This document summarizes Stephen Graham's paper on the politics of infrastructure disruptions. It discusses how disruptions can "frontstage" infrastructure that is usually invisible. It notes that infrastructure is often seen as fixed, but is actually vulnerable. Disruptions reveal complex politics and power geometries. They can challenge naturalized views of technology and systems, exposing myths of their stability and regulation. Responses to disruptions also reveal inequalities and securitization of flows.
Draft of article sent to academic and public administration journal for review this weekend. Concerns the New Orleans recovery process, civic engagement and questions regarding environmental sustainability and leadership.
Vermette - Transcript – Chapter 5 – Social Interaction and Everyday Life in t...Linda Vermette
This document provides an overview of Chapter 5 from the textbook "Introduction to Sociology Ninth Edition" which discusses social interaction and everyday life in the age of the internet. It introduces key concepts such as impression management, audience segregation, civil inattention, and non-verbal communication. It also outlines several sociological theories of social interaction including dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. Finally, it examines contemporary research linking macrosociology and microsociology, and considers unanswered questions around how social interaction and front/back regions are changing in the digital age.
Tick TOCS Tick TOCS - channeling change through theory into scenariosWendy Schultz
Describes an original scenario-building method used to explore futures for education, based on combining scanning output with specific social change theories. The social change theories provided logical narrative arcs to evolve different futures from starting points in the present.
This brief is a result of a January 30, 2012 program with Dr. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute. DCFR explored the prospects for cities as growth engines and how to think about their development going forward.
This document summarizes key concepts from Chapter 3 of the textbook "Culture and Society" on the sociological study of culture. It discusses how culture differs from society, the basic components of culture, and different types of human societies from hunting/gathering to industrialized. It also covers topics like colonialism, cultural conformity, diversity and relativism. The chapter questions whether biological or cultural factors influence behavior more and how the internet may impact global versus local cultures.
Representative Tracy Heard launched a 2010 public policy forum series focused on civic participation and voting rights. The first forum was held at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, where Heard emphasized that democracy allows the majority to influence policy outcomes through voting. An intentional effort has been made to discourage minority voting by spreading misinformation. Upcoming forums in April and May will address the state of black Ohio and issues impacting urban communities and young men.
Draft of article sent to academic and public administration journal for review this weekend. Concerns the New Orleans recovery process, civic engagement and questions regarding environmental sustainability and leadership.
Vermette - Transcript – Chapter 5 – Social Interaction and Everyday Life in t...Linda Vermette
This document provides an overview of Chapter 5 from the textbook "Introduction to Sociology Ninth Edition" which discusses social interaction and everyday life in the age of the internet. It introduces key concepts such as impression management, audience segregation, civil inattention, and non-verbal communication. It also outlines several sociological theories of social interaction including dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. Finally, it examines contemporary research linking macrosociology and microsociology, and considers unanswered questions around how social interaction and front/back regions are changing in the digital age.
Tick TOCS Tick TOCS - channeling change through theory into scenariosWendy Schultz
Describes an original scenario-building method used to explore futures for education, based on combining scanning output with specific social change theories. The social change theories provided logical narrative arcs to evolve different futures from starting points in the present.
This brief is a result of a January 30, 2012 program with Dr. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute. DCFR explored the prospects for cities as growth engines and how to think about their development going forward.
This document summarizes key concepts from Chapter 3 of the textbook "Culture and Society" on the sociological study of culture. It discusses how culture differs from society, the basic components of culture, and different types of human societies from hunting/gathering to industrialized. It also covers topics like colonialism, cultural conformity, diversity and relativism. The chapter questions whether biological or cultural factors influence behavior more and how the internet may impact global versus local cultures.
Representative Tracy Heard launched a 2010 public policy forum series focused on civic participation and voting rights. The first forum was held at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, where Heard emphasized that democracy allows the majority to influence policy outcomes through voting. An intentional effort has been made to discourage minority voting by spreading misinformation. Upcoming forums in April and May will address the state of black Ohio and issues impacting urban communities and young men.
Prof, Stephen graham Newcastle University disrupted cities: when infrastruct...Stephen Graham
This document discusses infrastructure disruptions in urban areas and their social and political impacts. It begins by noting the increasing urbanization of the global population and dependence on infrastructure networks. Infrastructure disruptions can reveal the politics underlying urban systems by frontstaging the normally invisible backstage areas. Disruptions may be caused by technical failures, natural disasters, or political mobilization targeting infrastructure. They can have cascading effects and reveal interdependencies. The document examines examples like blackouts, water shortages, and digital disruptions. It argues that infrastructure disruptions should not be seen as isolated technical issues but as revealing of social, political, and economic contexts, and can be used as forms of protest or warfare.
Infrastructure Disruptions as Extreme EventsStephen Graham
This document summarizes a presentation about infrastructure disruptions caused by extreme events. It discusses how modern societies have become highly dependent on complex infrastructure networks for mobility, resources, and connectivity. When these infrastructure systems experience failures or disruptions, it can expose vulnerabilities in urban political ecologies and have cascading impacts. The document examines examples like blackouts, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, disease outbreaks like SARS, conflicts that involve targeting civilian infrastructure, and how infrastructure disruptions can frontstage the normally invisible backstage systems and destabilize taken-for-granted services. It argues that infrastructure networks are more vulnerable and unpredictable than often assumed.
Stephen graham infrastructure disruptions as extreme eventsStephen Graham
An overview of how disruptions to the networks of infrastructure than keep cities running -- water, energy, transport and communications -- bring crises and emergency on a highly urbanised planet
Physical and virtual mobilities are interdependent and co-constitutive, not separate realms. Early perspectives viewed information and communication technologies (ICTs) as enabling dematerialization and substitution of physical travel and infrastructure. However, empirical evidence shows ICT and transport growth are parallel. ICTs are embedded in material networks requiring industry and infrastructure. They orchestrate complex combinations of electronic and physical mobilities across scales. Understanding mobilities requires seeing their inseparability rather than a binary view of virtual versus real worlds.
This presentation is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of
radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward
Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention
in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality’—so
central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores
in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the super-rich.
Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.
