‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.

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The new mobilities paradigm.

Debates about the future of urban development in many Western countries have been increasingly influenced by discussions of smart cities. Yet despite numerous examples of this ‘urban labelling’ phenomenon, we know surprisingly little about so‐called smart cities, particularly in terms of what the label ideologically reveals as well as hides. Due to its lack of definitional precision, not to mention an underlying self‐congratulatory tendency, the main thrust of this article is to provide a preliminary critical polemic against some of the more rhetorical aspects of smart cities. The primary focus is on the labelling process adopted by some designated smart cities, with a view to problematizing a range of elements that supposedly characterize this new urban form, as well as question some of the underlying assumptions/contradictions hidden within the concept. To aid this critique, the article explores to what extent labelled smart cities can be understood as a high‐tech variation of the ‘entrepreneurial city’...

Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?: Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?

Urban performance currently depends not only on a city's endowment of hard infrastructure (physical capital), but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure (human and social capital). The latter form of capital is decisive for urban competitiveness. Against this background, the concept of the “smart city” has recently been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and, in particular, to highlight the importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the last 20 years for enhancing the competitive profile of a city. The present paper aims to shed light on the often elusive definition of the concept of the “smart city.” We provide a focused and operational definition of this construct and present consistent evidence on the geography of smart cities in the EU27. Our statistical and graphical analyses exploit in depth, for the first time to our knowledge, the most re...

Smart Cities in Europe

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Smart cities in Europe

The following text is taken from the publisher's website:
"Splintering Urbanism offers a path-breaking analysis of the nature of the urban condition at the start of the new millennium. Adopting a global and interdisciplinary perspective, it reveals how new technologies and increasingly privatised systems of infrastructure provision - telecommunications, highways, urban streets, energy, and water - are supporting the splintering of metropolitan areas across the world. The result is a new 'socio-technical' way of understanding contemporary urban change, which brings together discussions about:
* globalisation and the city
* the urban and social effects of new technology
* urban, architectural and social theory
* social polarisation, marginalisation and democratisation
* infrastructure, architecture and the built environment
* developed, developing and post-communist cities."

Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition

Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities, and the urban condition

Telecommunications and the City provides the first critical and state-of-the-art review of the relations between telecommunications and all aspects of city development and management.Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches and a wide body of recent research, the book addresses key academic and policy debates about technological change and the future of cities with a fresh perspective. Through this approach, the complex and crucial transformations underway in cities in which telecommunications have central importance are mapped out and illustrated. Key areas where telecommunications impinge on the economic, social, physical, enviromental and institutional development of cities are illustrated by using boxed extracts and wide range of case study examples from Europe, Japan and North America.Rejecting the extremes of optimism and pessimism in current hype about cities and telecommunications, Telecommunications and the City offers a sophisticated new perspective through which city-telecommunications relations can be understood.

Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places

This article seeks to demonstrate the centrality of maintenance and repair to an understanding of modern societies and, particularly, cities. Arguing that repair and maintenance activities present ...

Out of Order Understanding Repair and Maintenance

In this short, highly readable book, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a condensation of the central ideas of The Modern World-System, his monumental study of capitalism as an integrated, historical entity. In developing an anatomy of capitalism over the past five centuries, Wallerstein provides one of the most coherent and succinct introductions tot he genesis of a global system of exploitation. Particular attention is focused on the emergence and development of a unified world market, and the concomitant international division of labor. Wallerstein argues forcefully, against the grain of much current opinion, that capitalism has brought about an actual, not merely relative, immiseration in the countries of the Third World. The economic and social problems of underdeveloped countries will remain unresolved as long as they remain located within a framework of world capitalism. Historical Capitalism is a welcome and stimulating synthesis of one of the most influential assessments of capitalism as a world-historic mode of production.

Stephen Graham

Papers

Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition

Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities, and the urban condition

Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places

Out of Order Understanding Repair and Maintenance

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism