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

The Production of Space

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

That is what most of us believe most of the time. They do happen, of course, sometimes with alarming frequency, sometimes with calamitous results. We explain these unnatural events as the consequences of lack of foresight, poor design, poor engineering andlor errors by some person or persons. Improve the design and production, admonish or train the persons to be more careful (less careless?) and they won't happen. It is easy to think of examples in the home, the laboratory, the office ... and in the public domain -for example, Chernobyl, Challenger, Bhopal, The Herald of Free Enterprise, King's Cross. The premise leads to an explanation of the cause, which in turn leads to the public inquiry recommending some action to prevent a similar accident occumng again. Chernobyl, for example, was blamed on a combination of unsatisfactory design and operator error. So also was the Zeebrugge disaster. So also ... and it is easy to make a long list including Flixborough, Torrey Canyon, Three Mile Island (TMI), to which King's Cross will probably soon be added. In each case the inquiry has prescribed corrective action based on this 'accidents are unnatural' (AAU) model: a technological fix plus wrist-slapping. In well-established technologies, in which we have many thousands or even millions of operating hours of experience. the repeated application of this process should by now have reduced the accident rate to zero -or, at the very least, to very nearly zero. Not a bit of it; there are no signs of this happening, and in some technologies the rate is rising. Could it be that we have got something wrong in our explanation?

Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies

Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies. A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity-one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist-and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist poststructuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic "development" pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action research in the United States, Australia, and Asia, they produce a distinctive political imaginary with three intersecting moments: a politics of language, of the subject, and of collective action. In the face of an almost universal sense of surrender to capitalist globalization, this book demonstrates that postcapitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered. The authors describe a politics of possibility that can build different economies in place and over space. They urge us to confront the forces that stand in the way of economic experimentation and to explore different ways of moving from theory to action. J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

A Postcapitalist Politics

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

Allen J. and Cochrane A. (2007) Beyond the territorial fix: regional assemblages, politics and power, Regional Studies 41, 1161–1175. The idea of regions as territorially fixed in some vital political sense is a stubborn conception, one that is both mobilized to pursue selective interests and to establish regional identities. To assert that regions are political constructs, however, is not to say that such bounded, territorial entities enclose all the political relations that produce them. This paper puts forward a relational view of the region based upon an assemblage of political actors, some public, some private, where elements of central and local government are ‘lodged’ within the region, not acting above or below it. Using examples drawn from governing agencies across and beyond the south-east of England, it is shown how a more diffuse form of governance has given rise to a spatially discontinuous region. This is grounded in an exposition of the political assemblage that is Milton Keynes today, with...

/pdf/beyond-the-territorial-fix-regional-assemblages-politics-and-1xltjoxuix.pdf

Beyond the territorial fix: regional assemblages, politics and power

Multi-scalar or multi-site power relations offer two contrasting ways of understanding the shifting geography of state power. In this paper, we argue for a different starting point, one that favours a topological understanding of state spatiality over more conventional topographical accounts. In contrast to a vertical or horizontal imagery of the geography of state power, what states possess, we suggest, is reach, not height. In doing so, we draw from Sassen (2006, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press) a vocabulary capable of portraying the renegotiation of powers that has taken place between central government in the UK and one of its key city regions, the South East of England; one that highlights an assemblage of political actors, some public, some private, where negotiations take place between elements of central and local actors 'lodged' within the region, not acting 'above', 'below' or 'alongside' it. The articulation of political demands in such a context has less to do with 'jumping scale' or formalizing extensive network connections and more to do with the ability to reach directly into a 'centralized' politics where proximity and reach play across one another in particular ways.

Assemblages of State Power: Topological Shifts in the Organization of Government and Politics

The pervasive quality of governments to reach directly into our lives, the striking ability of far-flung corporations to make their presence felt at close quarters, and the ease with which NGOs fol...

/pdf/topological-twists-power-s-shifting-geographies-13uhl72pnf.pdf

Topological twists Power’s shifting geographies

In privatised public spaces where people mill around and cross over one another's paths in largely unforeseen ways, one could be forgiven for thinking that power is largely about guards and gates or that it is present through surveillance techniques. This paper puts forward a rather different view of power in public spaces that highlights its unmarked presence. It argues that closure in some of the more recent privatised public spaces is achieved in decidedly modest ways through a logic of seduction. Using the example of a privatised public space at the heart of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz redevelopment, it is suggested that the layout and design of the complex represent a seductive presence that effectively closes down options, enticing visitors to circulate and interact in ways that they might not otherwise have chosen. The suggestive practices, experiences and spaces are laid out for temptation in such a way that closure is achieved by degree, through inclusion rather than exclusion. Power in this instance works through the ambient qualities of the space, where the experience of it is itself the expression of power.

/pdf/ambient-power-berlin-s-potsdamer-platz-and-the-seductive-53ej9pbs8f.pdf

Ambient Power: Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and the Seductive Logic of Public Spaces

Biosecurity, as a response to threats from zoonotic, food-borne and emerging infectious diseases, implies and is often understood in terms of a spatial segregation of forms of life, a struggle to separate healthy life from diseased bodies. While an ensuing will to closure in the name of biosecurity is evident at various sites, things are, in practice and in theory, more intricate than this model would suggest. There are transactions and transformations that defy easily segmented spaces. Using multi-species ethnographic work across a range of sites, from wildlife reserves to farms and food processing plants, we argue for a shift of focus in biosecurity away from defined borderlines towards that of borderlands. The latter involves the detachment of borders from geographic territory and highlights the continuous topological interplay and resulting tensions involved in making life live. We use this spatial imagination to call for a different kind of biopolitics and for a shift in what counts as a biosecurity emergency. As a means to re-frame the questions concerning biosecurity, we argue for a change of discourse and practice away from disease ‘breach points’ towards the ‘tipping points’ that can arise in the intense foldings that characterise pathological lives.

Biosecurity and the topologies of infected life: from borderlines to borderlands

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