Iconic Moves: Regeneration + Reproduction

Urban change throughout the 1980s and 1990s was marked by processes of deindustrialization. Cities, and entire regions, suffered a decline in productive industrial activity. As factories or plants closed down, a new type of architecture moved in with style. Urban regeneration was premised on the promise of the icon or the landmark. Ranging from corporate headquarters to museums, universities to football stadiums, opera houses to convention centres, markets to airports, architecture served the global economy by promoting iconic experiences. How is such experience produced, and, most importantly, how is it reproduced on the daily level? This lecture examines such iconic moves in architecture as they complexly interconnect urban regeneration and daily reproduction. Looking at the effective and affective dimensions of such iconic moves of architecture under neoliberal capitalism, we raise the questions what urban regeneration means and how it is maintained through reproduction. Focusing on the material dimension of architecture, the economy of production and the economy of reproduction are considered as equally relevant. Elke Krasnyis a cultural theorist, curator and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her scholarship connects critical practices in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art to questions of memory, ecology, economy, and labour. Recently she co-edited Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet. Her exhibition Hands-on Urbanism: The Right to Green was shown at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture.