Showing papers by "Stephen Graham published in 2005"

Software-sorted geographies:

Abstract: This paper explores the central role of computerized code in shaping the social and geographical politics of inequality in advanced societies. The central argument is that, while such processes are necessarily multifaceted, multiscaled, complex and ambivalent, a great variety of 'software-sorting' techniques is now being widely applied in efforts to try to separate privileged and marginalized groups and places across a wide range of sectors and domains. This paper's central demonstration is that the overwhelming bulk of software-sorting applications is closely associated with broader transformations from Keynesian to neoliberal service regimes. To illustrate such processes of software-sorting, the paper analyses recent research addressing three examples of software-sorting in practice. These address physical and electronic mobility systems, online geographical information systems (GIS), and face-recognition closed circuit television (CCTV) systems covering city streets. The paper finishes by identifying theoretical, research and policy implications of the diffusion of software-sorted geographies within which computerized code continually orchestrates inequalities through technological systems embedded within urban environments.

Switching cities off

Abstract: In this follow‐up to a piece originally published in City 8(2), Stephen Graham offers a detailed portrait of the tactics and techniques of contemporary urban warfare. As cities have become more reliant than ever on networks, and as their infrastructures have become more fragile due to the vagaries of neoliberal privatization, urban‐based warfare, which targets the systems—informational, medical, agricultural, and technological—that sustain the civilian populations of cities, has had disastrous consequences. Although terrorists have chosen to target urban infrastructures in an attempt to disrupt modern urban life, Graham suggests that the greater threat to metropolitan existence comes from systematic attempts by traditional powers, such as the United States, to disrupt urban networks, thereby effectively ‘switching cities off’. Policies of what Graham calls ‘deliberate demodernization’ have become the hallmark of US air power. Although such policies are thought to bring about asymmetrical military advantag...

In Search of the City in Spatial Strategies: Past Legacies, Future Imaginings

Abstract: This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented in contemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflected in diverse notions of 'cityne...

Urban metabolism as target: Contemporary war as forced demodernisation

Abstract: Increasingly, both formal and informal political violence centre on the deliberate destruction, or manipulation, of the everyday urban infrastructures that are necessary to sustain the circulations and metabolism of modern urban life. As urban life becomes ever more mediated by fixed, sunken infrastructures, so the forced denial of flow, and circulation, becomes a powerful political and military weapon.

Multispeed cities and the logistics of living in the Information Age.

Abstract: We now have a wealth of data on how the use of information and digital technologies (ICTs) is unevenly mapped onto different income, gender and ethnic groups However we remain poorly equipped to understand how ICTs, with their intrinsic abilities to transcend barriers of space and time, relate to the fine grain of people’s lives on the ground in cities and neighbourhoods ICTs contract space in enabling us to contact distant friends, pick up voice mail and order goods Mobile phones on the move short-circuit time to an instant But what are the effects of these space and time manipulations on the actual logistics of our interaction with other people? And what does it mean for people and neighbourhoods who do not have access to ICTs to live in a world that is being restructured to suit those who do? This project helps to fill these and allied gaps in our knowledge by simultaneously examining how ICTs relate to social inequalities through their use in orchestrati! ng the social time-space worlds both of a privileged and of a marginalized neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne Key Findings • Measures of the “digital divide” based on ICT ownership are inadequate to depict the complex patterns of use and access to a variety of technologies For example, respondents in the poorer area may not have had access to, say, the Internet nor used online services, but they often relied on neighbours, family or friends to provide access ICT use is often more collective and collaborative, beyond the household level, which suggests some caution over widely used official, individualistic measures • In the richer area ICTs formed pervasive infrastructures underpinning everyday life, to such an extent that respondents could not say when they specifically used a technology because it was on all the time In the poorer area, ICT use tended to be for specific purposes, which were recalled as discrete events marked out by their use of advanced technology • Research on ICTs can profitably use a conceptual framework which emphasises the way in which interactions that do and do not use ICTs inter-relate to shape the detail of subjects’ everyday life Such an approach allows research to address the ways in which multiple ICTs are used simultaneously and in subtle and continuous combination • The relaxing of restrictions imposed by time and space that ICTs can give offers new possibilities for structuring the rhythms of daily life Crucially, this leads not to a disembedding from local life but to forging new interactions within cities Other Findings • By having ICTs as an “always on” background, affluent and ICT literate groups benefitted from accelerating lifestyles and mobility patterns and are enabled to cram extremely dense and flexible patterns of transaction, communication and information exchange into the logistical framework of their lives • ICT use in the more marginalized neighbourhood tended to offer occasional support to existing patterns of everyday life About the Study The project deployed an innovative cascade of methods to establish how ICT- mediated and place-based activities intersect to define together the logistics of everyday life for the affluent Jesmond and a relatively marginalized “off line” Blakelaw neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne

Book Review: Colonial precedents and sovereign powers

Abstract: other ways the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq were regarded even by those who supported the invasion as quite different. This suggests that the rampant Orientalisms which Gregory makes such play of need to be sifted and situated quite carefully, so that they are in a sense brought down to size. The colonial present is concerned, above all, with the visible and invisible geographies ofviolence. Written in a moment of extraordinary brutality, when planes and missiles were raining in on cities across the globe, and when the carnage wrought by bomb and bullet was almost daily viewing, the book presents a terrif5ying picture of the world in which we now live. In a time of war, our visions become narrower, and the proper role ofthe public intellectual is surely to resist this narrowing, especially when it comes to the simplistic accounts ofthe clash ofcivilizations which continue to animate extremists on all sides. This Derek Gregory's book manages to accomplish through passionate and informed critique. Equally, we must also beware the temptation to accord Anglo-American imperialism a far greater cogency and agency in the world than it truly has. Viewed in economic and social terms, the imperial turn of US policy under George Bush could be construed as a sign ofweakness, not of strength. At any event, we must all hope and pray that there are other things under the sun than brute force and ignorance.