Category: space/place

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Reblog> New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Interesting new book highlighted by Colin McFarlane, including contributions by Rob Kitchin (and team) and Jennifer Gabrys…

New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin and myself have just published a new edited book on the ‘smart city’ debate. The book, Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge), is a critical examination of the claims, drivers, imaginaries and consequences of smart city discourses.

As we all know, there is an incredible amount of hype and noise made about smart cities, much of it by multinational corporations like IBM and Cisco in their effort to sell expensive ‘urban solutions’. In this book, we sought to take this debate on by bringing together a group of critical, international and interdisciplinary researchers.Smart urbanism

The book examines how smart city initiatives are being rolled out, and makes a series of arguments that seeks to advance a critical research agenda. It finds, for example, that the discourse is often in reality a justification for the latest round of neoliberal development and displacement. It finds a common tendency to place far too much faith in technology, with far too little attention to the actual urban context. It also finds that most of the time, and despite high profile cases such as Rio’s control room, the smart city discourse is little more than discourse, bolstered by pervasive imagery that globally circulates and effectively constitutes a powerful form of marketing.

But the book also finds openings in the smart city discourse, including in the actions of social movements, civil society groups, and critical researchers to use or promote digital technologies in more socially and ecologically relevant ways. In these efforts, it is urbanism and social justice that inform whether or not digital technologies are useful, as opposed to the positivist view that technology can be added to cities awaiting ‘enhancement’ through sensors, dashboards and real-time data management. But as the book shows, it would be far too simple to argue that there is an ‘alternative’ smart city discourse that opposes a ‘mainstream’ discourse, partly because the various overlaps between what may initially appear mainstream and alternative, and partly because many critical initiatives with digital technology reject the entire smart city discourse altogether while others seeks to reframe it.

Here’s the list of contributors and chapter titles:

  1. IntroductionAndrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane and Simon Marvin
  2. Smart cities and the politics of urban dataRob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle
  3. IBM and the visual formation of smart citiesDonald McNeill
  4. The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and a 100 other utopias in IndiaAyona Datta
  5. Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town: Beyond the rhetoricNancy Odendaal
  6. Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart cityJennifer Gabrys
  7. Smart-city initiatives and the Foucauldian logics of governing through codeFrancisco Klauser and Ola Söderström
  8. Geographies of smart urban powerGareth Powells, Harriet Bulkeley and Anthony McLean
  9. Test-Bed as urban epistemologyNerea Calvillo, Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier and Wolfgang Pietsch
  10. Beyond the corporate smart city?: Glimpses of other possibilities of smartnessRobert G. Hollands
  11. ConclusionsColin McFarlane Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin
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Reblog> Space, Power and the Commons: new book in Place, Space and Politics series

Clive Barnett on a new book out edited by Samuel Kirwan, Leila Dawney & Julian Brigstocke… all smart people so well worth a look!

Space, Power and the Commons: new book in Place, Space and Politics series

9781138841680The latest book in the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics series is now published (technically it is a 2016 book) – Space, Power and the Commons: The struggle for alternative futures is edited by Sam Kirwan, Leila Dawney and Julian Brigstocke, and is associated with the Authority Research Network. It’s an important addition to the literature on the theme of ‘the commons’, not least because it draws together discussions of high theory on this topic (Hardt, Nancy, Ranciere, etc) with empirical analyses of practices of ‘commoning’.

This is the second title to appear in the Place, Space and Politics series, after the collection on Urban Refugees. There are more titles in the pipeline. More details on the series, including guidelines for submitting proposals, can be found here and here.

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CFP> Transforming work in mobile worlds

Here’s an interesting call for papers from David Bissell and Francis Collins that’s been posted to Crit-Geog-Forum on the ways work is transforming travel and our uses of technology and vice versa, and how that is involved in shifts in how we perform other (perhaps all) aspects of our lives.

