Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of... more Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of “queer infrastructure”. Queer infrastructure, as we deploy it, reflects both an object of and orientation towards urban research practice. As an object, we discuss the function, use, and practice of (our) queer networks, specifically for research assumed to be unrelated to studies of sexuality and located in the urban African context. Here we centre questions of becoming, affect, and relationality. As an orientation, we discuss what can be “seen” both when entering the field through queer networks and by seeing urban spaces through queerness. In doing so, we suggest that sexuality is always present in urban research, even when not explicitly so.
T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is ... more T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is exemplified empirically by three of the most important protest movements of 2011: the Egyptian uprisings, culminating with the rallies in Tahrir Square, Cairo; the Spanish movement of the Indignados, with the occupation of Puerta del Sol, Madrid; and the American-based Occupy Wall Street movement, with camps in the relatively unknown then Zuccotti Park, a few meters away from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Bearing a critical challenge to the dominant interpretations of these phenomena, Gerbaudo offers the reader a genuinely rich insight into contemporary collective action, on the basis of an ideographic analysis of media practices. The latter is conducted through field research that drew on 80 interviews with activists and sympathizers, and on social media outlets such as Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Thus, a very precise account frames the events and the key figures of these three protest movements. On the theoretical side, the book finds its roots in the work of Zygmut Bauman (2000, 2001), Alberto Melucci (1996) and Ernesto Laclau (2005), but it shapes an original interpretative framework to explain the relationship between online action and offline demonstrations. There have been two mainstream tales of the events that transpired in Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. In the first case, many tales of the pundits that commented on the rallies limited the role of social media to their communication opportunities: Facebook was used to organize the events, Twitter to set the real-time logistics and YouTube to share the narrative with the rest of world. The second account is the one that links the recent literature on digital activism to the autobiographical accounts of those who took part in the 2011 protests. It is the chronicle of a leaderless horizontal power structure, the tale of social movements that are enabled by anything but the invisible threads of the Web. Gerbaudo confronts both tales, showing first that the mobilizing role of social media was not only at play in their technological properties, but in a wider acceptance of what a medium means, and second that the movements enabled by social media were not leaderless, horizontal or unbidden organizations. Gerbaudo’s argument is that social media was responsible for the construction of what he calls choreography of assembly, ‘a process of symbolic construction of public space which facilitates and guides the physical assembling of a highly dispersed and individualized constituency’ (5). The author’s claim is that such processes of construction are not at all spontaneous, but require choreographers, liquid leaders that set a digital/physical emotional space for collective action. It is through the metaphor of the choreography of assembly that this book offers an
In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice o... more In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring—an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, “smart city” policies became one of the foundational political technologies for the implementation of austerity measures. In this paper, I analyse how the smart city provided a lexicon for urban austerity through a series of different sites and vehicles of policymaking, from practitioners to companies and other institutions. I argue that smart city discourses and practices functioned as a political technology that was effective in justifying cost containment measures and supporting the shift to pro-innovation public expenditures. Yet, at the same time, the smart city techno-utopian vocabulary created spaces where other meanings and, potentially, alternative political outcomes were made possible by diverse alignments of knowledge and expertise.
This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of it... more This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of its cultural infrastructure through a process of classification and mapping of the City’s cultural venues. Its multi-layered database assists with the design of the most appropriate and effective policies to enhance the cultural and creative life of the city. The report provides: An explanation of the concept of culture that has been operationalised; A detailed rationale of the cultural classification framework adopted; An elaboration of the key methodological issues addressed in the collation of a consolidated database of cultural venues and infrastructure in the City, and the mapping technologies deployed; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribution of 3,106 cultural venues that were mapped and broken down into spatial, cultural industry, and venue types; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribut...
Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affer... more Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affermate nella ricerca geografica fino a diventarne una componente fondamentale. Eppure ‘fare etnografia' in geografia non è certo né scontato: richiede un adattamento alle esigenze e agli obiettivi della riflessione geografica, ma anche alla complessità del ‘campo' della ricerca nelle scienze sociali contemporanee. In particolare, i tempi, i luoghi e le forme di un'etnografia thick (Geertz, 1973) sembrano inadatte a confrontarsi con le complessità spazio-temporali delle dinamiche socio-spaziali attuali, con le trasformazioni del campo di ricerca, del soggetto che fa ricerca e del contesto in cui si fa ricerca, ma anche, e più radicalmente, con i limiti derivanti dal retaggio coloniale della ricerca etnografica. Attraverso il riferimento a cinque radicalmente diverse esperienze di ricerca sul campo, l'articolo pone la questione del fare etnografia nella ricerca geografica ed ...
Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outc... more Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outcome and a subject of academic research. In this article, we detail the results of workshops with young residents of five “Antarctic gateway cities” (Hobart, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Cape Town) who helped design and evaluate an online game that sought to communicate complex intersections of climate policy and science. We focus here on secondary effects of the workshops and game. On the one hand, outputs such as digital games respond to renewed desires for and from researchers to reach beyond scholarly sanctuaries and engage with real-world issues and communities in ways that question barriers of expertise and institutional entitlement. On the other, such dissolutions expose gaps in competency that can unnerve both researchers and participants, interrogating the expediency of collaborative game design and evaluation, and posing questions about the broader role and scope of ...
Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed acro... more Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, but they also draw upon local arrangements of heterogeneous constituents: policy experts, entrepreneurs, reports, IT infrastructures, universities, coworking spaces, networking protocols and so forth. The making of one such ecosystem, Cape Town’s so-called ‘silicon cape’, is the topic of this article, which, however, does not try to uncover the specific economic and geographic factors of tech clustering. Rather, it addresses some of the narrative discourses that have framed Cape Town as the entrepreneurial capital of South Africa and Africa at large. It shows how these narrative praxes are both reflexive and ontological: they at once work a...
Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l&... more Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l'origine della smart city e (ii) quanto le pratiche smart si differenzino o meno dalla maniera tradizionale (e neoliberista) di pensare e trasformare la citta
Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of... more Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of “queer infrastructure”. Queer infrastructure, as we deploy it, reflects both an object of and orientation towards urban research practice. As an object, we discuss the function, use, and practice of (our) queer networks, specifically for research assumed to be unrelated to studies of sexuality and located in the urban African context. Here we centre questions of becoming, affect, and relationality. As an orientation, we discuss what can be “seen” both when entering the field through queer networks and by seeing urban spaces through queerness. In doing so, we suggest that sexuality is always present in urban research, even when not explicitly so.
T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is ... more T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is exemplified empirically by three of the most important protest movements of 2011: the Egyptian uprisings, culminating with the rallies in Tahrir Square, Cairo; the Spanish movement of the Indignados, with the occupation of Puerta del Sol, Madrid; and the American-based Occupy Wall Street movement, with camps in the relatively unknown then Zuccotti Park, a few meters away from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Bearing a critical challenge to the dominant interpretations of these phenomena, Gerbaudo offers the reader a genuinely rich insight into contemporary collective action, on the basis of an ideographic analysis of media practices. The latter is conducted through field research that drew on 80 interviews with activists and sympathizers, and on social media outlets such as Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Thus, a very precise account frames the events and the key figures of these three protest movements. On the theoretical side, the book finds its roots in the work of Zygmut Bauman (2000, 2001), Alberto Melucci (1996) and Ernesto Laclau (2005), but it shapes an original interpretative framework to explain the relationship between online action and offline demonstrations. There have been two mainstream tales of the events that transpired in Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. In the first case, many tales of the pundits that commented on the rallies limited the role of social media to their communication opportunities: Facebook was used to organize the events, Twitter to set the real-time logistics and YouTube to share the narrative with the rest of world. The second account is the one that links the recent literature on digital activism to the autobiographical accounts of those who took part in the 2011 protests. It is the chronicle of a leaderless horizontal power structure, the tale of social movements that are enabled by anything but the invisible threads of the Web. Gerbaudo confronts both tales, showing first that the mobilizing role of social media was not only at play in their technological properties, but in a wider acceptance of what a medium means, and second that the movements enabled by social media were not leaderless, horizontal or unbidden organizations. Gerbaudo’s argument is that social media was responsible for the construction of what he calls choreography of assembly, ‘a process of symbolic construction of public space which facilitates and guides the physical assembling of a highly dispersed and individualized constituency’ (5). The author’s claim is that such processes of construction are not at all spontaneous, but require choreographers, liquid leaders that set a digital/physical emotional space for collective action. It is through the metaphor of the choreography of assembly that this book offers an
In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice o... more In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring—an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, “smart city” policies became one of the foundational political technologies for the implementation of austerity measures. In this paper, I analyse how the smart city provided a lexicon for urban austerity through a series of different sites and vehicles of policymaking, from practitioners to companies and other institutions. I argue that smart city discourses and practices functioned as a political technology that was effective in justifying cost containment measures and supporting the shift to pro-innovation public expenditures. Yet, at the same time, the smart city techno-utopian vocabulary created spaces where other meanings and, potentially, alternative political outcomes were made possible by diverse alignments of knowledge and expertise.
This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of it... more This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of its cultural infrastructure through a process of classification and mapping of the City’s cultural venues. Its multi-layered database assists with the design of the most appropriate and effective policies to enhance the cultural and creative life of the city. The report provides: An explanation of the concept of culture that has been operationalised; A detailed rationale of the cultural classification framework adopted; An elaboration of the key methodological issues addressed in the collation of a consolidated database of cultural venues and infrastructure in the City, and the mapping technologies deployed; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribution of 3,106 cultural venues that were mapped and broken down into spatial, cultural industry, and venue types; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribut...
Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affer... more Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affermate nella ricerca geografica fino a diventarne una componente fondamentale. Eppure ‘fare etnografia' in geografia non è certo né scontato: richiede un adattamento alle esigenze e agli obiettivi della riflessione geografica, ma anche alla complessità del ‘campo' della ricerca nelle scienze sociali contemporanee. In particolare, i tempi, i luoghi e le forme di un'etnografia thick (Geertz, 1973) sembrano inadatte a confrontarsi con le complessità spazio-temporali delle dinamiche socio-spaziali attuali, con le trasformazioni del campo di ricerca, del soggetto che fa ricerca e del contesto in cui si fa ricerca, ma anche, e più radicalmente, con i limiti derivanti dal retaggio coloniale della ricerca etnografica. Attraverso il riferimento a cinque radicalmente diverse esperienze di ricerca sul campo, l'articolo pone la questione del fare etnografia nella ricerca geografica ed ...
Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outc... more Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outcome and a subject of academic research. In this article, we detail the results of workshops with young residents of five “Antarctic gateway cities” (Hobart, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Cape Town) who helped design and evaluate an online game that sought to communicate complex intersections of climate policy and science. We focus here on secondary effects of the workshops and game. On the one hand, outputs such as digital games respond to renewed desires for and from researchers to reach beyond scholarly sanctuaries and engage with real-world issues and communities in ways that question barriers of expertise and institutional entitlement. On the other, such dissolutions expose gaps in competency that can unnerve both researchers and participants, interrogating the expediency of collaborative game design and evaluation, and posing questions about the broader role and scope of ...
Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed acro... more Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, but they also draw upon local arrangements of heterogeneous constituents: policy experts, entrepreneurs, reports, IT infrastructures, universities, coworking spaces, networking protocols and so forth. The making of one such ecosystem, Cape Town’s so-called ‘silicon cape’, is the topic of this article, which, however, does not try to uncover the specific economic and geographic factors of tech clustering. Rather, it addresses some of the narrative discourses that have framed Cape Town as the entrepreneurial capital of South Africa and Africa at large. It shows how these narrative praxes are both reflexive and ontological: they at once work a...
Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l&... more Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l'origine della smart city e (ii) quanto le pratiche smart si differenzino o meno dalla maniera tradizionale (e neoliberista) di pensare e trasformare la citta
Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi. Io: qual è l’... more Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi. Io: qual è l’origine della smart city? Come è stato possibile il passaggio da un’idea inizialmente vaga e debole di smartness – legata al miglioramento delle performance urbane in ambiti molto diversi (dal welfare all’efficientamento energetico) – a politiche e programmi che vedono nella smart city la “migliore delle città possibili”? IIO: a partire dall’analisi delle pratiche smart, sono rilevabili caratteristiche proprie del paradigma, o si tratta di un insieme di esperienze in linea con il modello neoliberale dominante di fare e pensare la città? Essere smart implica continuare, con un po’ più di tecnologia, con le stesse dinamiche di sviluppo urbano che sono parte integrante della profonda crisi economica, sociale e politica degli ultimi cinque anni o può (e deve) significare altro?
Book Review of Stiglitz and Greenwald (2015) Creating a Learning
Society: A New Approach to Grow... more Book Review of Stiglitz and Greenwald (2015) Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development and Social Progress.
In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis that involved United States first, and Europe im... more In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis that involved United States first, and Europe immediately after, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring (Peck, 2012). In Italy, a country that faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, austerity urbanism was declined through a series of measures that were tagged as ‘smart city policies’ (Vanolo, 2014). Observing the local translation of smart city paradigms in Turin and Milan, I argue that such agenda is a form of austerity urbanism that does not fit a restrictive category of neoliberalism. Although a critique of neoliberal regressive politics is still pertinent in the case of the smart city, other aspects need to be addressed in a different light. In this presentation, I will explain how diverse rationalities, not just neoliberal ones, converged in a mash-up of policies that were branded as ‘smart’.
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Papers by Andrea Pollio
Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development and Social Progress.
In Italy, a country that faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, austerity urbanism was declined through a series of measures that were tagged as ‘smart city policies’ (Vanolo, 2014). Observing the local translation of smart city paradigms in Turin and Milan, I argue that such agenda is a form of austerity urbanism that does not fit a restrictive category of neoliberalism. Although a critique of neoliberal regressive politics is still pertinent in the case of the smart city, other aspects need to be addressed in a different light. In this presentation, I will explain how diverse rationalities, not just neoliberal ones, converged in a mash-up of policies that were branded as ‘smart’.