Technology, Urban Space and the Networked Community


Book Description

This collection stages a dynamic scholarly debate about the ambivalent workings of technocapitalism and humanism in urban spaces. Such workings are intended to provide multiple forms of autonomy and empowerment but instead create intolerable contradictions that are experienced in the form of a slavish adherence to machines. Representing the novelty of a post-anthropocentric grammar, this book points towards a new ethical and political praxis. It challenges the anthropocentrism of bio-politics and neoliberalism in order to express the constitutive potential of an eco-sensible ‘new earth’.




Technology, Urban Space and the Networked Community


Book Description

This collection stages a dynamic scholarly debate about the ambivalent workings of technocapitalism and humanism in urban spaces. Such workings are intended to provide multiple forms of autonomy and empowerment but instead create intolerable contradictions that are experienced in the form of a slavish adherence to machines. Representing the novelty of a post-anthropocentric grammar, this book points towards a new ethical and political praxis. It challenges the anthropocentrism of bio-politics and neoliberalism in order to express the constitutive potential of an eco-sensible ‘new earth’.




The Urban Commons


Book Description

The future of smart cities has arrived, courtesy of citizens and their phones. To prove it, Daniel T. O’Brien explains the transformative insights gleaned from years researching Boston’s 311 reporting system, a sophisticated city management tool that has revolutionized how ordinary Bostonians use and maintain public spaces. Through its phone service, mobile app, website, and Twitter account, 311 catalogues complaints about potholes, broken street lights, graffiti, litter, vandalism, and other issues that are no one citizen’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life. The Urban Commons offers a pioneering model of what modern digital data and technology can do for cities like Boston that seek both prosperous growth and sustainability. Analyzing a rich trove of data, O’Brien discovers why certain neighborhoods embrace the idea of custodianship and willingly invest their time to monitor the city’s common environments and infrastructure. On the government’s side of the equation, he identifies best practices for implementing civic technologies that engage citizens, for deploying public services in collaborative ways, and for utilizing the data generated by these efforts. Boston’s 311 system has narrowed the gap between residents and their communities, and between constituents and local leaders. The result, O’Brien shows, has been the creation of more effective policy and practices that reinvigorate the way citizens and city governments approach their mutual interests. By unpacking when, why, and how the 311 system has worked for Boston, The Urban Commons reveals the power and potential of this innovative system, and the lessons learned that other cities can adapt.




Splintering Urbanism


Book Description

Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about: *globalization and the city *technology and society *urban space and urban networks *infrastructure and the built environment *developed, developing and post-communist worlds. With a range of case studies, illustrations and boxed examples, from New York to Jakarta, Johannesberg to Manila and Sao Paolo to Melbourne, Splintering Urbanism demonstrates the latest social, urban and technological theories, which give us an understanding of our contemporary metropolis.




Augmented Urban Spaces


Book Description

There have been numerous possible scenarios depicted on the impact of the internet on urban spaces. Considering ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile, wireless connectivity and the acceptance of the Internet as a non-extraordinary part of our everyday lives mean that physical urban space is augmented, and digital in itself. This poses new problems as well as opportunities to those who have to deal with it. This book explores the intersection and articulation of physical and digital environments and the ways they can extend and reshape a spirit of place. It considers this from three main perspectives: the implications for the public sphere and urban public or semi-public spaces; the implications for community regeneration and empowerment; and the dilemmas and challenges which the augmentation of space implies for urbanists. Grounded with international real -life case studies, this is an up-to-date, interdisciplinary and holistic overview of the relationships between cities, communities and high technologies.




Japanese Propriety, Past and Present


Book Description

This book thus offers a fresh view on Japanese society focussing on the role of comportment for group cohesiveness. It explores the stereotype that Japan is the world’s most polite country, examining how proper conduct is acquired and expressed, and how the apparent conflict with some of the concepts considered essential for Western modernity, such as society, freedom and the individual, are balanced with Japan’s great emphasis on courtesy, politeness and civility. By comparing the present situation in Japan with behavioural standards of former periods as well as with other cultural traditions the book explains some of the distinctive features of present-day Japanese society. Overall the book argues that Japan is a prime example of multiple modernities concerning individuals, collectives and relationships between state and society.




Anarchism After Deleuze and Guattari


Book Description

Deleuze and Guattari never identified as anarchists, nor do they seem to know much about its historical development or continued praxis. Yet their individual and collective work belies this apparent and wilful oversight through a steady consideration of revolutionary subjectivity and active political experimentation. Chantelle Gray argues that while we cannot - and should not - attempt to call them anarchists, their work resonates with core anarchist principles such as prefiguration, careful experimentation and emergent strategies aimed at creating a feeling that life is worth living. This involves paying attention to both joyous affects and sad passions, which necessitates the affirmation of all of chance and, from that, fabulating new modes of existence. By bringing together the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari with the theory and practices of anarchism, this book demonstrates that fabulating the future is nothing short of a noetic act, making reasonable something which initially was senseless.




Networked Neighbourhoods


Book Description

The setting for this book is the networked community. The treatment of the subject matter is broad and interdisciplinary, with contributions from computer science, sociology, design, human factors and communication technology. The chapter contributors, drawn from across Europe and North America, offer a varied




Advances in Future Computer and Control Systems


Book Description

FCCS2012 is an integrated conference concentrating its focus on Future Computer and Control Systems. “Advances in Future Computer and Control Systems” presents the proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Future Computer and Control Systems(FCCS2012) held April 21-22,2012, in Changsha, China including recent research results on Future Computer and Control Systems of researchers from all around the world.




Gated Communities and the Digital Polis


Book Description

This edited collection provides an alternative discourse on cities evolving with physically and virtually networked communities—the ‘digital polis’—and offers a variety of perspectives from the humanities, media studies, geography, architecture, and urban studies. As an emergent concept that encompasses research and practice, the digital polis is oriented toward a counter-mapping of the digital cityscape beyond policing and gatekeeping in physical and virtual gated communities. Considering the digital polis as offering potential for active support of socially just and politically inclusive urban circumstances in ways that mirror the Greek polis, our attention is drawn towards the interweaving of the development of digital technology, urban space, and social dynamics. The four parts of this book address the formation of technosocial subjectivity, real-and-virtual combined urbanity, the spatial dimensions of digital exclusion and inclusion, and the prospect of emancipatory and empowering digital citizens. Individual chapters cover varied topics on digital feminism, data activism, networked individualism, digital commons, real-virtual communalism, the post-family imagination, digital fortress cities, rights to the smart city, online foodscapes, and open-source urbanism across the globe. Contributors explore the following questions: what developments can be found over recent decades in both physical and virtual communities such as cyberspace, and what will our urban future be like? What is the ‘digital polis’ and what kinds of new subjectivity does it produce? How does digital technology, as well as its virtuality, reshape the city and our spatial awareness of it? What kinds of exclusion and cooperation are at work in communities and spaces in the digital age? Each chapter responds to these questions in its own way, navigating readers through routes toward the digital polis. Chapter "Introduction - The digital polis and its practices: Beyond gated communities" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.