Transforming Work in Mobile Worlds

David Bissell, The Australian National University
Francis Collins, University of Auckland

The dynamics of labour has been approached through many different geographical perspectives. In this session we want to explore how the conceptual lens of mobility offers a powerful and provocative way of posing new questions and staging new problems about the practices and affectivities that produce experiences for labouring bodies. Labouring bodies are entangled in various forms of movement and stillness. They involve different configurations of timing, rhythm and habit. Going to work, for instance, for many involves commuting across cities and regions, migrating within and across territories, or undertaking forms of mobile work. There are also distinct temporalities to labour practices that intersect with these mobilities in all sorts of ways – the tenure of a work visa, the rhythms of the workday, or the connections between labour and the timing of lifestages.

Beyond these general assertions about the relationship between temporality, mobility and labour we observe emergent phenomena that are potentially reshaping these connections, inviting us to think them anew. On the one hand there has been a growth in longer-distance commuting as a constitutive feature of some working lives, manifest in mobile work lives, fly-in-fly-out labour, long distance living arrangements and the rise of global work. Similarly, in the realm of ‘migration’ we have witnessed a marked shift towards temporary and circular migration, both in the aspirations and subjectivities of migrants and the governmentalisation of migrant mobilities and lives through temporary migration regimes.

Together, these trends suggest that there might be some profound and intriguing reconfigurations happening in many workers’ lives. But what sorts of transformations are these new working and migratory practices giving rise to? For instance, the trends indicate that these new mobile working practices are changing bodies, changing relationships, changing family forms, changing place attachments, changing communities, and changing the very nature of belonging. This session aims to grapple with precisely these transformations of labour, life and place.

Disciplinarily, this session aims to forge a richer dialogue between mobilities research and migration studies in order to explore how these mobility practices are creating new kinds of subjects; how they are necessitating new kinds of skill; and how new kinds of relationships are emerging. We believe that these new mobile working practices invite analysis through the complimentary perspectives and theoretical resources that mobilities and migration research offers.

We therefore invite papers that explore the relationship between labour mobility and migration, temporality and affect. This could include a focus on the timing and rhythms of social sites like the workplace; the multiplication of labouring bodies through the governmentalisation of time at the border; subjective understandings of timing of lives and labour and its interrelationship with pasts, futures and presents. Other themes may respond to the following questions:

  • In what ways are the multiple temporalities of work being reconfigured through different forms of mobility?
  • How are bodily capacities, thresholds and limits emerging through new working practices, including flexible, precarious or irregular work?
  • How are new temporalities and mobilities of labour generating new forms of aspirations, desire and sense?
  • How might we trace the affective contours of temporality and mobility in labour?
  • What are some of the intersections between forms of mobile or temporary work and expressions of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual difference?
  • What are some of the techniques for exploring the richness of subjective experiences of extended temporariness in migration and/or work life?
  • How are different institutions and organizations implicated in the transformation of work in mobile worlds?
  • What are the implications of the timing and mobility of work and life for experiences of belonging, identity and the generation of community?
  • What connections are emerging between mobile work and other migratory forms such as education, working-holiday, or lifestyle?

Abstract submission: Monday 19th October 2015

Please send abstracts of 250 words max to both David Bissell and Francis Collins. We will contact successful applicants by the 23rd of October 2015. Once selected participants must pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG by October 29th 2015.

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In Certain Places…

In Certain Places logoIn Certain Places is a programme of artistic interventions and events, led by curators Elaine Speight and Professor Charles Quick with the support of associate Rachel Bartholomew, in the School of Art, Design and Fashion at the University of Central Lancashire. Based in the City of Preston, in the North West of England, the project examines how artists can contribute to the form and functions of a place, by exploring new approaches to art, culture and urban development.


In Certain Places, whom I happen to follow on Twitter, have a new blog – looking forward to seeing what gets posted. The first post is about the recent Nordic Geographers conference, in which several of my colleagues participated.

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Greenfield on the politics of Uber as ‘socially corrosive mobility’

On his occasional blog Speedbird, Adam Greenfield has written an entertaining and incisive blogpost about the ‘mobility brokers’ Uber – the software-sorted unlicensed alt-taxi providers.

The post is worth a read for the trenchant dissection of how Uber is a kind of sigil of some of the questionable politics arising from the so-called ‘smart city’. For example:

– Interpersonal exchanges are more appropriately mediated by algorithms than by one’s own competence.
This conception of good experience is not the only thing suggesting that Uber, its ridership or both are somewhat afraid of actual, unfiltered urbanity. Among the most vexing challenges residents and other users of any large urban place ever confront is that of trust: absent familiarity, or the prospect of developing it over a pattern of repeated interactions, how are people placed (however temporarily) in a position of vulnerability expected to determine who is reliable?

