Christoph Lindner
Professor and Dean of the College of Design | University of Oregon
Eugene, OR, UNITED STATES
Interdisciplinary urban and cultural theorist spanning the fields of architecture, geography, visual culture, and urban planning and design.
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Biography
Christoph Lindner is an expert in the impact of globalization on the space and communities of contemporary cities and can speak to the politics of urban pollution, postindustrial decay, gentrification, urban creativity, and architectural design in cities such as New York, Amsterdam, London, and Paris. At the University of Oregon, he is dean of the College of Design. Lindner is also an honorary research professor in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and was professor of Media and Culture there, where he launched and directed the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis Cities Project and served as founding director of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis. His research and writings span architecture, urban planning, design, art, visual culture, art history, and even James Bond.
Areas of Expertise (7)
Contemporary Architecture and Design
Globalization and Cities
Gentrification
Politics of Urban Pollution
Postindustrial Decay
Urban Creativity
Popular Media and Culture
Links (3)
Media Appearances (6)
From Chicago to Sydney, how New York ignited a global High Line craze
CNN
2017-08-10
Adapting New York's model, however, is not a guarantee for success, according to urban theorist Christoph Lindner. "In many cities -- from London to Bangkok -- there are attempts to replicate the High Line. The majority of them tend to stall and turn out not to be economically viable. Most don't get off the ground," the editor of "Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park" tells CNN...
Welcome to the City of Trump
Fast Co. Design online
2016-11-29
Some may cast blame on blue-city urbanites for overlooking the needs of Americans in rural flyover states during this election, but the fact of the matter is that America is urban. Over 60% of the U.S. population currently resides in cities–a figure likely to only grow. And if most Americans live in urban areas, we must enter the Trump era considering his policies not only through the lens of the federal government, but through the lens of cities themselves. “We have a precarious global population, precarious environmental conditions, and precarious geopolitical future under Trump,” says Christoph Lindner, dean of the University of Oregon College of Design. “All of which means cities will be on the key battlegrounds to negotiating and possibly surviving the Trump urban future.”
The Spy Whom We Loved: The Enduring Appeal of James Bond
Knowledge@Wharton online
2015-11-12
Wheeler Winston Dixon and Christoph Lindner discuss the legacy of James Bond. The latest James Bond blockbuster, Spectre, opened last weekend, and while its flavor may be a little bit different from previous outings, it’s still firmly in the 007 oeuvre, filled with amazing stunts, twisty plots, improbable villainy and of course, its magnetically attractive yet coldly distant hero. Since the first film was made featuring Ian Fleming’s signature secret agent back in the 1960s — Dr. No, starring Sean Connery and filmed for a mere million bucks — the Bond movies have grown steadily more successful and deeply embedded in the culture, evolving with each sequel to fit the moment. But in the modern era of film and society, do we even need 007 anymore? What’s next for the super spy, and what does his ever-growing popularity signify? The Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111, recently interviewed Wheeler Winston Dixon, a professor of film studies at the University of Nebraska, and Christoph Lindner, a professor of media and culture at the University of Amsterdam who has edited a couple of books about the James Bond phenomenon, to discuss those ideas — and to answer that nagging question: Who is the best Bond?
A Brief, Depressing History of the Quest for a Black James Bond
GQ online
2015-10-31
Christoph Lindner, a professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, also remembers the "black Bond" discussion reaching a critical volume around the time of a potential Eddie Murphy casting. But Lindner, who edited the 2003 essay collection The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, insists the conversation about Bond's race has always been a conversation, if not always such a high-profile one. "As long as I can remember, there has been discussion about the possibility of a black Bond, as well as a non-British Bond, a female Bond, and a gay Bond," Lindner writes in an email. The demand for a Bond of color has just spiked again recently, he says, because certain other roles once only ever occupied by white guys are very visibly changing. "Now that the U.S. has had its first black President," Lindner says, "people are asking more forcefully why the role of Bond is not more open to black actors."
Rebel City Amsterdam: Reflections on the Occupied University
The New Metropolitan online
2015-03-16
Amsterdam has long been a transnational hub of countercultural activity, from the religious turmoil of early-modern Europe, to the Provo youth movement of the 1960s, to more recent experiments in underground art and urbanism.
Will the Image of James Bond Ever Be Shaken, Not Stirred?
CBC Radio online
2013-09-04
Anthony Horowitz, the writer behind the continuing Bond novel franchise, has apologized for describing actor Idris Elba as "too street" to play James Bond. The controversial remark has sparked a larger conversation about the immovability of the 007 archetype. The suave secret service agent has been played by Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig — and, like them, Elba is handsome, popular and British. So what's the problem?` For insight, Shad checks in with James Bond scholar Christoph Lindner. He outlines the casting controversy and what it reveals about the way James Bond is seen by producers and the public.
Articles (4)
Slow Art in the Creative City
Space and Culture
2014 Global cities have been studied predominantly in terms of speed and movement, acceleration and circulation. This article examines the relationship between globalization and cities in terms that run counter to such emphases, focusing instead on slowness as a condition in contemporary urban life. Drawing on Jamie Peck’s critique of the creativity syndrome in urban policy, we analyze a series of street photography projects in the city of Amsterdam in order to examine the role of “slow art” in neoliberal urbanization and city profiling. In its capacity to interrupt movement and redirect visual attention, slow art resists both the acceleration of everyday life and the rapid transformation of social space in the global city. Yet, exploited by urban creativity policies, slow art can simultaneously contribute to the gentrification and commodification of cities. We argue that slowness and creativity are deeply implicated in contemporary reshapings of urban social space and that their interrelations merit closer study.
The oblique art of shoes: popular culture, aesthetic pleasure, and the humanities
Journal for Cultural Research
2014 This article addresses popular culture and the humanities. It uses shoes as an object of analysis to interrogate the place and function of aesthetic pleasure in critical thinking and cultural practice in the age of globalization and the neoliberal university. Tracking contemporary articulations of the shoe as a popular cultural object, the discussion begins by recalibrating Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure” in terms of what I call an oblique art of shoes. The discussion also revisits Fredric Jameson’s footwear musings in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to elucidate a missing link between aesthetics, affect, and materiality in the critique of popular culture. The article accordingly works with obliqueness in two ways. First, my approach is oblique in the sense that I address popular culture and the humanities indirectly via the aesthetics and materiality of the shoe. Second, like many popular objects, I find shoes themselves to have an oblique relationship with art and so-called high culture. My argument – developed in relation to examples from visual art, museum exhibitions, urban space, and advertising billboards – is that analyzing the oblique art of shoes can make newly visible the extent to which aesthetic pleasure can inform, and sometimes even constitute, critical practice.
Questioning urban modernity
European Journal of Cultural Studies
2013 This critical introduction to the special issue examines the place and significance of urban modernity as a concept in contemporary urban studies. It draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate that the relation between the city and modernity developed within the western tradition of urban thinking has produced a geographically and historically uneven conceptualisation of urban modernity. This conceptualisation not only involves dynamics of othering, in which cities are differentiated hierarchically, but also obscures a vast array of possible understandings of contemporary urban living. The aim of this introduction is to question this way of thinking about urban modernity in light of globalisation and 21st-century transformations of urban space. It argues that it is crucial, now more than ever, to render the concept of urban modernity attentive to the lived experience of contemporary cities worldwide.
Amsterdam – New York: Transnational photographic exchange in the era of globalization
International Journal of Cultural Studies
2012 This article examines the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to two recent photography exhibitions – one held in Amsterdam and the other in New York City – which were designed as transatlantic mirror events to celebrate the 400-year anniversary of the Dutch ‘discovery’ of Manhattan. Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the exhibitions invited a group of New York artists to photograph Amsterdam and a group of Dutch artists to photograph New York. Both exhibitions claimed that seeing the city from these outsider perspectives enabled new and surprising photographs capable of challenging established images of both cities. Interrogating this claim, the article analyses individual artworks and artists, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibitions, and the urban branding campaigns with which the events were associated.
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