To Kill A Mockingbird Book Review Essay.pdfTakyra Roberts
Essay on to Kill a Mockingbird | To Kill A Mockingbird | Free 30-day .... Literary essay for to kill a mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird - critical review - GCSE English - Marked by .... To Kill a Mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird Essay Assignment - Google Docs. Essay on To Kill a Mockingbird: Writing Guide for Every Student .... To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - Insights | Instaread. Descriptive Essay: To kill a mockingbird essay. To Kill a Mockingbird Film Review Free Essay Example. To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee (Book Review) – Black Roses.
This document discusses the history and challenges of network visualization. It outlines James Moody's presentation on the topic, which traces the evolution of network visualization from Euler's early work to modern approaches. Key challenges discussed include determining which social space to represent, how to handle multidimensional data, and dealing with issues of scale and density in large networks. The document argues that visualization allows researchers to gain insights that metrics alone cannot provide, by making the invisible visible and communicating complex features effectively.
Stephen graham Nature, Cities and the ‘Anthropocene’Stephen Graham
An analysis of what the idea of the 'Anthropocene' -- our latest Geological epoch marked by the human shaping of the Earth -- means for how we think about cities
Sdal pires, bianica, riots in an urban slum 140813kimlyman
This document summarizes a talk on using computational modeling methods to explore social phenomena like urban riots. It discusses how the speaker built an agent-based model integrating agent-based modeling, social network analysis, and geographic information systems to model riots in Kibera, an urban slum in Nairobi. The model represents slum residents as agents that interact locally based on social networks and activities over the physical environment. It aims to explore how riots may emerge from identity disruptions, social influence diffusion, and changing economic conditions. The speaker concludes the model provides a foundation for further studying collective action and applying computational modeling across various social science domains.
This document discusses the history of privacy through the centuries and in the digital age. It covers how privacy existed in pre-digital times and primitive villages. Key events that shaped privacy laws include Entick v. Carrington in 1765 which established limits on search and seizure powers. The document also discusses how modern surveillance like the NSA's PRISM program threatens privacy, as well as calls for more regulation of data collection by social media companies.
This document discusses cultural networks through three lenses: systems, cities, and memes. It examines systems theory and how properties emerge at the whole system level. It explores cities as complex systems and how physical and digital networks intersect and influence one another. It also analyzes memes as basic units of cultural information that spread analogously to genes and discusses specific examples like LOLCATs. The document presents different approaches to studying the relationships between cities and telecommunications technologies.
Legibility, Privacy and Creativity: Linked Data in a Surveillance SocietyChristopher Brewster
The document discusses the concepts of legibility and privacy in the context of emerging technologies like linked data and the Internet of Things. It argues that while these technologies provide certain new freedoms, they also reduce illegible space and could potentially limit creativity and innovation by making everything more visible to governments and reducing privacy. Total surveillance societies may lose trust, encourage conformity over exploration, and see a loss of creativity that is important for change. The author concludes these technologies may reduce illegibility in damaging cultural and political ways unless spaces of privacy can still be maintained.
This document summarizes research on screens and spectatorship. It discusses three modes of engagement between humans and screens: absorption, immersion, and occupation. Absorption encourages passive spectatorship where the spectator is absorbed into the virtual world presented on the screen. Immersion encourages active spectatorship where the screen content comes into the spectator's physical space. Occupation builds on immersion by requiring physical activity from the spectator as they discover and interact with the screen and space. The research aims to understand how screens impact experiences and identities.
10 More than a Pretty Picture: Visual Thinking in Network Studiesdnac
Visualization has been important in network science since its beginnings to make invisible structures visible. While metrics can describe networks, visualizations allow researchers to see relationships and patterns across multiple dimensions that numbers alone cannot reveal. Effective network visualizations communicate insights that would be difficult to understand otherwise, by depicting global patterns and local details simultaneously in a way that builds intuition about the network's structure and generating processes. However, challenges include lack of consistent display frameworks, integrating too much multidimensional information, and issues of scale for large and dynamic networks.
The document discusses the history of network visualization and some challenges in creating effective network visualizations. It outlines how network visualization has relied on visual representations since the early work of Euler, Moreno, and others. Over time, visualizations evolved from artistic productions to attempts to make them more scientific. However, network images are now often oversimplified or used without proper context. Creating effective visualizations requires addressing issues like choosing an appropriate social space, deciding whether to show local or global patterns, and how to represent multidimensional network data.
Two Useful Theories for Environmental StudiesMichael Lehman
This document discusses two theories that can be useful for environmental studies: transnationalism and actor-network theory. Transnationalism examines interactions that transcend national boundaries, such as flows of ideas, capital and people between countries. It recognizes that the nation is an ideological construct and the environment does not stop at political borders. Actor-network theory views society as networks of human and non-human actors, treating things like animals, technology, pollution as important actants. It argues that power comes from connections within networks rather than inherent qualities. Both theories emphasize the importance of understanding connections between people and things across geographical and political boundaries for studying environmental issues.
Elite Avenues: Flyovers, Freeways and the Politics of Urban MobilityStephen Graham
Flyovers and elevated highways are built in many global cities to privilege the movement of elites and separate spatial movement. However, they often displace large numbers of poorer residents and further segregate access to mobility. While touted as symbols of modernity, these projects actually reflect ongoing struggles over who can freely move and are contested by those with constrained mobility. Alternatives are being explored in some cities that repurpose this space for equitable public use rather than private automobility.
Bunkering down the geography of elite residential basement development in londonStephen Graham
Much has been written about the “luxified skies” – “high-rise”, “super-prime” housing for the super-rich – that has been sprouting up across London. Thus far, less attention has been paid to what has been happening to the subterranean city. The “luxified skies” are highly visible reminders of elite “verticality” but, what we might term, “luxified troglodytism” is also an important aspect of London’s changing geometries of wealth, power and architecture. In this paper, we map out in detail the emerging subterranean geography of residential basement development across London since 2008. The very wealthy, it turns out, have been “bunkering down” across certain parts of London, to an extent hitherto little understood. Some 7,328 new residential basements underneath existing houses had been granted planning permission up to late-2019. Over 1,500 of them are of a size that their locations might best be thought of as marking out a distinct plutocratic “basement belt”.
Prof, Stephen graham Newcastle University disrupted cities: when infrastruct...Stephen Graham
This document discusses infrastructure disruptions in urban areas and their social and political impacts. It begins by noting the increasing urbanization of the global population and dependence on infrastructure networks. Infrastructure disruptions can reveal the politics underlying urban systems by frontstaging the normally invisible backstage areas. Disruptions may be caused by technical failures, natural disasters, or political mobilization targeting infrastructure. They can have cascading effects and reveal interdependencies. The document examines examples like blackouts, water shortages, and digital disruptions. It argues that infrastructure disruptions should not be seen as isolated technical issues but as revealing of social, political, and economic contexts, and can be used as forms of protest or warfare.
Infrastructure Disruptions as Extreme EventsStephen Graham
This document summarizes a presentation about infrastructure disruptions caused by extreme events. It discusses how modern societies have become highly dependent on complex infrastructure networks for mobility, resources, and connectivity. When these infrastructure systems experience failures or disruptions, it can expose vulnerabilities in urban political ecologies and have cascading impacts. The document examines examples like blackouts, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, disease outbreaks like SARS, conflicts that involve targeting civilian infrastructure, and how infrastructure disruptions can frontstage the normally invisible backstage systems and destabilize taken-for-granted services. It argues that infrastructure networks are more vulnerable and unpredictable than often assumed.
Stephen graham infrastructure disruptions as extreme eventsStephen Graham
An overview of how disruptions to the networks of infrastructure than keep cities running -- water, energy, transport and communications -- bring crises and emergency on a highly urbanised planet
Physical and virtual mobilities are interdependent and co-constitutive, not separate realms. Early perspectives viewed information and communication technologies (ICTs) as enabling dematerialization and substitution of physical travel and infrastructure. However, empirical evidence shows ICT and transport growth are parallel. ICTs are embedded in material networks requiring industry and infrastructure. They orchestrate complex combinations of electronic and physical mobilities across scales. Understanding mobilities requires seeing their inseparability rather than a binary view of virtual versus real worlds.
This presentation is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of
radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward
Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention
in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality’—so
central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores
in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the super-rich.
Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.
To Kill A Mockingbird Book Review Essay.pdfTakyra Roberts
Essay on to Kill a Mockingbird | To Kill A Mockingbird | Free 30-day .... Literary essay for to kill a mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird - critical review - GCSE English - Marked by .... To Kill a Mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird Essay Assignment - Google Docs. Essay on To Kill a Mockingbird: Writing Guide for Every Student .... To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - Insights | Instaread. Descriptive Essay: To kill a mockingbird essay. To Kill a Mockingbird Film Review Free Essay Example. To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee (Book Review) – Black Roses.
This document discusses the history and challenges of network visualization. It outlines James Moody's presentation on the topic, which traces the evolution of network visualization from Euler's early work to modern approaches. Key challenges discussed include determining which social space to represent, how to handle multidimensional data, and dealing with issues of scale and density in large networks. The document argues that visualization allows researchers to gain insights that metrics alone cannot provide, by making the invisible visible and communicating complex features effectively.
Stephen graham Nature, Cities and the ‘Anthropocene’Stephen Graham
An analysis of what the idea of the 'Anthropocene' -- our latest Geological epoch marked by the human shaping of the Earth -- means for how we think about cities
Sdal pires, bianica, riots in an urban slum 140813kimlyman
This document summarizes a talk on using computational modeling methods to explore social phenomena like urban riots. It discusses how the speaker built an agent-based model integrating agent-based modeling, social network analysis, and geographic information systems to model riots in Kibera, an urban slum in Nairobi. The model represents slum residents as agents that interact locally based on social networks and activities over the physical environment. It aims to explore how riots may emerge from identity disruptions, social influence diffusion, and changing economic conditions. The speaker concludes the model provides a foundation for further studying collective action and applying computational modeling across various social science domains.
This document discusses the history of privacy through the centuries and in the digital age. It covers how privacy existed in pre-digital times and primitive villages. Key events that shaped privacy laws include Entick v. Carrington in 1765 which established limits on search and seizure powers. The document also discusses how modern surveillance like the NSA's PRISM program threatens privacy, as well as calls for more regulation of data collection by social media companies.
This document discusses cultural networks through three lenses: systems, cities, and memes. It examines systems theory and how properties emerge at the whole system level. It explores cities as complex systems and how physical and digital networks intersect and influence one another. It also analyzes memes as basic units of cultural information that spread analogously to genes and discusses specific examples like LOLCATs. The document presents different approaches to studying the relationships between cities and telecommunications technologies.
Legibility, Privacy and Creativity: Linked Data in a Surveillance SocietyChristopher Brewster
The document discusses the concepts of legibility and privacy in the context of emerging technologies like linked data and the Internet of Things. It argues that while these technologies provide certain new freedoms, they also reduce illegible space and could potentially limit creativity and innovation by making everything more visible to governments and reducing privacy. Total surveillance societies may lose trust, encourage conformity over exploration, and see a loss of creativity that is important for change. The author concludes these technologies may reduce illegibility in damaging cultural and political ways unless spaces of privacy can still be maintained.
This document summarizes research on screens and spectatorship. It discusses three modes of engagement between humans and screens: absorption, immersion, and occupation. Absorption encourages passive spectatorship where the spectator is absorbed into the virtual world presented on the screen. Immersion encourages active spectatorship where the screen content comes into the spectator's physical space. Occupation builds on immersion by requiring physical activity from the spectator as they discover and interact with the screen and space. The research aims to understand how screens impact experiences and identities.
10 More than a Pretty Picture: Visual Thinking in Network Studiesdnac
Visualization has been important in network science since its beginnings to make invisible structures visible. While metrics can describe networks, visualizations allow researchers to see relationships and patterns across multiple dimensions that numbers alone cannot reveal. Effective network visualizations communicate insights that would be difficult to understand otherwise, by depicting global patterns and local details simultaneously in a way that builds intuition about the network's structure and generating processes. However, challenges include lack of consistent display frameworks, integrating too much multidimensional information, and issues of scale for large and dynamic networks.
The document discusses the history of network visualization and some challenges in creating effective network visualizations. It outlines how network visualization has relied on visual representations since the early work of Euler, Moreno, and others. Over time, visualizations evolved from artistic productions to attempts to make them more scientific. However, network images are now often oversimplified or used without proper context. Creating effective visualizations requires addressing issues like choosing an appropriate social space, deciding whether to show local or global patterns, and how to represent multidimensional network data.
