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

The Production of Space

Established in 2006, TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited operates as the nodal point for Tata businesses in West Africa. TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited has a strong presence in Nigeria with investments exceeding USD 10 million. The company was established in Lagos, Nigeria as a subsidiary of TATA Africa Holdings (SA) (Pty) Limited, South Africa and serves as the hub of Tata’s operations in Nigeria and the rest of West Africa.

What About Us

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

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term ‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.

Smart cities as corporate storytelling

In the post-9/11 context, security issues have become increasingly central to the hosting of sport mega-event (SMEs). Security budgets for events like the Olympic Games now run into billions of dollars. This article seeks to advance the emerging field of SME security research in substantive and analytical terms. We identify three sets of issues and problems that are taking shape within this field: first, comparative issues in relationship to the Global North and Global South, notably given the growing number of SMEs set to be staged in the Global South; second, various risks and security strategies that are specific to different SMEs, including perceived terrorist threats, spectator violence, and broader risks associated with poverty, social divisions, and urban crime; and third, the security legacies that follow from SMEs, such as new surveillance technologies, new security-focused social policies, and security-influenced urban redevelopment. We argue that future research into SME security governance sho...

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Security governance and sport mega-events: toward an interdisciplinary research agenda.

Drawing upon Michel Foucault's approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between apparatuses of discipline and apparatuses of security, the paper approaches these questions on three broad levels, namely: how contemporary ‘governing through code’ relates to its referent object (referentiality axis), to normalisation (normativity axis), and to space (spatiality axis). Empirically, the paper investigates two high-profile pilot projects in Switzerland in the field of smart electricity management, aimed at (1) the assessment of customer needs and behaviours with regard to novel smart metering solutions (iSMART), and (2) the elaboration of novel IT so...

Michel Foucault and the Smart City: Power Dynamics Inherent in Contemporary Governing through Code

Recent debates on surveillance have emphasised the now myriad possibilities of automated, software-based data gathering, management and analysis. One of the many terms used to describe this phenomenon is ‘Big Data’. The field of Big Data covers a large and complex range of practices and technologies from smart borders to CCTV video analysis, and from consumer profiling to self-tracking applications. The paper’s aim is to explore the surveillance dynamics inherent in contemporary Big Data trends. To this end, the paper adopts two main perspectives concerned with two complementary expressions of Big Data: (1) the individual use of various techniques of self-surveillance and tracking and (2) the simultaneous trend to optimise urban infrastructures through smart information technologies. Drawing upon exploratory research conducted by the authors, the paper shows that both expressions of Big Data present a range of common surveillance dynamics on at least four levels: agency, temporality, spatiality and normativity. On these grounds, the paper highlights a series of important issues to explore in future research.

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/download/infrastructures/infrastructure

From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data

The paper brings together Peter Sloterdijk's ‘theory of spheres' with urban studies literature on the forms and effects of the contemporary urban security agenda, in order to investigate the relati...

/pdf/splintering-spheres-of-security-peter-sloterdijk-and-the-38oflihc3j.pdf

Francisco Klauser

Papers

Smart cities as corporate storytelling

Security governance and sport mega-events: toward an interdisciplinary research agenda.

Michel Foucault and the Smart City: Power Dynamics Inherent in Contemporary Governing through Code

From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data

Splintering Spheres of Security: Peter Sloterdijk and the Contemporary Fortress City: