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-networked systems (e.g. Tilley et al., 2008 ), through the lens of urban political ecology (e.g. Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2006 ; Kaika, 2005 ), science and technology studies (e.g. Van Vliet, Spaargaren and Oosterveer, 2010 ), actor-network theory (ANT; e.g. Teh, 2011 ; Dombroski, 2015) or what has recently been termed ‘the infrastructural turn in urban studies’ (Coutard and Rutherford, 2015 ). The sociotechnical approach, confined to humans and technology, studies the development and use of technology as determined by and shaping social processes and practices over
the ideological precepts by which they are informed and conditioned. Especially in an age of geographic information systems – wherein lies an increasingly stark disparity between the visual appearance of the map itself on one hand, and the numerical data that it claims to represent on the other – the parameters within which such representations are given, and the socio-political consequences of such ‘givenness’ must be analysed with intense scrutiny. Digital mapping gives us a world through the binding of quantitative information to a set of representational
5 The ‘contested’ firm: the restructuring of work and production in the international political economy no involuntary changes have ever spontaneously restructured or reorganised a mode of production; … changes in productive relationships are experienced in social and cultural life, refracted in men’s ideas and their values, and argued through in their actions, their choices and their beliefs. (Thompson, 1976/1994: 222) T he desire to comprehend, order and manage the dual dynamics of globalisation and restructuring has led to much attention being paid to the
-sector-driven sites of market testing to third-sector drives for citizen empowerment through open data to partnership structures of city government and urban stakeholders. Geographies of different approaches reflect different national political cultures. So the Scandinavian stakeholder partnership laboratories of Helsinki and Copenhagen differ significantly from the state-driven natural experiments increasingly deployed in neoclassical economics-driven research, the randomised control tests of medical work or the attempts to harvest even the most basic data on cities dominated by
The air we breathe, the climate we share with others and the streets we walk down in the city where we might work and live are all just some of the many forms of urban commons . Like all commons they foreground the tensions between social demands that are shared by large numbers and particular rights that might be exercised by individuals, minorities and majorities. Conceptually, the notion of the city commons spans scholarly traditions. They range from empirically oriented political science to strands of critical urban studies informed by Deleuzian and
”’ rather than its wholeness as a ‘natural’ image’ of an object (Dorrian, 2013: 299). Unlike Wood, Dorrian sees 146 Stitching memories a significant difference between the cloud-swirled blue marbles of the Apollo photographs and the cloudless, eternal day of mosaicked satellite imagery; he argues that these patchwork worlds are a new kind of political map where differing resolutions and image upload frequencies speak more of Western political, security and economic interests, wherever they may lie, than they do of the bounded territories of nation-states. Regardless
places as against spaces. Places, in these stitchings, become holders for memory, moments or rhythms, that might be recombined in a reflective story of mapping with particular and unique resonances. To look at these kinds of practices through a temporal lens does not so much obliterate spatiality, but instead alters the analysis beyond modern conceptions, shifting to a more hybrid understanding of tempo-spatial translations. There is nothing inevitable about flow, and rich place-based analyses are needed to explore how the politics of placeholding emerges in a
and a political science of the institutional architecture of the Brazilian state. It describes in self-effacing and vivid detail his own attempts to engage, mediate, mitigate and even at times address and solve the complex system of everyday complicities between the state, its institutions and the agents of violence on both sides of the law. He describes movingly the times in which the logic of a poorly designed state architecture and the deep histories of exclusion, polarisation and racism have led to a rationally logical complicity between municipal corruption
state-societies (Giddens, 1998). Gerhard Schröder’s apparent embracing of the individualism and ‘workfare’ (Jessop, 1994) strategy of Blair’s ‘Third Way’ in his ‘Neue Mitte’ concept may be read as indicative of an acceptance of the necessary restructuring imperatives of a global economy. Yet, when we explore the debate taking place within and outside German state-society it becomes clear that the representation of Germany as a rigid and inflexible political economy in need of radical restructuring is by no means uncontested. An effective counter to neo-liberal claims
2 Nodes, ways and relations Joe Gerlach Here, now Maps, mappings, cartographies; (dis)orientations for the everyday, obdurate disciplinary motifs of and for geography, maligned and admired in variable measure. Cartography; a science and set of practices once pertaining to sovereign power alone, yet now increasingly diffuse in its geographic reach and performance. Nonetheless, whether rendered through hegemonic, quotidian or hybrid assemblages, mapping remains resolutely (geo)political at a range of disparate registers; statist to somatic. Elsewhere, I have used