divorced from anything else, this long essay is also about urban planning, philosophy, art, political economy, architecture, sociology, geography, neurology, pyschology and anything else that pertains to design, which is everything.
The word "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, my two favourite nations for design. Apropos of nothing, the word also contains the symbols for both zero and one, and it's the same right side up as upside down. My dad was a mathematician in love with puzzles, and that is maybe why those things please me so much.
This blog makes no attempt to avoid being nerdy or critical. There are plenty of nicey-nice design blogs out there and if that's what you're looking for, you will find many of those, and I wouldn't blame you for going there. I just think that without critique and complaint, the design of cities and dwellings in North America won't get any better. And it needs to get a lot better than it is—less creatively impoverished, more democratic and a lot more pleasurable. We do after all spend almost all of our lives in buildings and towns and cities and altered landscapes, all of which have a overwhelming impact on our conscious lives, our unconscious lives, our health, intelligence, creativity and our social interactions. These things affect us every moment of our lives whether we're aware of them or not. And not only do we need more humane spaces in which to live, we need—above all—to ensure affordable housing for all. Without this, all our interest in decor is just privileged fiddling while Rome (or insert your city here) burns. Housing is a human right. Public policy and regulation are the only ways to insure people are housed and can afford to live in the cities where they work. The market and private industry are not going to get us there.
We all need to fight the worsening property speculation! Dear Canada and the USA and beyond, quit letting developers run—and ruin—this show.
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