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>Ultraman-Ha in: >The Biggest Lie of Our Times (And We
Still Believe In It)<
An Attempt to (1) Recall a Well-known Story Called Capitalism and
(2) Reconsider Criticism in Aesthetics.<
Drawings (on Glass)
2009
Kashiwa-no-ha is a development area 30 minutes north-east from Tokyo situated in the Chiba Prefecture. The area is bound by a settlement of older single-story single-family houses.
Seven players are included into the urban planning process: the local japanese government, the real-estate-firm Mitsui Fudosan, which is a unit of one of the nations biggest corporations, the two universities Tokyo University and Chiba University, the Tsukuba-Express-Railway Corporation, a City Commercial Comittee and the actual inhabitants (who are not many).
The idea of the Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha (U.D.C.K.), where we exhibited, is to include the inhabitants in the process of urban planning in Kashiwa-no-ha. But that turned out to be just a weak excuse for other purposes.
The same applies for the idea of an ecologically friendly city labeled "Future City". This is almost entirely marketing strategy because, despite of the energy-friendly Casbee-standard of housing and a community-bus-project, there is nothing friendly in Kashiwa-no-ha. In fact a joint non-profit-organization researches on consumer behaviour and consumption prediction and implements surveillance. Mitsui Fudosan the biggest player in Kashiwa-no-ha targets upper middle-class people with the label "Eco" in order to sell its high-rise condominiums and attract consumers for its standardized shopping mall called LaLaPort.
In my opinion Kashiwa-no-ha is (1) about industry-academia-cooperation, (2) a commuter-region without any connection to the old part of Kashiwa and (3) heavy promotion of a problem-cleaned, homogenous middle-class neo-capitalist dwelling.
I tried to put most of my findings into the drawings on glass I made at the U.D.C.K. I used the well-known japanese Sci-Fi-Hero Ultraman to deconstruct the myth of something called future. Which is in my opinion also a buzz-word for marketing purposes.
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