New Conditions - Anna Greenspan - Urban Change - Symposium (6)

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  I'm happy to introduce Anna Greenspan. She is an assistant professor of media studies at NYU Shanghai. She holds a doctorate in philosophy and Kubernetes culture from the University of Warwick, UK. Her research focuses on the philosophy of time, urban Asia and technological trends. Her most recent book is Shanghai…

• 00:04:30

  And as I say, I think this is, you know, I've been thinking about this in the context of China, but I think it also has a really important relevance to what's going on in Europe today, because a lot of the places where migration is happening to are cities that do have a vibrant street life. And as we know, even…

• 00:09:51

  So just to I'm going to really race through this kind of urban planning history that many of you just know very well probably better than I do in many cases but obviously this arc modernist of Le Corbusier who had this kind of real reaction against the street right. Houseman's Paris who really destroyed the city. He…

• 00:13:11

  So anytime you see this in urban China, you know that that area is about to be torn down. And yeah. As you can see, there's a sort of half demolished bulldozers kind of situation in the area. But yet the street survives. This was an old area where the textile market lived and the market just stays. And I haven't been…

• 00:16:45

  Does anyone know the Jetsons? Okay. So it's done by Hanna-Barbera. Who also created the Flintstones. A 1960s television show. That projects the 1950s family into the future. So a very traditional 1950s family. That already by the 1960s is looking out of date. Gets projected into the future with their robot made…

• 00:20:01

  And this is celebrated in this Hollywood movie, Chef, where the Michelin star restaurant sort of Michelin star chef kind of loses his authenticity, loses his creativity, and has to return to the street to sort of open a street cart to gain this sort of authentic creativity back. Not only in North America, again…

• 00:23:37

  This isn't really... It's going to take too long to load, but you can get the idea, right? So a project that sort of celebrates street food. And I guess this raises this question of models, right? How does one intervene in these discourses? And so perhaps a sort of celebration is a way of intervening. And so perhaps…

• 00:29:02

  But precisely at this time, Shenzhen itself is starting to question Shenzhai and ask, you know, or many are arguing, oh we're beyond this, this was just a stage of development, piracy is a stage of development that everyone goes through, we are no longer Shenzhai, we want to brand ourselves, and they look to models…