Discussion of the design of satellite-laser measurement stations in the eastern Mediterranean under the geological aspect. Contribution to the earthquake prediction research by the Wegener Group and to NASA's Crustal Dynamics Project

Research conducted for determining the location of stations for measuring crustal dynamics and predicting earthquakes is discussed. Procedural aspects, the extraregional kinematic tendencies, and regional tectonic deformation mechanisms are described

Introduction

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Abstracting method: Taking legal abstractions seriously

This chapter sketches the contours of a methodological attitude aimed to explore the spatiality and materiality of law by taking abstraction seriously and using abstraction strategically. This is done through five steps. First, I briefly account for the impact that the spatial and subsequent (affective, material, post-human) turns in social sciences and humanities had on the notion of the social. Second, I draw the relative consequences vis-à-vis the law, by introducing the notion of spatiolegal. Third, I describe the way in which within the legal system, as well as legal thinking more generally, space has been systematically misunderstood. I especially focus on the case of socio-legal and critical legal approaches, highlighting how beneath their misunderstandings they betray a common incapacity to overcome the separation between law and space, thus reaffirming under another guise the opposition between the abstract and the concrete. Fourth, I tackle this question by integrating insights on the 'real', 'concrete' and 'productive' quality of abstractions, coming from Karl Marx, Peter Goodrich, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Along these four sections, the strategic significance of reevaluating the notion of abstraction becomes gradually apparent, both in the political and methodological sense. Therefore, fifth, I conclude by distilling the discussion hitherto developed, and operationalise it through an empirical example. In this way I am able to show the methodological approach developed in this chapter at work, as well as to provide a minimal testing ground for assessing its usefulness.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Introduction

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Vandalizing the Commons

The chapter is based in Bologna, Italy, and focuses on an (in)famous event that took place in the city in March 2016, when the renowned street artist Blu took the drastic decision to erase all his murals from the city’s walls. Prior to this event, various graffiti, included some by Blu, had been removed from the city’s walls to populate the exhibition ‘Street Art. Banksy & Co.’ Taking inspiration from Blu’s iconoclastic protest, the chapter develops a theoretical discussion that intersects notions of art, heritage and vandalism, exploring the contemporary obsession with physical preservation and the way it surreptitiously seeped through the lively public debate that followed Blu’s decision to erase his murals. Pointing towards a notion of urban commons that is dynamic, conflictual and in becoming, the chapter shows the potential of Blu’s gesture in the context of the ongoing co-optation of street art and, more generally, vis-à-vis the complex relation between street politics, public art and urban commons.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

O urbano na arte (urbana): (des)localizar a street art em uma época de urbanização neoliberal

This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. This is done in three steps. First, via a perambulating immersion into the complexity of a specific site. Second, via a critical engagement with the form and politics of contemporary street art. Third, via a strategic speculation on the relation between the notions of art, urban and site. Street art’s current impasse, I argue, paradoxically depends on its incapacity to become properly urban. A urban-specific street art, I contend, is not a decorative veneer nor an enchanting disruption to dramatic processes of urbanisation: it is a force-field in which these processes are made visible, experienceable, and thus called into question. The ‘Olympic’ works of JR and Kobra in Rio de Janeiro, and the iconoclastic performance by Blu in Berlin, are used to illustrate and complement the argument.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Liquidscapes of the city

The liquid reality of the urban has been often explored in the field of urban political ecology, which has considered the ways in which the city is actually stitched together or pulled apart by the physical flows of liquids, the submerged city made of pipes, tubes and sewers, a hidden network in which the drinkable and the wasted liquids intersect and flow asymmetrically. Many of these works have been crucial in embedding water in socio-political relations. However, often at the cost of reducing water to said relations, falling short of attending to water’s agentic capacity, failing to consider the encounter between those socio-political relations and the materiality of the liquid itself. Usually framed through questions of power, inequality, consumption and cultural meaning, rarely these studies have engaged with the materiality and agency of urban liquids and, most crucially, with their essential capacity to overflow. In this propositional piece, we ask the question: what does it mean to think the city through its overflows?info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Exceptional tunings: controlling urban events

This thesis is about space, law and control: how their relationship unfolds in the contemporary city, and how normative orderings emerge out of the urban mess, with particular attention to how this occurs in the extraordinary spatio-temporal context of mega events. The work is premised on the elaboration of an original spatial ontology through the notions of life, materiality and event, which culminates with the introduction of the notion of atmosphere and rhythm, and their folding into the concept of urban tuning. This understanding allows for re-thinking the spatiality and materiality of the urban from a non-dichotomous, immanent perspective, thus providing a novel way to investigate the spatiolegal configurations and the form they assume in the present-day city. Consequently, the thesis explores the exceptional relation between law, space and justice in modern and ‘post-modern’ times, by looking at contemporary forms of control and their on-going reformulation of urban space according to the twin requirements of consumption and immunity. Through this approach, I wish to push forward the urban and legal geographical debate, exploring the evolution of the spatiolegal into new, potentially oppressing logics of control, as well as delineating a radically material, ethico-politically worthwhile and strategically adequate concept of justice. Since I conceive urban mega events as paradigmatic contexts to investigate urban processes, I employ the 2010 World Cup in South Africa as the empirical testing ground for my conceptualisations

Urban animals – domestic, stray and wild: notes from a bear repopulation project in the alps

This piece explores “domesticity” as a social territory defined by its relationship with the conceptual and ecological space of “the wild,” and asks whether these spaces stand in opposition to each other or more subtle relations of co-implication are at play. As we look into the domestic and the wild, a conceptual map of notions emerges, including the public, the common, the civilized, and the barbarian. The paper suggests the domestic and the wild constitute two semiotic-ecological domains constantly stretching into each other without any stable or even clear boundary line, and it elaborates on a series of corollaries for studying non-human animals in urban contexts. As an illustrative case study, we follow the story of Daniza, a wild brown bear introduced in the Brenta Natural Park on the Italian Alps in the 2000s. Declared a “dangerous animal,” Daniza was accidentally, and controversially, killed by the public authorities in 2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio