Temporary Travel Office

Our blog address and feed has changed!

2010-01-25T22:14:00.002-06:00

Please visit us at temporarytraveloffice.blogspot.com - same blog, new location...

Contaminating the Preserve Takes a While...

2010-01-25T22:14:00.002-06:00

Our ongoing, unsolicited consultancy for the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve continues in spurts. Not having a permanent base in Jacksonville, FL has made our progress slower than desired. But we now have five proposed additions to the Preserve that we firmly believe would expand its geographic boundaries in productive directions. Eventually there will be some distributable artifacts and more complete tours available. For now, please have a look at our suggested directions for the Preserve in their more incomplete form.

The Ash Site Annex - an almost 42 square mile area that served as a solid waste burning ground for the city for the first half of the 20th century, largely due to racist demarcations of space. How would the city's conception of history and ecology change if communities (that have been forcefully marginalized and made toxic) used the mandates of ecological and historic conservation and preservation?
The Wilson Armstrong Memorial to the Timucuan Rebellion of 1656 - What can a failed 17th Century Timucuan insurrection possibly have in common with a failed mid 20th Century Jacksonville City Council campaign?
1964 Climatological and Civil Unrest Learning Center - 1964 was a turbulent year for Northeast Florida. Along the coast, efforts to achieve racial equality were being met with extreme violence, a devastating hurricane wrecked havoc, and somehow the Beatles managed to play a concert to a racially integrated audience in a football stadium surrounded by flood waters.
Eartha M.M. White Trail to the Acosta Electoral & Ecological Platform - Take a walk through the history, present and future of electoral and climate monitoring technologies, while learning something about the personalities and events that helped shape the political and physical landscape of Jacksonville.

Opportunistic Vistas

2010-01-15T14:49:00.005-06:00

We just received an announcement for an exhibition of video work by Cynthia Hooper titled "Opportunistic Vistas", opening at the Center for Land Use Interpretation January 22. Hooper has done work with Simparch and at CLUI's Wendover Residency program.
CLUI's announcement:

Exhibit open January 22 - February 28, 2010
Cynthia Hooper creates short films that observe sites such as waste disposal landscapes, effluent pipes, and salt mines. This CLUI Independent Interpreter exhibit features seven of Hooper's films: CESPT, Cuyahoga, Bay Dredge, Cummings Road Landfill, Lazaro Cardenas Electrizada, Basura Quemada, and La Morita Enamorada.

Opening night event - Cynthia Hooper will talk about trans-border water issues in the Mexicali Valley of Mexico and the Imperial Valley of Southern California, and will screen her latest film, Meximperiali on Friday, January 22 at 8pm. Please arrive early - seating is limited.
We were particularly drawn to her video of the Cummings Road Landfill that slowly reveals the technology subtly, and not-so-subtly, manipulating the landscape. Both humorous and insightful, it presents squirting pumps as geysers and bubbling methane fields as geothermal springs.

Cummings Road Landfill from Cynthia Hooper on Vimeo.

Power Plants

2009-12-16T22:43:00.006-06:00

Some folks working in the region generally referred to as the Midwest, under the name the Compass Group (including one of our own Travel Office agents), published a 2 sided map and quiz-card set that attempts to unpack the geography of corn and coal around the Great Lakes and Midwest. Coal-based utilities are identified by ownership type, and both coal mines and corn-based ethanol production facilities are located. Amidst this pretty overwhelming and depressing data are select organizations and communities who are exploring other forms of power generation. You can see a larger image of the map on Flickr and download the cards but if you'd like a paper copy of both the map and card, they're available this Winter at the Smart Museum in Chicago as part of the Heartland exhibition. The map is also available in the 9th issue of AREA Chicago: Peripheral Vision.
If you can't make it to Chicago, write us and we'll try to get one to you.

Retouching Colonialism

2009-12-15T18:49:00.010-06:00

We just came across this advertisement for an art contest that is asking artists to repaint 17th century etchings depicting pre-European inhabitants of present day Florida. An initiative of the Public Trust Environmental Legal Institute of Florida, the contest is designed to promote the preservation of Florida's ecological and historical assets. The prints need to be repainted, they say, pointing to the obvious "errors" that are visible in the Theodor deBry etchings (supposedly based on observational paintings by French colonist Jacques Le Moyne), such as giant alligators with ears and European facial features on people who are not European.
The inspiration for the contest was apparently the work of another Theodore, a contemporary Floridian named Theodore Morris. He has embarked on a series of paintings of pre-European peoples of called "Florida Lost Tribes", in which he refers to current archaeological and anthropological knowledge to produce more "correct" visualizations. In a recent article on his work, Morris explains how he sees his project historically:

"I would like to create a body of work similar to George Catlin who painted early portraits of America's Western tribes," explains Morris. "My goal is to complete paintings that cover an entire community of people from each of the major tribes of Florida"

To get back to the art contest and its motivations, we are interested in the continued use of the ultimate Other - a people and culture that was exterminated almost 300 years ago - in the service of historical and ecological preservation. The Timucua and the European invasions that destroyed them were the narrative starting points for the eventual creation of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in 1988, an effort that started in 1920s. And now that much of the "evidence" has lost its claims to truth (the Fort Caroline Exhibit and the Ribault Monument never had much of a claim to begin with and the images attributed to Jacques Le Moyne have been severely questioned since at least 2005), the record has to be corrected. But, what is interesting is that it's being corrected without much in the way of more "real" data. Le Moyne's original paintings have not been found, and certainly no one has uncovered a frozen Timucuan. The Timucua are being treated like dinosaurs, their images updated as our theories and ideas about them (and colonization) change. As a colleague once said of the ever changing depiction of dinosaurs, the pictures of the Timucua will always be more of a depiction of those creating them than they can be of the Timucua themselves.
Of course, such things are never about accuracy. The preserve preserves a story and the space in which that story takes place. What we have been trying to propose with our unsolicited consultations for the Timucuan Preserve is to address stories and places that connect other ecological and cultural concerns with the historic narrative already being offered. How can the policy-practice of preservation facilitate active protection of ecological and cultural networks without preserving the ideology of colonialism and violence, with its very material consequences? Practical approaches like "environmental preservation districts" seem promising, and what we would like to see advocated by organizations like the Public Trust.
Perhaps we should hold our own contest...

Touring With The Torch

2009-12-07T23:19:00.005-06:00

The Olympic Flame really gets around. After it's ceremonial ignition in Athens, it gets a whole row of airline seats to itself, then it's onto a mountain bike, across frozen bays, some tundra, and even for a surf in the Northern Pacific. The expense of keeping this little chemical reaction going across thousands of miles and in deliberately ridiculous situations is fascinating and disturbing. We'd like to see this whole process somehow re-enacted... what would it take to convince an airline to let you bring on six burning lanterns?
Thanks to Mr. Hamilton for forwarding this.
Photos credits AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Jonathan Hayward

Parking Public: Second Edition DVD Available

2009-12-06T13:56:00.004-06:00

We just got our second edition of the Parking Public DVD back from the printer/duplicator, so if you didn't get one from the first run, you can get one now!
It might make for an odd holiday gift for the parking enthusiast in your family.
We'll also be leading a Parking Public tour in Chicago in March, so look out for upcoming information on that.

Real, Desired & Recreated Geographies

2009-11-12T12:29:00.004-06:00

Along with our recent proposal for the mMigration Recreation and Research Center to top the iHotel and Conference Center, we also produced a micro exhibit to occupy one wall of the Conference Center Lobby area. The space of the conference center and hotel is one conceived for consumer-users that are frequently mobile populations who occupy the space for very specific and short periods of time. Not unlike airports, conference center hotels are places designed for people who are assumed to be universally mobile and act as temporary, modular inhabitants. We don't agree with conceptions of such places as non-places, put forward by scholars like Marc Auge, however. While such ideas provide a way of understanding a form of architectural and relational instrumentalization and homogenization, they only deal with the space from the position of mobile consumption. The idea that such non-places are spaces in which "no lasting social relations are established" overlooks the production of these places in very basic material and human terms. Airports, subways and hotels are places of work for large numbers of people who are not temporary, transient inhabitants. The workers who produce these places, or at least keep them operating, create and maintain meaningful, interpersonal relationships as most of us do when we work with others. Our mini exhibit at the iHotel Conference center was one way for us to think through this reality. Below is a basic description.

A Study in Migration Through the Real, Desired & Recreated Geographies of 8 Employees is a commissioned exhibit for the iHotel & Conference Center in Champaign IL.

