Journal articles on the topic 'Spatial rationalities'

In 1973, Horst W Rittel and Malvin A Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problem’ in planning theory. They describe spatial planning as dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. This contribution picks up the concept of wicked problems, reflects on it from a planning-theoretical perspective, and proposes the use of Cultural Theory’s concept of clumsy solutions as a response to wicked planning problems. In discussing public participation processes in spatial planning, it is then shown what clumsy solutions mean for spatial planning. The four rationalities of Cultural Theory are then used to explain why public participation in planning can become wicked, and how these rationalities provide a response that copes with this wickedness.

As an emergent and rapidly propagating concept through which the hydrological sphere of the earth is identified as a new economic possibility, the Blue Economy is traveling globally and is being localized differently. Adding to Winder and Le Heron’s interrogation of the Blue Economy as an investment-institutional project that creates new biological–economic knowledge and relations, I argue that the Blue Economy is necessarily a complex governmental project that opens up new governable spaces and rationalizes particular ways of governing. By demonstrating how China’s marine economy is being assembled and practiced in ways that not only open up new space for accumulation but also create new spatial rationalities that rearrange people and resources, I urge geographers to be attentive to the questions of space, rationality, and power in specific geographic contexts where the Blue Economy is being localized.

The rampant spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is worth examining from different angles. From the angle of urban spatial patterns and urban morphology, urban spatial agglomeration, polarization of spatial patterns, and the concept of centralization adopted in planning urban space are objective conditions that have aggravated the pandemic. This paper examines the mechanisms and effects that may have helped the spread of the pandemic. Considering the rapid spread and severe outcome of the coronavirus disease due to the spatial agglomeration of urban population, it is required to make a trade-off among economic, ecological and safe rationalities, and put safe rationality first.

This article scrutinises the role of communicative and strategic rationalities in the strategic spatial planning of a city. With an analytical framework that draws on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, the article identifies communicatively and strategically rational action orientations in competitive and collaborative settings at different scales of strategic spatial planning. The analytical feasibility of the framework is examined by analysing strategic spatial planning in the city of Turku (Finland). By providing insights on the central role of strategic rationality, the article contributes to the theoretical discourse on strategic spatial planning that has been strained by an overemphasis on communicative rationality. Regarding relevance to planning practice, the article adds to the understanding of the complex governance networks in which a city engages in its strategic spatial planning.

ABSTRACT:This special section of Urban History explores the spatial histories of urban house numbering and the calculative rationalities of government since the Enlightenment. More than a mere footnote to the history of postal communications, the house number was first introduced as an inscriptive device to serve a wide range of governmental purposes, from military conscription and the quartering of soldiers to census-taking and the policing of urban populations. The spatial practice of house numbering can therefore be seen as a ‘political technology’ that was developed to reorganize urban space according to the dictates of numerical calculation. The articles in this special section examine the historical emergence of house numbering, and related practices, in different geographical circumstances, illustrating the spatial strategies of governmentality and the tactics of resistance that shaped the spatial organization of the modern city.

Abstract Marine spatial planning (MSP) is advanced by its champions as an impartial and rational process that can address complex management issues. We argue that MSP is not innately rational and that it problematises marine issues in specific ways, often reflecting hegemonic agendas. The illusion of impartial rationality in MSP is derived from governmentalities that appear progressive but serve elite interests. By understanding the creation of governmentalities, we can design more equitable planning processes. We conceptualise governmentalities as consisting of problematisations, rationalities and governance technologies, and assess England’s first marine plans to understand how specific governmentalities de-radicalise MSP. We find that progressive framings of MSP outcomes, such as enhanced well-being, are deployed by the government to garner early support for MSP. These elements, however, become regressively problematised in later planning phases, where they are framed by the government as being difficult to achieve and are pushed into future iterations of the process. Eviscerating progressive elements from the planning process clears the way for the government to focus on implementing a neoliberal form of MSP. Efforts to foster radical MSP must pay attention to the emergence of governmentalities, how they travel through time/space and be cognisant of where difference can be inserted into planning processes. Achieving progressive MSP will require the creation of a political frontier early in the process, which cannot be passed until pathways for progressive socio-environmental outcomes have been established; advocacy for disenfranchised groups; broadening MSP evaluations to account for unintended impacts; and the monitoring of progressive objectives.

