Spatial Protest in the Era of Fast Capital

　　A video by Iva Radivojevic and Martyna Starosta exploring how Liberty Plaza is being inhabited by the Occupy Wall Street movement. "This space is our sonogram of potential."
On May 6, 2010, trillions of dollars — about 9 percent of the total world market — sloshed in and out of existence like a clumsy child carrying an over-flowing milk pail. The celebrated capital liquidity that is the hallmark of the wide spreads and cheap trades associated with High Frequency Trading (HFT) turned into hot lava as a result of the automated programming of a few trading algorithms. Traders the world over watched open-mouthed as the second-largest point swing (1,010 points) and the biggest one-day point decline (998.5 points) in the 114-year history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average unfolded over the course of 30 minutes.
Especially jarring for those who pay attention to the world's financial ecology was how the Flash Crash seemed to defy traditional conventions of space and time. Even the traders on the floor were confounded: Their bodies, the frantic voice of the announcer and the space of the stock exchange itself seemed pitifully quaint in comparison to the typhoon of 0's and 1's rocketing back and forth.
The “flash” was no more than a horrific blip only because the Chicago Mercantile Exchange​ was eventually able to pull the plug on the algorithms that were playing hot potato. But it became apparent that capital is hanging by a thread, as lightning-fast trades circle the globe continuously, beyond the average person’s understanding.
Traditionally, trades were executed by humans in close physical contact with each other. Hand gestures, emotional vibes and verbal outbursts ricocheted in the chambers of the Chicago, New York and Tokyo stock exchanges. Capital was moving, but within the context of humans communicating with other humans — even a day trader was in close contact with his or her clients over a phone line. The rapidity of HFT leaves human perspective in the dust, as market trends fall increasingly into an endless loop of responding to their own responses before the human world has a chance to catch up.
But there is another event unfolding that also pushes the boundaries of speed and unpredictability. While millions of trades are executed every second with little human oversight, the world is collectively witnessing — if not participating in — a rapidly evolving gesture that solidifies the power of a particular body in a particular place.
Today's globalized market place and the decentralized claiming of public space through protest are both powerful examples of how unpredictable flow — the gyrations of capital, the rhizomatic distribution of bodies – dictate and restructure ecologies. The collective gathering of human bodies is a different sort of liquid force, one that has the power to dissolve the traditional boundaries of territory and of how community is usually imagined under the umbrella of capitalism. One could see the emphasis on direct action through spatial occupation as a direct response to the mercurial unpredictability of today's robotized financial systems.
As Yves Smith wrote on the blog Naked Capitalism:
“There is nothing to oversee the hyper growth of derivatives or high frequency trading or endless debt games, because there is no global institution that equates with the global markets. It is a clash of the market state and the nation state … The market state is winning, which is probably why we are all on the brink of losing everything."

　　The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that manifested on Sept. 17, around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange, recognizes the failures of our current systems of government and market-capital. There is a critical misunderstanding on the part of the mainstream media that the people who gather in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Stockholm and hundreds of other cities are a disparate mob of disaffected and powerless individuals.
Instead, what I saw (and participated in) at Liberty Plaza was a quick adaption to change through the decentralized organization of a constellation of groups created on a need-by-need basis. Being able to change quickly, a trait lauded in the financial world, is generating new forms of conversation and possibility within the human network of the OWS movement. Basic needs are attended to by dedicated committees that distribute good food and sleeping bags. The very ground of the plaza is mapped by new territorial alignments, dictated by the overlapping and connected needs of people in close contact and constant communication with each other.
Painting the protesters as directionless individuals becomes a manufactured problem of spatial isolation. We are taught to be bodies that need to be clothed, fed and entertained so that we can function as productive workers, rather than bodies who can move together into a larger network of physical possibilities. The power of this movement lies in the fact that the gatherings of people represent themselves not as consumers, or even as voters, but as bodies in communication with other bodies, actively participating in the creation of a new horizontal community.
The importance of representation by physicality came to a head in the wee hours of the morning of Oct. 14 at Liberty Plaza. Brookfield Properties, the plaza's owner, had expressed worry about the “sanitation conditions” of the park, and a vacate order was issued for that Friday morning. In response, protesters took about $3,000 out of their OWS fund, bought cleaning supplies and washed every inch of the contested space. As of that Thursday, the vacate order remained in effect. It was not until thousands of bodies streamed into the park, despite a torrential rainfall, that the vacate order was “postponed.”

　　Liberty Plaza is a POPS — a Privately Owned Public Space. In return for tax abatements or increased building height, a developer can construct a space that must be available for public use 24/7. Developers construct these spaces with the intention that they are used by a passive public to eat lunch or as a resting place for a peripatetic tourist. OWS has forced both Brookfield Properties and the Bloomberg administration to examine what it means to create a space for the use of actual people, and not just as a decorative piece for “city beautification.”
The protesters who literally got down on their knees to scrub the plaza clean (which had been maintained from the beginning of the occupation by a dedicated OWS Sanitation Crew) became a powerful example of swiftly enacting ownership by taking responsibility. Brookfield Properties will now have to come up with a stronger pretense for enacting private rules in a public space.
This movement is exciting because it is in a constant flux. This flux is always mediated by the fact that groups of humans are working with the physical limitations of occupying an urban space built with a consumer in mind. This is a movement of anti-stasis through redrawing boundaries and expectations. This is a movement of bodily articulation over the cold manipulations of code attempting to generate capital for capital's sake.
.

Searching for Our Metropolitan President

　　
　　In 1967, Carl Stokes​ and Richard Hatcher​ became the first African-American mayors elected to head large American cities, part of a wave of African-American urban leadership that would sweep the North and South alike over the course of the next three decades. African Americans would be elected to head famously black cities like Chicago and Atlanta, famously white cities like Spokane and Seattle, and famously Latino cities like Los Angeles. Since Stokes and Hatcher, African Americans have been elected to head virtually every major city in the United States.
It has not always been an easy ride. African-American leadership has come under fire over the past forty years as cities struggled. Inner-city poverty, much of it African-American, worsened in many places, even as core parts of many cities gentrified with public support that seemed to benefit the growth machine as a whole but not many of its poorest citizens. What we tend to forget is that African Americans won the battle for urban leadership just as the abandonment and denigration of American cities was reaching its apex. The cities they took over were wracked by abandonment, stripped of their power and populace by federally subsidized suburbanization, and ripped apart by the modernist folly of slum clearance and freeway building. Undoubtedly mistakes were made, often in the name of maintaining power rather than using it for the public good, but this merely continued an American political tradition dating back to Tammany Hall and beyond.

　　As protesters occupy the centers of American cities from coast to coast, President Obama would be wise to remember this history — not simply because he shares a skin color with his urban predecessors, or because of any debt Obama owes to African American leaders, but because the story of pioneering African American mayors parallel his current situation in more ways than one. He too broke through one of human history's most famous barriers to take the helm of a polis just as it has reached its nadir; he too has fallen into sad traditions of maintaining power by kowtowing to the powerful rather than using power to reduce suffering or raise up the powerless; he too has taken over a debt-ridden economy beset by rising inequality and redevelopment for profit rather than people, all while under-invested infrastructure crumbles and the core reproductive functions of mobility and education remain inadequate.
In the aftermath of the election, as the full weight of decades of neoliberal economic policy and two generations of terrible or nonexistent urban policy came crashing down on President Obama, I remained more sympathetic than most, in part because of the clear parallels between his situation and that of many of his trail-blazing predecessors. For all the talk in the post-election excitement about Dr. King, my mind was squarely on the bravery and tragedy of Harold Washington​, Chicago's first African-American mayor. He bore the brunt of an obstinate city machine and a brutal urban history and paid the ultimate price. This was going to be exceptionally difficult, and any progressive who felt otherwise was simply blind.
But now the time for empathy has passed, and it is time for President Obama to remember that he was elected by many of us not to be the first black president but to be the first truly urban president in American history. Part of the legacy of the past forty years is that the overblown line between city and suburb has been blurred. When we speak of urban America what we really mean is metropolitan America — those amorphous regions at the heart of our economic innovation and the overwhelming majority of our populace. Eighty-five percent of Americans live in the 376 metropolitan areas in the country, more than half in the top 50 alone. The New York, Chicago and Los Angeles regions account for more than one in ten Americans.