Two Useful Theories for Environmental StudiesMichael Lehman
This document discusses two theories that can be useful for environmental studies: transnationalism and actor-network theory. Transnationalism examines interactions that transcend national boundaries, such as flows of ideas, capital and people between countries. It recognizes that the nation is an ideological construct and the environment does not stop at political borders. Actor-network theory views society as networks of human and non-human actors, treating things like animals, technology, pollution as important actants. It argues that power comes from connections within networks rather than inherent qualities. Both theories emphasize the importance of understanding connections between people and things across geographical and political boundaries for studying environmental issues.
Elite Avenues: Flyovers, Freeways and the Politics of Urban MobilityStephen Graham
Flyovers and elevated highways are built in many global cities to privilege the movement of elites and separate spatial movement. However, they often displace large numbers of poorer residents and further segregate access to mobility. While touted as symbols of modernity, these projects actually reflect ongoing struggles over who can freely move and are contested by those with constrained mobility. Alternatives are being explored in some cities that repurpose this space for equitable public use rather than private automobility.
Bunkering down the geography of elite residential basement development in londonStephen Graham
Much has been written about the “luxified skies” – “high-rise”, “super-prime” housing for the super-rich – that has been sprouting up across London. Thus far, less attention has been paid to what has been happening to the subterranean city. The “luxified skies” are highly visible reminders of elite “verticality” but, what we might term, “luxified troglodytism” is also an important aspect of London’s changing geometries of wealth, power and architecture. In this paper, we map out in detail the emerging subterranean geography of residential basement development across London since 2008. The very wealthy, it turns out, have been “bunkering down” across certain parts of London, to an extent hitherto little understood. Some 7,328 new residential basements underneath existing houses had been granted planning permission up to late-2019. Over 1,500 of them are of a size that their locations might best be thought of as marking out a distinct plutocratic “basement belt”.
Vertical : The city from satellites to bunkersStephen Graham
A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world.
Offering a critical response to the dominant vision of the smart city, this talk seeks to look beyond the seductive imagery and hype that surrounds emerging smart city paradigms. In their place, it explores arrange of critical perspectives to smart city planning that are emerging across the social sciences and activist communities, in various places across the world. These critiques centre, broadly, on ways in which smart city paradigms radically deepen urban surveillance ; the way they embed power into corporate urban operating systems; the way the glossy hype and marketing hides tendencies toward authoritarianism and centralized power ; and the way in which ‘smart’ city labels are used to camouflage the construction of highly elitist urban enclaves. The talk will finish by exploring efforts to mobilise digital media to more democratic and egalitarian urban vision.
Transcending the surface graham: The New Techno-Utopian Dreams (and Realities...Stephen Graham
A presentation about a range of utopian projects for moving about cities above and below the surface via tunnels. orbital travel, supersonic airliners and vertical take off and autonomous 'sky taxis'.
Subterranean urban politics: Insurgency, sanctuary, exploration and tourismStephen Graham
A presentation, drawing on my book 'Vertical', exploring the politics of the urban subterranean. The wide-ranging discussion explores the subterranean as a source of class threats and insurrections; as a sanctuary; as a space of exploration; and as a site for tourism.
Elite avenues: Flyovers, freeways and the politics of urban mobilityStephen Graham
This document provides a summary and analysis of the politics and impacts of elevated highways known as flyovers. It discusses how flyovers have been promoted by urban elites and planners as symbols of modernity and progress, yet often privilege the mobility of the wealthy while negatively impacting poorer communities. The document is divided into several sections that discuss the genealogy of flyovers, their role in social segregation, and examples of how they have been implemented in cities like Manila, the West Bank, South Africa, and Mumbai. It argues that flyovers should be viewed as part of broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and exclusion within cities.
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
This document provides an overview of how science fiction has influenced visions and depictions of future cities. It discusses early 20th century works like H.G. Wells' When the Sleeper Awakes that featured vast, towering urban architectures. More recent sci-fi from films like Blade Runner and works by Syd Mead portrayed divided cities with the wealthy inhabiting skyscrapers while the poor lived in underground slums. The document also examines how sci-fi visions shaped urban planning and concepts of ideal cities, and how works like these both depicted dystopian futures but also inspired dreams of vibrant, dense urban environments.
Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers Stephen Graham Stephen Graham
A presentation outlining some of the themes to my new book, 'Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers' (Verso, 2016).
"A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world."
See https://www.versobooks.com/books/2237-vertical
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities that operate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily dominated
by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around vertically stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive efforts
of H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel 'High Rise', to many cyberpunk classics, this essay – the latest in a series on the vertical dimensions of cities –reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. It begins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang, Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical structures, landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then then teases out the complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes that are actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some clean and binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verticalised
projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes and urban theories mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and important ways which do much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of the essay explores such connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects in the Gulf and forests of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The
essay’s final discussion draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginaries offer for contesting the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.
Histories of the Future in Contemporary Megastructures
An exploration of the development of multi-level cities around the world, and their links to historic futurism
Super-tall and ultra-deep: The Politics of the ElevatorsStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geographies
of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are
intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on).
And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural
geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of
vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks,
first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of
urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected
worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn:
the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the elevator
as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of
elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators
and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected vertical
politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
Vertical ground: making geology graham icus 2016Stephen Graham
Key note presentation at the Island Cities and Urban Archipelagos 2016. 07-12 March 2016, Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong
See http://www.islandcities.org/icua2016.html
Life support: The political ecology of urban airStephen Graham
This article discusses the need for a political ecology of urban air to address several key themes. It notes that while political ecology has analyzed urban nature like water and green space, urban air remains understudied despite public health crises. The article reviews links between global warming and lethal urban heatwaves. It also examines urban air pollution crises, paradoxes of pollution patterns, horizontal air movements, vertical politics of air, construction of elite high-rises, feedback loops in air-conditioned cities, and deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures. Developing a political ecology of urban air can help explain how unequal power relations shape the production and flows of good and bad air in cities.
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science...Stephen Graham
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature
Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham
This paper seeks to intersect two recent trends in urban research. First, it takes seriously the recognition that established traditions of research concerned with urban space have tended to privilege the horizontal extension of cities to the neglect of their vertical or volumetric extension. Second, the paper contributes to the resurgence of interest among social scientists in the validity of fiction – and especially speculative or science fiction – as a source of critical commentary and as a mode of knowledge that can exist in close reciprocity with non-fictional work. From these two starting points the paper develops a reading of the dialogue between the representations of vertical urban life that have featured in landmark works of 20th-century science fiction literature and key themes in contemporary urban analysis.
Water Wars in Mumbai
Stephen Graham, Renu Desai, and Colin McFarlane
Beyond the Pale
The Mumbai Mirror, January 8, 2010. A photograph shows a line of proud Mumbai police officers standing behind row upon row of what appear at first sight to be rusted machine guns (see fig. 1). But this is not one of the arms caches regularly unearthed to demonstrate the force’s effectiveness against the myriad terrorist networks that regularly target urban sites in contemporary India. Rather, the objects are water booster pumps, confiscated in a new campaign of dawn raids targeting “water theft” by slum dwellers in the Shivaji Nagar and
Govandi districts (see fig. 2 map below).
“Stealing Water to Earn a Few Bucks?” the headline reads. “Pay a Hefty
Price!” (Sathe 2010). The article details how the raids are being backed up by new legal moves to criminalize certain uses of water. Hundreds of people, arrested for installing and using the pumps, are to be prosecuted under draconian and nonbailable laws such as the Prevention of Damages to Public Property Act. All this activity is portrayed unproblematically as a heroic response to the threat that water theft in slums poses to the wider, formal, legitimate, and law-abiding city. “Pilferages, if not controlled,” writes the author, “could exhaust the potable water reserves before the next monsoon” (Sathe 2010).
Such statements tap into a mainstream discourse according to which recent poor monsoons have led to a major “water crisis” in Mumbai, necessitating radical, emergency measures to address widespread “water theft” or “water pilferage”— especially by the urban poor. What such discourses occlude, however, are the ways that current systems of urban water provision work to systematically dehydrate and profit from urban slum communities, while water wastage by the affluent and their preferred urban facilities goes unchecked.
Super-tall and Ultra-deep: The Cultural Politics of the ElevatorStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geo- graphies of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on). And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks, first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn: the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the eleva- tor as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected ver- tical politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
Life support the political ecology of urban air (Paper)Stephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacturer their own air. In and around the three-dimensional aerial environments within and above urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches particular levels of intensity. For a species which expires without air in two or three minutes, this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Curiously, however, urban air remains remarkably neglected within the political-ecological literatures. Accordingly, this paper suggests a range of key themes which a political ecology of urban air needs to address. These address, in turn, the links between global warming, urban heart-island effects and killer urban heat-waves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical condominiums structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterised air-conditioned urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly hot climates; and, finally, the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments.
Discover the Unseen: Tailored Recommendation of Unwatched ContentScyllaDB
The session shares how JioCinema approaches ""watch discounting."" This capability ensures that if a user watched a certain amount of a show/movie, the platform no longer recommends that particular content to the user. Flawless operation of this feature promotes the discover of new content, improving the overall user experience.
JioCinema is an Indian over-the-top media streaming service owned by Viacom18.
In our second session, we shall learn all about the main features and fundamentals of UiPath Studio that enable us to use the building blocks for any automation project.
📕 Detailed agenda:
Variables and Datatypes
Workflow Layouts
Arguments
Control Flows and Loops
Conditional Statements
💻 Extra training through UiPath Academy:
Variables, Constants, and Arguments in Studio
Control Flow in Studio
Connector Corner: Seamlessly power UiPath Apps, GenAI with prebuilt connectorsDianaGray10
Join us to learn how UiPath Apps can directly and easily interact with prebuilt connectors via Integration Service--including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Open GenAI, and more.
The best part is you can achieve this without building a custom workflow! Say goodbye to the hassle of using separate automations to call APIs. By seamlessly integrating within App Studio, you can now easily streamline your workflow, while gaining direct access to our Connector Catalog of popular applications.
We’ll discuss and demo the benefits of UiPath Apps and connectors including:
Creating a compelling user experience for any software, without the limitations of APIs.
Accelerating the app creation process, saving time and effort
Enjoying high-performance CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, for
seamless data management.
Speakers:
Russell Alfeche, Technology Leader, RPA at qBotic and UiPath MVP
Charlie Greenberg, host
Northern Engraving | Nameplate Manufacturing Process - 2024Northern Engraving
Manufacturing custom quality metal nameplates and badges involves several standard operations. Processes include sheet prep, lithography, screening, coating, punch press and inspection. All decoration is completed in the flat sheet with adhesive and tooling operations following. The possibilities for creating unique durable nameplates are endless. How will you create your brand identity? We can help!
What is an RPA CoE? Session 1 – CoE VisionDianaGray10
In the first session, we will review the organization's vision and how this has an impact on the COE Structure.
Topics covered:
• The role of a steering committee
• How do the organization’s priorities determine CoE Structure?
Speaker:
Chris Bolin, Senior Intelligent Automation Architect Anika Systems
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as “keys”). In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, they’ll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
AI in the Workplace Reskilling, Upskilling, and Future Work.pptxSunil Jagani
Discover how AI is transforming the workplace and learn strategies for reskilling and upskilling employees to stay ahead. This comprehensive guide covers the impact of AI on jobs, essential skills for the future, and successful case studies from industry leaders. Embrace AI-driven changes, foster continuous learning, and build a future-ready workforce.
Read More - https://bit.ly/3VKly70
Dandelion Hashtable: beyond billion requests per second on a commodity serverAntonios Katsarakis
This slide deck presents DLHT, a concurrent in-memory hashtable. Despite efforts to optimize hashtables, that go as far as sacrificing core functionality, state-of-the-art designs still incur multiple memory accesses per request and block request processing in three cases. First, most hashtables block while waiting for data to be retrieved from memory. Second, open-addressing designs, which represent the current state-of-the-art, either cannot free index slots on deletes or must block all requests to do so. Third, index resizes block every request until all objects are copied to the new index. Defying folklore wisdom, DLHT forgoes open-addressing and adopts a fully-featured and memory-aware closed-addressing design based on bounded cache-line-chaining. This design offers lock-free index operations and deletes that free slots instantly, (2) completes most requests with a single memory access, (3) utilizes software prefetching to hide memory latencies, and (4) employs a novel non-blocking and parallel resizing. In a commodity server and a memory-resident workload, DLHT surpasses 1.6B requests per second and provides 3.5x (12x) the throughput of the state-of-the-art closed-addressing (open-addressing) resizable hashtable on Gets (Deletes).
