‘Prevention of evil,production of good’: Jeremy Bentham’s indirect legislation and its contribution to a new theory of prevention

ABSTRACT

This paper critically analyses current depictions of prevention and tries to offer a new theoretical reflection on the concept by reconstructing it on the basis of Jeremy Bentham’s writings on indirect legislation. It is my aim not only to explore Bentham’s concept of indirect legislation as an outstanding example of enlightened social/public policy, but also to show to what extent his thoughts might be a fruitful contribution to a necessary reconceptualization of current conceptions of prevention, which are heavily criticized by many scholars.     

Platforms,Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal

UK online food delivery company Deliveroo has a platform that automates the coordination of meal delivery, creating a market for the delivered meal. This market indicates the necessity to examine the social arrangements produced through the platform beyond the labour of the delivery worker. Markets comprise heterogeneous actors that require their coordination to be calculated. Deliveroo, though, offers two competing views of markets. First, as interfaces in which supply and demand are represented as autonomous blocs that are articulated through the goods of the delivered meal whose constitution, including the labour of delivery, is black-boxed. Second, as agencement—formatting collective arrangements—in which the goods of the delivered meal are contingently calculated as a flexible arrangement of riders, restaurants and customers whereby these actors have differing degrees of choice concerning their participation, and through which new service performances are emerging in the necessity for their contingent interaction.     

基于空间特征的秦巴山区农村居民点整理分区与潜力测算

整理分区划定和整理潜力测算是农村居民点整理的核心内容。本文综合地形位、缓冲区、可达性、景观指数和Voronoi 图,引入空间分异特征指数,定量分析农村居民点用地特征,实现整理区合理划分;改进潜力测算模型,结合经济社会、土地利用、农户意愿因素,构建整理潜力综合评价指标体系,以秦巴山区竹溪县为例进行实证研究。结果表明：竹溪县农村居民点空间分异特征指数值位于0.0433-0.8038 之间;全县农村居民点可分为优先整理区、重点整理区、优化调控区和城镇发展区,现实潜力904.63 hm²,仅为传统潜力的65.42%;根据各乡镇潜力系数,划分为3 级潜力区。空间分异的潜力测算、整理区和潜力区划分,为确定因地制宜的整理模式和符合实际的整理时序提供依据。     

上下椽头尾搭接的木构古建筑受力性能的简化计算方法研究

古建筑木结构主要分为抬梁木构体系和穿斗木构体系,其结构布置与连接节点明显不同于现代木结构。为了进一步提高古建筑木结构的结构计算和结构安全评估的工程实用性,对常见木椽的受力性能简化算法、常见拼合檩条的受力性能简化算法、三架梁和五架梁受力性能的简化算法进行研究,并基于动力特性分析,初步提出古建筑木结构典型构架体系在进深方向和面阔方向结构基本自振周期的近似计算模型。研究成果可为古建筑木结构的结构性能计算、结构安全评估以及加固修缮设计提供依据和参考。     

治理术与地理学:研究述评与展望

治理术作为福柯后期研究的一个重要概念具有丰富的内涵,已被广泛用于西方地理学的研究。本文在福柯的著作和西方相关文献的基础上,梳理了治理术的概念,归纳了西方地理学对治理术的主要应用。福柯的治理术主要包含治理技术和治理理性两个向度;治理术的分析框架以生命政治、计算和治理目的为支柱;与这一分析框架相对应,西方地理学对治理术的应用集中在以下三个话题:族群与生命政治,领土与计算,认知/空间合理性和城市管治。治理术的相关概念和方法在解释中国的单位制度和户口制度、阶级斗争和空间非均衡发展、分税制和城市规划及加强中国地理学的理论化和学术贡献上具有重要意义。     

Indexing the great ledger of the community: urban house numbering, city directories, and the production of spatial legibility

Despite the recent focus on the spatial politics of calculation, few studies have explored the historical geography of house numbering, a spatial practice that has arguably been one of the principal strategies for rationalizing the geographic spaces of everyday life over the course of the last two centuries. This paper provides the beginnings of a critical spatial history of street and house numbering in the gridded cities of the United States since the eighteenth century. City directory publishers were among the leading proponents of numbering houses at a time when many local governments had yet to firmly commit to systematic house numbering as an essential responsibility of the local state. I therefore examine the connection between the publishing of city directories and the development of urban house numbering systems, both of which were integral to the production of spatial legibility and the individualization of the urban population. The notion of viewing the city as a ‘text’ is historicized through a critical analysis of the modernist comparison of urban space to a recordkeeping book. The paper concludes by tracing the institutionalization of house numbering as a practice of spatial governmentality.     

Thomas Hobbes and the Term ‘Right Reason’: Participation to Calculation

Three times between 1640 and 1651, once at considerable length, Hobbes used and accepted, and then mocked, repudiated and discarded, the ancient/medieval term recta ratio/right reason. These repeated fluctuations in his thinking and rhetorical strategy occurred during the writing of his three major treatises on moral and political theory, one additional note on the term in De Cive, and an unpublished commentary on Thomas White's De Mundo. They are made obvious by his substitution of recta ratio for reason or natural reason when recycling passages from Elements of the Law for use in De Cive, and by his subsequent reversal of that substitution when revising other passages in De Cive for use in Leviathan. Despite incorporating recta ratio as a structural element in De Cive, he finally reverted in Leviathan to regarding the term as a deceptive verbal construct, non-existent in rerum natura, and ridiculing its users and proponents. Right reason carried connotations linked to it in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and Hobbes's reversals in his view and use of it, and his final dismissal of it, provide further evidence and justification for the now familiar modern claim that he was a herald of modernity.     

Situating the imperial archive: the Royal Empire Society Library, 1868–1945

This paper explores the Library of the Royal Empire Society from its foundation in 1868 to the mid-twentieth century. It begins by considering the production of imaginative geographies of the British Empire not only by the materials in the collection but also by practices and technologies of assembling, classifying, cataloguing and display which went on in the Library. The architecture, spaces and experience of being in the Library are considered as integral to these imaginative geographies and the role performed by the collection. The second part of the paper considers the ways in which the Library was imagined as a centre of calculation for imperial, economic and geopolitical concerns and some theoretical and methodological issues involved in understanding how and by whom the Library was used. The Royal Empire Society Library offers an insight into the interplay between imperialism and wider concerns about knowledge, vision, order and control, as well as highlighting the importance of recognising the specificity of different types of knowledge space.     

Favelas and the divided city: mapping silences and calculations in Rio de Janeiro's journalistic cartography

This article aims to challenge the widespread consensus that Rio de Janeiro is a divided city by deploying two concepts in critical cartography: cartographic silences and cartographic calculations. As a kind of unconquered territory, a terrae incognitae, favelas were silenced on many of Rio de Janerio's maps over the last century. When these places began to be mapped, and converted to terrae cognitae, power relations often become even more apparent because of the intention to make it legible for purposes of intervention. By analyzing maps published in the mainstream Brazilian press throughout the last century, this article explores how national press often portrays Rio de Janeiro as a city divided between formal neighborhoods, where the state apparatus can ensure the rule of law, and favelas, where parallel politics enforce local forms of governance. In order to disseminate this image of the city, maps can play an important role, locating different urban zones and reinforcing old stereotypes. Despite many studies that focused on both material and embodied forms of state presence within favelas, maps can be an important source of information to understand persistant representations of favelas as excluded and divided places.