Like other contemporary services, Uber outsources judgments of this type to a trust mechanic: at the conclusion of every trip, passengers are asked to explicitly rate their driver. These ratings are averaged into a score that is made visible to users in the application interface: “John (4.9 stars) will pick you up in 2 minutes.” The implicit belief is that reputation can be quantified and distilled to a single salient metric, and that this metric can be acted upon objectively.

Drivers are, essentially, graded on a curve: their rolling tally, aggregated over the previous 500 passenger engagements, must remain above average not in absolute terms, but against the competitive set. Drivers whose scores drop beneath this threshold may not receive ride requests, and it therefore functions as an effective disciplinary mechanism. Judging from conversations among drivers, further, the criteria on which this all-important performance metric is assessed are subjective and highly variable, meaning that the driver has no choice but to model what they believe riders are looking for in the proverbial “good driver,” internalize that model and adjust their behavior accordingly.

What riders are not told by Uber – though, in this age of ubiquitous peer-to- peer media, it is becoming evident to many that this has in fact been the case for some time – is that they too are rated by drivers, on a similar five-point scale. This rating, too, is not without consequence. Drivers have a certain degree of discretion in choosing to accept or deny ride requests, and to judge from publicly-accessible online conversations, many simply refuse to pick up riders with scores below a certain threshold, typically in the high 3’s.
This is strongly reminiscent of the process that I have elsewhere called “differential permissioning,” in which physical access to everyday spaces and functions becomes ever-more widely apportioned on the basis of such computational scores, by direct analogy with the access control paradigm prevalent in the information security community. Such determinations are opaque to those affected, while those denied access are offered few or no effective means of recourse. For prospective Uber patrons, differential permissioning means that they can be blackballed, and never know why.

Uber certainly has this feature in comment with algorithmic reputation-scoring services like Klout. But all such measures stumble in their bizarre insistence that trust can be distilled to a unitary value. This belies the common-sense understanding that reputation is a contingent and relational thing – that actions a given audience may regard as markers of reliability are unlikely to read that way to all potential audiences. More broadly, it also means that Uber constructs the development of trust between driver and passenger as a circumstance in which algorithmic determinations should supplant rather than rely upon (let alone strengthen) our existing competences for situational awareness, negotiation and the detection of verbal and nonverbal social cues.

Interestingly, despite its deployment of mechanisms intended to assess driver and passenger reliability, the company goes to unusual lengths to prevent itself from being brought to accountability. Following the December 2014 Delhi rape incident, police investigators were stunned to realize that while Uber had been operating in India for some time, neither the .in website nor any other document they had access to listed a local office. They were forced to register for the app themselves (as well as download a third-party payment application) simply so they could hire an Uber car and have the driver bring them to the place where he believed his employers worked. Here we see William Gibson’s science-fictional characterization of 21st-century enterprise (“small, fast, ruthless. An atavism”¦all edge”) brought to pungent life.

Read the whole article.

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The Matter of Virtual Geographies – Progress in Human Geography Paper Prize

I am really pleased to be able to share that my article “The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies”, published in Progress in Human Geography last year, has been jointly awarded the Progress in Human Geography Best Paper Prize 2015.

One of the great things about this prize being awarded is that the article is now free to read! So, you can read it on the journal website.

If you find the article interesting, you might also like another I’ve written: ‘Memory Programmes’, published in Cultural Geographies, which you can read here (on ResearchGate). I’m also very happy to discuss my work, so please do feel free to get in touch.

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Reflecting on the field trip to Kilburn

Montage of Kilburn High Road using pictures taken by the author

At the end of October 2014, I accompanied 140 students in their first year of studying geography at the University of Exeter on a field trip to London to put into practise some of what they have learned so far on the BA Geography course. While many of the activities were located in central London locations, including Hyde Park and the V&A museum, all 140 students also visited Kilburn. You may ask: Why? Obvious answers would include that ‘it’s a diverse area’, with which you may or may not agree. Then again, as Zadie Smith argued, at the launch of her novel “NW”: “But that is only the dullest thing that can be said about Kilburn, that’s it’s so ‘diverse’.”

