“The Future of the Bunker // The Bunker of the Future”: Call For Papers: Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, London: 29 August – 1 September 2017

Call For Papers

Royal Geographical Society  Annual Conference,

London: 29 August – 1 September 2017

The Future of the Bunker // The Bunker of the Future

“Anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime the bunker appears as a survival machine, as a shipwrecked submarine on a beach.” (Virilio, 1994)

The last two decades have seen increasing public interest in, and engagements with, the abandoned remains of Second World War and Cold War era military and civil defence bunkers. Academics have been busy analysing the motives and forms of this engagement (Bennett 2011; Maus 2017) and also charting the origins and affective-material impacts of those 20^th century waves of bunker-building mania (Bartolini 2015; Klinke 2015; Berger Ziauddin 2016). Such engagements and studies have tended to figure the bunker as a now-deactivated form – as a form of contemporary ruin – and as a phenomenon of the (albeit recent) past. This Call for Papers seeks to supplement this scholarship by examining the bunkers’ futurity: through considering the bunker as an immanent contemporary and still-yet-to-come form of place. As John Armitage (2015) has recently put it (writing of Paul Virilio’s seminal first-encounter with a bunker of the Nazi Atlantic Wall in 1958): “when we face the bunker, we need to periodize our feelings of lurking danger – to insert them into historical time and to identify the periods of relative serenity, when not only the fixed content of the military bunker but also the relation between oblique architecture and the sudden appearance of this object on the beach remain relatively tranquil”.

This call invites proposals for 15 mins presentations originating in any discipline, that speak to this concern to examine the bunker’s futurity. This call is not intended to be prescriptive, as consideration of the bunker’s (benign or malevolent) potentialities requires a degree of speculation and cross-disciplinary thinking. The following list of potential themes is therefore indicative, rather than restrictive:

• How are the 20^th century’s redundant bunkers repurposed, and is this re-appropriation always playful or “funky” (Strömberg 2013). What does the variety of re-uses tell us about the multivalent resilience (or obstinacy) of the bunker-form?
• How, specifically, has the bunker-form influenced the ‘new military urbanism’ observed by Stephen Graham (2011) at heart of contemporary urban infrastructures and the bunkerisation of otherwise conventional buildings (Monteyne 2014)?
• How is the bunker-form evolving in its contemporary suburban manifestations as drone command centres, government crisis command rooms and fortified emergency stores?
• How might the “perpetual architecture” (CLUI 2013) of seed banks, nuclear waste and fissile material repositories and server farms be seen as the bunker’s latest iteration? And following Van Wyck 2004, how can we analyse the time-capsule role of such bunker-forms?
• How can the present and future of the bunker be publicly presenced? Do the techniques of bunker-hunting applied to the recreational surveying of the last century’s now-abandoned bunkers work for their extant, and forthcoming 21^st century variants?
• How is the image of the bunker evolving in popular culture?
• Is the intimate association between concrete and bunkers breaking down, and if it is what are the implications of this material change to the bunker-form? Is a bunker defined by it’s poured-concrete construction or by the exceptional, power-concentrated and emergency-driven reasons for its existence?
• Given the rise of commercial panic room and bunker-builders like http://www.terravivos.com/ has the bunker become privatised, and prospects of survival commodified? What are the emergent inequalities of protection against 21^st century existential threats?
• What and where are the bunkers of future? Space bases, underground or undersea living-stations, cryogenic capsules?

Please send abstracts (maximum of 250 words) to Luke Bennett (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk) (Reader in Space, Place & Law, Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University, UK) by 1^st February 2017.

 

References

Armitage, John. 2015. Virilio for Architects. Abingdon: Routledge.

Bartolini, Nadia. 2015. ‘The Politics of Vibrant Matter: Consistency, Containment and the Concrete of Mussolini’s Bunker’ Journal of Material Culture 20(2): 191-210.

Bennett, Luke. 2011. ‘Bunkerology: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Urban Exploration’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29: 421-434.

Berger Ziauddin, Silvia . 2016. ‘(De)territorializing the Home. The Nuclear Bomb Shelter as a Malleable Site of Passage’. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, advanced publication online 12 November, DOI 10.1177/0263775816677551.

CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation). 2013. ‘Perpetual Architecture: Uranium Disposal Cells of America.’ Lay of the Land Newsletter, Winter 2013 (online) http://www.clui.org/newsletter/winter-2013/perpetual-architecture

Graham, Stephen. 2011. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso.