This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and “technified” along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico’s Southern Border Program ( Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy’s goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two inter-related arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.

Mobility, especially for car traffic, is a contested spatial phenomenon in contemporary cities. It contributes to processes of segregation and inequality, and the power-geometry of mobility is an integral part of the conflicting rationalities inherent in contemporary urban space wars. Internationally, Copenhagen is often seen as a successfully planned city. However, a case study of a participatory planning initiative in Copenhagen reveals inert and unequal power relations. It illustrates how residents experience their living conditions as being reduced by heavy car traffic, and how they oppose the multidimensional side effects caused by traffic overload. To increase the welfare of everyday life, urban policies thus ought to focus much more on the spatial distribution of mobility and the ways that mobility influences place-bound living conditions. Integrating bottom-up initiatives and participatory planning processes oriented towards empowerment could be a vital part of democratic urban planning.

Linked to the image of a wild and still-to-be-explored territory, as well as to images of the region as one of new economic opportunities, discourses on the Arctic also tie in with issues of climate change, cooperation and conflict, Arctic governance, international law and the situation and rights of indigenous people, as well as Great Power politics. Taken together, these aspects characterize a region whose formation is different from regionalization processes in other parts of the world. As the regional peculiarity of the Arctic is reflected by a variety and plurality of representations, discourses, perceptions and imaginaries, it can usefully be analyzed as a region of unfolding governmentality. The present article argues that the prospects for the Arctic are strongly intertwined with perceptions and depictions of it as an international region subject to emerging practices of governmentality. By drawing on both Foucault’s texts and governmentality studies in international relations (IR), we discuss how the Arctic is affected by governmental security rationalities, by specific logics of political economy and order-building, as well as becoming a subject for biopolitical rationalizations and imaginaries. The discourses and practices of governmentality that permeate the Arctic contribute to its spatial, figurative and political reframing and are aimed at making it a governable region that can be addressed by, and accessible for, ordering rationalities and measures.

In Cape Town, as in other cities of the Global South, the paradigms of millennial development are continuously mobilized in specific material ways. The idea that poverty can be fought with profit is manifest in a series of urban experiments that involve informal entrepreneurs, corporations, real estate developers, local architects, economists, non-governmental organizations and state agencies, in the search for market solutions to economic marginality. To illustrate this argument about the spatial politics of development, this paper charts the architectural, organizational and pedagogical making of Philippi Village, a building complex in one of Cape Town’s poorest neighbourhoods. A former cement factory turned into an entrepreneurial hub, Philippi Village is a material inscription, at the so-called bottom of the pyramid, of the possibility of expanding the frontiers of accumulation. However, while this entrepreneurial village may be a brownfield site for new forms of profit, its architectures also reveal the diverse economic rationalities that emerge from the quest of good entrepreneurship, including the politics of seeking spatial justice amid the urban legacies of apartheid.

This article explores the rationalities of social change of a sports-based intervention, midnight football, carried out on two sites in the suburban landscape of Sweden. Based on interviews with coaches and managers and on-site observations, we examine how rationalities and technologies of social change are promoted, how technologies of social change are assumed to operate within the intervention, and how the intervention objectives are formed in relation to the technologies promoted. The analysis is guided by a Foucauldian perspective on disciplinary and pastoral power. It displays how various conceptualizations of risk underpin the intervention, and, in particular, technologies of spatial and temporal diversion. Youth are (dis)located to perceived sites of order and rule, as midnight football is portrayed as a regulated arena in opposition to outside sites of disorder. To form and visualize the rules of law, coaches, ascribed the position of role-models and law-makers, have a particularly important role to play, embodying law, rule, and conduct. In addition, disciplinary power operates through normalizing sanctions, stressing the corrective influence of coaches and readjustment of youth conduct. The technologies promoted are underpinned by goals to form a certain order of subjects, where ideals of conduct can be transferred and proliferated to the world outside, forming order and security in society. Those deemed at-risk and in need of social change, are addressed by means of discipline and control. Conclusively, the technologies promoted appear more as a symptom of existing patterns of inequalities and segregation than as a solution to the challenges confronted.

