Stephen graham mike crang sentient cities copyStephen Graham
An exploration of what 'ubiquitous computing' or 'ambient intelligence' -- the embedding of networked computing devices into rooms, buildings, streets, infrastrctures and even bodies -- means for the politics of urban life
Stephen graham mike crang sentient cities copyStephen Graham
An exploration of what 'ubiquitous computing' or 'ambient intelligence' -- the embedding of networked computing devices into rooms, buildings, streets, infrastrctures and even bodies -- means for the politics of urban life
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.
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.
Describing society's entry into the fourth industrial revolution, the impact of the digital era, and the emergence of participatory democracy as the right system to manage smart cities.
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'.
Smart Cities are all about collaboration, sharing and transparency. They need true openness of data. It is not just governments opening up their data for everyone in public platforms. It is individual citizens and privately-owned companies offering their data to the government or government departments sharing their data with one another. That is the true meaning of ‘Open Data’, which goes beyond the traditional definitions. Because Smart Cities eat the ‘status quo’ for breakfast. They change at the speed of light, together with their environment. They are the cities of the future.
Citizenship, social justice, and the Right to the Smart Cityrobkitchin
This presentation was delivered at the Right to the Smart City workshop at Maynooth University, Sept 5-6 2017. It sets out a set of questions and theoretical concepts for thinking through issues of citizenship, social justice, and the right to the smart city.
Disability and Smart Cities:
On Communication Policy, Technology, and Justice in Future Societies
by Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney)
paper presented at Communication Policy and Technology section of 'Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward', International Association of Media Communication Research (IAMCR) conference
27-31 July, 2016, University of Leicester
Digital Master Planning: Can we bring Smart Cities back to Earth? by Anthony ...Gigabit City Summit
Digital Master Planning: Can we bring Smart Cities back to Earth? was presented by Anthony Townsend, founder of Bits and Atoms, at the 2017 Gigabit City Summit.
Empowering citizens and local government with mobile dataTim Willoughby
Presentation to eCitizen II conference in Killarney, Co. Kerry, Ireland. Conference as part of a wider group looking at eCitizen. Presentation is taking a look at the future state of Government through a citizen lens
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
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.
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.
Describing society's entry into the fourth industrial revolution, the impact of the digital era, and the emergence of participatory democracy as the right system to manage smart cities.
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'.
Smart Cities are all about collaboration, sharing and transparency. They need true openness of data. It is not just governments opening up their data for everyone in public platforms. It is individual citizens and privately-owned companies offering their data to the government or government departments sharing their data with one another. That is the true meaning of ‘Open Data’, which goes beyond the traditional definitions. Because Smart Cities eat the ‘status quo’ for breakfast. They change at the speed of light, together with their environment. They are the cities of the future.
Citizenship, social justice, and the Right to the Smart Cityrobkitchin
This presentation was delivered at the Right to the Smart City workshop at Maynooth University, Sept 5-6 2017. It sets out a set of questions and theoretical concepts for thinking through issues of citizenship, social justice, and the right to the smart city.
Disability and Smart Cities:
On Communication Policy, Technology, and Justice in Future Societies
by Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney)
paper presented at Communication Policy and Technology section of 'Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward', International Association of Media Communication Research (IAMCR) conference
27-31 July, 2016, University of Leicester
Digital Master Planning: Can we bring Smart Cities back to Earth? by Anthony ...Gigabit City Summit
Digital Master Planning: Can we bring Smart Cities back to Earth? was presented by Anthony Townsend, founder of Bits and Atoms, at the 2017 Gigabit City Summit.
Empowering citizens and local government with mobile dataTim Willoughby
Presentation to eCitizen II conference in Killarney, Co. Kerry, Ireland. Conference as part of a wider group looking at eCitizen. Presentation is taking a look at the future state of Government through a citizen lens
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
Life-support: The Political Ecology of Urban Air (Presentation)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.
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.
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 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 in City on the vertical dimensions of cities1 –
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 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.
