Elche and Olympiades
elche
Les Olympiades
Les Olympiades street view and map
Elche Street view
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Part II: Google Earth
Elche and Olympiades
elche
Les Olympiades
Les Olympiades street view and map
Elche Street view
Final Exam pt I
Trent Huismann
Home as a Workplace
Many people have done some sort of work out of their house or have sun some sort of home based business (such as a daycare) for a short period of time. Some people however, run businesses out of their homes for a good part or for most of their lives. In the case of the building Les Olympiades in France and the town of Elche, Spain, There has been a long history of working from home and as a result the creation of the new identity of the home as a workplace.
In the town of Elche, Spain, has formed a new way of manufacturing and changed the idea of a traditional workplace completely. Instead of waking up every morning to go to a factory or other traditional workplace, the workers of numerous shoe and textile companies have workers stitch and manufacture shoes in their own home. The materials are brought to the workers, and they are completed, and further manufactured at another workers residence, factory, or workshop until there is a finished product. This has somewhat changed the layout of the town and challenges the idea of a traditional workplace by creating small nodes where people work, instead of having a large factory setting.
The building Les Olympiades in France was once part of a large urban building plan in Paris, France in the 1970's. The building was meant to house 16,000 people, and it turned into a failed project when the building did not meet the standards of it's intended target market. In 1974, political refugees mostly from southeast Asia rented out the vacant parts of the building at a reduced rate. The Asiatic community living in the building started to use the underground parking area in the building for market and retail space. Many of the residents of the building also work or own restaurants or retail space in Les Olympiades. And many of the restaurants in the building get most of their produce and goods from other stores in the building. Many of the residents of the building find this convenient, they can work, sleep, and buy goods all in the same building, and many of the residents said that there is almost no need to leave.
With the creation of this new identity as a home laborer, or having your home and your workplace in the same location, people have seen this new workplace setting as an advantage. In Elche, many of the women like the location of their work because they are able to take care of their family and make a living and not have to worry about travel times to a factory. In Les Olympiades, many people enjoy working and living in the same place, because it creates a new sort of social community where people no longer need to go to the bank to get a loan, the community can lend them money. Also, many of the businesses that are in the building depend on one another for survival.
Many of the people that have adapted this “work at home” lifestyle like it quite a bit and many do not want to go back to working in a separate location just because of convenience. The only real instance of a major disadvantage is in Elche, where labor contracts are not given out and people are often times underpaid. The home labor in Elche will soon be made legal, meaning that labor contracts and minimum wage standards will be enforced.
In both cities, the residents have had a significant impact on their physical landscape. In Elche, the town has been called by Multiplicity as “a network of production points that embraces the entire city”. The reason why Multiplicity says this is because production is scattered throughout the city, and there is a network of vehicles and people keeping production going the residents have gotten rid of the traditional factory setting, in favor of a workplace at home. Multiplicity calls Les Olympiades “a city in a building”, due to the large amount of people and businesses in one building. Residents of Les Olympiades have taken the idea of a traditional home, and transformed it into a small community and a network of businesses and people that rely upon one another for survival. In the cases of Elche, Spain or the Les Olympiades building in France, residents have challenged the idea of a traditional workplace in favor of working from home.
Home as a Workplace
Many people have done some sort of work out of their house or have sun some sort of home based business (such as a daycare) for a short period of time. Some people however, run businesses out of their homes for a good part or for most of their lives. In the case of the building Les Olympiades in France and the town of Elche, Spain, There has been a long history of working from home and as a result the creation of the new identity of the home as a workplace.
In the town of Elche, Spain, has formed a new way of manufacturing and changed the idea of a traditional workplace completely. Instead of waking up every morning to go to a factory or other traditional workplace, the workers of numerous shoe and textile companies have workers stitch and manufacture shoes in their own home. The materials are brought to the workers, and they are completed, and further manufactured at another workers residence, factory, or workshop until there is a finished product. This has somewhat changed the layout of the town and challenges the idea of a traditional workplace by creating small nodes where people work, instead of having a large factory setting.