Klinke, Ian. 2015. ‘The Bunker and the Camp: Inside West Germany’s Nuclear Tomb’ Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 33(1): 154-168.

Monteyne, David. 2014. ‘Uncertainties: Architecture and Building Security in the 21^st Century’ in Benjamin Flowers (ed.) Architecture in an Age of Uncertainty. Abingdon: Routledge.

Maus, Gunnar. 2017. ‘Popular Historical Geographies of the Cold War: Playing, Hunting and Recording Small Munitions Bunkers in Germany’ in Luke Bennett (ed.) In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Materiality, Affect and Meaning Making. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Strömberg, Per. 2013. ‘Funky Bunkers: The Post-Military Landscape as a Readymade Space and a Cultural Playground’ in Gary A. Boyd & Denis Linehan, Ordnance: War + Architecture & Space. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 67-81.

Van Wyck, Peter. 2004. ‘American Monument: The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’, in Scott C. Zeman & Michael A, Amundson (eds.), Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, pp. 149-172.

Virilio, Paul. 1994. Bunker Archeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press (translated by George Collins).

 

Image Credit: Svalbard Seed Vault, Norway via http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-war-forces-first-withdrawal-artic-seed-vault-n433471

This is New Uses for Old Bunkers #41.

“The House that Legal Geography Built: People, Places & Law”: CFP for a legal geography workshop at the University of Bristol on 25 April 2017*

Call For Papers

For a one-day Legal Geography Workshop at the University of Bristol, UK

On Tuesday 25 April 2017

“The House that Legal Geography Built: Exploring the Imbrication of People, Places and Law”

*[NB: the date of this event has been changed to Tuesday 25 April 2017 since the original version of this post] 

Legal geographers often describe their field of enquiry as studying the imbrication of people, places and law. We tend to think of imbrication as meaning braiding (following Braverman et al, 2014) or co-constitution (Delaney, 2016). But is this what imbrication actually means? In its OED definition, imbrication is not defined in the way legal geographers generally use the term today. Instead, imbrication’s 17th century origin, (in the sense of being ‘shaped like a pantile’): comes from the Latin imbricat-, covered with roof tiles.

This then is our starting point for this call for papers. How does this imbrication in legal geography actually work? How do the realms of law, spatiality and society fit together, for what purpose and in what circumstances? For while we presume that co-constitution (between people, place and law) is legal geography’s core premise, we also suggest that legal geography is still very much an inchoate cross-discipline, extending, one rooftile at a time. Envisaging legal geography as a project of interlacing, this workshop now aims to focus on the adjacent edges and overlaps. In particular, we are interested in any aspect of legal geography, including work on networks, materialities, affect, gender, race as well as scale, pluralism and performativity (Bennett and Layard, 2015). Of course, this is a relational connection, individual tiles come together to shelter the building as a whole but are also inter-related.

One purpose of this call for (15 mins) papers is to develop a network of all those interested in legal geography. It invites scholars working in human, urban, political geography and law, to offer empirical or theoretical contributions relating to legal geographies. Focusing on linkages, and extensions, papers will demonstrate how their connection illustrates the co-constitution of law, space and place by way of performative or relational significance to the chosen subject matter. In a collaborative setting, can we build legal geography still further? And if we do, what will the roof look like? We invite you to join us to find out.

If you would like to present a paper – or a sketch of a paper – please submit a title and abstract to antonia.layard@bristol.ac.uk by 15 March 2017.

This event is being organised by:

• Antonia Layard (Law – University of Bristol);
• Nick Gill (Geography – University of Exeter);
• Luke Bennett (Natural & Built Environment – Sheffield Hallam University) and
• Tayanah O’Donnell (Geography & Built Environment – University of Canberra).

The workshop is free to attend (we will announce the finalised programme and booking arrangements in the early April). We are not able to cover any travel or subsistence costs for speakers or delegates but hope for coffee and cake at the very least. If you are interested in legal geography but cannot make the workshop do let us know, we will compile a mailing list for anyone interested in the field.

Image credit:  Zola aka. Zhou Shuguang (http://zola.fotolog.com.cn/1671942.html) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)%5D. The owners of this Chongqing “nail house” refused to leave it, thwarting plans for a shopping mall.