“The exodus from blogging to the extreme use of Facebook[is] a much larger difference than that between blogging and the careful, painstaking writing of Marx‘ Capital. A Facebook comment leaves the reader with no choice but to either like it or leave it. You only receive feedback from people who already like you. The objectors simply go to their own page and issue statements that garner the ‘liking’ of their own fans. … They either join the page of their own sect or support group, ‘liking’ each other’s comments, or forever hold their peace.

The widespread use of Facebook has created the ‘final statement’ that replaces the messy exchange on a blog, which in turn replaced the in-depth thinking that exists in books, effectively recreating the Facebook user as a judge. Whether they like it or not, Facebook users find themselves in the position of a superstar or a prophet, needing to utter profound statements and expecting the cheers of the crowd. As it becomes easier and easier for people to connect, this loop tragically kills conversations and exchanges them for the proclamations of ignorant judges who know nothing of the world but their own personal narratives and verdicts.”

aus: Jon Rich: Facebook: A court of ignorant, cruel judges. In: The internet does not exist, e-flux journal. Berlin: Steinberg-Press 2015, S.160/61.

06/15

“Truthiness betekend dat je niet je hoofd, maar je haart gebruikt … Je gelooft iets omdat je in je hart wéét dat het waar is. … Dit is geen modern fenomeen … Alleen wordt die reflex nog versterkt in de mediawereld waarin we nu leven. … Ideologisch gekleurde media zijn er steeds geweest, maar nieuw is dat beide blokken met de opkomst van de nieuwe media steeds meer geïsoleerd zijn geraakt van elkaar. … Resultaat: verschillende groepen hebben niet meer alleen hun eigen mening over de realiteit, maar steeds meer ook hun eigen realiteit an sich. Objectieve feiten doen er steeds minder toe. … De meningsverschillen gaan niet over: ‘Wat moeten we doen in Irak?’ maar over de feiten zelf …

Een van de problemen is … dat er geen mainstream meer bestáát. The New York Times heeft een oplage van iets meer dan een miljoen en [een] miljoen onlinelezers. Dat klinkt als een boel, maar vergeleken bij de 300 miljoen mensen in het land is dat niets. De journaals van ABC, CBS en NBC – de grote Amerikaanse zenders, dus – trekken elk zes à zeven miljoen kijkers. De talkshow van Bill O’Reilly op Fox News heet populair, maar toch heeft hij maar twee miljoen kijkers. Dat zijn geen media die iedereen gebruikt en vertrouwd. …

Terwijl de oude huizen van vertrouwen afkalven, zijn er steeds meer nichemedia opgedoken die elk hun eigen micropubliek bedienen. … Het typevoorbeeld waren de Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, de groep die Kerry zo terroriseerde in 2004 … De Swift Boatcampagne was gebaseerd op leugens. Keer op keer kwamen journalisten die de claimes tegen Kerry checkten tot de conclusie dat de beschuldigingen vals waren … in de nieuwe mediawereld, waar nieuws niet noodzakelijk door de journalistieke filter heen moet, kun je een heel eind ver komen zonder harde feiten. …

We krijgen steeds meer problemen om beleid te formuleren. De VS hebben geen noemenswaardig klimaatbeleid omdat een groot aantal mensen simpelweg weigeren om de feiten te geloven. Als we niet eens kunnen overeenkomen over wat de realiteit is, wordt het heel moeilijk om doeltreffend aan politiek te doen.”

aus: We kiezen allemaal onze eigen waarheid. Der amerikanische Blogger Farhad Manjoo zitiert durch Tom Vandyck, De Morgen, 9.5.2008

Abb.: Amrizal Salayan: Truth, 2012, indoartnow, im Internet.

05/08

“… Wie bei gewissen Studenten, hat man sich nicht auch vor den dicken unveränderlichen Kinderpuppen tausendmal gefragt, was später aus ihnen wurde? … undurchdringlich und in dem Zustand von vorweggenommener Dickigkeit unfähig, auch nur einen Tropfen Wasser an irgendeiner Stelle einzunehmen; ohne eigenes Urteil … nur im Augenaufschlag einen Moment wach, dann sofort mit den unverhältnismäßigen berührbaren Augen offen hinschlafend … wie ein Hund zum Mitwisser gemacht, zum Mitschuldigen, aber nicht wie er empfänglich und vergeßlich, sondern eine Last in beidem; eingeweiht in die ersten namenlosen Erfahrungen ihrer Eigentümer, in ihren frühesten unheimlichen Einsamkeiten herumliegend … – mitgezogen in die Gitterbetten, verschleppt in die schweren Falten der Krankheiten, in den Träumen vorkommend, verwickelt in die Verhängnisse der Fiebernächte: so waren jene Puppen. Denn sie selber bemühten sich nie in alledem; lagen dann vielmehr da am Rande des Kinderschlafs, erfüllt höchstens von dem rudimentären Gedanken des Hinunterfallens, sich träumen lassend; wie sie’s gewohnt waren, am Tag mit fremden Kräften unermüdlich gelebt zu sein. … Wir mußten solche Dinge haben, die sich alles gefallen ließen. … Der Puppe gegenüber waren wir gezwungen, uns zu behaupten, denn wenn wir uns an sie aufgaben, so war überhaupt niemand mehr da. Sie erwiderte nichts, so kamen wir in die Lage, für sie Leistungen zu übernehmen, unser allmählich breiteres Wesen zu spalten in Teil und Gegenteil, uns gewissermaßen durch sie die Welt, die unabgegrenzt in uns überging, vom Leibe zu halten. Wie in einem Probierglas mischten wir in ihr, was uns unkenntlich widerfuhr und sahen es dort sich färben und aufkochen. Das heißt auch das erfanden wir wieder, sie war so bodenlos ohne Phantasie, daß unsere Einbildung in ihr unerschöpflich wurde. Stundenlang, ganze Wochen mochte es uns befriedigen, an diesem stillhaltenden Mannequin die erste flaumige Seide unseres Herzens in Falten zu legen, aber ich kann mir nicht anders vorstellen, als daß es gewisse zu lange Nachmittage gab, in denen unsere doppelten Einfälle ermüdeten und wir ihr plötzlich gegenüber saßen und etwas von ihr erwarteten. … wenn jenes beschäftigungslose Geschöpf fortfuhr, sich schwer und dumm zu spreizen, wie eine bäuerische Danae nichts anders kennend als den unaufhörlichen Goldregen unserer Erfindung: ich wollte, ich könnte mich entsinnen, ob wir dann aufbegehrten, auffuhren und dem Ungeheuer zu verstehen gaben daß unsere Geduld zu Ende wäre? Ob wir dann nicht zitternd vor Wut, vor ihr standen und wissen wollten, Posten für Posten, wofür sie unsere Wärme eigentlich gebrauche, was aus diesem ganzen Vermögen geworden sei? … Sind wir nicht wunderliche Geschöpfe, daß wir uns gehen und anleiten lassen, unsere erste Neigung dort anzulegen, wo sie aussichtslos bleibt? … Ob nicht in dem und jenem seine Puppe heillos weiterwirkt, so daß er hinter vagen Befriedigungen her ist, einfach aus Widerspruch gegen das Unbefriedigtsein, mit dem sie sein Gemüt verdorben hat? …”

aus: Rainer Maria Rilke: Einiges über Puppen. In: ders.: Ausgewählte Werke, 2.Bd. Leipzig: Insel 1938, S.265-270.

03/15

“Ich ging in der Stadt umher und konstatierte, daß sie sich verändert hatte. Es war mir angenehm, aus dem Hotel hinauszutreten, in dem ich abgestiegen war, und zu sehen, daß es nun eine Stadt für Erwachsene war, die sich für einen zusammennahm, fast wie für einen Fremden. Ein bißchen klein war alles geworden, und ich promenierte die Langelinie hinaus bis an den Leuchtturm und wieder zurück. Wenn ich in die Gegend der Amaliengade kam, so konnte es freilich geschehen, daß von irgendwo etwas ausging, was man jahrelang anerkannt hatte und was seine Macht noch einmal versuchte. Es gab da gewisse Eckfenster oder Torbogen oder Laternen, die viel von einem wußten und damit drohten. Ich sah ihnen ins Gesicht und ließ sie fühlen, daß ich im Hotel ‘Phônix’ wohnte und jeden Augenblick wieder reisen konnte. Aber mein Gewissen war nicht ruhig dabei. Der Verdacht stieg in mir auf, daß noch keiner dieser Einflüsse und Zusammenhänge wirklich bewältigt worden war. Man hatte sie eines Tages heimlich verlassen, unfertig wie sie waren. Auch die Kindheit würde also gewissermaßen noch zu leisten sein, wenn man sie nicht für immer verloren geben wollte. Und während ich begriff, wie ich sie verlor, empfand ich zugleich, daß ich nie etwas anderes haben würde, mich darauf zu berufen.”

aus: Rainer Maria Rilke: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Suhrkamp 1991, S.148.

Abb.: Chiharu Shiota: A Room of Memory, 2009, Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa Japan, im Internet.

03/15

“Talent war eigentlich nur nötig, wenn sich einer Mühe gegeben hatte, und brachte, wichtig und gutmütig, eine Freude, und man sah schon von weitem, daß es eine Freude für einen ganz anderen war, eine vollkommen fremde Freude; man wußte nicht einmal jemanden, dem sie gepaßt hätte: so fremd war sie.”

aus: Rainer Maria Rilke: Die Aufzeichungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Suhrkamp 1991, S.136.

03/15

“Das Unglück, obenhin, unverständig, ohne Geschmack, ohne Gefühl, mit Vorurteilen oder gar mit Schalksaugen und bösem Willen gelesen zu werden – oder, wie die meisten Leser, die nur zum Zeitvertreib in ein Buch gucken – oder zur Unzeit, wenn der Leser übel geschlafen, übel verdaut oder unglücklich gespielt oder sonst Mangel an Lebensgeistern hat – oder gelesen zu werden, wenn gerade dieses Buch, diese Art von Lektüre unter allen möglichen sich am wenigsten für ihn schickt und seine Sinnesart, Stimmung, Laune, mit des Autors seiner den vollkommensten Kontrast macht – das Unglück, so gelesen zu werden, ist, nach der Meinung des besagten Autors, keines von den geringsten, welchen ein Schriftsteller … sich und die armen ausgesetzten Kinder seines Geistes täglich und unvermeidlich bloßgestellt sehen muß. Unter hundert Lesern kann man sicher rechnen, von achtzig so gelesen zu werden. …

Was Wunder also, wenn den besten Werken in ihrer Art, und in einer sehr guten Art, oft so übel mitgespielt wird? Was Wunder, wenn die Leute in einem Buche finden, was gar nicht drin ist; oder Ärgernis an Dingen nehmen, die, gleich einem gesunden Getränke in einem verdorbenen Gefäße, bloß dadurch ärgerlich werden, weil sie in dem schiefen Kopf oder der verdorbenen Einbildung des Lesers dazu gemacht werden?  Was Wunder, wenn der Geist eines Werkes den meisten so lange und fast immer unsichtbar bleibt? Was Wunder, wenn dem Verfasser oft Absichten, Grundsätze, Gesinnungen angedichtet werden, die er nicht hat, die er, vermöge seines Charakters, seiner ganzen Art zu existieren, gar nicht einmal haben kann? Die Art, wie die meisten lesen, ist der Schlüssel zu allen diesen Ereignissen, die in der literarischen Welt so gewöhnlich sind. Wer darauf achtzugeben Lust oder innern Beruf hat, erlebt die erstaunlichsten Dinge in dieser Art.”

aus: Christoph Martin Wieland: Wie man liest. Hier zitiert in: Wort und Sinn, Schulbuch. Paderborn: Schönigh, S.124.

Abb.: Klaus Staeck: Kunstkritiker beim ersten Documenta-Rundgang, 1977, Edition Staeck, im Internet.

03/15

“Unser ganzes Bildungssystem lebt letztlich davon, Gelegenheiten zu schaffen … alle die etwas lernen sollen, mit Selbstgeschriebenem zu konfrontieren, weil sie nur so auf die Ordnung stoßen, die in ihrem Kopf herrscht – wobei diese Ordnung nur ein Effekt des Schreibens ist und nicht das Schreiben ein Effekt der Ordnung …

Was wir derzeit an Bildungsreform an Schulen und Universitäten machen, ist eine groß angelegte Vermeidungsstrategie des Schreibens. Weder in den Schulen noch in den Hochschulen bleibt Zeit zum Schreiben – mit der idiotischen Begründung, dass man dann mehr Zeit fürs Lernen hätte. Das Bücher … Kulturspeicher  sind, ist ja nur die halbe Wahrheit. Man denkt dabei nur an die Rezeption – dabei ist die Produktion der Ort, an dem die Ordnung entsteht, die da gespeichert wird. Die Linearität der Kommunikation diszipliniert unser Bewusstsein, weil nicht alles sofort, nicht alles gleichzeitig geschehen kann – und vor allem nicht alles, was möglich gewesen wäre. Schreiben bringt Ordnung in die Welt – dabei dachten wir, im Geschriebenen werde ihre Ordnung nur gespeichert.”

aus: Armin Nassehi: Die Macht der Unterscheidung. Kursbuch 173 (März 2013), S. 10/11.

01/15

[as an ancient Greek concept]

“In the beginning of Western history the distinction between the mortality of men and the immortality of nature, between man-made things and things which come into being by themselves, was the tacit assumption of historiography.” S.43

“[The beginning of] history as a category of human existence … [lies,] poetically speaking, … in the moment when Ulysses, at the court of the king of the Phaeacians, listened to the story of his own deeds and sufferings, to the story of his life, now a thing outside himself, an ‘object’ for all to see and to hear. What had been sheer occurrence now became ‘history’.” S.45

“The concern of greatness, so prominent in Greek poetry and historiography, is based on the most intimate connection between the concepts of nature and history. Their common denominator is immortality … History receives into its remembrance those mortals who through deed and word have proved themselves worthy of nature, and their everlasting fame means that they, despite their mortality, may remain in the company of the things that last forever.” S.48

“The Greek notion of the heroic deed … serves as a kind of yardstick with which to measure one’s own capacities for greatness. … the Greek … did not know any ‘moral’ consideration but only an … unceasing effort always to be the best of all.” S.67

[as a Roman and Christian concept]

“According to Christian teachings, the relationship between life and world is the exact opposite to that in Greek and Latin antiquity: in Christianity neither the world nor the ever-reoccuring cycle of life is immortal, only the single living individual.” S.52

“The only story in which unique and unrepeatable events take place begins with Adam and ends with the birth and death of Christ. Thereafter secular powers rise and fall as in the past and will rise and fall until the world’s end, but … Christians are not supposed to attach particular significance to them. … To the Christian, as to the Roman, the significance of secular events lay in their having the character of examples likely to repeat themselves, so that action could follow certain standardized patterns: … The faithful following of a recognized example.” S.66/67

“The Christian calender imitated the Roman practice of counting time from the year of the foundation of Rome.” S.67

[as a modern concept]

“Our concept of history … owes its existence to the transition period when religious confidence in immortal life had lost its influence upon the secular and the new indifference toward the question of immortality had not yet been born.” S.74

“The modern computation of historical dates, introduced only at the end of the eighteenth century, … takes the birth of Christ as a turning point from which to count time both backward and forward … is presented in the text books as a mere technical improvement. … Hegel inspired an interpretation which sees in the modern time system a truly Christian chronology because the birth of Christ now seems to have become the turning point of world history. Neither of these explanations is satisfactory. … [The] … twofold infinity of past and future eliminates all notions of beginning and end, establishing mankind in a potential earthly immortality. … Nothing could be more alien to Christian thought.” S.67/68

“The central concept of Hegelian metaphysics is history. … To think, with Hegel, that truth resides and reveals itself in the time-process itself is characteristic of all modern historical consciousness. … Men now began to read, as Meinecke pointed out, as nobody had ever read before. They ‘read in order to force from history the ultimate truth …'” S.68

“In the modern age history emerged as something it never had been before …, it became a man-made process …, which distinguished history from nature … Industrialization still consisted primarily of … mechanization … and man’s attitude to nature still remained that of a homo faber, to whom nature gives the material out of which the human artifice is erected.” S.58/59

“The problem of politics regained that grave and decisive relevance for the existence of men which it had been lacking since antiquity because it was inconceivable with a strictly Christian understanding of the secular.” S.71 “The modern concept of history proved to be [extremely useful] in giving the secular political realm a meaning which it otherwise seemed to be devoid of.” S.82

“What distinguishes Marx‘s … theory from all others in which that notion of ‘making history’ has found a place is only that he alone realized that if one takes history to be the object of a process of fabrication or making, there must come a moment when this ‘object’ is completed, and that if one imagines that one can ‘make history,’ one cannot escape the consequence that there will be an end to history.” S.79

[as a contemporary non-concept]

“Today the Kantian and Hegelian way of becoming reconciled to reality through understanding the innermost meaning of the entire historical process seems to be quite as much refuted by our experience as the simultaneous attempt of pragmatism and utilitarism to ‘make history’ and impose upon reality the preconceived meaning and law of man.” S.86

“… Today, after we have been treated to one such history-construction after another, to one such formula after another, the question for us is no longer whether this or that particular formula is correct. In all such attempts what is considered to be a meaning is in fact no more that a pattern … Marx was … the first … to mistake a pattern for a meaning, and he certainly could hardly been expected to realize that there was almost no pattern into which the events of the past world would not have fitted as neatly and consistently as they did into his own.” S.80/81

“Were not the old philosophers right, and was it not madness to expect any meaning to arise out of the realm of human affairs?” S.85

“What is really undermining the whole modern notion that meaning is contained in the process as a whole, from which the particular occurrence derives its intelligibility, is that not only can we prove this, in the sense of consistent deduction, but we can take almost any hypothesis and act upon it, with a sequence of results in reality which not only make sense but work. This means quite literally that everything is possible not only in the realm of ideas but in the field of reality itself. … I can choose to do whatever I want and some kind of ‘meaning’ will always be the consequence.” S.88

“Today … we are quite capable of starting new natural processes, and that in a sense therefore we ‘make nature,’ to the extend, that is, that we ‘make history.’ … The moment we started natural processes of our own – and splitting the atom is precisely such a man-made natural process – we not only increased our power over nature … but for the first time have taken nature into the human world as such and obliterated the defensive boundaries between natural elements and the human artifice by which all previous civilizations were hedged in.” S.58-60

“The modern age … has led to a situation, where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made … Neither history nor nature is at all conceivable.” S.89

aus: Hannah Arendt: The Concept of History. Ancient and Modern. In: Dies.: Between past and future. Harmondsworth/New York u.a.: Penguin 1977 (1961), S.41-90.

12/14

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other. … Throughout history, the truth-seekers and truthtellers have been aware of the risks of their business; as long as they did not interfere with the course of the world, they were covered with ridicule, but he who forced his fellow-citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehood and illusion was in danger of his life. …

The opposite of a rationally made statement is either error and ignorance, as in the sciences, or illusion and opinion, as in philosophy. Deliberate falsehood, the plain lie; plays its role only in the domain of factual statements, and it seems significant, and rather odd, that in the long debate about this antagonism of truth and politics, from Plato to Hobbes, no one apparently, ever believed that organized lying, as we know it today, could be an adequate weapon against truth. …

The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not – namely, secrets. …

… we find it in … countries that are ruled tyrannically by an ideological government … What seems even more disturbing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions – as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of the Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion. …

Seen from the viewpoint of the truthteller, the tendency to transform fact into opinion, to blur the dividing line between them, is … perplexing. …

Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. …

During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic, on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the first World War. ‘What, in your opinion,’ Clemenceau was asked, ‘will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?’ He replied, ‘This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.’ …

It is true … to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters. … Why a commitment even to factual truth is felt to be an anti-political attitude [?] …

What Mercier de la Rivière once remarked about mathematical truth applies to all kinds of truth: ‘Euclide est un véritable despote; et les vérités géométriques qu’il nous a transmises, sont des lois véritablement déspotiques.’ … Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character. It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize, and it enjoys it rather precarious status in the eyes of government that rest on consent and abhor coercion. Facts are beyond agreement and consent … Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing, can move except plain lies. The trouble is that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. …

… because of the haphazardness of facts … factual truth is no more self-evident than opinion, and this may be among the reasons that opinion-holders find it relatively easy to discredit factual truth as just another opinion. Factual evidence, moreover, is established through testimony by eyewitnesses – notoriously unreliable – and by records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries. In the event of a dispute, only other witnesses but no third and higher instance can be invoked. …

… when the liar, lacking the power to make his falsehood stick, does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his ‘opinion,’ to which he claims his constitutional right. This is frequently done by subversive groups, and in a politically immature public the resulting confusion can be considerable. The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion belongs among the many forms that lying can assume …

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little indeed to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities. Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle … can truthfulness as such … become a political factor of the first order. …

The modern political lies deal efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody. This is obvious in the case of rewriting contemporary history under the eyes of those who witnessed it, but is equally true in image-making of all sorts, in which, again, every known and established fact can be denied or neglected … We are finally confronted with highly respected statesmen who, like de Gaulle and Adenauer, have been able to build their basic policies on such evident non-facts as that France belongs among the victors of the last war …

If the past and present are treated as parts of the future – that is changed back into their former state of potentiality – the political realm is deprived not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new. … Conceptionally, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphysically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”

aus: Hannah Arendt: Truth and Politics. (ursprünglich in The New Yorker 25.02.1967) In: Dies.: Between past and future. Harmondsworth/New York u.a.: Penguin 1977, S.227-264.

Abb.: Zaenal Abidin: Will to Power 2, 2014, indoartnow, im Internet.

12/14

“What will be remembered about the twenty-first century more than anything else, except perhaps the effects of a changing climate, is the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life and into cities. We will end this century as a wholly urban species. … it will be the last human movement of this size and scope. [S. 1] …

In my journalistic travels, I developed the habit of introducing myself to new cities by riding subway and tram routes to the end of the line, or into the hidden interstices and inaccessible corners of the urban core. … These are always fascinating, bustling, unattractive, improvised, difficult places, full of new people and big plans. [S. 2] …

This ex-rural population, I found, was creating strikingly similar urban spaces all over the world: spaces whose physical appearance varied but whose basic set of functions, whose network of human relationships, was distinct and identifiable. And there was a contiguous, standardized pattern of institutions, customs, conflicts and frustrations being build and felt in these places [S. 3] …

The great migration of humans is manifesting itself in the creation of a special kind of urban place. These transitional spaces – arrival cities – are the places where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the next great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice, and our willingness to engage. [S. 3] …

Tower Hamlets, London, UK … The easy ability to open a small business in Britain, to get credit and purchase property and obtain restaurant licences without prejudice, allowed the Bangladeshis to avoid destitution and dependency, to accumulate capital and provide legitimate employment to new arrivals as British immigration laws toughened, and to build futures for their children over the hot tandoori ovens. Small businesses of this sort are the heart of almost any successful arrival city, and their absence, or the presence of laws that keep immigrants from opening them, is often the factor that turns arrival cities into poverty traps. [S. 28/29] …

Around the world, it appears that a good part of the success or failure of an arrival city has to do with its physical form – the layout of streets and buildings, the transportation links to the economic and cultural core of the city, the direct access to the street from buildings, the proximity to schools, health centres and social services, the existence of a sufficiently high density of housing, the presence of parks and neutral public spaces, the ability to open a shop on the ground floor and add rooms to your dwelling. [S. 32/33] …

The informal economy, previously considered a parasitic irrelevance on the edge of the “main” industrial economy, now represents a quarter of all jobs in post-communist countries, a third in North Africa, half in Latin America, 70 per cent in India, and more than 90 per cent in the poorest African countries. [S. 41] …

Kamrangirchar, Dhaka, Bangladesh … Jamar is the cable-TV man. This makes him a powerful and influential figure in the new slum, in good part because his is the first and most reliable utility to be delivered, years or decades ahead of running water, postal services and sewage. All across the developing world, in South America and Asia and the Middle East, the cable guy has become a source of influence in the slum. … To walk through the slum at night is to traverse pools of blue light and competing blasts of tinny music. [S. 48/49] … Poor people move house frequently, and arrival cities, in their early years, are places of constant movement and change. [S. 50/51] … In Bangladesh, as in many other places, the arrival city is turning women into primary headwinners, and they play a prominent and visible role in these communities. [S. 51] … As everywhere, life is a bet on the future of the children. Arrival cities are places of generational deferral, in which entire lives are sacrificed, often in appalling conditions, for a child’s better opportunity. [S. 52/53] …