　　But President Obama should not only pay attention to the metropolis because we are the overwhelming majority, but because some of the often-ignored roots of our problems lie in our tragic lack of true urban policy, as do many of our solutions. While Wall Street greed undoubtedly fueled the financial crisis, let us not forget that this whole mess could not have been built on any other commodity than the American home — the only product essential and ubiquitous enough to carry the debt load needed by Wall Street to fuel its speculation. We bought into it because we wanted the American Dream, not realizing that during the past 30 years more and more of that risk was placed on us as individual consumers and citizens rather than backed by the full weight of the country itself. Whereas prior generations could count on federally-backed mortgages and transportation, the past 30 years were built more and more on sub-prime loans, unequally divided local tax dollars and a fragile and ineffective patchwork of assessment districts and impact fees — a splintered urbanism built in reaction to the sins of the postwar suburban boom, which actually made things much worse.
The true tragedy of the past 35 years is that, rather than correcting the true problems of post-war urban development — racism, an emphasis on auto-dependent development, political fragmentation, etc. — we laid blame on federal involvement in this process, crippling its critical role in urban development. We then opened up suburbia to everyone who was denied the first bite at the apple. Except this time, suburbia was being built on bad debt while the gentry slowly reclaimed the core of the city — in part through high incomes generated by a global Wall Street. Now there are more poor folks in suburbs than cities, a foreclosure problem in some of the deepest exurbs you can find, and many of the same people who got screwed by urban abandonment are getting screwed by the new struggles of suburban America.

　　More than ever, we need an Urbanist-in-Chief unafraid to look to the metropolis for solutions to the problems of the 99 percent. Obama needs to channel his memories as an organizer in Harold Washington's Chicago and develop and articulate a true metropolitan vision for America. We need to invest from the federal level, as we once did, in the transportation infrastructure of our nation: everything from inter-metropolitan, high-speed rail to bike lanes, from car-sharing facilities to Bus Rapid Transit, from aging roads to crumbling bridges. We need to invest in housing our working and middle classes and providing the secure tenure that is such a part of the American dream, but this time under the rubric of a retrofitted, denser and more equitable suburbia and a healthier and more affordable city.
And we must build — using the carrot and stick of federal monies — a regional fiscal infrastructure that can sustain future generations of American schools, roads, police officers, parks and social programs. These three actions alone can help put millions of Americans back to work in jobs that can not be outsourced, restore faith in the possibility of government at all levels, break the ridiculous political dichotomy of city versus suburb (which fuels our red versus blue mentality) and undermine the grip of Wall Street on both our wallets and our soul. We now live in an urban and metropolitan world, a world in which urban development drives industry and economy and not the other way around, and we must recognize that economy, community and politics revolve around the spaces and places we occupy.

