burst of the bubble

IlGatto and friends were in Berlin last weekend…from what I can see from her pictures they had a good time! These pictures were taken by IlGatto at Brandenburger Tor, with passers-by mesmerized by a guy making bubbles.

all photos by IlGatto…

wall proliferation

Gian Matteo posted a deep analysis on the meaning of divided cities today…Old walls have been replaced by new ones. Visit Metapolis…

A Triestiner: Claudio Magris

Magris spent most of his life living near the Iron Curtain

Italian author Claudio Magris has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on Sunday. DW spoke with the literary giant about war, peace, the Cold War and the troubles between China and the West.

On Sunday, Claudio Magris receive the Peace Prize, awarded annually for the efforts of artists and scholars to overcome hatred. A native of Trieste, he is a retired professor of German literature who writes essays and novels. He had a brief political career as a Left Alliance senator in Rome for Trieste from 1994 to 1996.

His selection in June for the prize brought renewed interest in his philosophical ideas and incisive writing, and revived speculation that he was in line for the Nobel Prize for Literature. However some German arts commentators criticized the choice, saying his enthusiastic vision of European unity was out of date at a time when many EU citizens are bored with European Union politics and nationalism is rampant again.

Deutsche Welle: Claudio Magris, this weekend you’ll be awarded the 2009 Peace Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair, let’s talk about peace and war. War plays a big role in your works. Do we have to accept war as a part of our lives?

Claudio Magris: No. Of course there are different kinds of war, not just war where bombs are dropped. There are wars in everyday life – latent wars. There are two dangers. Firstly, that people think that war is unavoidable, that it’s part of life. On the other hand, the false optimism that people think that in our world progress has eliminated wars like immunization has eliminated smallpox. This is a danger, because to fight a disease – and war is a disease – you have to know the disease. You also have to unfortunately be aware of how serious it is and how probable it is that another war will break out.

You’ve mentioned different types of wars, the Cold War, for instance. In Europe we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. You come from Trieste, one of the places where east met west. You were on the border during the Cold War. How did you experience the end of communism and how Europe grew together?

First of all it was a big surprise for all of us. Nobody could believe in September 1989 that the Berlin Wall would fall so quickly. I couldn’t have imagined it. Even people who were active in bringing down the wall, I talked with some of them, and right up until the day before they never believed that the wall would fall. And they were fighting for this to happen. This is a danger that we blindly believe. We believe that the reality and the situation we are currently in today can never change. This border that was impregnable up until the end – the Iron Curtain – was close to my house. I lived in the center of Trieste, but it’s a small city, so I always felt that someone in spirit I was on the other side of the border. Not on a political level, but because these regions were divided for absurd reasons. Today we have other barriers; invisible, social barriers. Ethnic barriers within our towns that we can’t or don’t want to see. So the borders are still there.

firewall

Months ago MeinMann and I bought our flight tickets in ordet to “sei dabei”, to be there, in Berlin, on November 9th.

There are many reasons to it. The main one is to be physically there, since in 1989 I lived the events (fall of the Berlin wall, but also velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia) through the letters of my DDR and Czech pen pals but I wish I could have been there, side by side with my friends.

And of course we want to join the party, and live the Stimmung, the atmosphere of such a special day.

But there is also another reason. We want to escape to the viruses which are already incubating in Italy. I have already spotted extreme-right posters with the small icon in the corner: “against all walls”.

There are people here, in the Banana Republic, ready to hijack the celebrations. We don’t want to be in Italy on those days, even if we are very well equipped with firewalls against these viruses. We don’t want a beautiful day to be stained with Banana Republic rhetoric.

As Tabucchi says in an interview today “The end of totalitarian governments is a good thing to celebrate, but you have to be careful. Someone could use it to scrutinize other conquests and other freedoms”.

The laboratory of post-democracy, Italy, is not the place where I want to be on that day.

back to fundamentals…yours, essentially

There has been quite a hot debate in the press lately on the concept of “most liveable city”. Mercer’s, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Tyler Brulé’s Monocle and Micheal Skapinker on the Financial Times (“There is more to city life than convenience”), everybody joins the fight.

The ranking is indeed tricky. In the 80s and early 90s I remember Triest being always ranked as “one of the wealthiest cities in Italy”. So why so many graduates were leaving the town? Maybe because Triest is an old town from a demographic point of view, and the number of empty nestlers who had T-bonds in the bank were a measure of wealth? Or because in Triest many people go to the theater(s)  on a regular basis and theater in Italy was considered elitarian? Italians are supposed to be fond of calcio, right?

I guess that focusing on what motivates a CEO to live in London or Shanghai is not representative of a city’s attractiveness. The possibility that kids, students, elderly, families, single women, with various levels of income can share a metropolitan micro-cosmos makes what is called “a city”. Using public transport, going to school, making use of parks and gardens, sharing the public space safely, job opportunities, careers in the public, private, no profit sector. Gateway of ideas, incentive to share them. Mix of different age groups. But also nationalities, orientations.

Definitely, opportunities matter. But opportunities are not only a better paid job. They may be also a good public education system. A reasonably priced real estate market. Transportation which is not clogging citizens in their cars for 2 hours every working day (and weekends). Opportunity means not only salary, but also the value for money that can be bought with that salary in a specific city.

So, among all rankings, I looked at my personal fundamentals and you know what? Monocle’s ranking makes sense to me. It is skewed towards environmental policies, and I guess this is becoming increasingly important going forward. After all, we breath the same air, regardless of our disposable income. Living in gated communities (by fences, like in Brazil, or by policies, like in London) is not my cup of tea. The problem is…too many cities are growing fences at the moment…

democracy, activism and social networks

There!