In the earliest decades of the great arrival city boom, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the predominant way to acquire land was by squatting. … But the land invasion has become a much rarer activity … First, land nowadays tends to be private, with clear owners … Second, rural migrants, almost universally, do not want ambiguity in their possession of the land beneath their feet: the want clear ownership. [S. 54] …

Los Angeles, California … In the decade after Los Angeles burned, swathes of the city’s core turned from poor neighbourhoods populated by black tenants who rented from absentee white landlords into Latino arrival cities whose residents struggled to buy their ghetto homes. … While poor black Angelos were struggling to escape their neighbourhood as fast as they could and move into the suburbs, as the white working class had done a generation before, the Spanish-speaking arrivals were struggling to dig in, buy their homes and set up a shop. [S. 79] … People move through its neighbourhoods. … They arrive very poor, with poverty rates approaching 25 per cent, but … these rates fall sharply, especially during the first decade of residence, generally to less than 10 per cent. Nevertheless, the neighbourhoods themselves often stay poor or even get poorer. … The American arrival city … is constantly sending its educated second generation into more prosperous neighbourhoods and taking in waves of new villagers … the neighbourhood itself appears poorer than it really is. … [S. 82]

Parla, Spain. …A major study found that the Spanish-born children of Moroccan immigrants are becoming fully integrated into Spanish language and customs far better than South American and Central American migrants to Spain … This difference is attributed to the fact that Spanish immigration policies for Morrocans and other Africans, which were formulated a decade later, made is possible for entire families to migrate and become citizens, so that children are not raised in single-parent families or in families assembled through immigration-driven forced marriages. The Latin-American migrant process was more likely to split up families. [S. 259/260] …

Bijlmermeer [Amsterdam] … was subject … to what has been described as the most dramatic and violent act of arrival-city transformation in modern history. Build in the late 1960s …, it was a huge honeycomb of 31 very wide 10-storey apartment towers with wide spaces between them, housing 60,000 people in a commerce-free expanse of parkland and public spaces, separated from the city by a greenbelt. It never really even began to succeed …, having only a 20 per cent Dutch-born population. … Bijlmermeer was often described in the 1970s and early 1980s as the most dangerous neighbourhood in Europe. …

Finally, beginning in the mid-1990s … Amsterdam demolished all the apartment towers in two waves and replaced them with a tighter arrangement of mid-height structures that gave each apartment its own garden and ‘ownership’ of a section of the street, with loosely zoned spares for shops and businesses in between, allowing teeming and haphazard markets. This decade-long job was accompanied by a new active government role in the city’s southeast; its cornerstones are a powerful local security patrol and a municipal corporation dedicated to providing support to entrepreneurs and job-related training to youth. A new Metro link to the neighbourhood flowered into a prosperous business end entertainment hub. … What is it that the Dutch are doing with their arrival cities? First, they are increasing their intensity. … Until very recently, most urban officials believed that the greatest threat to the poor was crowding, density and confusion. … In less-desirable neighbourhoods, the poor arrivals are stuck with low intensity, high-division planning that forbids spontaneity. … [S. 297]

Around the world there is confusion about what should best be done about these neighbourhoods. [S. 306] … Often, the size of the building makes the difference, and there is a reason, why poor neighbourhoods in the developing world, when they turn into more prosperous neighbourhoods, so often evolve into long rows of five-storey buildings with shops on the ground floor. This is an almost ideal arrangement for self-managed neighbourhoods … People who arrive in cities need the help of the state. And what arrival cities need most – and what the market will almost never provide – are the tools to become normal urban communities. Sewage, garbage collection and paved roads are, for obvious reasons, vital and can be provided only from outside. But even more important, in the well-informed view of slum-dwellers, are buses: affordable and regular bus service into the neighbourhood is often the key difference between a thriving enclave and a destitute ghetto. One might think that the next priority would be electricity and running water, but in fact, these are often not considered priorities at all by slum-dwellers. They have typically arranged their own utilities, , and full-price utilities can be debilitating for poor households. Equally important, and far too often neglected, is street lighting. [S. 309-311]. …

… ethnic clustering (some would say segregation) gave the arrivals the benefit of ‘differential citizenship’ allowing them to participate in what I have described as a culture of transition. [S. 317].”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill 2010.

Abb.: Michael Cook: Sold (Livin’ the Dream Series), 2020. im Internet.

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