Nigel Thrift

This intervention contributes to recent work in urban geography that integrates the conceptual frameworks of assemblages and actor-network theory by highlighting two additional directions that require a more rigorous and detailed theorization. The first direction concerns the relationship between contingency and necessity in urban assemblages and actor-networks and this paper delineates four specific propositions as a starting point for further reflection. The second direction suggests that urban assemblages and actor-networks require a more explicit vocabulary for thinking about competition and cooperation within and between cities. To this end, the paper introduces a new concept – delayed asymmetric counterforces – that can foster a better understanding of competition-induced urban change and destabilization. The novel concept is developed in conjunction with a typology of delays in competitive urban dynamics, which helps illuminate how delayed asymmetric counterforces are both a cause and an effect of the complexity inherent in the urban realm.

This paper argues that, in order to take place, space and scale more seriously in the study of our discipline, we have to complement the pervasive understanding of geography as a tradition of thought or an extended conversation with an understanding of our discipline as a tradition of practice, in which the main focus is on the becoming of geographers. It is argued that the theme of 'what it takes to be a good geographer' is a fertile way to study this process of becoming. The four main advantages of this approach are illustrated empirically in the body of the argument by the author's reflections on his socializing within two very different geographical traditions.

The experimental maps produced by artists working with locative media both bear witness to and participate in a radical reworking of the way in which space is conceived and encountered that destabilizes longstanding assumptions about the nature of representation, knowledge, and power. These mapmaking practices, it is argued, operate at the juncture of a cartographic tradition that entails distinctively modern ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world,and digital technologies and software operations that propose alternative ways of linking the world up. The thesis charts how these art maps engage in a critique of cartography, the extent to which they remain indebted to it, but also their use of coded operations to pioneer novel apprehensions of space that mark a decisive ‘break’ with a modern worldview. The map works of locative media are accordingly positioned in relation to what is seen as a paradigmatic shift from Cartographic Space to Code Space, and the analysis of case studies supplies a means of comprehending this ongoing transformation, demonstrating that mapping survives beyond cartography but entails a tearing apart of the cartographic surface and the representational epistemology that accompanies it. Gone are the compass, scale and fix-points by which, for centuries, a sense of place was anchored and the world made knowable, yet to be set adrift in this way is not to be left ‘all at sea’. Working with the novel intuitions, forms and geometries that arise from the operations of software code, post-cartographical mapping practices continue to supply a sense of orientation. However, they also pioneer novel forms of territory, and power over territory, that call for new strategies of counter-mapping and, with it, a ‘post-cartographical’ reframing of the study of locative media. Now pictured as a site of contestation between antithetical spatial paradigms, locative media is rehabilitated as a vital force, operating at a pivotal moment, in a broadly epoch-defining reshaping of space and spatial representation.

This paper enquires into the history of clock-time through a critical engagement with Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift’s Shaping the Day. The paper delineates the contours of an approach to the history of clock-time based on an analysis of the parallelism between the historical trajectories of clock-time and market relations. This approach is presented through a four-fold critical engagement with Glennie and Thrift's book assessing theoretical shortcomings, definitional problems, normative commitments and historical method.

The last 20 years have witnessed a deepening of the imbrication between capital and the university. This paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of profit, value, and growth. These same ontologies have appealed to critical geographers as a means of reconceiving space as unfixed. Drawing on a case study of Deleuze’s appropriation in management literature, I show how such ontologies presuppose a vitalism that necessarily reproduces and obscures the structures of exploitation.

The city has become a defining feature of contemporary human experience, supporting diverse risk and enabling environments. Whilst urban risk environments have been the subject of numerous innovative research projects in recent years, the figure of the enabling environment is less well understood. This paper seeks to develop this figure through reference to recent scholarship in social theory, human geography and urban sociology. This figure will be illustrated throughout with data drawn from various qualitative research projects conducted in Melbourne, Australia and Vancouver, Canada. This qualitative research highlights the array of enabling characteristics present in urban drug use contexts, characteristics that have yet to be fully explored in relation to the development of innovative settings-based harm reduction strategies. This research draws attention to the ways particular urban settings support the development of affective and relational networks of “social repair” vital to the maintenance of health and wellbeing. These enabling characteristics serve to build social ties and enhance local networks; increase belonging and “connection to place”; and reinforce local “cultures of care”. They also represent resources of enormous potential for harm reduction policy and practice.  Greater attention to the array of assets and opportunities present in urban settings offers fresh insights into the nature of enabling environments and their role in reducing drug related harms and facilitating healthy growth and development.

In this article I propose we rethink the nature of the individual human subject in a landscape where cognition has been distributed (Hutchins, Clark), individuality has been transformed into associations between heterogeneous actors, and human and non-human agency has been reconceived as a product of attribution (Actor Network Theory). Reengaging with the material developed in my book Hawking Incorporated, where I did an ethnographic study of Stephen Hawking, the man and the persona, I will extend my original analysis to extract and map the processes through which the individual human subject is constituted. Turning upside down all the notions of which the ''subject'' is supposed to be made by exterior-izing, materializing, collectivizing, and distributing, mind, body, and identity, I will make visible the ramifications that constitute the subject through processes of distribution and singularization. To the powerful myth of the ''disincorporated brain,'' I propose an antidote—the concept of the distributed-centered subject.

The passing of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej on October 13, 2016 marked a significant turning point in modern Thai history. As the world’s longest-reigning monarch, King Bhumibol had been much loved and revered as the country’s father figure for 70 years. In the wake of his demise, it seemed to be that every corner of Thailand was packed with emotions that also came with an array of cultural implications for what it means to be Thai. Through an ethnographic study of the unique emotional phenomenon, this thesis aims to explore how grief in Thailand’s post-King Bhumibol era manifested in terms of spatiality, as well as and how it was culturally constructed. Ultimately, this thesis argues that how the nationwide mourning was practiced had engendered a space for mourners to perform Thainess–an umbrella term for good citizenship and Thai national identity. Apart from a cultural analysis, this thesis shall contribute to the interdisciplinary fields of ethnography, political science, Southeast Asian studies, and Thai studies, as it navigates the uncharted territory of understanding Thainess and the monarchy by taking into account the people’s perspective.

This text draws together a set of characteristics that can be used as building blocks for a conceptual model of Affect Space. I have previously described Affect Space as an emerging techno-sensuous spatial order. Here I build upon these earlier investigations and the outcomes of the Technology / Affect / Space (T / A / S) public research trajectory conducted in 2016, which included public seminars in Amsterdam, Cambridge (Ma.), and Rotterdam, and continues in a series of commissioned essays on Open! , of which this text is one. These essays can help to articulate new design strategies for this quickly evolving context, where the spatial design disciplines are curiously absent from the debate.

An edited version of this text has appeared on the Open! online publication platform for art, culture, and the public domain (September 19, 2017):
http://www.onlineopen.org/re-designing-affect-space

Instead of concurring with the stance of the overall rejection of formal institutions, Nigel Thrift poses the question of “how one can rework institutions and their work ethic in order for them to be appropriate to our times”. As a general principle, he outlines the view that “rather than a cipher, the organisation should be a ‘body’ people can interact with”. The growth of a large number of informal institutions in the past years, “all the way from citizens’ juries to NGOs”, embodies, along these lines, a form of politics that has positive effects. It allows for the dispersal of diverse forms of activism, promotes a degree of transparency, and allows for the closer monitoring of larger formal organisations.

In this article, we engage with notions of space, affect, and waste in relation to academic research. Specifically, we seek to make present the ignored and absent aspects of our daily lives and experiences. We pay particular attention to affect and its relationship to space, exploring and theorizing how space becomes (un)produc-tive or differently productive. In doing so, we return to the lived aspects of daily life and the everyday (Lefebvre, 1991) with non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008), hoping to not only better represent the formative, figurative, and relational aspects of experience but also that of the research process. It is our contention that such an approach to space will reengage the rhythms, intensities, and practices that enable a kind of becoming, a kind of unfurling and exploration, that is often absent and wasted in academic scholarship.