We took the students to Kilburn for a number of reasons: that it is precisely not ‘central London’ but still has carries the attributes of being situated within a ‘world city’ like London; that immigration has helped shape Kilburn in interesting ways; that the High Road marks a boundary, between Brent and Camden; and, significantly for me at least, because Kilburn has previously been an inspiration to the geographer Doreen Massey.

In her 1991 article “A Global Sense of Place”, Massey uses the narrative of a walk down Kilburn High Road to illustrate the various ways we can understand feelings of place not as territories encompassed by boundaries but instead as ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations’. It is the vitality and the various movements, the comings and goings of shoppers, families, locals and visitors alike, the businesses opening and closing: all of these connections through space AND time that come to make up our sense of place. This is the shared ‘Kilburnosity’ about which Zadie Smith writes. For Massey, places – and Kilburn in particular – are not solely local. The global threads through the local (producing those movements of people, money and goods) and, in the same way, the local builds the global.

The students enjoyed their brief exposure to ‘Kilburnosity’ and I enjoyed the questions Kilburn prompted them to begin to ask of themselves in the process: of how ‘places’ get continually made and of our various roles in that process. I think we all began to see why Zadie Smith boldly stated: “I’d rather walk down Kilburn High Road than the King’s Road – than any road in London. For selfish reasons: there’s so much more to see, and hear.”

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Paper accepted – Memory programmes: the retention of collective life

I am pleased to share that I have recently had a paper accepted for Cultural Geographies, which will form part of a theme section/issue co-edited by Sarah Elwood and Katharyne Mitchell concerning “Technology, memory and collective knowing”–stemming from a session at the 2013 AAG in Los Angeles.

The paper is entitled ‘Memory programmes: the retention of collective life’ and builds upon a theoretical conference paper I gave at the Conditions of Mediation conference in 2013.

The aim of the article is to interrogate some key elements of how software has become a means of ‘industrialising’ memory, following Bernard Stiegler. This industrialisation of memory involves conserving and transmitting extraordinary amounts of data. Data that is both volunteered and captured in everyday life, and operationalised in large-scale systems. Such systems constitute novel sociotechnical collectives which have begun to condition how we perform our lives such that they can be recorded and retained.

To investigate the programmatic nature of our mediatised collective memory the article has three parts. The first substantive section looks at a number of technologies as means of capturing, operating upon and retaining our everyday activities in ‘industrial’ scale systems of memory. Particular attention is paid to the quasi-autonomous agency of these systems, that appear to operate at a scale and speed that exceeds a human capacity of oversight.

In the second section I look at the mnemonic capabilities of networked technologies of digital mediation as ‘mnemotechnologies’. Following Stiegler, these are technologies and technical supports that both support and reterritorialise what we collectively understand about our everyday lives.

The conclusion of the article addresses the ways in which an ‘industrialisation of memory’ both challenges and transforms the ways in which we negotiate collective life.

I have copied below the abstract and I’d be happy to share pre-publication copies, please contact me via email.

Abstract:

This article argues that, in software, we have created quasi-autonomous systems of memory that influence how we think about and experience life as such. The role of mediated memory in collective life is addressed as a geographical concern through the lens of ‘programmes’. Programming can mean ordering, and thus making discrete; and scheduling, making actions routine. This article addresses how programming mediates the experience of memory via networked technologies. Materially recording knowledge, even as electronic data, renders thought mentally and spatially discrete and demands systems to order it. Recorded knowledge also enables the ordering of temporal experience both as forms of history, thus the sharing of culture, and as the means of planning for futures. We increasingly retain information about ourselves and others using digital media. We volunteer further information recorded by electronic service providers, search engines and social media. Many aspects of our collective lives are now gathered in cities (via CCTV, cellphone networks and so on) and retained in databases, constituting a growing system of memory of parts of life otherwise forgotten or unthought. Using examples, this article argues that, in software, we have created industrialised systems of memory that influence how we think about living together.