It’s exactly what I wanted to elaborate yesterday in my post (but we had an invitation to dinner and had to rush ).

The economist Loretta Napoleoni tells it very clearly today on D di Repubblica. “Is internet shutting activism down?”. Check out the article here (and babel-fish it, it’s in italian), issue n.652, page 19.

Basically, what she says is that participation (to democracy) is not the same as being connected online. You do not discuss themes which impact society in the same way if you are at dinner with friends, online or in a public gathering (a political party meeting or an assembly). Some things need to be done by being physically there, in the street.

On the other hand, two important events this year.

The Obama election. He’s no Gandhi, ok. But maybe this time the grass-roots movement (especially for the financing of the campaign) really made the difference. And the fact that he was online. The web was not a sticker on this candidate product. It was part of him.

Second event, the Tehran events on Twitter. When I read an account of the precise events of Paris, May 1968, what struck me is the fact that demostrants had to resort to Ancient Greece methods to communicate, namely: run. Run between one barricade and the other, bringing messages and information on where the police was. Even in the WWI trenches the transmission of messages was more efficient. But hey, these boys and girls could just use telephone boots and tennis shoes. Now Twitter brought us the events unfolding in Tehran before CNN. If we want to talk things italian, since we are approaching another G8, it’s on YouTube that you can find the reportage of what really happened in Genoa that night at the Diaz school and in the barracks of Bolzaneto (english witnesses).

I guess that social networks should be an additional mean towards participation and information but not an objective per se. I blog, I twitter therefore I can act. But sometimes the illusion of “feeling in touch with others” can be predominant and annihilate participation. As Napoleoni says “in the end, you are in your pajamas, at home. Alone”. So get in those jeans and get out and meet those people.

Because the Divided Cities exist. The fact is that the wall is not a vertical one that you can stumble upon when walking. It’s horizontal, above our heads. And we move like little ants or busy bees under the slab of grey reinforced concrete that we call “democracy”.

PS
I just saw by browsing on bora.la that the foreign minister Frattini is Twittering from the G8 in Triest…beware…

music for the masses

The elections are approaching and there are a couple of lyrics turning round and round in my head…it must be the politics of dancing…

source of the video: depechie17 on youtube

supporting evidence

The OECD’s recent study “Society at a Glance 2009″ sort of confirms some opinions we may have when observing society.

• Italians have less children than the French.
• Germans seem to have more time outside paid work for themselves and for the family, and don’t waste it watching TV.
• In Italy some people work too much and some other not enough.
• French take their time when they eat, and their pleasure too, and more than Italians. Obesity rates in Italy are among the lowest.
• Compulsive house-cleaning is, more than an italian obsession, an italian social distortion (see how different are detergent advertising campaign in Italy vs Rest of Europe).
• Italian students’ performance in science and maths ranks among the lowest in the OECD countries, after Mexico, Turkey and Greece.
• Japanese live longer than French (but the French live better, and sleep more).

So, nothing new under the italian sun or the berliner luft.

Italy is simply stuck, and is not progressing.

How are OECD societies progressing? How effective are their actions in promoting social progress? Society at a Glance provides a basis for addressing these twin questions. It offers a concise overview of quantitative social trends and policies across the OECD. This 2009 edition includes a wide range of information on social issues – such as demography and family characteristics, employment and unemployment, poverty and inequality, social and health care expenditure, and work and life satisfaction –as well as a guide to help readers understand the structure of OECD social indicators.

intensive car

In the press they talk about The Great Deal (Fiat-Chrysler), talks are underway today in Berlin on the future of Opel.

But only on Beppe Grillo’s blog I can read today some news on the price increases applied by the italian motorway companies. Oil is cheap, and it won’t last long. So toll rentiers seize the opportunity today to levy more taxes on the italian public.

Alitalia and Air One are lame ducks, public transport does not get the necessary investments, people who need to be on the move are forced into using the car.

In the meantime our real unemployment and our real inflation are figures never published in the press…not only the politicians but also the journalists indulge in abundant Schadenfreude, about the 6% GDP fall estimate for Germany, the 20% unemployment rate in Spain but…what about us? No real figures on our own inflation and unemployment, Keine Weltanschauung for the way forward.

Listen to the Sage from Omaha. He says that the only certainty about our future is inflation…(or read “Weimar, utopia and tragedy”).

someone fit the key(nes) brick, please!

On the bora.la website, my favourite place as far as Mitteleuropean métissage is concerned, I read an interesting panoramique by Julius Franzot on the forthcoming german elections.

This synthesis is a powerful stimulus for us to read more about it in the forthcoming weeks…after all, MeinMann and I are tiny taxpayers in Germany. The western economies – also those on the eastern brim of Europe – are undergoing unprecedented changes, even if in Italy the white noise tries to scramble everything.

In Ukraine banks are keeping hostage the citizens’ savings. I know the feeling, august 1998, Moscow, cash was king. Now that for the past year governments have been busy “saving banks” with our money, shouldn’t banks be more generous and lend to individuals who want to start a business? Shouldn’t the govvies incentive the creation or salvation of business – workers buying out the factories, or the shops where they work?

And what about women? Even the left in Italy removed the words “quote rosa”. But let’s face it: women are more cautious when it comes to money. Governments should grant them incentives more than proportionally. Think about Russia. Or Ukraine. Or the South of the World. Their microeconomies rest in the hands of mothers, grandmothers and young women. Why shouldn’t the macroeconomy too be fixed by giving them more space? …provided that they – in the first place – stop voting for male or femalepoliticians who want to maintain the status quo: the reserve army of underemployed/underpaid women.