FREE: Architecture on the Loose

Scales of Revolt: Within and Beyond the Arab Spring was an exploratory essay that I wrote for the volume FREE: Architecture on the Loose edited by E. Sean Bailey and Erandi de Silva. The essay I wrote attempted to link the Arab uprisings (or Arab Spring, I prefer uprisings) to contemporary academic debates on geographical scale.

The essay focuses on the self-immolation of Muhammed Bouazizi that sparked the Arab uprisings and – given that the Arab uprisings influence on movements such as Occupy Wall Street – global revolt and how this event can be framed as a productive entry point to think about issues of geographical scale. Specifically, the idea that there is a nested hierarchy of scale that goes from the body, to the nation and the finally to the global (like a Russian doll) is problematic when confronted by an event like Bouazizi’s protest suicide. Simply, how could a self-immolation that occurred at the scale of the body produce such a scale of revolt? But this question led to a more complicated one of how the body is not an isolated unit and it is what happens between bodies that can be most important. Can scale cope with the in-betweeness of social life? I don’t think it is a question I fully answered, and this may be my own limits, but it could also be due to the limits of geographical scale. Can we really foreground conclusions over what is big and what is small?

Scale is a critical concept in the architectural profession and one that some have started to think about seriously. Rem Koolhaas of course published S,M,L, XL and has an intelligent approach to questions of scale.

In addition to my essay, FREE contains a great collection of essays and interviews, here is the blurb:

Introducing ‘FREE’

There is implicit conflict in the word ‘free’. While culturally we celebrate the infinite opportunities afforded by the ‘freedom to’, the term also alludes to emancipation, a break from a captive state, or a ‘freedom from’. ‘Free’ is, at its core, an architectural concept. Architecture is a discipline directly engaged with shaping enclosure, of erecting and toppling barriers or—more explicitly—of extending and limiting ‘freedoms’.

Spatial interventions have reorganized much of the material and immaterial world. These actions are evident in the revolutionary public protests of the Arab Spring, the rehabilitation and adoption of land in Detroit and the invention and immanence of digital space. These types of reconfigurations offer a means of breaking with the past to establish new paradigms of operation and actualization. On the other hand, a lack of intervention can also prove to be equally liberating by allowing existing conditions to flourish, whether in nature or an alternate wilderness.

The book has recently received a great review by Domus:

“Free? What do you mean I’m free? I don’t feel free; if anything I feel the opposite.” This condition, what we could call the ‘abyss of freedom’ [1] is responded to in a variety of ways. Authors such as Bernd Upmeyer, Deen Sharp and Corbin Keech individually approach this as a task of making order out of chaos, largely by way of diagnosis and prescription of a well-reasoned theoretical framework.

What is a City or how does a City work?

In 1937, Lewis Mumford asked, what is a city? Mumford noted that cities have been handicapped because there is a poor understanding of the “social functions of the city”, functions that make a city what it is. “The city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations: the first, like family and neighborhood, are common to all communities, while the second are especially characteristic of city life”. For Mumford, the city is a group of neighborhoods formed for economic organization housed in permanent structures in a limited area through a corporate or public regulation: “… a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity”. Because the city, according to Mumford, is primarily about the facilitation of social life, he demanded that industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic, must be subservient to social needs. Mumford viewed the polluted overcrowded cities, dominated by the motorcar and the factory, of his era the result of not controlling and ensuring that machines served human interests. Thus he called for limitations on size, density and area of the city. In Mumford’s view human needs and demands make the city what it is and therefore these “social” needs must be considered first; technology and machines must be relegated to second-class citizens and serve the needs of humans. For Mumford it is man vs. machine and we must ensure that man is the winner.

Although not commenting on cities, Bruno Latour outlines a different view of the social in his guide to Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and therefore of the city. Both Latour and Mumford agree that the city is a collection of groups and associations but what these groups and association are made up of differs. For Mumford, the social is family and neighbourhood organized for economic modes of organization. Latour, disrupts Mumford’s stable notion of the social through his ANT approach. Latour understands the social as a type of connection between things that are not themselves social. Latour notes, “The sense of belonging has entered a crisis. But to register the feeling of this crisis and to follow these new connections, another notion of social has to be devised. It has to be much wider than what is usually called by that name, yet strictly limited to the tracing of new associations and to designing of their assemblages. This is the reason why I am going to define the social not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (p.7).

ANT has three tests:

1. Non-humans have to be actors and not simply the hapless bearers of symbolic projection;
2. If the social remains stable and is used to explain a state of affairs, it is not ANT.
3. Check whether a study aims at reassembling the social or still insist on dispersion and deconstruction.

For ANT what is a city? In every case you have to “follow the actors themselves”, so a city is its specific arrangement, is this a satisfactory answer? For ANT the city is not a collection of “men”, families or neighbourhoods but a collection of intricate relationships with a variety of non-humans and humans. For ANT, unlike Mumford, no stable category of what a city is can be produced, in each instance a city is the end result of the tracing what can be tied together. ANT does not provide a strong account for what a city is but prefers a question such as how does a city work.

Questions:

• Is ANT able to provide an answer to the question, what is a city?; if not do we need to change the question or ANT?
• Could ANT result in us thinking about meaningless details of the city and stop us from making machines and technologies serve human needs?

References:

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory . Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. (Part 1)

Mumford, Lewis. 1937. “What is a City?”. Architectural Record.

What is a City?

Today is the first day of classes and the start of my course Urban Arrangements (Syllabus_Assemblage Urbanism_Fall 2014_Sharp_CCNY.2). The first text we will engage is by former City College student Lewis Mumford and his 1937 article: What is a City?. A simple question and yet over seventy years after Mumford posed it, possibly more difficult to answer than ever. And this question is one that underlies the central thrust of this course, that attempts to interrogate the city through its “arrangements” (social, technical, political, economic… ).

The second piece we are going to read is by Bruno Latour and his introduction to Actor Network Theory: “Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory”. In this work Latour is not asking what is a city, but what is a society? The latter question being very much related to the former, especially with Latour’s insistence of the precise role given to non-humans that “have to be actors and not simply the hapless bearers of symbolic projection.” In interrogating what is the social, Latour gives us some strong tools through which we can get closer to an answer about what is a city.

Dam Debt

Mosul Dam

The Mosul dam has generated quite a bit of interest of late. The news that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had captured the “most dangerous dam in the world”, suitably  formerly known as the Saddam Dam, was widely reported in the media.  Nour Malas produced an excellent report on the Mosul Dam and cited that the “potential for a 65-foot wave to engulf the northern city of Mosul, and even flood the central capital Baghdad” was part of the decision of the US to intervene in Iraq. Following US air strikes, the Mosul Dam was forced from the hands of ISIS and the Dam is now – we are led to believe, “safely” – in the hands of the Peshmerga.

Dams are often deemed to be an important part of many cities arrangements generating the necessary electricity and water supply. But dams can also be a threat, as the Mosul Dam illustrates. I have long been fascinated by dams as reworkings of landscapes and sociotechnical worlds, the entanglements of human-nonhuman actors and as pieces of urbanism far removed from the city. The idea that the Mosul Dam was “the most dangerous dam in the world” I found particularly intriguing, the idea that the dam under the control of ISIS was met with apocalyptic scenarios was specifically of interest.

So, I looked for the 2006 report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) that called, according to Malas and numerous other journalists, the Mosul Dam “the most dangerous dam in the world”. And I searched and I searched. It was conceivable that the report was not in the public domain despite the fact that the US government and USACE have put a cache of documents on the Mosul Dam online. But then I found US Embassy comments on the document Relief and Reconstruction Funded Work at Mosul Dam, Mosul, Iraq  that notes: “ITAO [The Iraq Transition Assistance Office] is not aware of the September report that declares Mosul to be the most dangerous dam in the world” and also warned that such a claim is “inflammatory and almost certainly disprovable”. Indeed, I had no idea how dangerous and frequent Dam failures are – the Mosul dam has significant competition.

Myths, deaths, and dams seem to be good bedfellows. And on further searching into dams it appears one of the startling aspects is not necessarily their urban arrangements but their financial. Jacques Leslie, author of Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People and the Environment, had a interesting op-ed in the New York Times that highlighted the many undelivered promises of dams but also their crucial role in the creation of debt:

DAMS typically consume large chunks of developing countries’ financial resources, as dam planners underestimate the impact of inflation and currency depreciation. Many of the funds that support large dams arrive as loans to the host countries, and must eventually be paid off in hard currency. But most dam revenue comes from electricity sales in local currencies. When local currencies fall against the dollar, as often happens, the burden of those loans grows.

One reason this dynamic has been overlooked is that earlier studies evaluated dams’ economic performance by considering whether international lenders like the World Bank recovered their loans — and in most cases, they did. But the economic impact on host countries was often debilitating. Dam projects are so huge that beginning in the 1980s, dam overruns became major components of debt crises in Turkey, Brazil, Mexico and the former Yugoslavia.

This history is particularly important for the Arab world as it has been the site of extensive dam building. As Timothy Mitchell points out in The Rule of Experts the Aswan Low dam completed in 1902 inaugurated a new scale of twentieth-century engineering and I think it is right to view the Aswan dam as the first of the large scale dams that would include the High Dam of Aswan built in the 1960s. Mitchell notes that the Aswan dam resulted not just in a concentration in engineering but also the concentration of capital and true to being a dam “The dam cost twice the original budget.” Of course it was not the British – who occupied Egypt at the time and decided to construct the dam – who paid the heavy price for the dam but the Egyptian government.

Mitchell claims that the complex forms of calculation required by dam construction and to justify the expenditure resulted in a new field of cost-benefit analysis, a field that dams themselves have appeared unable to benefit from. And despite their dubious benefits and massive cost dams continue to be built. According to Leslie, there are 45,000 large dams worldwide in 140 countries at a cost of $2 trillion, many financed by the World Bank. So on top of a dams ability to generate generate electricity and produce a water supply, as well as flood entire cities through sabotage or failure, and their role in transforming entire ecologies, we should not forget the ability of dams to generate debt.

 

Update: A great article on Archinet on the Mosul Dam and “water wars”.

Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

Verso kindly sent me an advance review copy of Keller Easterling’s new book Extrastatecraft (ESC): The Power of Infrastructure Space. This book nicely intersects with many of my own research interests and with my course urban arrangements – I will report back once I have read through it. For now, I wanted to highlight the website that accompanies the book and nicely outlines the project:

ESC researches global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Some of the most radical changes to the globalising world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of infrastructure. Even building enclosures, typically considered to be geometrical formal objects, have become infrastructural—mobile, monetized technologies moving around the world as repeatable phenomena. Infrastructure is then not the urban substructure, but the urban structure itself—the very parameters of global urbanism.

The website has some detailed information on some of the chapters of the book, such as free zones, that is well worth exploring. From my initial look the website goes beyond the book’s content and has fascinating information including on Eurovision and the shift by European countries from competing on the battleground to technology.

Television was symbolic of a country’s technological development, and each country was busy developing its own broadcasting protocols. The most important parameter was the size of image defined by the number of lines per second broadcasted over a continuous analogue signal. Protocols in use ranged from the 405-line standard used by the BBC in the UK, developed by the EMI Research Team, to the 819-line standard used in France, developed by René Barthélemy. Although a third one, the 625-line standard, became de facto standard and the only one used for colour transmission, France continued to use its 819-line standard until 1984 when the last transmitter was closed down. This coincided with the presidency of François Mitterrand, who implemented the 819-line broadcast standard in 1948. France stuck to the 819-line standard so long not only because it was more advanced, but also to protect the national market. Supranational broadcasting was a difficult and complex technical issue, firstly because of converting between varying numbers of lines per second and frame rates used by different countries, and secondly there was little incentive for these countries to synchronise protocols due to the limited number of programmes one could broadcast in a broader region.

Easteringly provides a fascinating account of why Eurovision has such a distinct geography:

• Rule #1: Have a national broadcasting corporation which is a member of the EBU

• Rule #2: Be part of the european broadcasting area

• Rule #3: Have the capacity to broadcast the entire event live

  The combination of the first two rules opens up the competition to countries not conventionally considered “European”. The African and Asian coast of the Mediterranean are within the boundaries of European Broadcasting Areas and, as most of the countries in that region have television companies that are member of EBU (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia), all of them are potential participants in Eurovision. Out of these eight countries, Israel is the only one that has regularly participated in the competition since 1973, winning the contest three times. Morocco was the only other country in the group to compete in 1980.

More soon!

New York: A Global Perspective (or from Jay-Z’s Big Pimpin’ to Abdel Halim Hafez)

The second course that I am teaching, in addition to Urban Arrangements, is A Global Perspective in the International Studies department at City College. The course is designed to engage the literature on globalization through the events and spaces of New York City. The aim of the course, in addition to being an introduction to the literature on globalization, is to get students (and myself) to think more carefully about what we consider to be global and local. Influenced by thinkers such as Latour and Sloterdijk, I want to move away from the idea as the global as a field and the local as a point and towards a global that is local at every point and a local that is composed of events that take place elsewhere and elsewhen. I am excited to teach this class and have already learnt a lot in preparing the material for it. Best of all has been the discovery that New York native Jay-Z sampled, for his song Big Pimpin’, the legendary Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez’s song Khosora (meaning loss in Arabic); a great example of the circulation of sounds and ideas through the world and the Jay-z’s video Big Pimpin’ is also a good example of the rather toxic implications of globalization.

The course will start with Sassen’s Global City (defined around the three cities New York, London and Tokyo) and then we will travel through New York beginning  in Manhattan and the events of 9/11. From the World Trade Center we will then travel to Wall Street and engage the literature on financialization and then we will go to Zuccotti Park and think about the Occupy Wall Street movement (I am still finalizing the literature for this, so any suggestions would be very welcome). From Wall Street we will move to Midtown and look at global governance through the creation of the United Nations engaging the amazing work of Mark Mazower. Then we move across to Brooklyn where we will explore issues such as historical globalization and race (through the art exhibit the Marvelous Sugar Baby), gentrification (excited to read The World in Brooklyn) and the garment industry. From Brooklyn it is up to Queens where we will engage issues surrounding immigration (still finalizing the literature for this). Then we move to the Bronx where we will engage with cultural globalization and the birth of Hip-Hop in Sedgwick Avenue. For our engagement with Hip-hop we will read Sujatha Fernandes’ book Close to the Edge and a couple of pieces on  hip-hop and the Arab world. Finally, we arrive in the “forgotten borough” of New York – Staten Island – where we look at the secessionist rumblings that have emerged in the city’s fifth part and link this to the broader debate around secessionism and globalization.

The course description:

A Global Perspective offers students an introduction to the complexities and controversies surrounding globalization through the particular spaces of New York City. This course is grounded in a perspective that disrupts distinctions between the global and the local and challenge students to think about how the local is always composed of the results of actions that take place elsewhere and elsewhen and a global that is local at every point. Students will think through the central debates in globalization through a focus on the cultural, political and economic productions and locations of New York City. Specifically, this course will engage the literature on globalization through the events and locations in Manhattan (9/11, Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street and the United Nations), Brooklyn (an art installation at the Brooklyn Domino Sugar Refining Plant and the garment industry), the Bronx (the invention of hip-hop at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx), Queens (immigration and race) and Staten Island (Secessionist movements).

Erewhon: Man’s very soul is due to the machines

Bruno Latour’s book Aramis or the love of technology begins by mentioning the fascinating work of the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler and his book Erewhon (so needless to say I got distracted). Latour writes:

“Samuel Butler tells the story of a stranger passing through the land of Erewhon who is thrown into prison because he owns a watch. Outraged at the verdict, he gradually discovers that draconian measures forbid the introduction of machinery. According to the inhabitants of Erewhon, a cataclysmic process of Darwinian evolution might allow a simple timepiece to give birth to monsters that would rule over humans. The inhabitants are not technologically backward; but they have voluntarily destroyed all advanced machines and have kept none but the simplest tools, the only ones compatible with the purity of their mores.”

On reading Butler’s Erewhon, I found that Latour gets the details wrong in the above quote (he is not sent to prison because he owns a watch or outraged at the verdict) but the core narrative is correct. The stranger passing through Erewhon is taken to the magistrate once he has entered the town and on searching through his belongings they find a watch in his inside pocket. The magistrate orders our traveler to the museum of the town where there are fragments of steam engines and a range of broken machinery on display: “Indeed, there were fragments of a great many of our own most advanced inventions; but they seemed all to be several hundred years old, and to be placed where they were, not for instruction but curiosity.”

On questioning the people of Erewhon about the museum the stranger notes:

“I learnt that about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book… proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life.”

The people of Erewhon convinced with this reasoning remove all technology “that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years (which period was arrived at after a series of compromises)”.

Samuel Butler

This made me think about how we often condemn new technologies to the museum and resurrect old ones. The current diffusion of bike-share schemes in cities across the world is one immediate example; the bike has begun to overtake the car. But Butler’s book is a far more interesting than a call for “out with new and in with the old”. Writing in 1872 (!), Bulter sets the stage for Latour’s task of illuminating the entanglement of humans and non-humans. As Latour states “Butler’s Nowehere world is not a utopia. It is our own intellectual universe, from which we have in effect eradicated all technology. In this universe, people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their separate world, the world of engineers, technicians and, technocrats.”

Butler is clearly very interested in the social life of machines:

If all machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man but his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man’s very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest they should tyrannise over us even more completely.

Given that Latour is heavily influenced by Deleuze, it is not surprising that Deleuze also drew from Bulter’s work. Deleuze quotes Bulter in the anti-Oedipus and built on many of his ideas in Erewhon and liked the idea of seeing machines as networks (or maybe Deleuzian “rhizomes”). The stranger in Erewhon notes: “We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind.” Latour takes a lot from Butler (without referencing), for instance: “A technology isn’t one single character; it’s a city, it’s a collective, it’s countless” (p.227) and “The soul of machines constitutes the social element. The body of the social element is constituted by machines” (p.213). Erewhon is clearly then an important text for thinking about our techno-social world and how urban arrangements are made up of machines.

Mirrors: Here and Elsewhere

Ici-et-ailleurs (here and elsewhere) is the title of the new exhibition at the New Museum in New York on art from and about the Arab world that I have been to see twice now. The title of the exhibition is taken from the fascinating French documentary of the same title (see video above) by Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean-Luc Goddard and Anne-Marie Melville.

Qalandia 2087 by Wafa Hourani

The documentary made in 1976 is about Palestinian revolutionaries and focuses on the problematic between the image and politics. An issue of course more relevant than ever at the moment and what better place for it than here, New York. There is a lot a material in this exhibition and I am going to focus on one small part, of one small part, of the exhibition, specifically the use of mirrors in Qalandia 2087.

I was really interested in the use of “architectural” models as art pieces in the exhibition (I am thinking a lot about the socio-spatial uses of such models at the moment) and specifically Qalandia 2087 by Wafa Hourani, the third part of a series called the Future Cities (see images of the artwork here).

Hourani has produced an architectural model of a utopian vision of Qalandia one hundred years after the first intifada. Online (here) I found an interesting timeline of Qalandia 2087 by Hourani that I did not see at the exhibition and that seems important to understand the piece. In 1948, following the Nakba, Qalandia became home to thousands of refugees. The name Qalandia comes from a nearby airport of the same name. The Qalandia refugee camp that formed became a pivotal space, located between north Jerusalem and south Ramallah. According to Hourani’s timeline, the year 2087 is when the Mirror Party sign a historic agreement with the new Israeli government and the Palestinians are given the right of return and the 1967 lands back.

Mirrors are important to the piece, and from the information on Hourani’s timeline, have been placed on the Israeli Wall by the Mirror Party “to create the illusion of more space, and seeing their reflection everywhere, begin to wonder how they got in there” and (of course) the mirror has made it into the Guinness Book of Records for the largest mirror in the world. In 2087 when the historic agreement is signed the Wall is not taken down but the cement is taken down and a mirror is fixed to the other side.

Qalandia 2087 by Wafa Hourani

The insertion of mirrors and use of mirrors in this piece reminds me of two pieces and provides interesting connectors to Hourani’s piece and speak to two possible understandings of how this future city ended up with two of the largest mirrors in the world facing opposite each other.

The first is Mumford’s Technics and Civilization where Mumford highlights the introduction of the mirror (glass coated with a silver amalgam) in the sixteenth century and the transformative impact this had on society: “Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror conversation developed with the new object itself: this preoccupation with one’s image comes at the threshold of the mature personality when young Narcissus gazes long and deep into the face of the pool – and the sense of the separate personality, a perception of the objective attributes of one’s identity, grows out of this communion.” This passage resonates with Hourani’s model that is a vision that provides a critique of Palestinian social life, as much as, the Israeli occupation. Later Mumford delivers this: “Indeed, when one is completely whole and at one with the world one does not need the mirror: it is in the period of psychic disintegration that the individual personality turns to the lonely image to see what is in fact is there and what he can hold on to; and it was in the period of cultural disintegration that men began to hold the mirror up to outer nature.”

The other piece of writing that this use of mirrors reminded me of is Eyal Weizman’s chapter in Hollow Land on Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror. And surprise suprise the chapter features… Qalandia checkpoint! “The upgrade of the Qalandia terminal crossing, which connects (or rather disconnects) Jerusalem from Ramallah, was completed, according to the principles of the Spiegel plan, at the end of 2005. The new system includes a labyrinth of iron fences that channels passengers en route to Jerusalem via a series of turnstiles… The inspection booths are encased in bulletproof glass. The glass is so thick that it tends to reflect the outside light rather than letting it through, thereby obscuring the security personnel inside, and effectively functioning as a one-way mirror”.

Urban Arrangements

Urban Assemblages. How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. Edited by Ignacio Farías, Thomas Bender. Routledge – 2009 – 352 pages

Below is the course description that I am continuing to develop for my upcoming course Urban Arrangements. A key text for this course is  Urban Assemblages and the key thinkers that the course will engage on the urban question are Lewis Mumford, Bruno Latour, Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin (at the moment). I am currently going through some of the key texts again (i have just finished Technics and Civilization by Mumford and going through Aramis by Latour) and will hopefully pull a few posts together for the blog as I develop the course.

Any suggested readings and/or comments are more than welcome.

Urban Arrangements:

Urban Studies meets Science, Technology and Society (STS) Studies

Urban Arrangements offers students an introduction, in the context of urban studies, to the study of Science, Technology and Society (STS), the approach of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and the concept of assemblage/agencement. In Urban Studies, ANT is credited with transforming and challenging conventional understandings of the object of study, reshaping our view of urban infrastructures, built environments, ecologies, urbanites, practices, spaces, economies and other core issues central to urban studies. This course will cover the central literature in urban studies utilizing ANT approaches and engage with the debate that has emerged between proponents of ANT urbanism and “traditional” critical urban theorists.