The building Les Olympiades in France was once part of a large urban building plan in Paris, France in the 1970's. The building was meant to house 16,000 people, and it turned into a failed project when the building did not meet the standards of it's intended target market. In 1974, political refugees mostly from southeast Asia rented out the vacant parts of the building at a reduced rate. The Asiatic community living in the building started to use the underground parking area in the building for market and retail space. Many of the residents of the building also work or own restaurants or retail space in Les Olympiades. And many of the restaurants in the building get most of their produce and goods from other stores in the building. Many of the residents of the building find this convenient, they can work, sleep, and buy goods all in the same building, and many of the residents said that there is almost no need to leave.
With the creation of this new identity as a home laborer, or having your home and your workplace in the same location, people have seen this new workplace setting as an advantage. In Elche, many of the women like the location of their work because they are able to take care of their family and make a living and not have to worry about travel times to a factory. In Les Olympiades, many people enjoy working and living in the same place, because it creates a new sort of social community where people no longer need to go to the bank to get a loan, the community can lend them money. Also, many of the businesses that are in the building depend on one another for survival.
Many of the people that have adapted this “work at home” lifestyle like it quite a bit and many do not want to go back to working in a separate location just because of convenience. The only real instance of a major disadvantage is in Elche, where labor contracts are not given out and people are often times underpaid. The home labor in Elche will soon be made legal, meaning that labor contracts and minimum wage standards will be enforced.
In both cities, the residents have had a significant impact on their physical landscape. In Elche, the town has been called by Multiplicity as “a network of production points that embraces the entire city”. The reason why Multiplicity says this is because production is scattered throughout the city, and there is a network of vehicles and people keeping production going the residents have gotten rid of the traditional factory setting, in favor of a workplace at home. Multiplicity calls Les Olympiades “a city in a building”, due to the large amount of people and businesses in one building. Residents of Les Olympiades have taken the idea of a traditional home, and transformed it into a small community and a network of businesses and people that rely upon one another for survival. In the cases of Elche, Spain or the Les Olympiades building in France, residents have challenged the idea of a traditional workplace in favor of working from home.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
The Grapes of Wrath
New worlds New identities
The Grapes of Wrath and the dust bowl
When most people think of migration to another place and the struggle of having an identity crisis of who they are and why they are there, we most often times think of people that have moved to another country struggling to assimilate, but we often times don't think of migration in our own country and the concept of a new “world” as a place in our own country. I studied the film The Grapes of Wrath, which is a film based on a book by John Steinbeck which documents a family's migration from Oklahoma to California during the 1930's “dust bowl”.
The dust bowl period in the United States is the period during the depression when the farmlands of Oklahoma and the southwest where being over farmed. As a result, the land started drying up, and dust storms started destroying crops. Farmers could no longer support themselves, and got evicted off of their land. This sparked a massive migration of people out of the southwest to places like California, where they could work on a farm. As a result of this massive migration, there was too many people looking for work on the California farms, and the local people tried to drive them out by treating them less than human. Poverty and starvation often times ran rampant among the farmers that moved to California. Throughout the dust bowl era, roughly 116,000 people where displaced(1) from the southwest, and most of those people came from Oklahoma.
In the film, the main character Tom Jode gets paroled from prison for manslaughter. He comes back to his home town in Oklahoma, where he finds out that almost the entire town was displaced due to farms not being able to produce crops. Tom finds his family, who are moving to California the following day. The family moves to California and Tom begins to realize that even though he came from a community where people often times helped each other and stood united together, that now in order to survive you have to become selfish and think only about what's best for you and your family. His old neighbor Muely Graves quoted “what happens to other people I don't care about, I only care about myself”. Tom quickly learns this and shows it by working out in a farmers crops when some of his old friends and neighbors are outside of the farm protesting the low wages. Tom Jode and his family eventually find a government run camp where they live and try to find a legal form of employment. At the end of the movie, the police try to capture Tom Jode for striking a police officer, and Tom ends up leaving his family to avoid going back to prison.
One of the identity struggles that Tom and his family faced is the same situation that many migrant workers in the town of Elche, Spain face. Having the identity of being an illegal underpaid worker. Tom and his family cannot find a job legally and the people that he works for in the film refuse to sign a contract with him or any other displaced farmer so that they can pay them next to nothing for wages. One of the labor contractors in The Grapes of Wrath quotes “if you want the work take it, otherwise there are 200 other people that will”. Likewise, Vicentina Navarro also faces the same situation and quotes:
“It all stays in the hands of the contractors, of the distributors and manufacture is paid very little. They say: well, if you want to do it good! Otherwise... nothing. ”(2)
Unfortunately, for Navarro and for Tom Jode, this type of labor is often times not stopped because it drives the prices of goods down and boosts sales. In some cases, there are a few labor contracts given out to keep the business “legal” but the places that do this also keep the number of legal workers to a minimum so that they can still drive down the cost of labor far below average. Tom Jode and his family faced this issue of not being able to find legal employment multiple times in the film. Navarro also quotes:
“The authorities say that it will be legalized. But there are many workshops where the workers are employed completely illegally. In others they make contracts for some and others are employed illegally. That is all I know. It would be very good for me to have a contract or something like it.”(3)
The struggles that many illegal workers these days face of having the identity of an illegal undocumented worker with little to no job security is not that different from the struggles that Tom Jode and other people from the dust bowl era faced.
Citations
(1)Gregory, N. James. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. Oxford University Press. 1991
(2)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (155)
(3)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (156)
The Grapes of Wrath and the dust bowl
When most people think of migration to another place and the struggle of having an identity crisis of who they are and why they are there, we most often times think of people that have moved to another country struggling to assimilate, but we often times don't think of migration in our own country and the concept of a new “world” as a place in our own country. I studied the film The Grapes of Wrath, which is a film based on a book by John Steinbeck which documents a family's migration from Oklahoma to California during the 1930's “dust bowl”.
The dust bowl period in the United States is the period during the depression when the farmlands of Oklahoma and the southwest where being over farmed. As a result, the land started drying up, and dust storms started destroying crops. Farmers could no longer support themselves, and got evicted off of their land. This sparked a massive migration of people out of the southwest to places like California, where they could work on a farm. As a result of this massive migration, there was too many people looking for work on the California farms, and the local people tried to drive them out by treating them less than human. Poverty and starvation often times ran rampant among the farmers that moved to California. Throughout the dust bowl era, roughly 116,000 people where displaced(1) from the southwest, and most of those people came from Oklahoma.
In the film, the main character Tom Jode gets paroled from prison for manslaughter. He comes back to his home town in Oklahoma, where he finds out that almost the entire town was displaced due to farms not being able to produce crops. Tom finds his family, who are moving to California the following day. The family moves to California and Tom begins to realize that even though he came from a community where people often times helped each other and stood united together, that now in order to survive you have to become selfish and think only about what's best for you and your family. His old neighbor Muely Graves quoted “what happens to other people I don't care about, I only care about myself”. Tom quickly learns this and shows it by working out in a farmers crops when some of his old friends and neighbors are outside of the farm protesting the low wages. Tom Jode and his family eventually find a government run camp where they live and try to find a legal form of employment. At the end of the movie, the police try to capture Tom Jode for striking a police officer, and Tom ends up leaving his family to avoid going back to prison.
One of the identity struggles that Tom and his family faced is the same situation that many migrant workers in the town of Elche, Spain face. Having the identity of being an illegal underpaid worker. Tom and his family cannot find a job legally and the people that he works for in the film refuse to sign a contract with him or any other displaced farmer so that they can pay them next to nothing for wages. One of the labor contractors in The Grapes of Wrath quotes “if you want the work take it, otherwise there are 200 other people that will”. Likewise, Vicentina Navarro also faces the same situation and quotes:
“It all stays in the hands of the contractors, of the distributors and manufacture is paid very little. They say: well, if you want to do it good! Otherwise... nothing. ”(2)
Unfortunately, for Navarro and for Tom Jode, this type of labor is often times not stopped because it drives the prices of goods down and boosts sales. In some cases, there are a few labor contracts given out to keep the business “legal” but the places that do this also keep the number of legal workers to a minimum so that they can still drive down the cost of labor far below average. Tom Jode and his family faced this issue of not being able to find legal employment multiple times in the film. Navarro also quotes:
“The authorities say that it will be legalized. But there are many workshops where the workers are employed completely illegally. In others they make contracts for some and others are employed illegally. That is all I know. It would be very good for me to have a contract or something like it.”(3)
The struggles that many illegal workers these days face of having the identity of an illegal undocumented worker with little to no job security is not that different from the struggles that Tom Jode and other people from the dust bowl era faced.
Citations
(1)Gregory, N. James. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. Oxford University Press. 1991
(2)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (155)
(3)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (156)
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