Digital natures: New ontologies, new politics?<strong><strong> </strong></strong>

Digital tools and practices are transforming societal relationships with non -human worlds — whether through smartphone apps that city dwellers use to navigate urban forests, robotic bees that pollinate crops, or webcams that livestream rare birds’ nests. Recent academic and popular interest in the coming together of digital and natural worlds has generated both creative and critical reflections on what the digital means for the very concept of nature, troubling the latter’s ontological stability. In this Introduction to the special issue Digital Natures: Reconfiguring Ontologies, Epistemologies, and Politics we claim that the digital, when considered beyond an epistemological register, is a productive and political force that is unsettling, rather than reinforcing, the boundaries between society and nature. We review the extensive body of work from across geography and the social sciences that is actively engaging with digital –nature intersections, and historicise current debates through reference to the figures of the cyborg, technonatures, biomimicry and digital organisms. Asking whether digitalized practices of sensing, abstraction and algorithmic recombination simply mirror a pre -existing and external Nature, or whether they advance a reconceptualization of nature, we set out to trace the progressive political potential of a digitally -entangled ontological redefinition of nature. We discuss how, within emerging digital natures , agencies are entangled in a reimagining of what both nature and society are about. Here, we argue, lies the transformative potential of digital natures —precisely in challenging and subverting the ontological place of an external Nature. The introduction finishes by simultaneously outlining a research agenda for digital natures and presenting the six papers that comprise the special issue

Enhancing urban autonomy : towards a new political project for cities.

As the 21st Century world assumes an increasingly urban landscape, the question of how definitive urban spaces are to be governed intensifies. At the heart of this debate lies a question about the degree and type of autonomy that towns and cities might have in shaping their economic, environmental, social and cultural geography. This paper aims to examine this question. Starting with the premise that the degree of autonomy any particular town or city has is inherently an empirical question – one which can only be conceptualised in relational terms vis-à-vis the distributed, networked and territorialised responsibilities and powers of the city and the nation-state and other zones of connection – we examine four different contexts where debates over autonomy have intensified in recent history (Brazil, UK, India and South Africa). Drawing on recent respective histories, we identify key elements and enablers in the making of urban autonomy: a characteristic that exists in a variety of guises and forms and creates a patchwork landscape of differentially powerful fragments. We reveal how, beyond its characteristic as a political ideal, autonomy surfaces as a practice that emerges from within specific sectors of particular societies and through their relationship with national and regional politics. Four alternative forms of urban autonomy are delineated: fragmented, coerced (or enclave), distributed and networked. We contend that the spatial templates for autonomy are not predetermined but can be enhanced in multiple different sites and forms of political space within the city. This enhancement appears essential for the integration and strengthening of capacities for sustainable and just forms of development throughout the urban

Enhancing urban autonomy: towards a new political project for cities

As the 21st Century world assumes an increasingly urban landscape, the question of how definitive urban spaces are to be governed intensifies. At the heart of this debate lies a question about the degree and type of autonomy that towns and cities might have in shaping their economic, environmental, social and cultural geography. This paper aims to examine this question. Starting with the premise that the degree of autonomy any particular town or city has is inherently an empirical question – one which can only be conceptualised in relational terms vis-à-vis the distributed, networked and territorialised responsibilities and powers of the city and the nation-state and other zones of connection – we examine four different contexts where debates over autonomy have intensified in recent history (Brazil, UK, India and South Africa). Drawing on recent respective histories, we identify key elements and enablers in the making of urban autonomy: a characteristic that exists in a variety of guises and forms and creates a patchwork landscape of differentially powerful fragments. We reveal how, beyond its characteristic as a political ideal, autonomy surfaces as a practice that emerges from within specific sectors of particular societies and through their relationship with national and regional politics. Four alternative forms of urban autonomy are delineated: fragmented, coerced (or enclave), distributed and networked. We contend that the spatial templates for autonomy are not predetermined but can be enhanced in multiple different sites and forms of political space within the city. This enhancement appears essential for the integration and strengthening of capacities for sustainable and just forms of development throughout the urban

Solar energy for all? Understanding the successes and shortfalls through a critical comparative assessment of Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka and South Africa

Lanterns, homes systems, hot water systems and micro-grids based on small-scale solar have become prominent ways to address the energy access challenge. As momentum grows for this form of energy transition this paper draws together research on small-scale solar in six different countries – Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka and South Africa – to argue for a need to understand how, when, and for whom solar provides energy access. It argues that an assemblage perspective can provide vital insights into the diversity and dynamism of energy access. The paper demonstrates that the diverse ways in which solar provides energy access is a function of the flexibility/fixity of the socio-technical assemblage and the de/centralisation of agency. The central thesis of this paper is that energy access is fluid and ever changing and we need fluid, easily maintainable, locally modifiable ‘assemblages’ for providing such access. Using this perspective, we find three common features of solar energy access across our case studies. First, there are significant gaps between what solar projects are designed to achieve and what they deliver, which are highly contingent on the flexibility of their structure and the decentralisation of agency within them. Second, access needs to endure continuously. Third, to foster enduring access, projects should embed logics of improvisation. This paper is based on six separate qualitative research projects conducted during 2010–2016. It draws data from 482 interviews, 91 home tours and 12 group discussions

When urban modernisation entails service delivery co-production: a glance from Medellin

International audienceThrough the example of Ciudadela Nuevo Occidente, a large social housing district in Medellín, this article describes a process that primarily involves co-learning and micro-negotiations that help produce the cognitive alignment necessary to the management of services. The hypothesis put forward in this article is that the frictions caused by the residents' difficulties in adapting to the socioeconomic , cultural and cognitive frameworks of their new environment, imposed by urban modernisation running processes, engender forms of service co-production that ultimately strengthen the utility's capacity to extend and adapt its delivery model while enhancing the quality of services

LHS 1815b: The First Thick-disk Planet Detected By TESS

We report the first discovery of a thick-disk planet, LHS 1815b (TOI-704b, TIC 260004324), detected in the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) survey. LHS 1815b transits a bright (V = 12.19 mag, K = 7.99 mag) and quiet M dwarf located 29.87 ± 0.02 pc away with a mass of 0.502 ± 0.015 M ⊙ and a radius of 0.501 ± 0.030 R ⊙. We validate the planet by combining space- and ground-based photometry, spectroscopy, and imaging. The planet has a radius of 1.088 ± 0.064 R ⊕ with a 3σ mass upper limit of 8.7 M ⊕. We analyze the galactic kinematics and orbit of the host star LHS 1815 and find that it has a large probability (P thick/P thin = 6482) to be in the thick disk with a much higher expected maximal height (Z max = 1.8 kpc) above the Galactic plane compared with other TESS planet host stars. Future studies of the interior structure and atmospheric properties of planets in such systems using, for example, the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, can investigate the differences in formation efficiency and evolution for planetary systems between different Galactic components (thick disks, thin disks, and halo)

Structure-Based Predictive Models for Allosteric Hot Spots

In allostery, a binding event at one site in a protein modulates the behavior of a distant site. Identifying residues that relay the signal between sites remains a challenge. We have developed predictive models using support-vector machines, a widely used machine-learning method. The training data set consisted of residues classified as either hotspots or non-hotspots based on experimental characterization of point mutations from a diverse set of allosteric proteins. Each residue had an associated set of calculated features. Two sets of features were used, one consisting of dynamical, structural, network, and informatic measures, and another of structural measures defined by Daily and Gray [1]. The resulting models performed well on an independent data set consisting of hotspots and non-hotspots from five allosteric proteins. For the independent data set, our top 10 models using Feature Set 1 recalled 68–81% of known hotspots, and among total hotspot predictions, 58–67% were actual hotspots. Hence, these models have precision P = 58–67% and recall R = 68–81%. The corresponding models for Feature Set 2 had P = 55–59% and R = 81–92%. We combined the features from each set that produced models with optimal predictive performance. The top 10 models using this hybrid feature set had R = 73–81% and P = 64–71%, the best overall performance of any of the sets of models. Our methods identified hotspots in structural regions of known allosteric significance. Moreover, our predicted hotspots form a network of contiguous residues in the interior of the structures, in agreement with previous work. In conclusion, we have developed models that discriminate between known allosteric hotspots and non-hotspots with high accuracy and sensitivity. Moreover, the pattern of predicted hotspots corresponds to known functional motifs implicated in allostery, and is consistent with previous work describing sparse networks of allosterically important residues