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
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
Crafting the Right Mobile Device Management Framework to Mitigate Risks and M...IT Network marcus evans
Crafting the Right Mobile Device Management Framework to Mitigate Risks and Maximise Benefits of BYOD by Gary Pettigrove, ANAO at the Australian CIO Summit 2014
Digital Transformation and Innovation on http://denreymer.com
- Merging the Real World and the Virtual World
- Intelligence Everywhere
- The New IT Reality Emerges
http://www.gartner.com//it/content/2940400/2940420/january_15_top_10_technology_trends_2015_dcearley.pdf
Smart city concept has a great potential improve the quality of life by use of Internet of Things paradigm.
Deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks would provide huge amount of data
It would present massive and unstructured data management and analysis challenges.
Cloud based storage and Big Data techniques show promise to generate actionable intelligence from these data streams.
The Rising Floor of Platform - MIT Platform Summit 2014Peter Coffee
If someone thinks that they can create differentiating value by starting at the level of what you sell, at a cost that enables them to sell the result, then you are - to them - a platform. Too much lower, you're plumbing. Above that level, you're a competitor or an irrelevant product. What should a platform provide today, as 24x7 connected people want trustworthy access to data and command of useful function?
We read a lot about new companies who use digital platforms to disrupt an industry and create immense value (and wealth for themselves in the meantime). What can the traditional players in these industries to protect themselves from these "uberisers"?
Future IT Trends Talk @Stanford OIT 554 Class - Guest Speaker - 3.7.17Paul Hofmann
The big five future IT trends
Internet of Things:
Assets Turn Into Applications
Machine Intelligence:
AI Could Replace 50M Professional Jobs
Distributed Ledgers:
Block chain is becoming mainstream
Sharing Economy:
We don’t owe anything anymore
Virtual and Augmented Reality:
Remote experience merge visual & digital world
Digital Transformation Major tech trends through the customer lens and relati...Larry Smith
Digital Transformation
Major tech trends through the customer lens and relationships to the Insurance Industry
7 core technology trends: Mobility – Data – Social - Bots – Intelligence – Visualization – Things
A Big Data Telco Solution by Dr. Laura Wynterwkwsci-research
Presented during the WKWSCI Symposium 2014
21 March 2014
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre
Organized by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University
A look at the layers of the IoT - Created in a collaboration between Postscapes and Harbor Research -- Technology, Business, User Experience and Market Architecutures
A slide version can be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/Postscapes/internet-of-things-stack-presentation-version
Full resolution can be found at: http://www.postscapes.com/internet-of-things-stack
Elite Avenues: Flyovers, Freeways and the Politics of Urban MobilityStephen Graham
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the global south still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at “worlding” their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this article presents an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and expressways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the west Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or re-appropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
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.
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
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the Global South still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at ‘worlding’ their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this paper presents an international and interdis- ciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and express- ways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the West Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or reappropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
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.
Life support: The political ecology of urban airStephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacture 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 that 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 touch upon the links between global warming, urban heat-island effects
and killer urban heatwaves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal
movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical
condominium structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterise air-conditioned
urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly
hot climates; the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments; and, finally, the
manipulation of urban air through political violence.
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.
Vigar, Geoff, Stephen Graham, and Patsy Healey. "In search of the city in spa...Stephen Graham
Summary. This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented in contemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflected in diverse notions of ‘cityness’ in contemporary policy discourses about spatiality and territoriality. Through a detailed case study of the use and construction of the word ‘city’ in a range of urban governance contexts in Newcastle upon Tyne, this paper analyses the political work done by diverse representations and invocations of ‘cityness’ in contemporary urban governance. Such representations matter because the way in which contemporary cities are conceptualised influences policy formulations and policy outcomes. In addition, considerable emphasis is being placed in contemporary urban policy on ‘joining-up’, ‘integrating’ and co-ordinating governance efforts. How conceptions of the city are mobilised to do such integrating work provides insight into the challenge such ambitions present. The evidence from the case study suggests that the capacity of local actors to think about the processes of change in metropolitan regions, and to define the ways in which they can respond, is often limited, as they struggle to define what their ‘city’ actually might be these days. This tends to be to the detriment of collective attempts to maximise conditions for citizens and for investment.
Graham, Stephen. "Bridging urban digital divides? Urban polarisation and info...Stephen Graham
The societal diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICTs) remains starkly uneven at all scales. It is in the contemporary city that this unevenness becomes most visible. In cities, clusters and enclaves of ‘superconnected’ people, rms and institutions often rest cheek-by-jowel with large numbers of people with non-existent or rudimentary access to communications technologies. In such a context, this paper has two objectives, reected in its two parts. The rst part of the paper seeks to demonstrate that dominant trends in ICT develop- ment are currently helping to support new extremes of social and geographical unevenness within and between human settlements and cities, in both the North and the South. The paper’s second part aims to explore the prospect that such stark ‘urban digital divides’ might be ameliorated through progressive and innovative policy initiatives which treat cities and electronic technologies in parallel. It does this using a range of illustrative exemplars from a variety of contexts
Crang, Michael, Tracey Crosbie, and Stephen Graham. "Variable geometries of c...Stephen Graham
Summary. This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising urban ‘digital divides’. It focuses on the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) unevenly affect the pace of life within the urban environment. Based on a detailed case study of how ICTs are being used in an affluent and a marginalised neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, the paper suggests that urban digital divides need to be understood as more than uneven patterns of access. They emerge in this work as more than the presence or absence of specific technological artefacts. Rather, it is argued that different styles and speeds of technologically mediated life now work to define urban socio- spatial inequalities. The paper distinguishes between two such key styles and speeds. First, the paper argues that affluent and professional groups now use new media technologies pervasively and continuously as the ‘background’ infrastructure to sustain privileged and intensely distanciated, but time-stressed, lifestyles. Secondly, more marginalised neighbourhoods tend to be characterised by instrumental and episodic ICT usage patterns which are often collectively organised through strong neighbourhood ties. For the former, mediated networks help to orchestrate neighbourhood ties; for the latter, it is those neighbourhood ties that enable on-line access.
Graham, Stephen. "“Homeland” insecurities? Katrina and the politics of “secur...Stephen Graham
This intervention explores the paradox that although the Bush administration has repeatedly stressed the purported insecurity of U.S. urbanites to “terroristic” threats since 9/11, it has simul- taneously undermined the preparedness and resilience of U.S. cities in the face of catastrophic weather and seismic events. Arguing that Katrina needs to be seen as an event that unerringly exposes the politics of urban security in post-9/11 U.S. cities, the piece explores the relationships between neoconservative, antiurban ideology; the “homeland security” drive; and climate change, catastrophic weather events, and oil geopolitics.
Graham, Stephen, and Lucy Hewitt. "Getting off the ground On the politics of ...Stephen Graham
This article contends that critical urban research is characterized by horizontalism. It argues that the swathe of recent urban writings have neglected the vertical qualities of contemporary urbanization. The article’s introductory section elaborates this argument in detail. The paper then elucidates three areas where vertically oriented research is emerging. These encompass: the links between Google Earth and urbanism; the connections between social secession and ascension through buildings, walkways and personalized air travel; and the links between verticalized surveillance and urban burrowing.
Graham, Stephen "Software-sorted geographies." Progress in Human Geography 29...Stephen Graham
Abstract: This paper explores the central role of computerized code in shaping the social and geographical politics of inequality in advanced societies. The central argument is that, while such processes are necessarily multifaceted, multiscaled, complex and ambivalent, a great variety of ‘software-sorting’ techniques is now being widely applied in efforts to try to separate privileged and marginalized groups and places across a wide range of sectors and domains. This paper’s central demonstration is that the overwhelming bulk of software-sorting applications is closely associated with broader transformations from Keynesian to neoliberal service regimes. To illustrate such processes of software-sorting, the paper analyses recent research addressing three examples of software-sorting in practice. These address physical and electronic mobility systems, online geographical information systems (GIS), and face-recognition closed circuit television (CCTV) systems covering city streets. The paper finishes by identifying theoretical, research and policy implications of the diffusion of software-sorted geographies within which computerized code continually orchestrates inequalities through technological systems embedded within urban environments.
Graham, Stephen. "The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptuali...Stephen Graham
Abstract: This article critically explores how the relations between information technologies and space and place are being conceptualized in a broad swathe of recent writings and discourses on the geographies of `cyberspace' and information technologies. After analysing the powerful role of spatial and territorial metaphors in anchoring current discourses about information tech- nologies and society, the article goes on to identify three broad, dominating perspectives. These I label the perspective of `substitution and transcendence' (dominated by technological Utopian- ists), the `co-evolution' perspective (drawing from political economy and cultural studies) and the `recombination' perspective (derived from recent work in actor-network theory). The discussion turns to each in turn, extracting the geographical dimensions and implications of each. The article concludes by considering the implications of the discussion for spatial treatments of society± technology relations and for broader debates about the nature of space and place.
Graham, Stephen. "War and the city." New Left Review 44 (2007): 121. APA Stephen Graham
Western military strategy was long premised on the avoidance of urban combat, with air strikes the preferred method of subduing large conurbations. Cities were seen as targets, not battlefields. But today, the cityscapes of the global South have emerged as paradigmatic conflict zones. Since the end of the Cold War, America’s militarized thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia has focused Pentagon planners’ attention on the burgeoning Arab and Third World cities that are now deemed de facto sites of current and future warfare for us forces. While the ‘revolution in military affairs’ emphasized overhead dominance, the losing battle for the streets of Iraq has sharpened the Pentagon’s focus on battles within the micro-geographies of slums, favelas, industrial districts and casbahs, as well as on globe-spanning stealth and surveillance technologies.....
An astonishing, first-of-its-kind, report by the NYT assessing damage in Ukraine. Even if the war ends tomorrow, in many places there will be nothing to go back to.
03062024_First India Newspaper Jaipur.pdfFIRST INDIA
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El Puerto de Algeciras continúa un año más como el más eficiente del continente europeo y vuelve a situarse en el “top ten” mundial, según el informe The Container Port Performance Index 2023 (CPPI), elaborado por el Banco Mundial y la consultora S&P Global.
El informe CPPI utiliza dos enfoques metodológicos diferentes para calcular la clasificación del índice: uno administrativo o técnico y otro estadístico, basado en análisis factorial (FA). Según los autores, esta dualidad pretende asegurar una clasificación que refleje con precisión el rendimiento real del puerto, a la vez que sea estadísticamente sólida. En esta edición del informe CPPI 2023, se han empleado los mismos enfoques metodológicos y se ha aplicado un método de agregación de clasificaciones para combinar los resultados de ambos enfoques y obtener una clasificación agregada.
01062024_First India Newspaper Jaipur.pdfFIRST INDIA
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Here is Gabe Whitley's response to my defamation lawsuit for him calling me a rapist and perjurer in court documents.
You have to read it to believe it, but after you read it, you won't believe it. And I included eight examples of defamatory statements/
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‘वोटर्स विल मस्ट प्रीवेल’ (मतदाताओं को जीतना होगा) अभियान द्वारा जारी हेल्पलाइन नंबर, 4 जून को सुबह 7 बजे से दोपहर 12 बजे तक मतगणना प्रक्रिया में कहीं भी किसी भी तरह के उल्लंघन की रिपोर्ट करने के लिए खुला रहेगा।
3. I Introduction:
• ”The modern city exists as a haze of
software instructions (Amin Thrift)
• Computer software mediates,
saturates and sustains contemporary
capitalist societies.
• Enrolled into complex technoscientific
systems, stretched across time-space
• Vast universe of code provides the
hidden “calculative background” to
the functioning and ordering of such
societies
• This “background” has become
the ‘ordinary’ socio-technical world
4. • Ubiquitous, pervasive, interlinked spaces, systems, and
equipment
• Link databases to sensor,
tracking, logistics and access
control systems
• Continuously classify,
standardise, and demarcate
rights, privileges, inclusions,
exclusions, mobilities and
normative social judgements
across multiple scales
• Geographies of exclusion are
now performed through the
agency of software algorithms
Software-Sorting:
The Agency of
Algorithms
5. • Socio-technical architectures of
software-sorting are tending to
blend into the wider urban
environment
• “Surveillant assemblages”
embedded into infrastructures and
urban spaces: Transponders, RFID
Chips, ‘smart’ cards, biometrics,
mobile handsets etc
• Urban everyday life becomes series
of obligatory passage points policed
by software-sorting systems (with
proliferating codes, identifiers, scans,
passwords)
‘The Most Profound
Technologies
Are Those
That Disappear’
6. Software-Sorting:
A New Technological Politics?
• Software challenges us to
understand new forms of
technologies politics and new
practices of political invention,
legibility and intervention that
we are only beginning to
comprehend as political at
all (Thrift and French, 2002)
7. • Helping to facilitate neoliberal
infrastructural transformations
• Undermine barriers to
recommodification, mass-customisation,
Software-
and individualisation
Sorting and
• From standardised service regimes based
Neoliberal
on generalised tariffs or universal service
Transformations
obligations and supply monopolies
• To complex infrastructural marketplaces
where each user is surveilled, tracked and
treated differently based on normative
judgments of their fitness, worth or
profitability
8. III Code Space: Software-Sorted Mobilities
• (a) Biometric IDs and Airport
Immigration Filtering
• Opt-in biometric bypass for elite
travellers combined with
tightened controls for those
identified by risk profiling
• the control of international
mobilities that cross through
airports and border zones are
effectively managed, filtered and
screened within these sites (Peter
Aday, 2004),
• Politics of differential speed and
anticipatory profiling
9. • To Peter Aday, this “facilitates the ease
of speed for trusted, ‘good’ and
economically sound business travellers
and yet impede the flow of ‘bad guys’
or secondary processing – where
officers ‘really don’t care how long it
takes’ to process their entry
• Aday concludes, the airport is now a
surveillance machine— an assemblage
where webs of technology and
information combine. Movement, and,
increasingly, the body, identity, and
objects are made legible, momentarily
fusing with technology and virtual
realism (2004).
10. (b) Road Pricing:
Unbundling Public Roadspace Monopolies:
• Most road-pricing (e.g.
London) still based on
standard tariffs at all times
• Rely on transponders,
automatic number plate
recognition, call centres,
cameras and databases
• Do allow differential
pricing
• London proposing to
charge big extra levy for
4x4s by 2009
11. The Quest for ‘Real-Time’ Road Pricing
• Software-sorting being introduced to
display variable pricing in real time -for example I-15 highway in San Diego
• This is based on algorithms which
estimate exactly the level of price per
journey that is likely to deter enough
drivers to guarantee free-flowing traffic
-- no matter how bad the congestion is
on the surrounding public highway
system.
• May also be built into proposal for EU
roadspace pricing using GPS
technology
12. (c ) The Internet: From ‘Best Effort’
to ‘Squelching the Scavenger Class’
• Internet originally developed to
accord all the ‘packets’ of
information that flowed within it
equal status. This was the so-called
‘best effort’ model of packet
switching
• Now, under pressure of congestion
and pressures to introduce
neoliberal service regimes, the entire
Internet is being reengineered into a
corporately controlled system of
systems dominated by a wide range
of commercial services
13. • Software-sorted Internet
systems allow a guaranteed
quality of service to premium
users and prioritised services,
even at times of major internet
congestion
• But those packets deemed
unprofitable will slowed down
or actually ‘dropped’
• This is likely to lead to a
dramatic deterioration in the
electronic mobilities of
marginalised users or nonprioritised services
14. • World’s largest provider of Internet Routers,
Cisco (2002), describe how premium internet
services can now be offered to what they call the
transactional/interactive data class of users, whilst,
at the same time, what they term the scavenger
class will be actively impeded based on softwaresorting of every single Internet packet.
• The Scavenger class [categorisation] is intended
to provide differential services, or ‘less-than-BestEffort’ services, to certain applications, the
document suggests. Applications assigned to this
class have little or no contribution to the
organizational objectives of the enterprize.
Assigning a minimal bandwidth queue to Scavenger
traffic forces it to be squelched to virtually nothing
during periods of congestion .
15. (d) Call Centres: The Politics of
Speed-Up and Slow-Down
• Call centres can detect the
telephone numbers of
incoming calls, and instantly
check these against
customer and
geodemographic databases
• Use software-sorting
techniques to queue ‘good
customers’ for shorter
times than ‘bad’
customers.
16. Initially, Mediated by Call Centre Operator
• A marketing brochure from the
Avaya Corporation (2000):
One of your best customers dials
the national customer service
number for your company. The ANI
[Automatic Number Identification]
database reveals the customer to be
among the top 5% of your
customers. [Our system] routes the
customer at high priority. When the
agent picks up the call, he hears a
whispered announcement that this
caller is ‘Top 5’
17. But Shifting to Automated Prioritisation
• Ian Davis, a customer relations manager at the
IT company ATG: “It’s all about finding out who
the customer is, and putting then in the correct
bucket. The unprofitable customers never hear
about the discounts and promotions”.
• Can be used to allocate scarce operator time.
The phone company Orange, for example,
allows immediate access to a human being only
to those users who sign up for a premium
‘Panther’ service. The Virgin call centre,
Thetrainline, deters first time callers with lengthy
interactive voice response menus whilst
prioritising regular, business, passengers for
tailored, human, support.
18. IV Code Place: Software-Sorted Cities
• Geosurveillance and
geotracking boom
(e.g. Radio Frequency
Identification Tags)
• Databases link to
Geographic
Information Systems
(GISs) to offer
different services to
different
neighbourhoods
19. Supports Geographical Unbundling of
Previously Standard Services/Prices
• E.g. Amazon has offered
different DVD prices to
different customers in USA
• UK train travellers now
access a labyrinth of different
tariffs and prices based, using
software-sorted web sites
and call centres, on when
they book their tickets, who
they are, and even where
they live.
20. RFIDs: The Politics of
Ubiquitous Tracking?
• Once RFID based ‘tracking’ becomes routine, software-sorting
techniques will move beyond crude, generalised, and ‘lumpy’
simulations of places, to personalised advertising and real-time
tracking
• In Japan, owners of malls or privatised public spaces are
experimenting with using RFID cards to identify each individual who
enters their realm covertly and automatically. May allow trackings of
their tastes, wealth, habits, associations and potential profitability.
• Could allow extra services and benefits to be offered to those
deemed most desirable whilst supporting attempts to remove or
discourage those deemed to be problematic
• So may work to “chill [speech, actions or assembly deemed]
irregular, deviant or unpopular” in such places (Kang and Cuff, 2005)
21. V Code Face: Software-Sorted Streets?
• Building on the massive and rapid
diffusion of analogue CCTV, which
relies on the (expensive) ‘MK1
eyeball’ of human operators, scanning
monitors and recording footage using
banks of domestic-style video
recorders, a major effort is now being
made to install much cheaper,
automated, facial recognition, or
‘event-driven,’ CCTV in the place of
such systems
• Here algorithms scan for ‘abnormal or
‘target’ events or people based on
software which monitors and learns
the putative ‘normal’ background
22. Face-Recognition CCTV
• Many technological problems inhibit FR CCTV on open city streets
(as opposed to airport passage points)
• But major R and D to address these
• ”Unlike other biometrics [facial recognition CCTV] can operate
anonymously in the background (Koskela, 2003)
• The code within the facial recognition system becomes a key
political site because its operation automatically stipulates the
subjects, locations or behaviours that are deemed by the
operators to be ‘abnormal’, ‘threatening’ and worthy of further
scrutiny or tracking.
• There are very real risks that the multiple ‘islands’ of private and
public CCTV systems, each monitored by its own human
operators, could quickly merge, or link, into much more massive
and geographically-stretched facial recognition CCTV systems.
23. The Politics of Facial Tracking
• Mitchell Gray (2003): As the technology advances, the clear
risk is that the software will effortlessly track individuals
moving through urban space, public and private. Any
appearance of a person deemed threatening can be set to
trigger an alarm, assuming that that person’s face has been
recorded in a linked database.
• Inherent biases. On one trail identification rates for males
were 6% to 9% points higher than for female. Recognition
rates for older people were higher than for younger
people (Introna, 2003).
• Also, the trial report states that Asians are easier [to
recognise] than whites, African-Americans are easier than
whites, [and] other race members are easier than
whites (FRVT, 2002)
24. VI Conclusions: The Agency of the Algorithm
• This paper has sought to underline the centrality of
software-sorting in structuring contemporary social and
geographical inequalities.
• It has also attempted to illustrate the need to maintain a
broad, multisectoral perspective which can capture how
different software-sorting techniques are encroaching
across different dimensions of contemporary societies.
• Clearly, though, much more detailed analyses on
software sorted assemblages in practice is needed
25. (i)
Software-Sorting: New ‘Digital Divides’?
(ii) Politics of Speed and (Relative)
Immobilisation
(iii) Challenges of Transparency
and Visibility