Conversational agents, or chatbots, are increasingly used to access all sorts of services using natural language. While open-domain chatbots - like ChatGPT - can converse on any topic, task-oriented chatbots - the focus of this paper - are designed for specific tasks, like booking a flight, obtaining customer support, or setting an appointment. Like any other software, task-oriented chatbots need to be properly tested, usually by defining and executing test scenarios (i.e., sequences of user-chatbot interactions). However, there is currently a lack of methods to quantify the completeness and strength of such test scenarios, which can lead to low-quality tests, and hence to buggy chatbots.
To fill this gap, we propose adapting mutation testing (MuT) for task-oriented chatbots. To this end, we introduce a set of mutation operators that emulate faults in chatbot designs, an architecture that enables MuT on chatbots built using heterogeneous technologies, and a practical realisation as an Eclipse plugin. Moreover, we evaluate the applicability, effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on open-source chatbots, with promising results.
AppSec PNW: Android and iOS Application Security with MobSFAjin Abraham
Mobile Security Framework - MobSF is a free and open source automated mobile application security testing environment designed to help security engineers, researchers, developers, and penetration testers to identify security vulnerabilities, malicious behaviours and privacy concerns in mobile applications using static and dynamic analysis. It supports all the popular mobile application binaries and source code formats built for Android and iOS devices. In addition to automated security assessment, it also offers an interactive testing environment to build and execute scenario based test/fuzz cases against the application.
This talk covers:
Using MobSF for static analysis of mobile applications.
Interactive dynamic security assessment of Android and iOS applications.
Solving Mobile app CTF challenges.
Reverse engineering and runtime analysis of Mobile malware.
How to shift left and integrate MobSF/mobsfscan SAST and DAST in your build pipeline.
Getting the Most Out of ScyllaDB Monitoring: ShareChat's TipsScyllaDB
ScyllaDB monitoring provides a lot of useful information. But sometimes it’s not easy to find the root of the problem if something is wrong or even estimate the remaining capacity by the load on the cluster. This talk shares our team's practical tips on: 1) How to find the root of the problem by metrics if ScyllaDB is slow 2) How to interpret the load and plan capacity for the future 3) Compaction strategies and how to choose the right one 4) Important metrics which aren’t available in the default monitoring setup.
Northern Engraving | Modern Metal Trim, Nameplates and Appliance PanelsNorthern Engraving
What began over 115 years ago as a supplier of precision gauges to the automotive industry has evolved into being an industry leader in the manufacture of product branding, automotive cockpit trim and decorative appliance trim. Value-added services include in-house Design, Engineering, Program Management, Test Lab and Tool Shops.
Introducing BoxLang : A new JVM language for productivity and modularity!Ortus Solutions, Corp
Just like life, our code must adapt to the ever changing world we live in. From one day coding for the web, to the next for our tablets or APIs or for running serverless applications. Multi-runtime development is the future of coding, the future is to be dynamic. Let us introduce you to BoxLang.
Dynamic. Modular. Productive.
BoxLang redefines development with its dynamic nature, empowering developers to craft expressive and functional code effortlessly. Its modular architecture prioritizes flexibility, allowing for seamless integration into existing ecosystems.
Interoperability at its Core
With 100% interoperability with Java, BoxLang seamlessly bridges the gap between traditional and modern development paradigms, unlocking new possibilities for innovation and collaboration.
Multi-Runtime
From the tiny 2m operating system binary to running on our pure Java web server, CommandBox, Jakarta EE, AWS Lambda, Microsoft Functions, Web Assembly, Android and more. BoxLang has been designed to enhance and adapt according to it's runnable runtime.
The Fusion of Modernity and Tradition
Experience the fusion of modern features inspired by CFML, Node, Ruby, Kotlin, Java, and Clojure, combined with the familiarity of Java bytecode compilation, making BoxLang a language of choice for forward-thinking developers.
Empowering Transition with Transpiler Support
Transitioning from CFML to BoxLang is seamless with our JIT transpiler, facilitating smooth migration and preserving existing code investments.
Unlocking Creativity with IDE Tools
Unleash your creativity with powerful IDE tools tailored for BoxLang, providing an intuitive development experience and streamlining your workflow. Join us as we embark on a journey to redefine JVM development. Welcome to the era of BoxLang.
How information systems are built or acquired puts information, which is what they should be about, in a secondary place. Our language adapted accordingly, and we no longer talk about information systems but applications. Applications evolved in a way to break data into diverse fragments, tightly coupled with applications and expensive to integrate. The result is technical debt, which is re-paid by taking even bigger "loans", resulting in an ever-increasing technical debt. Software engineering and procurement practices work in sync with market forces to maintain this trend. This talk demonstrates how natural this situation is. The question is: can something be done to reverse the trend?
What is an RPA CoE? Session 2 – CoE RolesDianaGray10
In this session, we will review the players involved in the CoE and how each role impacts opportunities.
Topics covered:
• What roles are essential?
• What place in the automation journey does each role play?
Speaker:
Chris Bolin, Senior Intelligent Automation Architect Anika Systems
1. Fronstaging the Urban Backstage?
The Politics of Infrastructure Disruptions
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University
2. 1. Leigh-Star (1999)
• For Susan Leigh-Star (1999) nine characteristics.
• embedded (i.e.“sunk into other structures);
• transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented each
time or assembled for each task”);
• offers temporal or spatial reach or scope;
• is learned by its users;
• is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of
electricity use);
• embodies standards;
• is built on an installed base of sunk capital;
• is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once or
globally;
• Finally, infrastructure “tends to become visible upon
breakdown”
3. Conventional Narratives
• When infrastructure networks work
best, they are noticed least of all (David
Perry, 1995).
• Modernist urbanism associated with
progressive veiling of infrastructure,
physically and discursively, beneath the
urban scene, as part of emergence of
“Wired-Piped-Tracked” Metropolis
• Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) the
networks became buried underground,
invisible, banalised, and relegated to an
apparently marginal, subterranean urban
world.
4. ‘Unblackboxing’
• Technosocial ‘blackboxes” are
momentarily undone
• Cultures of normalised and taken-for-
granted infrastructure use sustain
widespread assumptions that urban
‘infrastructure’ is somehow a material
and utterly fixed assemblage of hard
technologies embedded stably in place
which is characterised by perfect
order, completeness, immanence and
internal homogeneity rather than leaky,
partial and heterogeneous entities.
5. Myth of Fixed and Stable
Emplacement
• Infrastructures regarded as symbols of the
complexity, ubiquity and the embodied power of
modern technology (Summerton 1994).
• “We sometimes seem to view mature LargeTechnical
Systems as invulnerable, embodying more and more
power over time and developing along a path whose
basic direction is as foreseeable as it is impossible to
detour [But] systems are more vulnerable, less stable
and less predictable in their various phases than most
of us tend to think (Summerton, 1994)
6. ‘Frontstaging’ Urban ‘Backstage’
• Irving Goffman’s (1959)
terms, the built
environment’s “backstage’
becomes momentarily
“frontstaged”
• The sudden absence of
infrastructural flow creates
visibility just as the
continued, normalised use
of infrastructures creates a
deep taken-for-grantedness
and invisibility.
7. Reification?
Too Categorical,
Static, Crude
• Often simply not the case!
• Varies enormously by site/place/sector/subjectivity
• Complex politics/poetics/mediations/remediations of
produced visibilities and invisibilities
• Contested and woven through with profoundly unequal
power geometries across topologies of time/space
• Need a much more nuanced, detailed exploration of
precisely how disruptions are discursively and materially
constructed and experienced in different sites/’sectors’/
places/ cases/subjectivities to reveal complex politics of
visibility and invisibility
8. 1. Often Simply Not the Case: Discourse of the Powerful?
For a billion urbanites or more, infrastructural failure, exclusion and precarity is
perpetually and profoundly visible imprivisation is constant
Infrastructures have “always been foregrounded in the lives of more precarious
social groups — i.e. those with reduced access or without access or who have
been disconnected, as a result either of socio-spatial differentiation strategies or
infrastructure crises or collapse.”
Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008)
9. • Cultures and economies of infrastructural repair
and improvisation almost invisible within urban
studies
10. 2. ComplexTopologies of Disruption and (Re)Mediations
of Produced (In)Visibility inTime-Space
Cascading disruptions in space and time within multiple, tightly-
coupled, skeins of infrastructure networks (Richard Little)
11. “We are all hostages to
electricity” Leslie (1999)
Socio-technical
‘Normal Accidents’ (Charles
Perrow): Blackout
12. Exposed Myths of
Dematerialisation/ Sectoral
Isolation/ ‘Cleanness’:
The Electromateriality of
‘cyberspace’
• “When servers are down,
panic sets in. Electronic
power failures, internal
surges, the glitches that
corrupt and destroy memory,
mirror our relation with
power itself” (Grossman,
2003, 23).
• A single Google server farm
consumes as much electrical
power as a city the size of
Honolulu.
13. “On July 19, 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper,
wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey
derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have
reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make the
boxcars glow.A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks.
By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid
along the railroad right-of-way, disrupting telecommunications traffic on
a critical NewYork-Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail.
The NewYork–based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability
to update its web pages.Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report
problems. Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and Los
Angeles, and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact
with Washington.” KazysVarnelis
ExposedTopologies
Disruption and Digitality
14. Exposed Myths of Neoliberal Re-Regulation
• Electricity deregulation in the USA had actually ignored the
economic and geographical fundamentals of an industry that
necessitates reliable, material connectivities between
generation and use; that is prone to cascading and spiralling
failure as transcontinental and transnational markets in supply
are established within “complex interactive networks,” with
dramatic unintended consequences ; and where the hard
infrastructures are ageing and organised with a baroque level
of complexity and local fragmentation.
15. But post-mortems for such events become messy!
“A distributive notion of agency does interfere with the
project of blaming. But it does not thereby abandon the
project of identifying [ ] the sources of harmful effects.To
the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to
look for sources. ”
Must look at the “selfish intentions and energy policy that
provides lucrative opportunities for energy trading while
generating a tragedy of the commons”; at “the stubborn
directionality of a high-consumption social infrastructure”;
and at “the unstable power of electron flows, wildfires, ex-
urban housing pressures, and the assemblages they form”
Jane Bennett
Jane Bennett, (2005) “The Agency of Assemblages and
the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3): 445–65. Pp. 463.
25. 4. Can be Used to Disrupt Conventional Media/ PoliticalTropes and Provide
Heuristic Devices for Critical Scholarship/Pedagogy and Engagement to
Challenge and DenaturaliseThese
An ‘act of God’? A ‘technical failure’? ‘Accident’?
A ‘natural disaster’? A social meltdown?
26. • Reveal the Often Hidden Politics of
Risk
• Also unerringly reveal the often
concealed politics of cyborganised
cities
• e.g. Katrina in 2005 not a ‘natural
disaster’ or ‘Act of God.’ Rather, the
inevitable result of:
• Climate change accentuating hurricane
• Hitting a city denuded of natural
protection and
• Very poorly covered by a levee
network that was systematically racially
biased over centuries of constructed
socio-nature in context of a
• A Neoconservative Federal
Government that had systematically
skewed Emergency Planning towards
terrorism for political ends
27.
28.
29. 5. Culture of Fascination
“Cyborgs, like us, are endlessly fascinated by machinic breakdowns,
which would cause disruptions in, or denials of access to, their
megatechnical sources of being.”
Tim Luke (2004)(above NYC blackout, 2003)
•
30.
31. • Arcade Fire’s song,“Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”; a visceral reflection of the experience, and hammers home
the sense of modernity unraveled, lives threatened, and norms abandoned:
“Woke up with the power out, not really somethin to shout about. ice
has covered up my parents hands, don't have any dreams don't have any
plans. i went out into the night, i went out to find some light. kids
are swingin from the power lines, nobody's home so nobody minds
I woke up on the darkest night, neighbors all were shouting that they
found the light - we found the light. - shadows jumpin' all over my
walls, some of them big, some of them small. i went out into the night
i went out to pick a fight with anyone. light a candle for the kids,
Jesus Christ don't keep it hid!
Ice has covered up my parents hands, don't have any dreams don't have any plans. growin' up in some strange
storm, nobody's cold, nobody's
warm. i went out into the night, i went out to find some light. kids
are dyin' out in the snow, look at them go - look at them go!
and the power's out in the heart of man, take it from your heart put
it in your hand. what's the plan? what's the plan?
is it a dream? Is it a lie? i think I'll let you decide. just light a candle for the
kids, Jesus Christ don't keep it hid! cause nothing's hid, from us
kids! you ain't foolin' nobody - with the lights out! and the power's
out in the heart of man, take it from your heart put it in your hand.
and there's something wrong in the heart of man, you take it from your
heart and put it in your hand! where'd you go?!”
