Binational Urbanism: On the Road to Paradise by Bernd Upmeyer
Valiz/Trancity, 2015
Paperback, 224 pages

Reviewed by Matas ?iup?inskas

Split Identities

Mass migration is not a modern phenomenon. From crusades to slave trade, people have been displaced or have been displacing themselves in order to reach new territories of opportunity. Even if migration has recently become a huge problem and is seen only negatively, some voices express different kinds of opinion. In a contemporary global economy migration does not always end up with permanent displacement, and because of that it becomes possible to look into migrants differently. So what kind of new perspective opens up by this twist of perception"

Bernd Upmeyer argues that in the recent decades a new phenomenon appeared: binational urbanism. A binational urbanist is constantly living between two different cultures and two different sets of urban landscapes. He is not a migrant, but an ultimate commuter who travels not between home and work place, but between two identities of its own, between two cultures from which he breeds. This kind of commuter is presented as the urban avant-garde and not as a victim of faith and context. In Binational Urbanism the author explores not only the lifestyle, but also the whole mechanism of such movement.
You might know Bernd as an editor-in-chief of the MONU - magazine on urbanism. His book follows the conceptual pathway of the magazine by using simple, restrained design la...