Destroying Nahr el-Bared: Sovereignty and urbicide in the space of exception

During the summer of 2007, Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon was the scene of a fierce battle between the Lebanese Armed Forces and a militant Islamist group called Fateh al-Islam. When Palestinian evacuees returned after the conflict, they found Nahr el-Bared utterly destroyed, houses smashed first by shells and bombs, then by vandalism and arson, possessions stolen and broken, offensive graffiti daubed on walls. I argue in this paper that the battle of Nahr el-Bared, and particularly the month of looting and arson that followed the battle, was a case of urbicide in a space of exception. The seemingly unrestricted destruction of homes, the theft of possessions and arson, went beyond any possible military necessity and became the deliberate and systematic erasure of the camp. This urbicide was made more possible by the very nature of the political spaces of the camp, which are in Lebanon but not of Lebanon, in which Lebanese sovereignty and law are not fully enforced, in which a whole range of non-Lebanese actors exercise political power outside the control of the Lebanese state. In these spaces of exception in which the rule of law is suspended, the looting, arson and vandalism took place without sanction. Palestinian homes and lives had become sacred in the sense that they could be destroyed without sanction, without recourse to legal redress, because there was no law.     

广州商务办公空间发展及其与城市空间的耦合研究

系统回顾了广州商务办公空间的发展历程,将广州商务办公空间的发展阶段划分为五个阶段,并总结了每个阶段的发展特征。以此为基础,对广州商务办公空间的演变阶段及其特征进行了总结,定量计算了广州商务办公空间的空间演变情况,分析广州商务办公空间与城市空间结构的耦合关系。分析结果表明,广州商务办公空间结构的"多次极化"过程与城市空间多中心化趋势基本趋于一致,商务办公空间在城市空间实现外拓后才逐渐呈"马赛克"式内嵌填充发展。而随着城市产业结构的升级、城市职能的转变,商务办公空间的扩散可以实现与城市空间形态扩展的同步进行。     

The Trump administration and outer space: promoting US leadership or heading towards isolation?

In a relatively short period of time, the Trump administration has been fairly active in the field of space. The reconstitution of the National Space Council, under the direction of Vice President Pence, the President’s signing of Space Policy Directive 1, that calls for the return of humans to the Moon, and the announcement of a National Space Strategy that calls for an ‘America first’ approach in space, have been the highlights of this process. A key component of the administration’s approach has been the promotion of commercial (private) space activities through an effort of regulatory reform intended to facilitate free enterprise and individual initiative in space.

Overall, it is evident that the Trump administration views a consolidated US leadership in space as instrumental to ‘Make America Great Again’. However, due to the lack of cohesion in the management of the US space program, the controversial interpretation of international principles and the US-centred view of space endorsed by the administration, doubts remain as to whether the space policy of the Trump administration will foster US leadership in space or lead to its progressive isolation.     

The Conventillo,the Department Store,and the Cabaret: Navigating Urban Space and Social Class in Argentine Silent Cinema, 1916–1929

This article examines an understudied film genre that some Argentine early film periodicals labeled cinedrama porteño. Porteño cinedramas portrayed a bleak Buenos Aires, a dark metropolis of massive immigration and accelerated urbanization in which opulence was reserved for the few and misery was all around, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods. Centering on ‘fallen women’ and well-dressed wastrels, the genre foregrounded social instability by confronting emerging and established social actors in several locations, including tenement housing, department stores, and cabarets and garçonnières. Based on surviving film fragments, this article argues that porteño cinedramas rendered visible varying degrees of sociocultural proximity and separation in urban space. In doing so, the genre traced sociocultural cartographies and identitary strategies to confer narrative and visual saliency to mobile subjects, most noticeably urban outcasts. Porteño cinedramas warned against the dangers of upward mobility while at the same time denouncing gender and class inequality in Buenos Aires. Films discussed include Hasta después de muerta (Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche, 1916), La chica de la Calle Florida (José A. Ferreyra, 1922), and La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928).     

Space syntax analysis of Central Inuit snow houses

Space syntax is a graph-based theory used by architects to examine how the spatial layout of buildings and cities influences the economic, social, and environmental outcomes of human movement and social interaction. Archaeologists have explored this concept by analyzing how social structure is reflected in the spatial configuration of public and domestic architecture. In this paper, space syntax is used to examine the spatial morphology of snow houses built by three Central Inuit groups in the Canadian Arctic, based on ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts. The results of this study demonstrate that variation in family structure and the behavioral directives present in Inuit kinship systems are reflected in the spatial configurations of snow house architecture. This has important implications for understanding how architecture might be used to identify enduring and changing patterns of household and community organization in the archaeological record.     

Clusters, Power and Place: Inequality and Local Growth in Time–Space

The argument of this paper is that a deeper appreciation of the nature of the power relationships between firms and the circuits of power that bind them together is key to understanding how clusters function — including how they might emerge and how they might decline. We begin to develop a conceptualization that allows us to generate a deeper understanding of the processes that enable the production and reproduction of enterprise clusters under some combinations of circumstances but not others. The sections of the paper explore: (1) concepts of power and circuits of power including their spatialities; (2) the temporarily stabilized relationships which occur in clusters of economic activity; (3) the openness and permeability of clusters as a way of understanding conditions that foster cluster growth; (4) a tentative integration of concepts. From this reading of the concepts of clustering and power we draw the conclusion that clusters are, at any particular point in time, temporary and transient conjunctures of interfirm relationships. They depend on specific circumstances in 'time–space' and, because of their very transience and specificity, those conditions might be very difficult if not impossible to create through the blunt instruments of policy.     

Analog flows in digital worlds: ‘Migration multiples’ and digital heterotopias in Greek territory

Migrants' engagement with Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) reveals a wide spectrum of resistance practices that enact “heterotopias” (Foucault, 1967) that extend from the human body to transnational landscapes (Gillespie et al., 2016). This paper enhances the theoretical debate on migration with new ways of understanding borders and space as fluid, autonomous, and provisional linkages between humans and nonhumans. Based on findings from field research conducted in Greece, it aims to discuss how migrants' digital practices generate new spaces and materialities. Attending to the making of migrants’-ICTs intertwining it examines the emergence of unbordering practices, the creation of crucial solidarity networks and the risks and limitations that emerge when using ICTs. Finally, the paper highlights the recent migratory influx not simply as a result of neoliberal doctrines, but (also) as an act of disobedience to fortress Europe through the creation of digital-urban heterotopias through the lenses of Migration Studies, Science and Technology Studies and Critical spatial theory.