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TOURIST CAPSULE In early 70's the first capsular hotel was built in Tokyo.
It is the Nakatan hotel projected by Japanese metabolist architect Kisho
Kurokawa. In his "Capsule Declaration" (1969) he wrote that
the capsule is "a device which has become a living space in itself
in the sense that man cannot hope to live elsewhere". In 2006 one
of the most extravagant resorts will be opened in front of Dubai - "The
World". It is artificial archipelago of small islands in the shape
of the map of the world, with luxurious villas and sophisticated communication
and recreation devices. Each island is a capsule for itself, privately
owned enclosed living unit. Since the publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and particularly its English translation we are witnessing an ongoing debate on the notion of “bare life”. The debate, which has been situated in the context of law and juridical questions, became a political debate par excellence in the field of human rights and biopolitics. Speaking in simple biopolitical terms, “bare life” refers to the body’s mere “vegetative” being, separated from the particular qualities, the social and historical attributes that constitute individual subjectivity. Agamben analyzes the notion of “bare life” in concentration camp, showing us that the camp is actually a biopolitical paradigm for the contemporary West. The camp is a state of exception, a state of emergency upon which the entire political and legal system of the First World is built. The camp is always a parallel system, literally a 'para'-system, an exterritorialized site, where the usual legal system does not apply. And yet, exactly as such, it is a place or even a non-place which the regular legal system can turn to any time. The question derived is: can a concept of a "camp" serve as a role model for any kind of capsularity we are looking at? In this regard we have undertaken a research on the unique situation in Croatia, where in the years of emergency the tourist infrastructure served as infrastructure for refugees and internally displaced persons. The paralels between the "tourism capsule" and the "emergency capsule" are difficult and obvious at the same time, since both dwell on the concept of more or less improvized urban and architectonic solutions, with a strong signature of temporariness and relative isolation. Improvisation, temporariness and isolation can generate permanent tensions, conflicts as well as potentials and benefits for the local environment. First we focused on internal organization of the tourist
infrastructure (hotels) during different times and uses by different groups
of people (before emergency, during emergency, after emergency). The method
of analyzing the internal organization of the hotels was tested on three
case studies. In the forthcoming research we would also like to focus
on time and user-based (before emergency, during emergency, after emergency)
transformations regarding In this respect we are addressing the questions of continuity
of the tourist economy in the case of Croatian coast. By employing a bottom
up method we are aiming at opening up a perspective on identification
of potentials and possible conflicts regarding creation, enduring and
re-creation of identity and its spatial impacts in local and broader terms. . |