Keywords: memory, technology, mnemotechnics, industrialisation, programming, Stiegler

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Reblog> ERC Video for the Programmable City Project

Nice video offering an overview of the Programmable City project (funded by the European Research Council):

This video introduces the Programmable City. In the video Rob Kitchin outlines the aims and objectives of the project and highlights the importance of the support received from the European Research Council (ERC). Each researcher on the Programmable City team also briefly discusses their work. The video was made by the Programmable City team in order to promote the project and the ERC.
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Contextualising ‘virtual’ geographies

Following on from the publication of my article in Progress in Human Geography, I wanted to post here some thoughts that didn’t quite fit into that paper but nevertheless feel like a worthwhile contextualisation of the long-running engagement with digital mediation and ideas of a ‘virtual’ or ‘cyber-‘ spaces in geography.

Discussions of alternative or transformed forms of spatiality constituted by computation have spawned a range of names and phrases for those spatial formations. As Pile argued, the descriptions of ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the virtual’ are ‘a plurality of clashing, resonating and shocking metaphors’ (Pile, 1994, page 1817). In this post I want to begin to discuss the malleable nature of our descriptions of computation, data and software. In particular it seems pertinent to examine the role of metaphors and how some geographers have addressed that role. Sawhney (1996) describes metaphors as ‘midwives’ that ease new conceptualisations of spatial experience into understanding. However, metaphors that constitute discourses are not politically neutral. If metaphors ‘do things’ as Lakoff and Johnson (2003) assert, what they ‘do’ needs to be explicitly examined.

Paul Adams, Stephen Graham and Ken Hillis all offer examinations of the role of metaphors in understanding the spatial experience of ICTs that are worth revisiting (see also: Graham, 2013):

First, Adams’ (1997) useful review of metaphors in literary treatments of computer mediation identifies three, overlapping, ‘fields’ of metaphors: ‘virtual architecture’, ‘the electronic frontier’ and ‘cyberspace’. Adams argues that, despite fears concerning ‘a metaphor’s power to corrupt’ (1997, page 167), such ‘mythical geographies’ fill in the spaces between established knowledge to form what Tuan calls the ‘fuzzy area of defective knowledge’ (Tuan, 1977, page 86).

Second, Hillis (1999) highlights a background of mysticism to metaphors utilised to describe and explore virtual reality as a ‘cyberspace’. For Hillis, many of the metaphors draw upon understandings of light. Hillis (1999) offers three types of metaphor: virtual reality as a privileged position affording ‘vision’; virtual environments as facsimiles or simulations represented through light, akin to Plato’s shadows on the cave wall, and the virtual as an ability to inhabit images as such. Both Adams (1997) and Hillis (1999) postulate a link between the types of metaphors used and the desire to affirm an elevated or omniscient perspective, drawing upon the remote gaze as a tool of imperialism (akin to Virilio, 1984) or the near-omnipotent reach of light to illustrate that desire.

Third, Graham describes the ‘powerful role of spatial and territorial metaphors’ that anchors discourses of ICTs (Graham, 1998, page 165). Graham (1998) identifies a typology of spatial metaphors through which space and place are conceptualised in relation to ICTs: ‘substitution and transcendence’, ‘co-evolution’, and ‘recombination’. Metaphors of substitution and transcendence, echoing Hillis’ (1999) critique, denote replacing physical territory with a ‘virtual’ using new technologies. A co-evolutionary perspective argues that, while remaining separate, both physical and electronic ‘spaces’ are necessarily produced together.

Finally Graham (1998) posits a re-combinative, topological, understanding of socially constructed forms of spatiality that are ‘sociotechnical’ (i.e. linkages between ‘heterogeneous’ actors, including humans, technology and others, formulate spatial experience). Graham (1998), along with Adams and Hillis, identifies the problematic form of Cartesian dualism (a mind/body split) implied by his first category, which also somewhat underlies the second, and the uncritical technological determinism that often accompanies this somewhat fanciful race away from our embodied existence.

Regardless of the apparently ephemeral or amorphous nature of the metaphorical ‘virtual’ or ‘cyberspace’, such evocations are still grounded in a resolutely material register. As Hillis (1999, pages 160-162) notes, language itself is profoundly spatial, and material, in its expression. Writing is the spatialisation of knowledge, what philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the externalization of thought recorded as ‘tertiary retentions’ (Stiegler, 2007), most frequently orthographic writing (see: Stiegler, 1998), with different technologies of retention using space differently. The expression of ‘virtual’ spaces is, then, always already material in character. Hillis, in an argument similar to Stiegler (1998), presses further, highlighting the reciprocal, yet fragmented, relation between word and world:

language is not only a discrete, concrete thing”¦ Neither is it ephemeral, language can be thought of as an “embodied prototechnology”, both confirming us to ourselves existentially at the level of embodied voice and extending us to engage with the lived world through its symbolic affect (Hillis, 1999, page 161).

Metaphors and neologisms are, of course, not the sole preserve of geographers or, indeed, academics. Of course, much of this work speaks to broader popular (Western), late 20th century interests in ‘telematic culture’ (Ascott, 1990), the creation of ‘artificial experience’ and ‘virtual communities’ (Rheingold, 1989, 1998), and the convergence of subaltern cultures experimenting with drugs and computing (Rushkoff, 1994). Alternative, less dyadic, conceptualisations of a ‘virtual’ are also offered by geographers considering the growth of digital mediation. Although perhaps now considered somewhat dated, we might note that ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtual space’ has not been solely evoked as an abstract alternative realm, as Kitchin (1998) has argued:

Cyberspaces are dependent upon spatial fixity, they are embodied spaces and access is unevenly distributed”¦ cyberspaces do not replace geographic spaces, nor do they destroy space and time (page 403).

Following Adams (1997, 2011), Graham (1998, 2005), Hillis (1999) and Kitchin (1998, 2011; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) we can see how, and perhaps why, metaphors and neologisms are used to describe computer-mediated spatial experience and also how geographers have situated the agency of those terms. Earlier engagements with computation were necessarily speculative and concerned with formulating understandings of nascent or imagined technologies. However, in the last decade the growth in ownership of digital technologies has created case studies of widespread everyday use. Some of these case studies are explored in my recently published article ‘The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies‘.

Some references

Adams, Paul C., 1997, “Cyberspace and virtual places” Geographical Review 87 (2), pp. 155-171.

Adams, Paul C., 2011, “A taxonomy for communication geography” Progress in Human Geography 35 (1), pp. 37-57.

Ascott, Roy, 1990, “Is there love in the telematic embrace?” Art Journal 49 (3), pp. 241-247.

Graham, Mark, 2013, “Geography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities?” The Geographical Journal forthcoming.

Graham, Stephen, 1998, “The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualising space, place and information technology” Progress in Human Geography 22 (2), pp. 165-185.

Graham, Stephen, 2005, “Software-sorted geographies” Progress in Human Geography 29 (5), pp. 562-580.

Hillis, Ken, 1999 Digital sensations: space, identity and embodiment and virtual reality. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Kitchin, Rob, 1998, “Towards geographies of cyberspace” Progress in Human Geography 22 (3), pp. 385-406.

Kitchin, Rob, 2011, “The programmable city” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 38 (6), pp. 945-951.

Kitchin, Rob, Dodge, Martin, 2011 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 2003 Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Pile, Steve, 1994, “CyberGeography: 50 years of Environment and Planning A” Environment and Planning A 26 (12), pp. 1815-1823.

Rheingold, Howard, 1989 Virtual Reality: Exploring the Brave New Technologies of Artificial Experience and Interactive Worlds – From Cyberspace to Teledildonics. Mandarin, London.

Rheingold, Howard, 1998 The Virtual Community. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Rushkoff, Douglas, 1994 Cyberia: Life in the trenches of hyperspace Flamingo, London.

Sawhney, H, 1996, “Information superhighway: metaphors as midwives” Media, Culture and Society 18 pp. 135-155.

Stiegler, Bernard, 1998 Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. trans. Beardsworth, R., Collins, G., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2007, “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: The Memories of Desire”.) Technicity. Charles University Press, Prague, pp. 15-41.

Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1977 Space and Place: The prespective of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Virilio, Paul, 1984 War and Cinema: The logistics of perception. trans. Camiller, P., Verso, London and New York.