Manuel Castells

Another Form: From the ‘Informational’ to the ‘Infrastructural’ City

by Stephen Read

in: Footprint 5. Special Issue: D. Prosperi, A. Vernez Moudon & F. Claessens (eds.), Metropolitan Form. pp. 5-22

The city is at once material and medium, substantial and enduring on the one hand but mobile, changeable and different... more The city is at once material and medium, substantial and enduring on the one hand but mobile, changeable and different things to different people on the other. So to speak of its form has never been straightforward. In the last fifty years the city has become enmeshed in momentous processes transforming our societies and our senses of our place in the world. We have seen urban places become drawn into ever more integrated circuits with other places across the boundaries of nations and continents. This leaves us with question marks about the places we inhabit today and has generated problems of place and coherence in the contemporary city. Without offering solutions to problems of sprawl and fragmentation, I propose here a way of understanding the city and its growth as ordered. To do this I extend Castells’s idea of the ‘technological paradigm’ to spaces of places as well as those of flows and outline an urban form comprising limited technical systems, both high and low tech, establishing coherent and bounded infrastructures of objects, subjects and practices. These infrastructures are internally ordered as total technical systems or paradigms while they are also externally related to other infrastructures in backward and forward articulations that are capable of being generative and place-forming. I argue that we need to understand complex processes of boundary and centre formation in these articulations and use this knowledge to deliver a ‘dappled world’ of varying niches or inhabitable places from the very large to the very small. We need to find alternatives to the macrophysics and smooth pervasive power of the space of flows by maintaining, inventing and reinventing microphysical architectures of enabling places offering us multiple ways of being and living in our contemporary city.

Terminal <2012>

by Joerg Potthast

in N. Marquardt & V. Schreiber (eds.)

Ortsregister: Ein Glossar zu Räumen der Gegenwart, Bielefeld: transcript.

The Network University? Technology, Culture and Organisational Complexity in Contemporary Higher Education

by Tania Lewis

Flow

by Stuart Rockefeller

Published in Current Anthropology, as part of a special issued entitled "Keywords". This paper is a critique of the term "flow" in the anthropology of globalization.

“Flow” is a term that is frequently employed in anthropological discussions of globalization, although little... more “Flow” is a term that is frequently employed in anthropological discussions of globalization, although little attention is paid to the presuppositions and history the term carries with it. The rise of this keyword has been surprisingly inconspicuous. In this article, I show some of the ways “flow” is employed in anthropological and other social science writing today, tracing its development from the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and ultimately the writings of the philosopher Henri Bergson. I then raise two important concerns regarding the use of “flow” to talk about globalization. First, that argue that as it is employed today, the term lends itself all too easily to a metaphysical dualism which can only impede our understanding of the dynamic nature of locality and global interconnections today. Second, I argue that the term encodes what I call a “managerial perspective”, which finds agency only in large-scale social patterns and institutions, and is largely unable to recognize individual agency or the significance of small-scale organization and phenomena.

Millward, P. (2006) ‘Networks, power and revenue in contemporary football: An analysis of G14’, International Review of Modern Sociology 32(2): 199-216. Reprinted as Millward, P. (2007) ‘Networks, power and revenue in contemporary football: An analysis of G14’, Discourses on the Beautiful Game (Eds. L. Grunberg and S. Kukreja) Ash-win-Anoka Press: New Delhi

by Peter Millward

The Labour of 'Evolving' and 'Extending' Information: A Comparison of Karl Marx, Manuel Castells and Juche

by Gregory Sandstrom

Under review for "Science and Culture" and up for discussion at the second Summer School for Evolutionary and Institutional Economics, Rostov on the Don, Sept. 13-17, 2010

Keywords: Work/Labour Theory; Electronic-Information Age; Marxism; Sorokin – Sensate, Ideational and Idealistic... more Keywords: Work/Labour Theory; Electronic-Information Age; Marxism; Sorokin – Sensate, Ideational and Idealistic Cultural Systems; Natural-Physical Sciences and Human-Social Sciences; North Korea, Juche Ideology; Evolutionism; Extensive Growth and Intensive Growth; Integral Philosophy

The Rhetoric of Play: Locative Gaming and the Global City

by Dale Leorke

In early discussions of digital networks, many theorists tended to distinguish between the material world of physical... more In early discussions of digital networks, many theorists tended to distinguish between the material world of physical space, and the immaterial realm of cyberspace. But today we are increasingly seeing these two spaces converge as mobile technologies, locative media and digital networks collide with the physical architecture of contemporary cities. Previously separate and disconnected places are being absorbed into the networked space superimposed onto them, creating a ‘hybrid space’ embedded simultaneously in the local and the global. This embeddedness has created the potential for individuals living in these cities to intervene and interact in its public space. This thesis examines one manifestation of these interventions: ‘locative gaming’, or games which are located simultaneously in the physical world, and the virtual space of the game world. These games create their own rules that enable public play, but they must also navigate the rules of the real world, including its laws, social norms, and physical boundaries. As such, I argue these games must create their own ‘rhetoric of play’ to confront the constraints imposed on them from above, and develop a form of play which encourages participation and social relations, while taking into account the unique cultural dimensions of the local places in which they are performed.

SCANDAL POLITICS IN THE NEW MEDIA ENVIRONMENT: Analytical Note Spring 2008

by Amelia Arsenault

unpublished research