32. 6. Multiple, Contested, Disruption Discourses
Privileged Discourses of Disruption (and Invoked Securitisation)
Often Work to Obfuscate Less Privileged Ones, Sometimes
Violently!
E.g. Blackouts and the ‘Global’ City
• “We are talking about
Mumbai as the next
Shanghai”, a general
manager for a major
Mumbai advertising firm,
faced with losing 30% of its
revenues due to daily 4
hour power cuts, reported
in 2005.“And here we are
faced with the possibilities
of blackouts”
• (SAND, 2005).
36. Securocratic
War (Allen Feldman )
• Permanent, open-ended and deterritorialised mobilisations
or ‘wars’ (on drugs, crime, terror, illegal immigration,
biological threats) organised around vague and all-
encompassing notions of public safety rather than territorial
conquest
• Reproduce state sovereignty not through external war and
internal policing but through raising the spectre of mobilities
and flows which are deemed to contaminate societies and
threaten the social order internally and externally
simultaneously
• Terrorism, demographic infiltration,‘illegal’ immigration, and
pathogens and disease (SARS, bird flu, Mad Cow….
• Unknown and unknowable, these varied and dispersed
threats are deemed to lurk within the interstices of urban
and social life, blending invisibly with it.
•
37. Virtual Borders Erupt Both Within and Without
Territorial Limits of States
• “The virtual border, whether it faces outward or inward
to foreignness, is no longer a barrier structure but a
shifting net, a flexible spatial pathogenesis that shifts
round the globe and can move from the exteriority of
the transnational frontier into the core of the
securocratic state.”Allen Feldman
• Central here is the distinction between an event and
the normal, societal background.Thus,‘security events’
emerge when “improper or transgressive circulations”
from the range of putative threats become visible and
are deemed to threaten the ‘normal’ worlds of
transnational capitalism.
• The figure of the ‘terrorist’ looms especially large here
because such figures are seen to simultaneously breed
improper circulations of bodies, money, and drugs
38. “The interruption of the moral economy of safe circulation is characterized as a dystopic ‘risk
event’,” Feldman suggests.“Disruption of the imputed smooth functioning of the circulation
apparatus in which nothing is meant to happen.‘Normalcy’ is the non-event, which in effect
means the proper distribution of functions, the occupation of proper differential positions, and
social profiles.”
42. • the next Pearl Harbor will be
both everywhere and nowhere at
the same time. It's targets will not be
the U.S. military or defense system
but, instead, the U.S. public and its
post-industrial and highly
informatized lifestyle.What is now a
tool for comfort, an object of
leisure, or a necessary support for
work [..] will soon become the
world's deadliest weapon” (Debrix,
2001).
49. Cyborgian
Global City System and the
New Imperialism
• Neoliberalised global cities often have a parasitic relationship with
near and distant hinterlands
• Global neoliberal urbanisation has led to ‘devastating disparities
between the mobility of capital and labour that have produced new
forms of economic serfdom in the global South’ Matthew Gandy
• Resource (food, water, energy) grabs organised and finance through
the financial centres and technopoles of the North’s global finance
capitals
• Biopiracy and biofuels push (indigenous groups in Indonesia,
protesting, above)
• E.g. Daewoo (South Korean corporation) has just leased half of all
the arable land in Madagascar to feed South Korean cities in the
future
51. Bill Joy:WhenTurning Off Becomes Suicide
• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems,
caused a furore amongst, suggested that
the mediation of human societies by
astonishingly complex computerised
infrastructure systems will soon reach the
stage when people won't be able to just
turn the machines off, because they will be
so dependent on them that turning them
off would amount to suicide (2000).
52. War andTerrorism as ‘Decyborganisation’
• ‘Switching cities off’
• Deelectrification
• We need to study how to degrade and
destroy our adversaries' abilities to
transmit their military, political, and
economic goods, services and
information […]. Infrastructures, defining
both traditional and emerging lines of
communication, present increasingly
lucrative targets for airpower [The vision
of] airmen should focus on lines of
communications that will increasingly
define modern societies (Edward Felker,
‘US Air PowerTheorist’, 1998)
• US Air Force model of enemy societies
(right)
53. ‘Strategic Paralysis’:‘Bomb Now, Die Later’ :
The War on Public Health’, Bombing “Back to the Stone Age” etc.
• General Buster Glosson, Iraq, 1991 : ”I want to put every [Iraqi] household in an
autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated… We wanted to play
with their psyche
• We need to study how to degrade and destroy our adversaries' abilities to
transmit their military, political, and economic goods, services and information.
Infrastructures, defining both traditional and emerging lines of communication,
present increasingly lucrative targets for airpower [The vision of] airmen should
focus on lines of communications that will increasingly define modern
societies (Felker, 1998).
54. Disruption by Design and
the Liberal Way of War:
State Infrastructural Warfare
There is nothing in the
world today that cannot
become a
weapon (Liang and
Xiangsui, 1999)
If you want to destroy
someone nowadays, you
go after their
infrastructure. (Phil
Agre, 2001)
55. “It should be lights out in Belgrade :
every power grid, water pipe, bridge,
road and war-related factory has to be
targeted. We will set your country
back by pulverizing you. You want
1950 ? We can do 1950. You want
1389 ? We can do that, too!”
Thomas Friedman, New York Times,
April 23rd, 1999
56. First Order Effects
Second Order
Effects
Third Order Effects
No light after dark or in
building interiors
Erosion of command
and control capabilities
Greater logistics
complexity
No refrigeration
Increased requirement
for power generating
equipment
Decreased mobility
Some stoves/ovens non
operable
Increased requirement
for night vision devices
Decreased Situational
Awareness
Inoperable hospital
electronic equipment
Increased reliance on
battery-powered items
for news, broadcasts,
etc.
Rising disease rates
No electronic access to
bank accounts/money
Shortage of clean water
for drinking, cleaning
and preparing food
Rising rates of
malnutrition
Disruption in some
transportation and
communications
services
Hygiene problems
Increased numbers of
non-combatants
requiring assistance
Disruption to water
supply, treatment
facilities, and sanitation
Inability to prepare and
process some foods
Difficulty in
communicating with
non-combatants