April 22nd, Roundtable Discussion with Anna Fenko

Prior to the meeting and roundtable discussion of last wednesday a text by Svetlana Boym was handed out as reading material and thus preparation for this roundtable discussion. Anna Fenko, a Russian raised researcher at the faculty of Industrial Design in Delft, held a presentation on the way inhabitants and the city of Moscow reacted to the transition from communism and Perestrojka to the submerging into capitalism. Next to the presentation the take-home assignments were shown on the wall which portrayed several examples of ‘urban interventions’ in the Netherlands, the United States, Russia, the UK and China.

Anna Fenko stated that Moscow reacted on 70 years of Communist repression in an extravagant way. On the one hand the city center has become a consumer paradise for the very rich (cup of coffee: $10), and on the other the outskirts of Moscow turned into a theater of street vendors, which have no legal permission and due to the lack of regulation attract all sorts of criminal activities.

Anna Fenko considered several problems that are occuring throughout the city: Read the rest of this entry »