Metropolis

Informal 2.0
Remittances, Global Barcelona
master class 2010

Laura Kurgan

Migrants from poor countries send home about $300 billion a year. This is more than three times the global total in foreign aid, making 'remittances' the main source of outside money flowing to the developing world." (New York Times, November 18th, 2007)

Approximately 150 million people remitted money at an average cost of $200 per year in 2007 (1). This workshop will examine the pathways, institutions, and built products of the informal global trade in money. How is the movement of money manifested locally, and in what forms, in urban centers worldwide? The Raval district of Barcelona will be our laboratory for experiments with this phenomenon, and we will use visual, analytic, and design tools to understand the flexible forms and institutions that emerge with informal patterns of global migration.

Rather than reaffirming the common presumption that the West or the developed world establishes institutions which dominate the developing world, we will document and respond to the reverse trend, in which the developing world establishes new patterns in its host cities, Euro by Euro, person by person, often in an ad hoc, makeshift, unapparent ways. Our work will be provisional, since this is a massive, still growing, dynamic global network of physical, informational, and institutional spaces.

Our project will be two-fold:

As a group we will make use of new web-based user-driven software, FLCKR RSS Feeds, and Google API’s, to explore the ways in which new toolkits enable non-experts to create maps and populate them with all sorts of information, and in doing this discover new possibilities for participation, interaction, critique, creation, and dissidence.

Individually, you will ask questions about the movement of money, in the form of visualizations of the multiple cities linked through remittances to - and thus in a certain sense embedded in - the Raval (2). What are the spatial definitions of these multiple cities: what do they look like now? What materials, networks, technologies and programs inform or build them? How does the informal city embed itself in the formal city? How do the informal and the formal cities transform one another? And what might each look like in the future?

(1) Sending Money Home: Worldwide Remittance Flows to Developing and Transition Countries. IFAD publication, 2007
(2) From the Xino to the Raval, Culture and Social Transformation in Central Barcelona. CCCB publication 2006