Science, Technology and Society (STS) Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their cultural, historical, and social contexts. This course aims to provide an overview urban studies’ engagement with STS, and specifically Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and the central concepts of assemblage/agencement. Bruno Latour, one of the central figures of the “Paris school” of STS, with his colleagues Callon and Law, developed ANT in part from Deleuze and Guttari’s concept of assemblage/agencement. ANT treats objects as part of social networks and is a “material-semiotic” method that tries to explain how material-semiotic networks come together as a whole. As this course illustrates, urban studies’ utilization of ANT and Deleuzian notions of assemblage/agencement has resulted in important new avenues of research.

Technology and the city have always had a special relationship. Indeed CCNY alumni Lewis Mumford produced path-breaking work addressing the link between technologies and urban history and how cities and technical networks co-evolve. Until recently, however, Mumford’s path was one few urbanists followed. The rise of STS has begun to change urban studies approach to technology and the city and over the past decade urban studies has returned to a more extensive and innovative engagement with city-technology relations. Some of the most important texts coming out of urban studies over the past decade have utilized, both explicitly and implicitly, an ANT approach and this course will engage with these texts.

 

Urban Arrangements, a new blog

The geographer Edward Soja declared at some point that “every square inch of the world is urbanized to some degree,” it is possible then to understand the world as one vast urban arrangement. On the other hand, however, the geographers Thrift and Amin argue cities have become extraordinarily intricate and difficult to generalize. Urban arrangements are simultaneously everywhere and distinct, and the various urban arrangements (and their various techno/socio/eco/political arrangements) on our planet further new/particular modes of living. What a city is, how cities work, what cities engender and what makes a good city are just some the debates that will form the focus of my research and will take up a large part of this blog.

I want to use this blog as a laboratory for ideas focused around my research and central disciplinary interests: geography; science, technology and society studies; urban studies and middle east studies. It will also be a place for me to post thoughts and reviews on books (expect small reviews/thoughts soon on The Security Archipelago and Leisurely Islam), exhibitions (I will soon post something on the new exhibition at the New Museum Here and Elsewhere) and for me to provide updates on other work I am pursuing, which at the moment also involves the creation of an issue of the Urban Research Journal that is currently in production.

The blog will also act as an extension of two courses that I am teaching at City College both of which I am still refining the syllabuses for and hope to share some of the ideas that I developing for both of these courses. The first course I am teaching is the blog’s namesake Urban Arrangements (officially listed as Urban Assemblages and the reason I changed the name will likely be the subject of a blog post). The second course that I am teaching is an undergraduate course called global perspectives also at City College but in the international studies program. I am excited about this course and designed it so students engage “global” issues through the absolute spaces of New York City.

I am eager to explore ways in which social media can accompany the courses to both engage students taking the course beyond the classroom and generate discussion with a broader audience. I have introduced Twitter into the classroom and had some positive results but I think there are more ways in which social media can be utilized to enhance engagement, conversation and interest in the subjects I am teaching and researching that I want to try out. So, I will continue to experiment – suggestions are very welcome, so please feel free to use the comment section!

I have not blogged properly for nearly four years and a return to the world of the blogosphere (do people still use that term?) is long overdue. When I actively wrote this blog I was a journalist and consultant in Lebanon – I stopped living (but not visiting) Lebanon when this blog also stops in October 2010 – but since then there have been many changes. The most significant development is that I do not live in Lebanon or work as a journalist any longer. At the end of 2011, I came to New York and in the Fall 2012 I was accepted as a doctoral candidate in the Earth and Environmental Science Department at the Graduate Center, CUNY specialized in geography. Other things, however, have not changed. My research continues to engage Lebanon and the Arab world and I am still focused on questions surrounding the built environment. Keeping with the theme of both continuity and change, I have decided to keep the blog I maintained in Lebanon but to change its name. Previously, this blog was called al-bayt baytak (my home is your home in Arabic) and is now called urban arrangements. I hope this is a start of a long and fruitful journey.