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January 22, 2007
Barclays Center: Where Symbolic Violence Meets Street Violence?
Picketing Henry Ford uses the media campaign for the Forest City Ratner-Barclays Bank naming-rights deal to explain the paradox of "globalization" and "financialization."
At times this blog nearly writes itself. The announcement that Barclays, a British investment bank with nary a US commercial branch, will pay for naming rights of the Gehry-designed basketball arena to be built at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues is one such time. I have argued that undergirding the Atlantic Yards (AY) development is the immense movement of global capital associated with speculative real estate, even as this evolution in capitalism is responsible for the precarious economic position of so many minority communities in Brooklyn, whom Forest City Ratner (FCR) has enlisted for support of the project even though they are the least likely to reap any benefit from it. Additionally, I have argued that this project is especially characterized by a disconnect between superficial images and reality, a disconnect endemic to our hypervisual society, but increased by the use of a sham democratic review process, paid-off supporters, and an architect who, perhaps more than any of his peers, privileges the surface of his structures in order that they might enter into the image-based branding lexicon of their hometowns.
NoLandGrab: If you're too busy multi-tasking to parse through Stuart Schrader's intellectual mumbo-jumbo, think of it this way: it's beginning to dawn on folks that Wal-Mart seduces middle- and working-class America with low prices while undermining the economic (and thus political) stability of the same classes. Stuart Schrader is making the case that Atlantic Yards represents and exploits the same global-economic trends.
Posted by lumi at January 22, 2007 10:55 AM