URBAN PLANNING
How Global Cities Work
(written for The Social, Economic, and Environmental Context of Urban Planning in Fall 2010)
In the past 15 years we have entered the process of establishing a new paradigm of world order, one dictated by large global cities functioning in a virtual capacity to compete against each other and make profits primarily for the sake of nurturing the spirit of capitalism. Contemporary global cities like New York and Tokyo use disassociated workers and specialist labor to perform information and communication transactions in virtual space that require little investment or overhead and result in great profit. Large global cities dominate, working over the heads of the non-technological world and dictate the future direction of everything from politics to industry to environmentalism.
Full Text: How Global Cities Work
The Development of Information Space and the Space of Flows:
Pioneering New Regions of Productivity in the Global Economy
(written for The Social, Economic, and Environmental Context of Urban Planning in Fall 2010)
The current structure of information space and the space of flows described by Manuel Castells can be seen as a progression in history that involved the abstraction of capital and labor and the concurrent rise of the global city as information hub and world cultural node. This Space has no relationship to traditional implications of time or the traverse of physical space, nor does it treat labor or social interests as they have been handled in the past. With the advancement of communication technology and the rise of the internet, the non-spaceness of this space is ever more real. Castells quantifies two primary aspects of this information space: one, the power of networks, partnerships, agglomeration, and communication, and two, the power of identity found in branding, image, and abstract value (2003). Global cities are now driven by values relating to the flow of their economies over any physical reality, and the effect on the lived city is one of social/labor alienation and a reformation of network bonds focused on the individualization of skill and the emergence of contracted work at both micro and macro scales.
Full Text: The Development of Information Space and the Space of Flows
LANDSCAPE
Musings on Landscape and Parallax View
(written as an exercise in response to photos in Winter 2009)
Topics noted, to be explored in future posts in further detail:
Patterns in science
Science fiction influenced landscape
Space-time, the Big Bang
Aerial Photography
Parallax View
Mental Oasis
My personal artist vision
Slavoj Zizek
Landscape and our world in general are all a matter of scale and perspective. From one view you see a perspective that can grow, shift, travel time and space, all by simply being viewed from a different place. Hence, one could say we are all looking at the same thing: existence, just from different perspectives. Approaching landscape as a universal entity, one directly tied to nature, existence, and human transcendence gives new life to the field, and inspires my visual aesthetic. As Slavoj Zizek observes in The Parallax View, “the explanation of a universal concept becomes ‘interesting’ when the particular cases evoked to exemplify it are in tension with their own universality…”
Full Text: Musings on Landscape and Parallax View
CULTURE
Robots at War
(written for Technology in Contemporary American Culture in Spring 2005)
Today, we live and breathe the conveniences of technology, and this is how we secure our power in the world. Machines are our closest friends, without them, we would have to relearn all kinds of archaic processes of subsistence. We build a world around us that can work without us, so that we can spend our time doing whatever we please. Yet, in this way, work and play conflate into one activity, and this holds some implications for our future and the future of social systems.
I argue that technology is being used to militarize our society both subconsciously and in reality practices. By creating an environment that challenges our attention to reality, placing us in a virtual world where we can let our desires take control and appealing to the human weakness for total control and outer-body agency, technology redraws the lines of our perception of what is here and what is other, what is real and fictional, what is safe and what is dangerous, and what is desirable and what is not.
