Questions Regarding Simone's Text

Simone's text articulates how cultures of risk and speculation in post-industrial capitalism inform the infrastructural development of global cities and how these developments influence networks of people within such cities. What implications do these ideas of speculation, temporariness and uncertainty have when thinking about social identity/social categories? Historically useful, primary markers of identity and allegiance are becoming less tangible. What kinds of questions should we be asking to account for these new uncertainties?

Discussion questions for Graham’s “The City Economy”

1. What are the two concerns that Graham begins the article with?

2. What are the relationships between the global and the local that are pointed to within these two concerns? What are the tensions?

3. What is the localization vs. globalization debate? How does it shape our understanding of cities?

4. What impact do concepts and analytical approaches regarding globalization or localization have on concrete city economies? What is Graham’s critique of these analytical approaches?

5. What is the role of institutions that Graham points to?

Quote out of Gandy's "cyborg urbanization" piece:

"The very idea of the network is trapped within an epistemological myopia that privileges issues of quantification and scale over the everyday practices that actually enable our analysis to function. An emphasis on cyborg urbanization extends our analysis of flows, structures, and relations beyond so called 'global cities' to a diversity of ordinary or neglected urban spaces. The cyborg city is, in other words, closer to an interpretative analytical framework that can connect analysis with the cultural and ideological realm of everyday lief and include those 'unconventional' urban landscapes that have emerged outside the core metropolitan regions of the world economy and where incongruities and displacements are an even more pervasive feature of the urban experience" (pg 36)

Hi all,

See link for guest blog entries about OWS for MADRE by yours truly.

Potentially Bad Weather

(WATCH FIRST READ AFTER)

This video exploration deals with issues of clarity, program, and the unknown. Footage used in this piece was taken from three tours of Zucotti park, two during the day and one at night. This work also relates a systemic global network (possessing an unifying "unknown") to an intricate biological system. (in the sense that it is a dense network of cells/ organisms) all operating on individual or local leves but serving a greater purpose unknown.

Fog, a reoccurring image in this work, obscures clarity. The unknowns of both financial mechanisms and the OWS program is made muddy by "bad weather".

We have to see "bad weather" as among the most uncontrollable things; However, as something that is systemically connected to us. All things are. We can't control the weather, but it can completely ruin our day. We can mitigate it with lawyers or raincoats but there is nothing we can do about It's presence.

O.

3 pages 1 ½ space

Due next Thursday October 27, 2011

Methods of observation

What we are observing

How are placement changes our methodology?

Experience of doing fieldwork:

How your participation changes the evidence that you gather

How the evidence you gather informs your research question.

The Wide Spread Craze thats Sweeping the Nation...

(Click on the picture to be catapulted in to the wild world of saucy wonder)

"These ain't your grandma's sauces!"™ "Just dip the rag in the sauce, suck it and dip it again."™

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