I find last week’s news that facebook has reached the milestone of 500 million subscribers interesting for several reasons. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘infrastructure’
Ash and infrastructure
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010The ongoing disruption caused by volcanic ash has demonstrated some of the ways in which contemporary urban life is constituted by its infrastructures. Similar in many ways to Don DeLillo’s Airborne Toxic Event, the cloud from Eyjafjallajökull has reinforced the manner in which our sense of self is tied up in the things and circuits that keep us mobile and fed. (more…)
Imagining urban cataclysm
Monday, November 16th, 2009On Thursday and Friday (19th & 20th November) I will be at the World Politics and Popular Culture conference organised by Newcastle University Politics staff Simon Philpott, Matt Davies and Kyle Grayson. The conference will explore the manner in which
I will be giving a paper entitled Zombies and flesh eaters: imagining urban cataclysm in the era of metropolitanisation. The paper will discuss the relation between the politics of global urbanisation and representations of urban cataclysm in the film 28 Days Later, video game Resident Evil; and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. I argue that novels, films and games are textual artefacts embedded in complex assemblages of things, signs, meanings and affects. As such they are mutually imbricated with the dynamics of delineation and contestation we refer to as ‘politics’. The paper discusses two particular ideas arising from a reading of these texts: |
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Disrupted Cities
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Routledge have recently published an interesting volume on urban infrastructure. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, edited by Stephen Graham explores various cases in which infrastructure fails, revealing the extent to which contemporary urban life is predicated on technical structures.
It should be of interest to those exploring the nexus of violence, urbanisation and critical infrastructure.
Click on the book cover on the left to see contents and read an extract
A flyer giving 20% discount on the book can be downloaded here.
Mobile Infrastrucures of Metropolitanisation
Friday, October 23rd, 2009The Guardian today has an interesting report on the global penetration of mobile telephony and broadband internet (‘Africa calling: mobile phone usage sees record rise after huge investment‘). Perhaps the most striking statistic is that ‘[o]n average there are now 60 mobile subscriptions for every 100 people in the world’. However, it is also worth noting the phenomenal growth of mobile phone usage in Africa (550% in the last 5 years). It is worth highlighting the services that are made available through mobile phones in the developing world:
Popular mobile services include money transfers, allowing people without bank accounts to send money by text message. Many farmers use mobiles to trade and check market prices.
Elsewhere I have written about the way in which communications infrastructures are constitutive of contemporary urbanised ways of life. These figures – and the manner in which mobile phones have become integral to accessing vital services – reaffirm this point.
What is interesting, however, is the manner in which the mobile phone is a flexible, rather than static, infrastructure. (more…)
Overloaded infrastrucure
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Reports of a 10 day traffic jam in China bring into sharp relief questions around the infrastructures of global urbanisation. This jam started on the 14th August1 and may last until September. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports that drivers on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway are ‘inching along little more than a third of a mile a day’. The Guardian interviews a driver that took 3 days to get through the jam. It makes the 2003 closure of the UK’s M11 by snowfall seem small by comparison. (more…)
Tags: infrastructure, urbanisation
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