Rationalities endemic to modernity entail an implicit spatial imaginary of networks. Additionally, modernity envisages nature as an external domain that is discoverable by science and domesticable through technology in order to drive economic productivity. This article examines Grapevine Reservoir as an artifact of modernity. Through an examination of Dallas-based representations of Denton Creek space, we seek to demonstrate that the area was discursively produced as a distal node of the Dallas network: as nothing more than a point-source for urban water. And as water flowed into Dallas, the city flowed outward to Grapevine along the same conduit. We draw on archival data from a major local newspaper during the proposal and construction phases of the reservoir (1921–1954), as well as key government documents prepared by the US Congress and US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in the 1940s. Texts were subjected to discourse analysis, to examine how urban interests rationalized Denton Creek space.

The current paper examines the legitimacy dilemmas that rise from local governments’ direct policy instruments and market interventions. It takes the case of public land management strategies. The paper argues that current societal challenges—such as energy transition, climate change and inclusive urban innovation—require planning practices to be more effective. Direct government instruments such as direct market interventions have proven to significantly reduce the implementation gap of planning practice. Looking at significant urban challenges, municipalities worldwide could be urged to apply such direct government instruments on a larger scale in the future. However, although direct government intervention in markets can be very effective, it is also controversial in terms of legitimacy. It explicitly and inevitably introduces financial incentives to the organization of government. Balancing these incentives against spatial planning interests unavoidably causes dilemmas. Based on eight Dutch case studies, this paper develops a framework to systematically spell out the legitimacy dilemmas that stem from public market intervention. It facilitates an explicit discussion on varying instrumental rationalities and improving the legitimacy of public action.

This text handles with the fate of the built monuments to the memory of victims built as martyrs in a context of crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. He is mainly interested in the way the political systems legitimize them since their construction. As regards him "Monument of the martyrs", the results show a kind of legitimization of the power in sync with the mobilization of urban logics. Which passes by the gratitude and the valuation to the deaths set up as martyrs and by the strategies of identification, resistance and identity domination. The article tends to highlight a variability of the fields of use of the monument as social resource and the representations which are associated with it, the links built between such representations and the arrangement of the city during period going from 2002 till 2010. As a matter of fact, the text shows that the legitimization of the monument in the urban dynamics favors rationalities the coherence of which strengthens the public action regarding governance, regarding production of a shape of citizenship, a type of collective identity and spatial marking

AbstractAs digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data and how the boundary between self and other is drawn algorithmically. It argues that algorithmic security practices and Big Data technologies have transformed self/other relations. Rather than the enemy or the risky abnormal, the ‘other’ is algorithmically produced as anomaly. Although anomaly has often been used interchangeably with abnormality and pathology, a brief genealogical reading of the concept shows that it works as a supplementary term, which reconfigures the dichotomies of normality/abnormality, friend/enemy, and identity/difference. By engaging with key practices of anomaly detection by intelligence and security agencies, the article analyses the materialisation of anomalies as specific spatial ‘dots’, temporal ‘spikes’, and topological ‘nodes’. We argue that anomaly is not simply indicative of more heterogeneous modes of othering in times of Big Data, but represents a mutation in the logics of security that challenge our extant analytical and critical vocabularies.

This article argues that the EU's neighbourhood policy is deeply entrenched in the Eurocentric spatial imaginaries of the EU as the universal core of and pole of attraction to its neighbours. This is especially clear in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and Eastern Partnership (EaP) concept of an asymmetrical partnership and neighbourhood. The ENP and EaP constituted the EU as a fully European core, while simultaneously othering its neighbourhood as not-fully European with an uncertain status of being between the inside and outside. This article attempts to expose how the ENP and EaP's practices draw a border for the EU/Europe and its neighbourhood with the use of specific EU policy instruments, which are not just technical or professional tools. To the contrary, these instruments hold some potential power in constituting and envisioning the EU's closest outside neighbours. This article will move beyond application-oriented research and draw on critical social theory, especially the already-existing governmentality research as well as Michel Foucault's theory of power. The article concludes with the exposed mechanisms of constructing the political and cultural space of neighbourhood (and ultimately Europe too) through the ENP and EaP's governmental rationalities of their border practices.

In Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, high population growth rates, decades of rural-urban migration, and rampant land and real-estate speculation have contributed to the rapid urbanization of peri-urban land and the engulfing of pre-existing rural settlements. Lahore’s spatial transformation goes hand in hand with an increasingly complex urban governance framework. Historically shaped by colonial planning institutions and decades of political instability as power alternated between military and civilian regimes, Pakistan’s governance practices have contributed to increasing levels of urban segregation and inequality. This raises questions around the in- and exclusionary role of planning in fostering or constraining residents’ access to housing and services. Comparing three vignettes and drawing upon insights gained from extensive fieldwork, this article employs the concept of ‘access-assemblages’ to analyze how access to urban resources—i.e., land, housing, and services—is experienced, disputed, and negotiated in the rapidly urbanizing peri-urban fringe of Lahore. The cases represent different spatial and socio-political configurations brought about by a variety of actors involved in the planning and development of the city’s periphery as well as in contesting development: private developers, the army, the city development authorities, and the residents of affected villages. The analysis unpacks the planning rationalities and mechanisms that reinforce inequalities of access and exclusions. Unfolding practices that enable or hinder actors’ ability to access resources sheds light on the complex layers assembled in urban planning in Lahore and serves as a basis to rethink planning towards a more inclusive approach.

Across the developing world, immigrants, internal migrants and long-time residents increasingly co-occupy and co-produce estuarial zones: sites loosely structured by the disciplines of state, formal employment or hegemonic cultural norms. In these hyper-diverse, often highly fluid sites, the appearance and form of friendships and solidarities are varied and revealing. Drawing on examples from rapidly transforming African cities – particularly Johannesburg and Nairobi – this article adds three facets to the emerging literature on urban friendship. First, it outlines conditions under which the localised intimacy of friendship represents a potentially frightening form of social obligation and regulation. Given many ‘southern’ urban economies’ uncertainty and migrants’ orientation to ‘multiple elsewheres’, local solidarities – including friendship – are often more frustration than facilitator. Second, it suggests that amidst these seemingly anomic, distrustful sites, residents forge shared values and socialities that eschew friendships’ potentially confining bonds. These ‘communities of convenience’ illustrate the value of solidarity in migrant-rich spaces while raising broader questions about the spatial scale and role of affective relationships in overcoming economic and physical precarity. It lastly argues that the relative strength of localised friendships provide a means of comparing urban sites while revealing rationalities – political, economic and social – at work: friendship fears reveal the distinct estuarial spaces shaped by ongoing movements of people into, out of, and through precarious cities of the south.

Neoliberalism as a hegemonic global ideology and framework of governance has been the subject of extensive critical analyses in geography and urban studies. Despite the conceptual difficulties involved, a growing number of scholars have attempted to apply this critical discourse to China. In this commentary, we critically interrogate the urban China literature that deploys the neoliberal lens, mostly authored by scholars outside China, and we raise the fundamental question as to whether this discourse can ever capture the central stories or trajectories of China’s urban transformation. We examine the interpretations of China’s urban land property market, urban inequality and its spatial manifestation, and the emerging urban governmentality – the areas in which neoliberalism has been most often invoked – to highlight the utility and limitations of a neoliberal treatment of China. We argue that the neoliberal representation of China’s urban (re)development, with its preoccupation with capital and class interests, is unable to effectively capture the distinctive nature of entanglement of capital, state and society in China, and thus obscures the driving role and the competing rationalities of the authoritarian state, and the rapid reconfiguration of urban society. By citing examples of recent urban China research, we show that the neoliberalism framework, even in its ‘variegated’ or ‘assemblage’ versions, tends to trap China’s analysis within a frame of reference comfortable to Western researchers, and ultimately hinders the development of diversified, potentially more fruitful inquiries of the urban world.

Selection of scale in science and planning is often guided by ad-hoc decisions and arguments of accuracy and availability of existing data and resources. A more analytical approach to selection of scale and a bridge between theoretical insight and practical application is required. This paper reviews recent developments in thinking on theoretical concepts on scale from the perspective of geo-information science and compares these with a real life case. The concept of scale is framed as a three dimensional boundary object that explains scale choice as resultant of rationalities in reality-, model- and data scales. It is applied to a case-study of how issues of scale were handled in the Reconstruction program of the Province of North Brabant in The Netherlands. The Reconstruction is an ongoing regional spatial planning exercise that started in the year 2000 in response to major veterinary, environmental, social and economic problems in areas with concentrations of intensive livestock keeping. It combines legislation and policies at international, national, regional and municipal levels. Geographic information was produced to support and present the results of the plan process and related SEA. Scale of various intermediate and final geo-information products varied from 1:5000–1:400,000 and was dependent on the plan stage, plan status and target audience, plan instrument, level of participation, data characteristics, costs and technology. By comparing theory with the case study we bring out the criteria and conditions of selection of appropriate scale whereby the usefulness of academic research in geographic information science for planning and decision making could be improved.

Sports practices have been emphasised in social policy as a means of responding to social problems. In this article we analyse a sports-based social intervention performed in a “socially vulnerable” area in Sweden. We examine the formation of includable citizens in this project, based on interviews with representatives involved in the project. The material is analysed from a governmentality perspective, focusing on how problems and solutions are constructed as being constitutive of each other. The focus of the analysis is on social solidarity and inclusion as contemporary challenges, and how sport, specifically football, is highlighted as a way of creating social solidarity through a pedagogic rationality—football as a means of fostering citizens according to specific ideals of solidarity and inclusion. The formation of solidarity appears not as a mutual process whereby an integrated social collective is created, but rather as a process whereby those affected by exclusion are given the opportunity to individually adapt to a set of Swedish norms, and to linguistic and cultural skills, as a means of reaching the “inside”. Inclusion seems to be possible as long as the “excluded” adapt to the “inside”, which is made possible by the sports-based pedagogy. In conclusion, social problems and social tensions are spatially located in “the Area” of “the City”, whose social policy, of which this sports-based intervention is a part, maintains rather than reforms the social order that creates these very tensions.

Abstract Introduction The paper investigates the relation between spatial justice and recognition. With this respect, it focuses on rhetorics of recognition, namely discourses, narratives and slogans put in place by actors who produce a territorial identity in order to be recognized in their peculiar and different characters. Case description The case-study employed is the Riace model, a worldwide known example of refugees and asylum seekers hosting and welcoming practice in Italy. Fieldnotes, public statements and newspaper articles were used to investigate both narratives through which Riace’s identity was produced and how this identity shaped Riace’s rhetorics of recognition within the context of a conflict between the local administration and the national government. Discussion and evaluation The paper shows how claims for recognition may drive towards negative outputs. Specifically, in the case of Riace, claims for diversity re-affirmed path-dependency and conditions of marginalization as a result of a depersonalised place-based approach and logics of exception. Conclusions Finally, the paper suggests that researchers should avoid considering diversity as a value per se in order to address spatial justice issues. Moreover, it suggests that rhetorics of recognition may help both in case of conflicting rationalities and to formulate situated ethical judgments.

This article aims to contribute to recent debates on the politics of smart grids by exploring their installation in low-income areas in Kingston (Jamaica) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). To date, much of this debate has focused on forms of smart city experiments, mostly in the Global North, while less attention has been given to the implementation of smart grids in cities characterised by high levels of urban insecurity and socio-spatial inequality. This article illustrates how, in both contexts, the installation of smart metering is used as a security device that embeds the promise of protecting infrastructure and revenue and navigating complex relations framed along lines of socio-economic inequalities and urban sovereignty – here linked to configurations of state and non-state (criminal) territorial control and power. By unpacking the political workings of the smart grid within changing urban security contexts, including not only the rationalities that support its use but also the forms of resistance, contestation and socio-technical failure that emerge, the article argues for the importance of examining the conjunction between urban and infrastructural governance, including the reshaping of local power relations and spatial inequalities, through globally circulating devices.

This essay reflects on how built architecture can be studied as an intangible heritage, focusing on the specificities of city life in the Iberian states of the European region and in Ibero-American states. This reflection foregrounds the ways in which the concept of built architecture as an intangible heritage may be enabling for those invested in challenging the contemporary dual planning regimes that often govern unequally divided cities in both regions; such situated planning regimes are characterized by persistences of the rationalities of colonialism and development. The essay starts by discussing how architecture research—and architectural history in particular—can articulate critical theories of space that allow research to understand built architecture as a “constantly recreated,” plural assemblage of spatial representations, practices, and imaginations. It will continue with an examination on the methodological implications of this theoretical approach to built architecture as an intangible heritage, notably regarding the possibilities of historical research methods informed by an ethnographic perspective. The reflection draws on an experience of fieldwork and archival research on the history of the late Twentieth-Century urban extensions of Lisbon. In addition, it draws on the valuable debates on built heritage within tradition studies, as well as on the diverse literature on informal spatial production in cities in Brazil, Peru, and elsewhere in the Ibero-American region. The reflection will conclude by exploring how studying the built environment as an intangible heritage can illuminate the elisions of urban history in the construction of a domain of built heritage; and in particular on how specific informally produced spaces are conceived synchronically as expressing a timeless cultural heritage, notably of rurality. What are some of the ways in which situated urban histories in Iberia and in the Ibero-American region articulate colonial and developmental rationalities that foster the celebration of certain kinds of built heritage, and the forgetting of others? Furthermore, to what extent does scholarly research, as well as the much maligned practices of poverty tourism, focus on a select number of unequal spaces such as Rio’s Rocinha or Lisbon’s Cova da Moura, often productively placing such spaces in the frame of a bounded, cultural heritage while neglecting situated histories of unequal division, attentive both to plural intangible heritages and to global circulations of prospective imagination.

Since the concept of redeveloping Wrigley Field became prevalent, the Chicago Tribune has notably constructed a variety of narrative strands on related urban dynamics. Through a framework that connected post-Gramsci insights of hegemony, discourse, and critics of spatial and economic neoliberalism, this study examined how the newspaper strategically assembled discourses in mediatizing urban politics surrounding the Wrigley renovation. First, the newspaper fostered hegemonic consent that endorsed the redevelopment(s) by promoting old tropes of economic development and market growth despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Second, it also produced a parallel discourse that expressed moderate recognition and sympathy to the interest and experience of the community. Without fundamentally challenging neoliberal power, however, such discursive construction was a strategic and instrumental intervention that reinforced the contingencies and boundaries of neoliberal hegemony. Through such investigations, this study shed light on the ongoing rearticulation(s) of the media regime that strategically produced neoliberal rationalities, subjectivities, and discursive antagonism as it assisted to shape urban imageries and political economies of sporting spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of the governing of flood risk mitigation in advanced liberal society, through an in-depth Swedish case study. By combining social network analysis and genealogy, this paper investigates who is involved, how they organise, their modes of thinking, how they mitigate flood risk, as well as how such regime of practises have come into being. The findings suggest dominant rationalities that reduce the actual complexity of flood risk in spatial and temporal terms to fit the legal and institutional environment. The resulting fragmentation is associated with a commodification of flood risk mitigation, in which actors expect to be able to procure modules of safety and sustainability on the market. This commodification materialises in a vacuum of responsibilisation, when obligations are imposed without commensurate guidelines. These processes of fragmentation, commodification, and responsibilisation are core constituents of neoliberalisation, which is clearly shaping the governing of flood risk mitigation even in Sweden; a bastion of the strong welfare state. Regardless of the notable individual capacities of the involved actors, systemic constraints in the governmentality have generated these detrimental processes in the face of overwhelming complexity. These systemic constraints must be removed or overcome for the governing of flood risk mitigation to match the complexity of flood risk in the catchment area. This paper thus provides input that can inform policy changes for a more sustainable future in the face of unprecedented change.

Résumé L’agencement spatial des périphéries urbaines, au travers du « lotissement » (loteamento), n’a pas suscité beaucoup d’intérêt de la part des anthropologues. Prenant appui sur les documents d’urbanisme impliqués dans les opérations de lotissement, cet article prétend faire la « généalogie » (Foucault) de cette forme d’habitat à Rio de Janeiro en analysant les différentes rationalités techniques et politiques qui la traversent. En particulier, il défend que le lotissement doit beaucoup à la « raison graphique » (Goody), au genre d’opérations que l’utilisation « d’artefacts graphiques » (Hull) rend possible. Il soutient également que la technologie du lotissement est née en réponse à des problèmes spécifiques: à l’époque coloniale, il s’agissait de réglementer la création de voirie pour préserver l’espace public de la rue, alors qu’à la fin du dix-huitième siècle, l’enjeu était plutôt de réformer le réseau des voies de circulation. La codification des opérations de lotissement telles que nous les connaissons aujourd’hui ne survint qu’au début du siècle précédent en accord avec les nouvelles préoccupations de l’époque concernant les nécessités collectives de la population urbaine. Loin des stéréotypes sur la « ville informelle » (cidade ilegal), la périphérie se révèle un véritable laboratoire de l’aménagement urbain (planejamento urbano).

Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn't looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. -- Don DeLillo (16) DeLillo captures in a few lines key aspects of a cultural narrative concerning how technology has sped up human lives. The speeds at which forms are transmitted and affect the ways we apprehend the world. Speed is enjoyable. Speed abstracts. Speed is visceral. Speed fragments. We are both agents of its processes and subject to its force. Like DeLillo's channel surfer then you may explore the content of this 'speed' issue of M/C with a certain mobility, and yet you are constrained to pass through at some speed. If you're interested please hang around for a while... This issue acknowledges the reification of speed, its elevation into a mysterious quality continuous with general cultural conditions. It has ceased to be a variable among and equal to others, or one that gains its value from local happenings. It is a cultural dominant. And in this usage speed has, of course, come to stand for high speed, not slow or any speed. Virilio, the founder of dromology, is perhaps the outstanding contemporary theorist of inherent speed culture. He urges that political analysis must start from a recognition of speed, viewing it as intertwined with current conditions of technology and capitalism. The force of speed needs thinking through though. Is it Virilio's generalised tyranny, a global accident? What is at stake? One possible answer to this question can be drawn from the very definition of 'speed': as anyone who has ever rushed to make a date they were late to would know, speed expresses a relationship between space and time, between a distance covered and a time elapsed. As the noted Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, "'distance' is a social product; its length varies depending upon the speed with which it may be overcome (and, in a monetary economy, on the cost involved in the attainment of that speed" (12). The higher the speed, the greater the distance covered in any given time period -- and the secret to attaining the speed is the ability to pay the price. For those who can meet the price, space is dematerialised: communication, movement, the satisfaction of desires, is instantaneous. The residents of the first world who are empowered by the new economic processes, who can pay for the speed, "live in a perpetual present, ... are constantly busy and perpetually 'short of time'". For those who -- for whatever reason -- cannot afford the speed, time is decomposed by space, trapped by and in space. As Bauman argues, those without the access to speed are "marooned in the opposite world ... crushed under the burden of abundant, redundant and useless time they have nothing to fill with" (88). As Bauman succinctly and pithily puts it: "rather than homogenising the human condition, the technological annulment of temporal/spatial distances tends to polarise it" (18). Speed is a cultural dominant because its possession -- or the lack thereof -- defines people's social and economic future: it marks one's cards, determines one's destiny, more precisely, more forcefully and more thoroughly than any genetic sequence identified by the Human Genome Project ever could. In this light, our contributors take us through an excursus of the range, limits and functions of speed. Our feature writer, Esther Milne, takes a historical perspective on the perceptual reconfigurations of space and time that come with changes in communications and transport technologies. She observes how twentieth-century commentators including Marinetti, Harvey and Castells have heralded the arrivals of new temporal regimes on the basis of technological and economic changes. However, by examining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English reactions to the use of the mail coach, train and telegraph to relay messages, she identifies a longer tradition of commentary on communication technologies, which sets up themes -- such as the possible alienation of messages from physical bodies -- that are still applied today. Claudia Mesch, in her contribution "Racing Berlin: the Games of Run Lola Run", takes us into the Berlin of Tom Tykwer's recent movie Run Lola Run. Playfully using the multiple narrative style of the movie, Mesch alternately discusses the film's narrative and visual form to comment upon its characterisations; its physical and spatial location to comment upon its intra- and extra-diagetic textualities; and its filmic tropes and conventions to comment upon the historical, geo-political and mythic existence of Berlin as a lived space. In a timely review article of Virilio's latest book The Information Bomb, John Armitage reflects upon Virilio's current thinking about speed, digital technologies and the state of the world. He outlines the metaphors of the militarisation of information that Virilio is using to describe the social and political effects of an explosively fast technoculture, and contrasts Virilio's thinking with that of Negroponte and Baudrillard. Sadeq Rahimi explores the shrinking of time and the virtualisation of space to question how identity is redefined in the postmodern condition. Utilising the work of Helga Nowotny, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, amongst others, Rahimi argues that the self-identity constructed by these changing social conditions can no longer be described as human -- bound as this is by both space and time -- and calls for the theoretical and philosophical development of a new, posthuman theory of identity. Writing at the time of millennium fever McKenzie Wark takes a 'detour' away from the incessant media multiplication of a single moment by contemplating the enduring architectural media of ancient Egypt. Wark is thereafter able to put into relief how the twentieth century mummified change itself and in doing so has created new media empires designed to extend their dominion through momentary saturations of space. The tour stops by Valery, Innis, Microsoft, Time-Warner and the London Millennium Dome. Brian Ward draws our attention to the social and cultural experience of speed, and the ways to which speed is the result of an obsession, under capitalist rationalities, with notions of progress, advancement and unique sensation. Discussing the function of speed within the proto-Fascist philosophy of the Italian Futurist movement, Ward points to the way its overt fascination with speed foregrounds a more latent, yet no less obsessive, preoccupation with speed and progress within contemporary Western metaphysics. In "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom" Paul Taylor shows how the recent Biopunk fiction of Jeff Noon and Michael Marshall Smith plays out a contemporary ontological confusion between the physical and the informational. Going beyond Cyberpunk's exaggeration of digital abstractions, Biopunk metaphorises information's colonisation of the physical world as a "an alarming maelstrom of biological uncertainty" in which a fecund capitalism breeds mergers, images, and a smorgasbord of private products that overrun social life. In "Waiting for Instantaneity" Maya Drozdz reflects upon the temporal paradoxes of cyberspace. She questions Virilio's and Baudrillard's suppositions of realtime mediation arguing that movement in cyberspace is "subordinate to connection speed and loadtime", which means all online content is mediated by the temporalities of its transmission. She outlines online narratives that have arisen to accommodate and investigate the discrepancy between transmission time 'as it happens' and its perception and draws parallels with filmic techniques for creating temporal continuity. Kate Eichhorn also examines speed of the Net applying it to arguments about the effectivity of hate speech. She shows how the "speed and subsequent loss of orientation" that Virilio associates with virtual environments may actually prove the grounds for its recuperation. While cyberhate may still injure, the speed at which it may be recontextualised by parody, critique and the mobility of the reader disrupt its perlocutionary effects. In contrast to Ward, Gwendolyn Stansbury argues against the speed of contemporary life. Extrapolating the Slow Food movement's critique of fast food, she posits the negative effect that the modern pace of life has on the communal experience of preparing and eating food together. Finally, as a special feature this issue, we bring you a recording of a seminar recently presented by the noted Dutch media activist and theorist Geert Lovink at the Media and Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Queensland. Entitled "Directions for Cyberculture in the New Economy", it reprises a paper he presented at the "Tulipomania" conference held not long ago in Amsterdam, exploring the changes and potential of online activism and culture as it speeds headlong towards complete commercialisation. Greg Hearn and David Marshall respond to Lovink's views, and a lively audience discussion, ranging from AOL users to cyberwarriors, follows. Geert Lovink visited Brisbane as a participant in Alchemy, an International Masterclass for New Media Artists and Curators, which was organised by the Australian Network for Art and Technology in association with the Brisbane Powerhouse -- Centre for the Live Arts from 8 May to 9 June 2000. M/C and the Media and Cultural Studies Centre are highly grateful to ANAT and Geert Lovink as well as the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy for making this event possible. Guy Redden & Sean Aylward Smith -- 'Speed' Issue Editors References Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Washington: Bay Press, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. DeLillo, Don. Players. New York: Random House, 1989. Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review 146 (1984). Citation reference for this article MLA style: Guy Redden, Sean Aylward Smith. "Editorial: 'Speed'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/edit.php>. Chicago style: Guy Redden, Sean Aylward Smith, "Editorial: 'Speed'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Guy Redden, Sean Aylward Smith. (2000) Editorial: 'speed'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/edit.php> ([your date of access]).