Open 18,
2030: War Zone Amsterdam
Imagining the Unimaginable

‘The contemporary social reality of Amsterdam, in which the debates on some social issues exhibit very little creative development, can be presented in a radically different light through the fictitious element of a war in Amsterdam 2030. Using Amsterdam as a test case, this issue of Open is about questions and problems facing contemporary Western cities in general: fear and safety, privacy and biopolitics, control and militarization, globalization and virtualization, commercialization and neoliberalism. Brigitte van der Sande, curator of the art project ‘2030 War Zone Amsterdam’, was guest-editor.

With contributions by Brigitte van der Sande, Willem Schinkel, Dirk van Weelden , Stephen Graham, Frank Furedi, John Armitage, Tom McCarthy, Wietske Maas en Matteo Pasquinelli, Eyal Weizman, Gert Jan Kocken en het Israëlische duo Adi Kaplan & Shahar Carmel.

Contents Open 18, 2030: War Zone Amsterdam. Imagining the Unimaginable

Jorinde Seijdel
Editorial
2030: War Zone Amsterdam
Imagining the Unimaginable
Online artikel

Brigitte van der Sande
2030: War Zone Amsterdam
Introduction to the Manifestation
Online artikel

This issue of Open functions as an independent reader for 2030: War Zone Amsterdam,1 an event that kicks off in November 2009. Here, Brigitte van der Sande, curator of the event and guest editor of this issue, explains her motives.

Willem Schinkel
The Continuation of the City by Other Means
Online artikel

Now that politics is deliberately being shunted aside with greater and greater frequency and all sorts of measures that sooner apply to an emergency are being legitimized, cities are coming under increasing pressure. War rhetoric and marketing strategies are converging in the formulation of urban policies that are primarily aimed at attracting the creative class and integrating the ‘underclass’. Reflecting on Amsterdam’s future, sociologist Willem Schinkel reacts to the marketing slogan ‘I Amsterdam’ by asking, ‘Who is Amsterdam and where is it heading?’

Frank Furedi
Refusing to Perform Fear

In the Netherlands, the politicization and dramatization of fear is preventing people from seeing the real problems, according to sociologist Frank Furedi. It is high time we realize that this in fact has to do with an estrangement from our own identity, especially as it has developed since the 1960s. Furedi thus argues for a more future-oriented activism, in which we must ask ourselves what the Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular want to be in the future

Bryan Finoki
The City in the Crosshairs: A Conversation with Stephen Graham

The investigations of geographer and writer Stephan Graham show us a city not only caught in the crosshairs of a perpetual war between international military coalitions and their swarming counterparts, but a city that’s been reframed, re-imaged, as a strategic site in a larger geoeconomic scheme for engineering the urban machinations of control that are necessary to secure the triumph of neoliberal capitalism across the globe.

Bianca Stigter
Musing Map
Online artikel

An introduction to the art contribution to this issue by Gert Jan Kocken, which is included as a loose supplement titled Depictions of Amsterdam in the Second World War.

Dirk van Weelden
Letter from Amsterdam

Eyal Weizman
Lethal Theory

Architect and researcher Eyal Weizman uses interviews with two brigadier generals of the Israeli Armed Forces, Aviv Kokhavi and Shimon Naveh, the latter of whom headed up the Institute for Operational Theory and Research that closed in 2006, and is now retired, to illustrate the importance of the formulation of theories in the Israeli army’s recent ways of conducting a municipal war.1 He likewise shows what radical and disastrous consequences the ‘operational theory’ derived from thinkers such as Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari has for the population.

John Armitage
In the Cities of the Beyond
An Interview with Paul Virilio
Online artikel

At the request of Open, the cultural theoretician John Armitage interviewed the French urbanist and philosopher Paul Virilio (b. 1932, Paris). A discussion on the future of the city.

Column
Tom McCarthy
Mexico City, Amsterdam
Online artikel

FUGUE
Artists’ contribution by Adi Kaplan and Shahar Carmel

The artist duo Adi Kaplan (b. 1967) and Shahar Carmel (b. 1958) have worked
and lived together in Tel Aviv since 1993. Their paintings, cartoons and
performances offer biting criticism of the social and political reality in
Israel. For this issue, Kaplan and Carmel took a trip to Amsterdam in the
midst of civil war in the year 2030. This contribution is based on a short story called The Leader by Avigdor Hameiry (1951).

Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli
The City Devouring Itself
Urbanibalism in Times of World Wars, Insurgent Communes and Biopolitical Sieges

In times of war, the accepted food chain is broken and the city becomes ‘edible’. It starts to cannibalize itself, according to Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli, who use various historical examples to prove their point. With this ‘urbanibalisme’, as they call it, as their motive, they’ve developed a recipe for a therapeutic beverage, Ferment Brussels, to bring a toast to a communal lifestyle as the antidote to rising forms of nationalism.

Boeken

Willem van Weelden
Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam, NAi Publishers in association with the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam.

Kathleen Vandeputte
Ed Romein, Marc Schuilenburg and Sjoerd Van Tuinen (eds.), Deleuze Compendium, Amsterdam, Boom, 2009.

Ilse van Rijn
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, New York, Lukas & Sternberg, 2009.

Ilse van Rijn
Sven Lütticken, Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle, New York, Sternberg Press, 2009.

Insert
Depictions of Amsterdam in the Second World War
Artist’s contribution by Gert Jan Kocken