Although we have maps of the world that show us the forms of oceans, land masses, and political boundaries, such maps can only be aggregations of the experiences and hypotheses of specific social formations. The flattening of the globe requires projections.

This map, for example, charts the experience, both real and imaginary, of land by eight employees of the iHotel Conference Center in Champaign, IL. These employees responded to short surveys, answering questions about where they have lived, where they have visited and where they desire to go. Land masses not named, are not pictured. They also described valued souvenirs collected from these locations. Some of these souvenirs are on display in facsimile form - they are represented by approximations purchased from the online auction house Ebay. The origin of the described souvenirs, and the location from which their facsimiles were obtained, are also located on this map.

Touring a Year in the Life of a Shipping Container

2009-10-14T12:33:00.004-05:00

For the last year, the BBC has been tracking a shipping container as it travels the world. As it traverses the sea and land, reports on its status were logged: "Economic hardship greets the box in LA"; "Scotch wiskey exports buck downturn". But tracking the box has not been without problems, as the GPS tracking device installed on it has had to be repaired and, even after repairs, its signal has been intermittent. The story that this journalism-cum-locative media project points to however, is an extremely interesting and overlooked area where the economic crisis and global commerce intersect, at least it was for us.
As the BBC reports:

After 53 years of annual growth, the volume of cargo carried by container ships may record a fall in 2009. The May figures for westbound Asia-Europe services were down by a fifth on the previous year - an indication of the severity of the slump. The problems for the industry have been compounded by a boom in building large new container ships.

We're reminded of our favorite precedent to locative-media projects, the critical documentary project of Alan Sekula, particularly his expansive Fish Story and Lottery of the Sea projects:

It struck me that Smith (speaking of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations") introduces the concept of risk entirely through examples drawn from seafaring and sea trade: the sailor who risks all for meager pay, incommensurate with his skills; the wealthy ship owner who "insures himself" against risk by funding a fleet large enough to offset the inevitable loss of individual vessels. The concept of risk emerges with a measure of human sympathy and understanding, based no doubt on Smith's own life-world at the edge of the North Sea, that is completely absent from the musings of our contemporary apostles of the free market.

As is the case in Fish Story, I follow a meandering path from ocean to ocean, and from ocean to sea, but with different landfalls and departures. The film begins in Japan, moves to Panama and concludes in Spain, stopping first on the oil-fouled Atlantic coast of Galicia, and ending with the redeveloped Mediterranean littoral of Barcelona. Along the way, there are a number of detours, to the ancient agora in Athens and to the port of Piraeus, to a "millionaires' fair" in Amsterdam, to a number of demonstrations in different cities against neoliberalism and then against the war in Iraq. In each of these contexts, "risk" takes on new meaning, is refracted differently by circumstances. The narration asks a question: "What does it mean to be a maritime nation, to harvest the sea, or to rule the waves?" This is posed for the inherently unstable power relations of the western Pacific, but applies less literally to choices faced in Panama and Spain, choices having to do with sovereignty and our fragile dominion over the sea.

From an interview in Bomb Magazine

Parking Public in Columbus, OH

2009-09-17T11:25:00.003-05:00

We were invited by the Bureau for Open Culture's James Voorhies at the Columbus College of Art & Design to present our Parking Public tours there. A "virtual" version of walking tour of Hollywood CA will be on display within the Agency for Small Claims (seen above) until October 3.
On October 23, we'll be presenting a screening of our short Parking Public video essay and giving a brief illustrated talk on some of the other guided Parking Public tours. We will also likely have a discussion about parking in Columbus that ties into the work of Learning Site, who are in residence at the Bureau as part of the exhibition Descent to Revolution (also featuring Red 76, Claire Fontaine, Office of Collective Play, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT and Tercerunquinto).
image below: a drawing by Learning Site for their work Audible Dwelling.

House of Cars

2009-09-10T15:11:00.002-05:00

Believe it or not, there are some benefits to being on the mailing list of the National Parking Association. At least if you're into parking. One benefit is finding out about things like an upcoming exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. titled House of Cars. Opening October 17, the exhibit takes a look at the architecture of parking garages as an overlooked, yet important element of the built environment in the U.S.. The Museum is planning to host a lecture series and film screenings that survey "the many roles played by the parking garages on screen, from extreme action to avant-garde expression".
The NPA is the "presenting sponsor" of the exhibition, which opens immediately after the NPA's Annual Convention and Expo, also happening in D.C. this year.
image above: First LEED certified parking garage, the Santa Monica Civic Center parking structure (from Inhabitat.com)

Radical Hip Hop Tourism

2009-08-13T11:22:00.002-05:00

We were just sent a link to the Emergence Travel Agency, "the world's first hip-hop travel agency" and a project of Emergence Music, a DIY hip hop enterprise by Detroit-based MC Invincible.
On the site, they have videos that cover the history of displacement and resistance in Detroit ("Locusts" see below) and Palestine/Israel ("People Not Places"), mixing music video and documentary interviews to some pretty great effects.
Also check out their collaboration with the Detroit Summer Collective on an audio documentary on the effects of Superbowl XL on the city.

mMigration Research and Recreation Center Proposal

2009-07-31T15:35:00.004-05:00

Our proposal for an architectural addition to the iHotel Conference Center and a site owned by Ameren in Champaign, IL has finally been "released," meaning the poster and model of the proposal are currently on display in the iHotel. Below is a brief summary of the proposal, more info and images here.

...it is necessary to examine the social relations that the means of mobility afford and not only the changing form taken by the forces of mobility.
-- John Urry, Mobilities

For we live in the maps that the colonial surveyors bequeathed us.
-- Paul Carter, Dark Writing

One of the problems in studying "cancer clusters" - statistically high rates of cancer in a given area due to environmental conditions and contamination - is the increasing rate of migration of people over the course of their lives.
-- Richard Huggett, Fundamentals of Biogeography

The mMigration Research & Recreation Center will be a multi-use entertainment and educational facility serving the greater Champaign-Urbana area, and would be focused on various forms of migration. Multiple narratives of human, animal and geological movement in the region would be explored and documented through a media library housing videos, books, oral histories, photographs and digital archives.

The form of the mMigration Center will further visualize and encourage thinking about migration and mobility. Its primary facility will be prominantly located over the current iHotel and Conference Center South of the University of Illinois's flagship campus. Entry to the center will only be available through a satellite portal, located approximately 2 miles to the North, in a lot at the intersection of 5th and Hill Streets. From there an underground walkway and elevators will take visitors under the city and up to the center's 120 ft high facility.

The structure of the main building itself, hovering over the iHotel and Conference Center, is based on soil samples that document ground contamination of the lot at 5th and Hill Streets, where the entrance to the center will be located. This lot was once a manufactured gas plant that operated during the first half of the 20th Century, supplying lighting for Champaign and powering its interurban rail system.

Superfund or Superfun?

2009-07-20T11:52:00.002-05:00

We were recently in New York, where we took a really great tour of the Flushing Meadows Worlds Fair site (Now the NYC-run F.M. Corona Park), and also checked out Damon Rich's intervention (as part of his exhibition Red Lines) into the Queens Museum of Art NYC Panorama, built by Robert Moses for the 1964 Worlds Fair. It's pretty spectacular on its own, but Rich's intervention provides a less utopian chapter in the development of the city - - mapping the geography of foreclosures onto the Panorama.
We also attended an event about the initiative to get the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn designated as a Superfund Site by the US EPA. We won't go into that initiative here... readers can look into it more at the previous link, but we were inspired to make this post after reading a story in the New York Times about a "secret" (how secret can something in the NYT be?) urban pool made out of dumpsters. The pool is a project (dare we say, business venture) of a company called Macrosea, that appears to be a sort of avant garde development firm. Interestingly, one of its key partners (as Project Director) is artist and writer Jocko Weyland, whom some readers may recognize for his writing on skateboard culture, or for his contributions to the art-culture-intellectual curiosity magazine Cabinet. The NYT story on this much blogged about trendier form of dumpster diving discussed an after party for Cabinet magazine held at one such dumpter-derived swimming hole located in Gowanus, and featured sound bites from artists and curators like Nina Katchadourian and Aaron Levy. Macrosea is, along with their more lucrative ventures, working on plans for re-uses of strip malls, perhaps putting to practice the research of Julia Christensen's Big Box Reuse project. The story also alludes to the abundance of unused dumpsters as the result of construction lulls during the recession/depression.
Perhaps it's simply an indication of our reading art and culture sources, but the recent instances of artists colonizing economic misfortune in such parasitic ways (such as artists buying cheap houses in Detroit) is both interesting and troubling. This seems markedly different from what is generally thought of as gentrification. The construction of party pools for neo-bohemians out of dumpsters on vacant industrial sites next to a potential Superfund site merges the utopian and dystopian in a way that makes cynicism seem completely ridiculous. We think it would have been even better if the pools were made as party ships, complete with glass bottoms, so party goers could swim in fresh water (trucked in from a New Jersey aquifer, of course) while looking down through the murky, inhospitable canal below and the wreckage of capital all around.
image of the Gowanus Canal by Listen Missy!

Taking Earthwork to the Streets of Chicago

2009-06-14T09:20:00.005-05:00

Some colleagues from Chicago and around the midwest recently completed a political street stenciling project in support of the Tamms Year Ten Campaign. Tamms is shorthand for a supermax prison located in a town by the same name that has been operating under conditions considered torture by many human rights organizations and Tamms Year Ten is a grass-roots campaign to bring attention to it and at least bring it back to its original, legal mandate. As you can see from the pictures, they created an outline of the state of Illinois locating the location of Tams within in. To make the image they used giant stencils and mud, a technique learned and borrowed from artist Jesse Graves. Chicago-based art historian and writer Lori Waxman has written on the action, discussing the relationship between the stencil action and the issue of Tamms in more detail.
image above from Jesse Graves' blog.

London Olympics Runs Over Iron Age Britons

2009-06-12T16:45:00.002-05:00

Looks like a road being constructed for the 2012 Games in London has been built atop a mysterious, ancient mass grave, speculated to be the remains of Britons killed by invading Romans. From Reuters.

Staging Stadiums

2009-06-12T09:53:00.002-05:00

We have been following (of course) NPR's Anne Garrels' coverage of the build up to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, and other reports about the economic situation there. Of course, the official Russian line is that everything looks good, and the Olympics are being touted as the means to convert Sochi into a world-class resort town, with all the amenities it currently lacks.

We also ran across this Denver Post article on a Kansas City firm named Populous (formerly HOK Sport Venue Event) and their role in designing Olympic venues (along with other mega sporting facilities). Apparently, the firm has been involved in every Olympic Games since 1996, including the Chicago 2016 bid and the upcoming London and Sochi games. The firm is responsible for projects like the Autodrome in Dubai, design for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and the new Yankee Stadium.
For anyone wanting to follow the role of construction in mega sporting events, we highly recommend Neil deMause & co's blog (and book) Field of Schemes.
image above: Populous' designs for London 2012 Olympic Stadium.

Upcoming Event, June 25

2009-06-03T00:00:00.002-05:00

We'll be giving a presentation on June 25 at the Orientation Center in Chicago, as part of the Public Culture Lecture Series organized by InCubate and Randall Szott.
We will be talking about some newer developments and projects as well as discussing our broader interest in tourism as a form of public critical culture. Perhaps a teaser image from a recent project will entice you into coming?

Pocket Guide to Hell Tours

2009-06-01T17:17:00.003-05:00

We've posted before about the walking tours by Paul Durica (aka Pocket Guide to Hell) of the "Crime of the Century" - the infamous Chicago murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb. We've since been in touch with Paul, who also lead a tour recently titled "A Working Man's Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition", an exploration of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. While we haven't been on one of Paul's tours (yet), we're really excited by them and hope to have the pleasure of touring Chicago with him soon.
Perhaps we'll attend his next Crime of the Century tour which will be June 7 at 11am, starting at the corner of 49th and Ellis in Kenwood (the tours are free, but Paul would really benefit from $5 donations). Email him to reserve a spot.
And read up on Paul's tour to see what you're in for.
image from Distances Between Ports

Freshkills Park Blog

2009-05-20T15:36:00.003-05:00

We just came across this blog (via) for the Freshkills Park in NY. It's maintained by "members of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation team working to develop Freshkills Park."
While we may suffer from blog overload, this is a really great find, with posts ranging from Freshkills specific topics to larger issues of ecology and renewable energy.

World Information City Conference, Paris

2009-05-19T10:43:00.003-05:00

We just received an announcement for what promises to be an amazing conference in Paris, hosted by World-Information Institute for Futur en Seine. The conference title is "In/Visibility, Access and Urban Zoning," and features John Urry, Eyal Weizman, Brian Holmes, Bruno Latour, Saskia Sassen, Stephan Graham, and more. Takes place Saturday May 30 and Sunday May 31, 2009 14:00-19:30, and admission is free.
We don't think we could have dreamed up a more interesting line up. Unfortunately, we're not in Paris and it doesn't look like there are any simultaneous broadcast streams. Bummer.

Regime Change in Love Land

2009-05-18T23:11:00.002-05:00

A sex theme park, called Love Land, set to open in October in Chongqing, near the Yangtze River in China will, alas, not get the chance to greet visitors with its sexy statue.

via NY Times, China Daily and News.i63.com

Tours for Tough Times

2009-05-16T12:54:00.002-05:00

Our friend Nick recently sent us the Mother Jones list of tourist destinations for recessionary times. Definitely some good suggestions - we visited the Herbert Hoover Museum and Presidential Library earlier this year, and it's definitely worth the trip to Iowa (really great models!).
If none of these are your cup of tea, there's the suggested "Drug Tunnel Museum of Nogales, Arizona". Or, if you prefer your drug tourism above ground, and can get to Spain, take really, really deep breaths.

Scouting the War on Terror

2009-05-16T12:26:00.006-05:00

The NY Times reports on an Explorer Scout program that "trains" young scout to "fight terrorists".
Here's how the article describes the program and its attraction for youth:

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out "active shooters," like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.
"Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he’ll shut up."

And what attracts youth?

One participant, Felix Arce, 16, said he liked "the discipline of the program," which was something he said his life was lacking. "I want to be a lawyer, and this teaches you about how crimes are committed," he said.Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns.

We could go on about the convergence of individualistic/libertarian fantasies, digital games and the dual role these fantasies play in reproducing legal and illegal violence... but that's not really our goal here. But we can't help but be reminded of the stories from a couple of years ago about the production of touristic experiences surrounding illegal border crossing.

Photos: Todd Krainin for The New York Times

The Nude, the Dark and the Slightly Off

2009-05-12T23:33:00.001-05:00

The Nude:
A nudist hotel opens in Germany and, just in case, the Swiss make sure visitors don't wander into the alps in their birthday suit.
The Dark:
A British firm plans a cruise to celebrate the anniversary of the Titanic disaster.
Apparently, the Killing Fields are good for gambling?
Nebraska needs a tourist site really, really bad.
And the Slightly Off:
Did you visit the four corners? Ooooh, so close.
image via

Olympic Round Up

2009-04-08T16:04:00.002-05:00

Whew... there's a lot of media being churned up around the Olympics! Here's a quick report back from some of the recent material that we've been trying to keep up with.
The Chicago Sun Times on Mayor Daley's gambling Chicago's future on the 2016 games. Interesting that he cites all these international cites as success stories and none in North America. Wonder why that is? Could it be that Montreal JUST paid off it's Olympic sized debt a couple of years ago?
The Chicago Trib on how the games would actually obstruct recreation for Chicago residents.
Obama is the "quarterback" of Chicago's bid, according to Mayor Daley, as quoted in USA Today.
The AP covered the IOC visit to Chicago, and mentioned that 205 volunteers held up flags to show the footprint of the proposed stadium. If anyone has pictures of this, please let us know! We'll be looking for them.
The Trib on the pothole protesters, apparently foiled when the city "coincidentally" headed them off by filling potholes on Garfield Blvd just before the protests were scheduled.
Japan's answer to the Chicago bid... we're more peaceful than you. Tokyo's governor says: "Japan hasn't been in any kind of war or conflict since the end of World War II. That's why Tokyo is the most appropriate city to stage the Olympics."
Despite the Oprah, Obama, Michael Jordan endorsement team, some Chicagoans aren't convinced. Maybe they've actually looked at what happens in Olympic host cities.

In news closer to home (for us at least), we'll be working on more tours and analysis of Olympia with collaborator Sarah Ross, now teaming up with long time comrade Lize Mogel to look at the spaces of Olympics and World's Fairs together. Vancouver and Chicago will likely be first on our list of comparative projects.