New York City Tourist Attractions

　　American Museum of Natural History

　　The Museum of Natural History is one of those attractions in new York city that's not only enjoyable, but educational. Making it a great place to also bring children. Located in the upper west side of Manhattan on 79st, it sits directly across from central park. The museum building, which has been at this location since it was completed in 1877, is designed in a neo-Romanesque form . The museum of natural history is well known for it's exhibits like the full-scaled blue whale ( the largest living animal ) that hangs from the ceiling of the Milstein Family hall of ocean life, it's famous fossil collection, the planetarium and so many others. My personal favorite exhibit is "The Hall of the Age of Man" know called "The Hall of Human Biology". This exhibit has the most in dept history of human evolution in the world. It has a collection of anatomically correct models of are ancestor's and other early primates. Two of the models thats well known are the 1.7 million year old Peking man plus the better known and famous Lucy skeleton. A fact that you might find interesting is the father of are 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. is one of the museums founders. So if you visit this New York City tour site, you'll definitely want to have a camera.
Radio City Music Hall
One of my favorite sites and also a place that's synonymous to New York City is Radio City Music Hall. Since it's opening during the Christmas holiday of 1932 it has attracted people from all over the world to see it's many event's and concerts. Located in midtown Manhattan on sixth Ave between 50th and 51st street it is part of the Rockefeller center complx. It also shares its glory with other sites famous for the area like NBC's rainbow room, FOX studio, and the Rockefeller ice skating rink. I find the best time to visit this site is during the Christmas holiday, when you can see the rockettes perform there Radio City Christmas Spectacular. There's also other marvelous on ice escapade shows and event around that season. Radio City music hall is also a regular venue for many award shows like the Emmy award, Tony awards, Grammy awards, and even MTV Video Music Awards. With its beautiful art-deco design its a major historical piece in the puzzle of the Rockefeller center area. So definitely add these one to your winter season NYC tour list. Its also a perfect place for kids, It'll leave a long lasting memorable impression on the mind.
Ellis Island
One of the most well known historical places not only in NYC but in the whole of the united states is Ellis island. Located in New York harbor right at the mouth of the Hudson river it offers a beautiful panoramic view of the statue of liberty, jersey city N.J. and NYC's main land. The island was named after Welsh immigrant Samuel Ellis who was the owner during the late 18th century. During that time Ellis ran a tavern on the island catering to local fisherman and sailors. During the late 19th to the early 20th century

　　Ellis island had became the main immigration port for immigrants from abroad coming into America. In more than a 40 year period it has processed over 12 million immigrants which means many Americans have relative that have come through its doors. It was the start of new lives for a range of ethnicities. As with many historical sites in the united states that had huge impacts on this country's it was designated as an landmark and national monument (on October 15, 1966). Today Ellis island is one of new York city's favorite and most frequently visited tourist attraction. The circle line (a touring ferry) and other ferries have daily trips that visits the island, where you can enjoy the marvelous outside view and the beautiful well upkept building which is know the museum. The ferries that visit the island also make a stop at the statue of liberty as well, which is a two in one deal. So if you ever travel to NYC be sure to add this one to your tour list.
Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum

Located on Manhatten's westside water front at pier 86 the Intrepid museum's is in an area also known to tourist for its cruise ship terminal and the circle line, which is a famous sightseeing tour ferry. Before it was designated as an museum the u.s.s Intrepid was an navy Essex class aircraft carrier with a long and astonishing service history which include serving in world war II and the Pacific war. It was also the ship that recovered the mercury capsule and the Gemini astronauts. At 852 feet long the Intrepid is as long as a new York city block and about 10 stories high from waterline to control tower. the Intrepid Sea Air and Space museum is known for such exhibits as the world fastest jet and U.S. spy plane A10 Blackbird plus the world's first supersonic transcontinental passenger jet the Concord and a huge collection of some of the most unique military planes in the world. The museum also houses USS Growler a navy Grayback class submarine. The Fleet week annual events are held at the museum. The visiting warships are docked next door at the cruise ship terminal and the events are held on the deck of the museum. Since opening in 1982 the big war ship has been a unique part of new York City and was designated as an historical and national landmark in 1987. If you ever do travel to NYC be sure to add this one to your tour list.

Some magnificent attractions in Malaysia

　　Malaysia is considered as one of the most beautiful and stunning places in South East Asia. This country is rich in culture, traditions and moral values and provides a lot of beautiful places to visit. It is a popular holiday and tourists’ destination providing some magnificent attractions that include:
Cameron Highlands
Being the hub of tea industry of Malaysia, Cameron Highlands consists of a number of hill stations. It is a popular destination both for locals and foreigners. There are a lot of things to see in Cameron Highlands like waterfalls, dazzling valleys, beautiful gardens and hills covered with wild flowers. Tourists can also enjoy beautiful scenes and jungle walks here making their trip more enjoyable and fun-filled.

Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur offers both historical and modern attractions to visit. It is an international city that attracts thousands of visitors every year. The most worth-seeing place in Kuala Lumpur is the Petronas Towers which is the tallest building in the world. Other attractions in Kuala Lumpur are:
Batu Caves
Kuala Lumpur Tower
Merdeka Square
Malaysia Tourism Center
Thean Hou Buddhist Temple

Malacca
This old town is located in the South of Malaysia offering to see an exciting mixture of Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese and British cultures. It offers some of the most beautiful experiences to the tourists when they visit historical ruins or look at the olden junks sailing on water. There are Chinese streets, temples and antique shops to visit. You can also visit Ethnographic Museum that represents the historical and cultural facets. Another must visit attraction is Chinese temple named Cheng Hoon Teng Temple which provides you an opportunity to watch religious architecture.

George Town
It is located in Penang Island. It is one of the Malaysia’s most important resort areas. It is a compact city so tourists freely wander here and there in the streets. The popular tourists’ attractions in George Town are Chinese houses, vegetable markets and temple ceremonies.

Fraser’s Hill
It is another popular tourist attraction as it is famous as bird-watching place having 250 species of birds. There are also some other attractions for the tourists like Clock Tower; being the middle point of Fraser’s Hill. 5 KM away from the Fraser’s Hill are the Jeriau Waterfalls which are 6 meters far above the ground and fall into a puddle where you can take bath. There are rooms and shelters for those who come here for a picnic. You can also enjoy your visit to Fraser’s hill as you can go on trekking, play golf and tennis, do shopping, eat and drink in lavish restaurants and much more.

These were some must see and top tourists attractions in Malaysia. I hope that this article will stimulate you to plan a visit to this beautiful country.

Oslo is the capital and most populous city

Oslo is the capital and most populous city as well as scientific, cultural and governmental center of Norway. It is a global city having varied tourists’ attractions. Guided tours of Oslo are available providing an opportunity to learn more and more about this wonderful city. Do you also want to know about this marvelous city? Yes! Then read this post to have an idea about the beauty and elegance of this place.
Vigeland Sculpture Park
Vigeland Sculpture Park is located two miles to the north-west of central Oslo and it is one of the most popular and favorite attraction in Norway. More than one million people visit this park every year. Here in this park, you will find more than 212 sculptures of different sizes which are sculpted in bronze and granite. These sculptures were actually created by famous and renowned Norwegian artist named Gustav Vigeland. The most famous sight in this park is Monolith.

Nobel Peace Center
Nobel Peace Center opened in June, 2005 and therefore it is a comparatively new addition to Oslo’s attractions. It rejoices the contribution of winners of this prestigious award. This center is featured with a fascinating exhibition that gives explanation about Alfred Bernhard Nobel who used his wealth to create Nobel institution.

The Oslo Fjord
If you ever visit Norway, don’t miss to visit magnificent and natural beauty of Norwegian fjords. It is a popular and world-famous cruise destination and makes the most breathtaking and stunning scenery in the world. I would recommend you to grab a boat or ferry from Oslo to visit fjords. While visiting fjords, you can stop at many beautiful and worth-seeing islands which you should never miss. If you pay a visit to fjords in summer, you can relax and take rest on one of the many glorious and splendid beaches. If you have some interest in visiting a cultural and historical sight, then I will strongly recommend you to visit ruins of an old cloister that is located on the island.

Tryvann Vinterpark/ Holmenkollen Ski Jump
The Hollmenkollen Ski Jump is a famous ski arena all over the world. It has a tall observation tower from where you can view beautiful scenes of city. It also houses a museum tracing history of skiing over the past 4000 years. The best time to enjoy Holmenkollen Ski Jump is during winter season as different championships are held at this time of year.

Oslo Opera House
A recently opened attraction in Oslo is the Oslo Opera House that was opened in 2008 and a visit to this opera house must be included in your list while visiting Oslo. It is featured with 1100 rooms and spread over an area of 38000 square meters. Greatest attractions in this opera house are ballet
performances which are quite enjoyable and should never be missed at any cost.

These were some of the most famous attractions of Oslo. Visit these places and have a memorable time.