Toward a utopia of difference? October 19, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Human Geography, Urban Geography, parkour.add a comment
Having been looking into the realms of urban subcultures for the past 12 months (mostly through parkour, but I find myself constantly amazed by people’s creativity and innovate capacity in their usage of urban space), I recently re-read David Pinder’s book, Visions of the City, as it is a fantastic insight into what utopian thought, and striving for it, has done to planning and urban geographical debates in general. And having re-read it, the book brings to life the role of the Situationist International group (in particular, Guy Debord) and infuses it with the many themes of urban sub-culturism in contemporary society.
The over-riding ethos of the urban sub-cultures which engage with the urban terrain in innovate and alternative ways (which elsewhere, have been coined ‘urban subversions’) is often seen as one of reaction; a critique and subjugation of capitalist meaning in urban architecture by a more playful and sometimes ironic use of the built environment. This is something which I have argued is slightly erroneous when charged at these subversions in general, although often applies at the individual level – and something which the situationists debated. As Pinder (2005: 149) notes;
“Since the principle of the spectacle was based on contemplation and nonintervention, the letterists and the situationists sought to counter its powers by intervening in the city and experiencing its spaces directly as actors rather than spectators. They resisted dominant depictions of the city as a space of capital and traffic, and opposed restrictions on play. They attacked the way in which functionalist approaches to architecture and urbanism were seeking to eliminate play entirely, and mocked designers who implied that their schemes were being ruined by people’s tendency to play”.
The urban utopias that are alluded to in Pinder’s book often emanate from a planning perspective, most notably Ebenezer Howard’s attempts at the Garden City (which was fiercely critiqued by Jane Jacobs). Hence, the role of the Debord (at least in Europe, and perhaps Jacobs in North America) in bringing agency into the utopian rhetoric cannot be understated. The staunch anti-capitalism that is rife with the situationist mantra often overcomes any attempts at co-operation and cohabitation with capitalist thoughts,yet in my own research into urban subversions, I find increasingly that Debord and the situationists message ringing through the motivations for why these urban subversions are proliferating – or at least gaining more infamy and public attention. (NB: The internet clearly catalyzes these activities, although as it applies to all facets of communicative life, in true Latourian style we can ignore the internet as a mediator and concentrate on the real dynamism that is of interest, namely the growth in interest and participation of these subcultures.) The idea of utopia and those who try to achieve/plan/map/dream it is one which, I would argue, is crucial to society’s progression and hence is an important facet of academic and political debate – however, to always begin this debate from a purely spatial perspective, i.e. from a planning point of view, negates those who are contemporaneously appropriating the urban environment via innovation and creative use of urban tools.
The urban terrain, as I blogged recently is homogenising and for some utopian thinkers this is clearly a good thing as it seems that many utopias lack heterogeneity and shun diversity as a potential arena for conflict and schism. However, there are movements in the social science (notably human geography – although I would say that…) which suggest that the constant restriction of these types of activities under the auspiciousness of ‘health and safety’ or ‘political correctness’ are beginning to be resisted. Psychogeography (wonderfully outlined by Bradley L. Garrett on his blog) is a good example of a ‘movement’ (or at least an area of interest) that is seeking to dissolve the homogenised urban landscape theoretically, as well as empirically, creating a realm of horizontalised knowledge and urbanity, rather than hierarchical power and structure – something which, Pinder points out, utopias tend to favour.
The defiance of urban authority by those individuals who participate in urban subversions and their constant creativity which sparks into life other urban spaces and functionalities which otherwise not exist, are creating a different urban cultural landscape that is at odds with commonly held utopias – and as such, we may need to rethink the way in which utopias and utopian thinking informs how our cities are formed, i.e. a utopia of difference.
Battlestar Gallactica: A review October 8, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Battlestar Galactica, The Matrix, The Wire.Tags: Battlestar Galactica
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Having just finished watching the entire four series of Battlestar Gallactica, rather modestly, the conclusion of the show evoked a wide range of thoughts, emotions, arguments and queries about the nature of society, religion, philosophy and morality. So where to begin? Not much to deal with is there?
First things first, if you haven’t seen it all then stop reading now; go out and buy the boxset (or download it), stop watching any series you are currently engrossed in (unless it’s The Wire, or the first half of season 1 of 24) and clear a week in your diary.
A detailed synopsis is available on the Battlestar wikipage, but very briefly, the series details the journey of humans as they escape from their home planets (called the 12 colonies), having just been nuked by humanoid robots (Cylons). The Cylons then chase the remaining humans, led by a military ‘Battlestar’, called Galactica through the universe. The president of the fleet, inspired by mythical visions and prophetic texts (akin to the Bible) is leading them to a new home, ‘Earth’ (the fabled 13th colony), only to find that this planet has also been nuked. It turns out that this destruction-chase-resettlement cycle has been going on for a while, with humans creating Cylons, Cylons rebelling against the humans, war, then resettlement. However, in the final battle, a truce is agreed, and together, they find ‘Earth’ (as we knew it 150,000 years ago) and decide to forgo their technologies and create a new civilisation with the primitive hunter-gatherers they find on the planet, based solely on their interactions, language and minds (and all the culture and socialisation therein imbued). Hence, throughout the series, what we see as human-like technology and culture, is in fact the basis of our current society. This is ossified by the final scene that is set in our present New York City (some 150,000 hence) – with the cycle seemingly over. However, it concludes with what feels like a warning that our current obsession with AI and technology may be fueling another occurrence of man-made robot rebellion (re Frankenstein, Terminator or any other Sci-Fi cyborg-related story out there) and the cycle will start again once more (note – this echoes the message I teased out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in a previous blog post).
The show is rich in philosophical and societal tangents and it seems almost ignorant to boil the show down to one ‘theme’, but if there is one thought that permeates throughout the series (for me anyway) is the spirituality of it – references to God, gods, souls, angels, demons and a ‘higher purpose’ are rife throughout and ultimately conclude the show. However, this is not to say that the show has a preachy evangelistic message, far from it. The adult dialogue and (for the most part) undiluted and deliberately esoteric language demands attention and forces the viewer to engage with what religious people will proclaim is ‘God’, and what other people ignore or fail to comprehend. There are many Christian references, with Christ-like resurrection, angels and even the importance the Bob Dylan track ‘All Along the Watchtower’ with it’s direct biblical quotations, namely Isiah 21:5-9. The hook of the show is essentially that some ‘higher power’ has been guiding the fleet and presiding over (or the direct causation of) the ‘cycles’ of destruction and rebirth, and with freewill the way it is, waiting for the humans to decide to stop the cycle by engendering a ‘clean slate’ which is what we see in the finale.
What is interesting to me is echoed in the closing dialogue of the show:
The reference to mathematics and complex systems is elsewhere in the series, however, the interplay between the workings of mathematics and the planning of a deity is a deliberate attempt to align the two. They are further interwoven with the remark “You know It doesn’t like that name”, with the word ‘it’ used instead of ‘he’ – the more traditional definitive article of a deity (the retraction of this afterwards I put down to a final exchange of comedy between these particular two characters that has played out throughout the series). Herein lies the crux of the matter. The producers of the show, while they have talked about how they like the show to be interpreted however you choose, seem to be alluding to the visceral knowledge of ’something else’ other than what can be attributed to empirical observation. This ‘ether’ can be interpreted though a range of experiences, idioms or processes including complexity and mathematics, an infinite and collective consciousness, the emotional swell felt with a piece of music, or by assigning it the name ‘God’. Unlike The Matrix, which also has as its hook the breaking of a cycle of war between humans and machines, Battlestar Galactica plays on the otherness of experiential humanism by engaging with the significance of it to our behaviour, both individually and collectively. The limitations of the human body to experience this otherness is all too obvious (such as the fact that the human eye only sees only a small percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum) and there is a wonderful piece of dialogue between two Cylons earlier on in the series which alludes to this fact. The characters struggle with these other ‘forces’ at work (interpreted as either destiny, God, luck, angels, fate etc) and some accepting their humanity for what it is, others fighting it every step of the way. The exploration of this matter is far from perfect (as it is to be expected, laced with Hollywood banalities), however, for the thoughts it leaves you with alone, it is worth the hassle.
The fact that the filmmakers suggest that the present day human race are decedents from the Cylons, with the overt implication that the Cylon-human hybrid little girl (seen in the video above) is Mitochondrial Eve, is also one of many interesting tangents (one that Bruno Latour would no doubt have alot to say about) that could be extrapolated from BSG (there are many books delving much deeper into the topics – this being one of the best). It’s geopolitics and commentary on contemporary American foreign policies is particularly striking, sometimes forehead-slappingly determinate, but always thought-provoking and comes with notable acting performances by some. In answer to the question posed by this journalist, I would levee a big frakking ‘no’, however it deals with a much broader range of issues, and arguably leaves a more emotional lump in the throat than Baltimore’s finest.
A Paradox of the Urban Condition September 24, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Urban Geography, parkour.Tags: parkour, Urban Geography
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Gary Bridge once asked “Surely it is time to banish reason, with all it’s exclusivities and homogenisations, from the city, and to let difference in?” (Bridge, 2004: 1). A poignant issue, given that that more and more people are flooding into our cities. And yet, they continue to show signs of convergence – aesthetically, politically, sociologically and ideologically. Globalisation is often blamed for the homogenisation tendencies of world cities and with some justification; however to suggest that cities are buckling under pressure from an Adam Smith-esque invisible fist of global homogenising change is to underplay the role that cities themselves are performing in this very process. Sassen famously said that cities are the ‘command and control centres of the global economy’, and this being the case, then they are responsible for their own fate, and cannot be labeled as victims of the somehow ‘out-there’ global economy.
So, the modern urban condition is inherently paradoxical. Urban officialdom (and by this I include city and local councils, politicians, development agencies, quangos, private property companies, planners and security forces) is relentlessly restrictive on urbanites, with surveillance and restrictions on movement and behaviour increasingly commonplace. This restriction is a symptom of the capitalist society in which (the majority) of world cities are situated in, however, it is a truism that this constriction of urban practices prioritizes particular processes, usually profiteering, and marginalises a myriad of misdemeanors. Yet, with the inevitable increase in the urban population, the variety of our hobbies, pastimes, interests, likes and dislikes will increase the diversity and heterogeneity of the urban cultural and social fabric. There in lies a disproportionate and reductive paradox – the urban cultural milieu is broadening, while the law-makers and policy implementations are narrowing.
Counter-arguments in this regard are often leveed at the fact that this ‘narrowing’ is an illusion, indeed, we see policies that encourage cultural experimentation, as well as officialdom actively encouraging disparate and disruptive innovation. However, I would argue that these efforts are merely crystalising a more fluid and ephemeral ‘plasma’ of urban heterogeneity, into a more commercialised and ‘bite-sized’ version of ‘urban culture’. In other words, it is only skin-deep and creating a commercial veneer to a rhizomatic ether of urban activity.
A classic example (and one which I have recently published on) is that of the dualism that is parkour and free-running. This dichotomy is due a blog post (and then some) all of its own, but suffice to say, parkour was the original format of running, jumping, playing and experimenting with the urban terrain in new and innovative physical ways. It is less a ’sport’ or a ’sub-culture’ more a philosophy or way-of-life. ‘Free running’ is more ’showy’, the people who partake in it perform more spectacular stunts, and there are free running world championships, sponsored by Barclaycard. The osmotic movement of parkour to free-running is indicative of the commercialisation tendencies that work at ‘centralisation’, i.e. bringing activities and disparate urban cultures into the realms of capitalism and profit-making.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad thing at all – free-running is fantastic to watch, and the athletes who partake in it are spreading fitness and healthy living to a society in dour need of it. The message here is that while there is a rhetoric of cities embracing alternative cultures and pastimes (in this case free-running), it comes diluted, detached and distanciated from the urban fabric. And anyone practicing parkour ‘illegally’ on private property or in a way that defies the health and safety leviathan, is immediately subjugated.
This march of the profiteer is clearly a logical prerequisite for cities, in that they are self-perpetuating machines with the lubricating grease of money coating their many gears. However, to limit the functionality of the urban topology to one cause is at best limiting, at worse, selfish. There are increasing and alternate ways in which the city can be reappropriated, and for examples, there are a number of information sources (you could do worse that join the Urban Subversion network , or follow them on Twitter). In answer to Gary Bridge’s question, the answer as you now forsee is a resounding ‘yes’. Difference and variety are essential for the proliferation and health of urban life, and by marginalising certain activities, we are at risk of essentially dividing the city – which is diagnostic of catastrophe.
Now, I appreciate that I now stand before you with an empty can and worms strewn all over the place, however, I am actively developing these arguments in future publications so watch this space – and feel free to comment/make suggestions/argue/shoot down as you see fit. However, take note from history…
“He knew what they were thinking and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is destroyed, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand”.
(Matthew, 12: 25, International Standard Version)
The future’s not bright, it’s a little cloudy… August 28, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in The Cloud, Web 2.0.Tags: The Cloud, Web 2.0
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That most memorable of advertising slogans coined by Orange way back in the early 90s sticks in the mind as the signal for the future communications that we were about to embark. Yes, in the 90s, the ubiquity of mobile phones seemed as likely as the demise of the shellsuit as a fashionable health and safety nightmare. Now, we all have mobiles and anyone who doesn’t have one is labeled as weird and it’s arguably so ingrained into society’s Lefebvrian ‘rhythmanalysis‘, that it is starting to effect the gene pool – would you like it if your child was about to embark on a relationship with someone who didn’t own a mobile?
Computers and/or visual screens dominate our eyeballs all day. Yet, the variety of them is increasing. Some of us will have a work computer, laptop, iphone and a TV – and screens are now all over the tube, in hotel lobbies and are even appearing in magazines now. This ‘pervasive computing‘, while increasing, is not new, however the transfer of actual data between these mediums (and by data, I mean that which is of importance to the users) is starting to melt into ‘the cloud‘. Once upon a time we would carry around USB pen drives or have access to our home computers’ hard drive. But these days, dropbox will suffice. Our emails are stored a dusty server deep in Google’s basement. Our photos are not on an external drive which is now bursting at the seams, but on Facebook, Picasa, Panoramio, or whatever is popular this week. With Spotify’s availability on the iphone now confirmed, no one will download actual files anymore, instead they are just a click (and an annoying advert) away.
All this leaves us free. Free from the burden of having to remember to copy this file across or upload that photo. No longer do we need a USB stick or a bulky external hard drive and a plug point in order to present our latest paper. Instead, with the help of our variety of devices we now have at our disposal, we can just pluck it out of the cloud. Easy.
So where does this leave us? Civil liberty campaigners are already dubious as to the nature of storage of our material by third parties, and the cloud is only likely to increase this suspiciousness. But we don’t have to use the cloud do we, so we can opt out right? Well yes, but you could opt out of having a mobile phone and look what that does to your social mantra. You can even hide all your money under a matress and flip bank accounts the finger, but you try and function in our economic-centric society without one and you soon become something worse than an outcast – you are viewed with suspicion by the powers that be. So ignoring the cloud is not really an option, at any individual level at any rate.
But with Moore’s law seeming now ‘too slow’, the alacrity of those at the forefront of our technological hybridisation means that the cloud may be superseded by another technological ubiquity in a few years time. Maybe driven by AI or ‘Augmented Reality‘. And it is this that forms the main prevailing deux et machina of this post. There are no dystopic murmurings here, simply a focus on the philosophies that ‘UbiComp’ or the cloud afford us. If we continue to surrender agency to this realm of ones and zeros, then ultimately we are hybridising ourselves and the duality of humans and nonhumans really is confined to a pre-historic era (if it wasn’t already – which is was). My previous post discussed 2001: A Space Odessey as the quintessential film about tools, and the more we live with our head in the clouds, the more the finale of the film resonates. In essence, there is a need to dispel the categorization tendencies of a neo-Marxist tradition, and reject a unambiguous reality of Descartes and embrace a rhizomatic (even Spinozian) language of continuity. There are no human nonhuman boundaries, only a continuing journey. So bring your brolly, it looks very cloudy out…
Is ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Latour’s favourite film? July 16, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Actor-Network Theory, Bruno Latour.Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Actor-Network Theory, Bruno Latour
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In reading Bruno Latour’s work over the years, one of the overt messages that comes through, and one of his lasting legacies, is the importance he gives to non-humans in society. The actant-networks that constitute the body politic are spun by the constant processes and actions of nonhumans, just as much as they are by nonhumans. Latour’s classic example (it’s when the penny dropped for me anyway) is of Bill Gates and his Microsoft empire. Latour argues that;
“Since Bill Gates is not physically larger than all his Microsoft employees, Microsoft itself, as a corporate body cannot be a large building were individuals reside. Instead there is a certain type of movement going through all of them, a few of which begin and end in Mr Gates’ office. It’s because an organisation is even less a society than the body politic that it’s made only of movements, which are woven by the constant circulation of documents, stories, accounts, goods and passions”.
The ‘constant circulation’ of nonhuman actants have therefore as much agency in the formulation of perpetual structure as humans do. This sparks one of the major criticism of ANT as it seen as little more than technological determinism and that humans ultimately have dominance over their tools. This rather Kaczynskian view however misses the point. As Latour suggests that power is heterogenously disseminated through a rhizomatic actor-network, to say that one is dominant over the other is erroneous as it implies a linear power-relationship that is pre-existent. Agency, if defined as the ability to ‘thingify’, is just as much inherent in, say a laptop as it is in a human being. Ever since Man picked up a bone fragment to beat his prey to death, tools and nonhuman actants have been intertwined through the networks we generate.
Which leads nicely onto Kubrick’s seminal 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rest of this post will contain ’spoilers’ for the film although if you have not seen the film or do not know what happens then I can only assume you are more akin to those in the opening scenes of the film rather than the latter ones. The monolith’s presence at the ‘Dawn of Man’ is symbolic of our use of tools, as Kubrick heavily infers with the ape smashing up the skeleton of his prey with a large femur bone. And the monolith on the moon is a representation of man’s next technological leap, that of space travel. The other monoliths (near Jupiter and in ‘the room’) are Kubrick’s attempt at suggesting that man needs further evolutionary leaps. Debates around the meaning of the monoliths are varied and some more rigorous than others (see this compelling argument – part 1 and part 2), however, if taking an ANT point of view, it would seem that they are indicators of man’s evolutionary ability in their use of tools.
The use of tools and their interdigitisation with humanity effects us all, so much so that the human/nonhuman divide is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Future inventions blur the dichotomy even further (see this enlightening talk by Dr Kaku at the RSA). Therefore, in 2001, the beautiful and esoteric implications of the way human and nonhuman entities’ futures are intertwined to produce the ‘star child‘ can be, I would argue, an indirect inference to the nature and ethos of ANT. However, 2001 also tells us (or at least, one interpretation of it) that to achieve this state, man has to destroy his dependence on technology (the destruction of HAL) and embrace the frailty of the ‘container’ body. Hence, Kubrick brings the nonhuman aspect to a further ‘dimension’ by implying that the human body itself is nonhuman (to be dispensed with) and what is left can be reborn as the ’star child’. This is perhaps an uncomfortable ethos for ANT, as it brings an inherently philosophical (and even spiritual) idiom to what is essentially an empirical rhetoric.
Therefore, in answer the question of the post’s title, I would say probably not. What could be however, is Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 masterpiece, Koyaanisqatsi. The film’s basic tenant is man’s increasing tendency to live life ‘out of balance’ with technology. The term Koyaanisqatsi is a word in the Hopi language meaning ‘crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living’. Again, this is perhaps a dystopic view of man’s continuing evolutionary journey with technology, but the film itself is quite haunting and it’s depiction of nonhuman’s agency is meritoriously accurate.
Nonhumans are integral to the way in which society is held together and so, ANT would argue, cannot be ignored when analysing how reality constructs itself. Any visualisations that can help to achieve this are welcome, and 2001 and Koyaanisqatsi are fine examples of this. Whether or not Latour himself agrees would be interesting, and there may be other examples which you could offer. However, if anyone suggests Antz, then your are neither big, nor clever…
Visualising Cities: Part 4 – Ecstacity June 15, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Architecture Industry, Ecstacity, Films, Language, Urban Geography.Tags: Cities, Ecstacity, Nigel Coates, Urban Geography
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During the course of navigating the gargantuan library of literature and visual material on urban life, finding a book which encapsulates the complexity of the urban condition succinctly and concisely is much like searching for some sort of knitting implement in some sort of stack. This is in part due to the inherent paradox that our linear, one dimensional mode of communication, language is woefully inappropriate for conveying the vastness of emotions, experiences, memories, attributes etc that are associated with the modern day city. Hence, it becomes all the more important to embrace books and films that attempt to convey the city in a non-linear way. By stretching the comfort zone of the reader’s or viewer’s capacity to enjoy an uncomplicated narrative, authors or filmmakers can sometimes evoke urban complexity, if even for the briefest of moments before our brains begin the computation process which establishes order and functionality upon such chaotic neuron activity.
That is why, happening across ‘Ecstacity’ was a very exciting moment. This 2003 ‘book’ (the scare quotes will become apparent if you have ever flipped through it’s pages) is part of a wider spectrum of media from the architect slash urban designer Nigel Coates. The premise of the book is to coagulate 7 cities together – London, Bombay, Tokyo, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Rome and Cairo – to form a ‘factional’ city called Ecstacity.
However, the book acts a kind of surreal ‘tour guide’ of Ecstacity, pointing out the experiences and emotions connected with its various artifacts and places. The amalgamation of these seven cities is most visually evident in the maps on pages 134-5, and the metro guide (page 140-1 – pictured to the left). Placing the Vatican to the north of Blackfriars station, and the Cairo Museum next to Tokyo station creates a visually representative version of a world city network – collapsing cities from around the world in on themselves and emphasising the fact that many ‘world cities’ have more in common with each other than they do with national neighbours (Taylor, 2004).
More than this though, Ecstacity painstakingly creates an urban environment that is centred around the emotional, experiential and architectural difference that is so absent from many contemporary world cities. Creating and celebrating difference is key kernel of thought in this book; and while it is partly a vehicle of the (sometimes downright) weird architectural urban designs, and some of Nigel Coates’ real-world pieces have been the focus of considerable debate (the Body Works in the old Millennium Dome is one that immediately springs to mind); there is a sense of chaos, complexity and convolution throughout the book which resonates with the urban condition in ways unparalleled by other books, films and other media. The complexity and short-circuiting of urban areas is exemplified in the following quote, part of the section ‘Around the world in Ecstacity’:
“Ethnic places in Ecstacity are full of distraction and scramble the choices on offer. Activities interfere with one another constantly. A single door may connect quite different cultures. It’s the inhabitants of Ecstacity who make sense of it, and not the buildings. Check the Japan Centre on Picadilly, or Babington’s Tea Rooms in the Piazza diSpagna. Go through the right door and they’ll join up” (Coates, 2003: 265).
The mixing of city cultures and styles and reliance on the inhabitants to make sense of them is symptomatic of world cities across the globe. More than this however, Ecstacity’s architectural mantra is inherently ‘networked’ with the city itself, and not isolated from the functioning and operationalisation procedures of the city by what Coates calls ‘pumplanning’:
“For some reason, [twentieth century] architecture felt safe by separating itself from the day-to-day world. ‘Pumplanning’, had reversed all that. Pump up the body, pump up the city. Every act of lobbying counts, whether online or picketing parliament. Pumplanning is Ecstacity’s mechanism that fields the contest between control and everyone’s desire, however different. It regenerates the city in a way that straight planning never by working with what’s literally there” (Coates, 2003: 143).
Following Thomas More, Ebanezer Howard and other utopianists, Coates is purporting a city of calm and overriding tranquility. However, unlike these other utopianists, Coates’ utopia is based on a disjointed, multifarious heteroglossia, but is connected through the collaboration between people, places and buildings. Echoing the concerns that Jane Jacobs (1961) had with utopianists, Coates’ Ecstacity rejects a central planning ethos, instead embracing complexity, difficulties and in many cases, untruths.
This ‘book’ is not without it’s faults, and a reading of it is difficult, disjointed and confusing. But given that these are the prevailing qualities of the contemporary world city, then for me, it is essential reading for anyone wanting to gain a theoretical and philosophical grasp of the city.
New York, LA and London: A Creative Industry World City Network May 7, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Creative Industries, Urban Geography.Tags: Creative Industries, World Cities
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Being the newest member of the Globalisation and World Cities Research Group at Loughborough University, I thought that it was worth splicing together my interest in the creative industries and cultural economy with the methodologies of my new Ivory Tower.
What GaWC pioneered in recent years was a methodology to produce hierarchies based not on what is inside cities (such as what Sassen (1991) with her famous book title ‘London New York and Tokyo’, and others previously had been doing), but on city connectivity of multinational companies (see Taylor, 2004). One of the first papers (Beaverstock et al., 1999) published by the GaWC group compiled a hierarchy of world cities based upon the connectivity of business service firms, as opposed to the attributional factors that previous scholars used (Such as Hall, 1966; Friedman, 1986). This study was important because it was the first to rank cities upon relational data. In other words, it used the connectivity of the firms (APS firms, not creative industry firms) being studied as the barometer for the hierarchy, not attributional data that had previously been adopted. Using data on the location of the headquarters of major business service firms, and the location of those firms’ subsidiary branches, the connectivity of each city was ranked, thereby creating a relational hierarchy based on communication and connectivity; rather than counting the number of firms in any given city and comparing them.
This paper became was a seminal research agenda which spawned a number of other authors to conduct simiilar into the connectivity of world cities, which are all available as research bulletins on the GaWC site. One which is ofrelevance here, is that of Krätke (2003) who produced a similar connectivity index, but this time based on media conglomerates, again using the headquarter locations and subsidiary branches as the basis of quantifying the connectivity. The production of the quantitative relational empirics by Beaverstock et al. (1999) for advanced producer service firms and Krätke (2003) for media firms, produced a preliminary visualisation of the world city network, and were the first empirical steps into a new conceptualisation of world cities. However, Krätke’s (2003) work used 33 media firms, using specific criteria;
“In order to carry out an empirical study of the network of globally linked media cities and the relative importance of the various urban nodes in the global cultural economy an analysis was made of the location networks of 33 global media industry firms with a total of 2,766 business units (establishments). To qualify as “global” a media firm had to have a presence in at least three different national economic areas and at least two continents or “world regions” (USA / Canada / Latin America; Europe; Asia / Australia; Africa) with its branch offices, subsidiaries and holding firms”.
(Krätke, 2003: 610)
Therefore, the hierarchy in this blog post is put forward as an extension (and update) of Krätke’s initial work, by including more firms from an official ranking – namely the Financial Times Top 500 and the Forbes Global 2000 – the (arguably) two most recognised (and utilised), list of global companies by business. These sources rank companies by turnover and value, which provides are more objective economic representation of the ‘global’ companies in any given sector (this list is given here).
The categories that aligned most with the ‘accepted definition’ of the creative industries (by this I mean in the UK) were media, software and services and leisure goods. While these are not exact matches for the DCMS’ sub-sectors, they represented those companies which deal in services and products that are considered part of the creative economy. The methodology involved having to select which cities the selected companies were located in, and where their subsidiary branches and wholly-owned companies were located. This information was gathered from hoovers.com, and where needed, research on the individual company’s website. Each city where an office was located was given a score of 1 and added together to give the final score. The list of cities and their scores are listed here. Below is a map of the cities that scored 3 or more (for reasons of clarity).
It is worth considering the consequences of this hierarchy in light of the methodology used. First, as can be seen, there is very much a North American bias to these cities which comes about from the nature of the companies used in this methodology. The majority of the top global companies are media conglomerates and software companies (the top 5 being Microsoft, Time Warner, Viacom, Comcast and Walt Disney) and the large number of small to medium sized firms and freelancers that populate the creative economy are not represented. However, it can be said that while these global firms do not represent the ‘whole’ of the creative industries globally, they are the most accurate portrayal of those global, trans-national companies which produce and deal in products that are considered ‘cultural goods’ (Scott, 2004, 2005; Lash and Lury, 2007). And as they represent a large proportion of global trade in these products, their inter-city connectivity data can provide valuable information regarding the cities and regions of interest to the global firms in contemporary creative industry activity. So, in using these firms (which are predominately based in the US) then this data set will have a tendency to skew toward a North American bias, as many of these firms will have offices in cities across the US before they branch out overseas.
With this in mind, we can see from the map and the list of cities, that New York, Los Angeles and London form a triumvirate of cities in the creative industries. Other notable cities include San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta; and the cities with any significance that occur outside the North American region are Paris and Tokyo. The lack of other regional cities in the UK is significant, with Birmingham the next highest with a score of only 3.
This data is designed to provide an overview of the world city connectivity of the creative industry, and while it is a ‘snapshot’, this exercise could be repeated at regular intervals in order to provide temporal aspect to the data, which will highlight which cities are increasing their creative industry internationalisation practices through their global firms.
Why Facebook is the new Jurassic Park: Web 2.0 and Actor-Network Theory April 15, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Actor-Network Theory, Facebook, Web 2.0.Tags: Actor, Facebook, Web 2.0
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In the opening scenes of Jurassic Park when John Hammond’s invited guests embark upon their tour in the automated jeeps, they are whisked through the gargantuan ingression with the cinematography and the music creating a sense of grandeur, danger and wonderment. “What have they got in here, King Kong?” marvels Goldlum’s (annoying) character in reference to the giant gates that kept King Kong at bay. The giant electric fences ring the park and their catastrophic failure leads to the major premise and action of the film.
Fast-forward to 2009 and a pre-historic site of conflict of a different kind, Facebook. There has a lot written about Facebook’s continued malaise and their recent thematic change has been seen by many to be more ‘Twitter-like‘, which is difficult to argue against. Their constant shifting of layouts and architecture makes it all the more difficult to navigate and often vital pieces of information are lost, and the controversy surrounding their hording of user’s content only served to damage further their reputation as a ‘for-the-user’ institution. However, the main ‘problem’ I have with Facebook now is that it seems all too Jurassic Park. You have to get there, enter through massive gates and once inside, it’s all a bit messy and rushed, which leads to lawyers getting eaten by T-Rex’s (ok maybe not that bit but here’s hoping). It’s not quite as crazy an analogy as you might first expect. Facebook are very keen to let you know you’re there – heavy branding; the infrastructure of the site is such that the navigation panels remain in place as you move around meaning that not that much of the page is malleable; even the links you click from it have a Facebook banner atop. It’s all just a bit too ‘labeled’ or like a walled city, entering through the massive gates (or domain name – FACEBOOK.COM!!).
Then consider Twitter. Those who use it will tell you that the web page twitter.com is one of the least-used interfaces for updating their status. TwitterFox is a favourite of mine, but there are numerous others which people use, among the most popular are tweetdeck and possibly dabr. The mobile usage of twitter was one of it’s main catalysts of growth, whereas for Facebook, it was mostly an afterthought and it’s features are severely reduced on a mobile service. The now (semi-)famous twitchhiker said that twitter is like an infrastructure rather than a ‘website’, and this is something with which I agree – it has diffused and permeated people’s web interfaces, mostly discreetly and become simply for many, an alternative mode of communication.
Such an ontology can be attributed with many other Web 2.0 techniques. The ease at which features from one site can be embedded in another means that the boundaries of traditional domains and websites are being eroded and people are bringing what they want from the web in one place, rather than one place linking to all the others. Google Maps can be embedded in websites, twitter feeds into a blog, YouTube embedding – the list is increasing daily.
In an earlier blog post, I championed the use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) with the epistemology of Web 2.0, and it seems that this is increasingly so the case. The network metaphor is often a very spatial one, with nodes and networks continually spreading further and further into the ether, connecting endless amounts of actors and bringing them more and more into the complexity of the central network. But ANT tells us that “there exists no place that can be said to be ‘non-local’. If something is to be ‘delocalized’, it means that it is being sent from one place to some other place, not from one place to no place”. Latour (2005: 179). In other words, when it comes to information communication in web 2.0 environments, when it is ‘delocalised’, it is not in some form ‘out there’, it is simply another place. The ease at which we can bring various threads of information and visualisations from disparate places to one place (be it our blog, our RSS feeder or whatever) it collapses the network in on itself and does away with the whole ’spatial’ network metaphor altogether. Instead, it is an ‘actor-network’, one which is comprised of action and relationality. The network is purported by the performance of actors (us, our laptops, the servers, camera phones etc.) and it is this energising which creates the network, not other way round.
There are many websites which are attempting to ‘delocalise’ their operations, with the BBC football gossip column offering widgets for blogs and Facebook pages, ebay offering ‘ebay to go‘ which allows you to embed an auction in your blog, thetrainline offering desktop gadgets, the list is seemingly endless. The decomposition of traditional meta-narrative ‘boundaries’ is a key kernel of thought in social science literature at present and I think that it can be attributed to websites; the gates of Jurassic Park were eventually breached – and the same seems to happening to traditional web architectures.
Creative Recessions: Are the Creative Industries the way out? March 9, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Architecture Industry, Creative Class, Creative Industries, Projects, Richard Florida, Slumdog Millionaire.Tags: Creative Industries
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The last few weeks has seen myself and other creative industry commentators share information (through Twitter, Google Reader feeds etc) about how various institutions, companies, governments and individuals are championing the cultural and creative industries (some saying ‘the arts’) as a way out of the current financial turmoil.
There is no doubt that while the financial sector has been imploding, the creative industry sectors have been steadily increasing their wealth, income generation and presence (in the UK economy at any rate) – or so the rhetoric would have you believe. NESTA’s recent report on how the creative industries will be the engine of growth in the UK suggests “between 2009 and 2013 the UK creative industries – which is responsible for films, music, fashion, TV and video games production – will grow on average at 4% – more than double the rate of the rest of the economy. By 2013, the sector is expected to employ 1.3 million people, likely to be more than the financial sector” (quote taken from here). These are bold statements, given the recent problems that have been reported in the so-called creative sectors. Forster & Partners, the global architectural firm shed 350 workers, Geary has halved its workforce, ITV is facing huge job cuts through a fall in advertising revenue, the music industry continues to battle against online innovations which limit their profits, and a particular issue of mine, the UK computer game industry is still facing a massive brain drain to Canada (also here) due to the fact that the government is still sitting on it’s hands regarding tax incentives for the industry.
However, recently, the creative evangelist himself Richard Florida has been trumpeting how the creative economy is where the US should be focusing it’s efforts, and not bailing out the stagnant and ‘old world’ industries of the banks and the automobiles. There is a sense that we should be enforcing a ‘revolution’, not ‘reseting’ the old and unworkable Fordist economy regime, by encouraging creativity and not supporting industries which got us into this mess in the first place – a message that has been echoed for the UK.
So where does this leave us? The mixed messages coming from the UK government are unhelpful, but they do point toward the fact that their is a consensus that creative and innovate workers need to be encouraged to ‘let rip’ and rebuild a different economic base to that from before. But more than this, it is the ‘atomisation’ (i.e. networked individualisation, or connected fragmentation) of the creative economy that will be crucial in the future. Architecture as an industry is so heavily linked to construction that an economic downturn, which effects the construction of major projects more acutely (one only has to remember the stationary, rusting cranes of the Asian financial crisis of 1997), will always see these firms suffer in one way or another. That is why those innovations that can make things more efficient or more environmentally friendly will win out in the end, not only politically, but economically.
Also, I believe that the problems facing ITV (and to some extent Channel 5 and 4) are indicative of a wider social media movement. Spoon-fed media is not what the majority of people are looking for in this hyper-connected, user-generated-content environment; and producing films, televisiual products, music recordings or newspapers for mass consumption is a process that will soon be redundant. Having the ability to produce and manipulate content to your own desires is the future of cultural production and the industrial policies that Mandelson is keen to operationalise will have to take note of this. How? That’s for the politicians to argue over, but encouraging risk-taking and collaborative innovation are essential facets of a creative escape from recession. 
For example, the success of Slumdog Millionaire at the Oscars is always going to be heralded as a British cultural achievement, but will the filmmakers actually make that much hard cash? Film4 (the funders) will see little of the huge profits generated by the film. The creative talent on show in this product is immense, but this does not always translate into financial reward, which if rectified, could be ploughed back into the industry. This is not just the case in the UK, with Australia and other ‘inde’ producing countries and cities seeing similar problems.
With the advent of the democratisation of the production of cultural products through social media techniques (on which I blogged some thoughts on recently), investing the right people, firms and products will be crucial and will need to be an important part of future policy developments.
Technologies, Local Governance and Community Informatics February 27, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Community Engagement, Community Informatics, Creative Industries, Innovation.Tags: Community Engagement, Digital Britain, Local Politics
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The global economic downturn has forced us all to re-evaluate our economic, social and personal assets. A panacea that is often heralded for the general community malaise that is a consequence of the global crisis is community engagement and increased civil participation. This can take many forms, however a key arena is local politics.
The UK government is trying to encourage local people to engage with their local governments in order provide solutions tenable to the local situation. The release of a decentralisation Green Paper by the Conservatives ‘Control Shift‘, released in February 2009, which stated the aim was to give more power to local councils and people, echoed many of the sentiments of the less recent (July 2008) white paper by Government’s Communities and Local Government department (CLG) ‘Communities in control: real people, real power‘, which signaled the governments commitment to “shift[ing] power… away from existing centres [and] into the hands of communities and individual citizens” (CLG report, 2008: page 1).
These reports/papers are a timely contribution as there has been research which suggests that 63 per cent of local residents do not feel they have any influence is decisions made by local councils and governments, and more generally, only one third of people vote in local elections. So there is a distinct sense of apathy which is a barrier that needs to be addressed if the goals in the white paper are to be achieved. That said, community involvement has always been part of the ethos of local government. Councils and boroughs have often engaged with local residents in innovate ways in order to gain their opinions/help in their administrative and bureaucratic processes. From the improvement of services, influencing important budgetary and regeneration issues to running local services; there are a number of ways in which the council can engage with local people. For example, councils already have an obligation to involve their community through the ‘Statements of Community Involvement and Planning Application‘ procedures required for all planning documents. So, there is a sense that the recent white paper(s) is(are being) aimed at building on existing processes by local governments as well as stimulating a fresh impetus, yet there is huge room for improvement.
Because in parallel to this, the increased technological participatory powers of citizens through the Internet and Web 2.0 techniques, has meant that the technological barriers to entry for community or civil engagement have been lowered, and the uptake of information from a variety of sources has intensified. Governments across the world and at various levels (federal, national, state level, local and district) have started to embrace this technology to further their reach and to encourage feedback and participation.
Hence, while the perceived apathy of community engagement in local government decisions is therefore one considerable barrier to entry for some people, techniques such as open-sourced websites, blogs, wikis are all facilitating the way in which information can be fed back from residents to governments, and are relatively inexpensive to implement; shortening the distance between decisions of the collective and the results of those decisions. We have already seen how Web 2.0 techniques were used strategically by Barack Obama’s campaign in the presidential victory of 2008, and now the White House has a specific technological ‘new media’ director to aid in its Web 2.0 capacity.
However, as yet, there is still very much a digital divide in the UK with 26 per cent of the UK population unable to receive a digital broadband connection. Lord Carter said in a recent NESTA speech that he wanted a minimum of 2mbps for all homes in the UK, however this has been criticized as not being enough for modern day Internet usage. And at any rate, if the research by Point Topic is anything to go by, then there is still a lot of work to do (particularly in Northern Ireland). Charles Leadbetter has questioned the effectiveness of this policy on the growth of the creative industry sector by suggested that the increase of broadband to the population will only serve to increase user-generated content and therefore decrease the market share/penetration of large media corporations and perhaps stifle the growth of the industry. This may be true, but in terms of creating a platform for local voices to effect local government then this policy is a must. Community Informatics is a burgeoning discipline, but it seems to tie in with the processes of increased technological capabilities of civil society in effecting local policies and change, particularly for disempowered or marginalised (socially, economically and geographically) communities – with the recent papers by the government and its shadow have argued for.
So, it is important to question Lord Carter’s proposal as being too narrow or not enough for the needs of modern creative industries in the UK (which as we are being reminded are the panacea for the world’s current economic turmoil). However, by increasing local engagement with local governance, the broadband roll out, however small in terms of badnwidth, could be crucial as it seems to be a genuine and achievable option. Both the government and the conservatives have said they want to ‘decentralise’ power, so for all that entails, a digital Britain is crucial.
