Star Architecture as Socio-Material Assemblage

Taking inspiration from new materialism and assemblage, the chapter deals with star architects and iconic buildings as socio-material network effects that do not pre-exist action, but are enacted in practice, in the materiality of design crafting and city building. Star architects are here conceptualized as part of broader assemblages of actors and practices ‘making star architecture’ a reality, and the buildings they design are considered not just as unique and iconic objects, but dis-articulated as complex crafts mobilizing skills, technologies, materials, and forms of knowledge not necessarily ascribable to architecture. Overcoming narrow criticism focusing on the symbolic order of icons as unique creations and alienated repetitions of capitalist development, the chapter’s main aim is to widen the scope of critique by bridging culture and economy, symbolism and practicality, making star architecture available to a broad, fragmented arena of (potential) critics, unevenly equipped with critical tools and differentiated experiences

Maps, Memories and Manchester: The Cartographic Imagination of the Hidden Networks of the Hydraulic City

The largely unseen channelling, culverting and controlling of water into, through and out of cities is the focus of our cartographic interpretation. This paper draws on empirical material depicting hydraulic infrastructure underlying the growth of Manchester in mapped form. Focusing, in particular, on the 19th century burst of large-scale hydraulic engineering, which supplied vastly increased amounts of clean drinking water, controlled unruly rivers to eliminate flooding, and safely removed sewage, this paper explores the contribution of mapping to the making of a more sanitary city, and towards bold civic minded urban intervention. These extensive infrastructures planned and engineered during Victorian and Edwardian Manchester are now taken-for-granted but remain essential for urban life. The maps, plans and diagrams of hydraulic Manchester fixed particular forms of elite knowledge (around planning foresight, topographical precision, civil engineering and sanitary science) but also facilitated and freed flows of water throughout the city. The survival of these maps and plans in libraries, technical books and obscure reports allows the changing cultural work of water to be explored and evokes a range of socially specific memories of a hidden city. Our aetiology of hydraulic cartographics is conducted using ideas from science and technology studies, semiology, and critical cartography with the goal of revealing how they work as virtual witnesses to an 1 unseen city, dramatizing engineering prowess and envisioning complex and messy materiality into a logical, holistic and fluid network underpinning the urban machine. 1

Mundane objects in the city: Laundry practices and the making and remaking of public/private sociality and space in London and New York

The paper considers how shifting laundry practices and technologies associated with dirty washing have over time summoned different spaces, socialities and socio-spatial assemblages in the city, enrolling different actors and multiple publics and constituting different associations, networks and relations in its wake as it travels from the home and back again. It argues that rather than being an inert object of unpleasant matter, whose encounter with humans has been largely restricted to certain categories of person for its transformation to re-use, and thus passed unnoticed, the paper explores how laundry practices have figured in producing and reproducing gendered (and classed) relations of labour, and enacting multiple socio-spatial, and gendered, relations and assemblages in the city, which have largely gone unnoticed in accounts of everyday urban life

Microclimates of urban reproduction : the limits of automating environmental control

Enclosed, controlled environments, stretching from sites of luxury consumption to urban food production, are proliferating in cities around the world, utilising increasingly advanced techniques for (re)creating and optimising microclimatic conditions for different purposes. However, the role of automated control systems – to filter, reprocess and reassemble atmospheric and metabolic flows with growing precision – remains under-researched. In this article, we explore the phenomenon of automated environmental control at three sites in the UK city of Sheffield: a botanical glasshouse, a luxury hotel and a university plant growth research lab. In doing so, we first show how controlled environments are constituted through specific relations between the inside and outside, which are embedded in inherently political urban contexts and processes. Second, we identify the technical and ecological tensions and limits of indoor environmental control at each site which limit the scope of automation, and the considerable amount of hidden labour and energy required to maintain and restabilise desired conditions. Drawing on these more established examples of ecological interiorisation in a key moment of transition, we raise urgent questions for critical urban and environmental geographers about the possible futures of controlled environments, their practical or selective scalability, and who and what will be left ‘outside’, when they are emerging as a strategic form of urban adaptation and immunisation in the face of converging ecological pressures

The Achievement of a Decentralized Water Management Through Stakeholder Participation: An Example from the Drôme River Catchment Area in France (1981–2008)

International audienceDifferent water Acts (e.g., the European Water Framework Directive) and stakeholders involved in aquatic affairs have promoted integrated river basin management (IRBM) over recent decades. However, few studies have provided feedback on these policies. The aim of the current article is to fill this gap by exploring how local newspapers reflect the implementation of a broad public participation within a catchment of France known for its innovation with regard to this domain. The media coverage of a water management strategy in the Drôme watershed from 1981 to 2008 was investigated using a content analysis and a geographic information system (GIS). We sought to determine what public participation and decentralized decision-making can be in practice. The results showed that this policy was integrated because of its social perspective, the high number of involved stakeholders, the willingness to handle water issues, and the local scale suitable for participation. We emphasized the prominence of the watershed scale guaranteed by the local water authority. This area was also characterized by compromise, arrangements, and power dynamics on a fine scale. We examined the most politically engaged writings regarding water management, which topics each group emphasized, and how the groups agreed and disagreed on issues based on their values and context. The temporal pattern of participation implementation was progressive but worked by fits and starts

The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife

Geographical scholarship has, since the late 1990s, shown how infrastructure was central to the making of urban modernity and the metabolic transformation of socio-natures. Meanwhile, the work of Latin American scholars including Aníbal Quijano and Maria Lugones has focussed attention on the imbrications between modernity and coloniality, in particular through the international racial division of labour. Moving between these ideas, I argue that there is intellectual and political ground to be gained by specifically accounting for the coloniality of infrastructure, in both its material and epistemic dimensions. I ground the analysis in the history of Recife, Northeast of Brazil, analyzing the role of British engineering in the production of the city's landscape and infrastructure, and address the epistemic dimensions of the coloniality of infrastructural by exploring infrastructural spectacle in 1920s Recife. Finally, I explore how the coloniality of infrastructure directs our attention to race, labour and finance

Бремя новой коронавирусной инфекции в детском многопрофильном стационаре Санкт-Петербурга 2020–2021 гг.

Objective: To describe the burden of COVID-19 in a children’s multidisciplinary hospital for two years of the pandemic, taking into account of age, severity of the disease, the spectrum of underlying conditions and the intensive care need.Methods: An assessment of 6048 cases of COVID-19 in patients under 18 years of age hospitalized from March 26, 2020 to December 31, 2021 was carried out. The diagnosis was confirmed by PCR on an outpatient basis or after hospitalization with the help of diagnostic kits registered in the Russian Federation. The features of the work of a children’s multidisciplinary hospital in new conditions, the dynamics of hospitalization, age characteristics and new coronavirus (CV) infection severity in the pandemic development process are presented. The analysis of the underlying condition’s structure depending on the severity of the disease, as well as the need and volume of therapy in the intensive care unit. The frequency and main characteristics of children’s multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) in hospital conditions, long-term PCR positivity and its effect on the duration of inpatient treatment of children have been established.Results: The spread of SARS-COV-2 in St. Petersburg required a radical change in the work of the children’s multidisciplinary hospital. During the two years of the pandemic, four waves of hospitalization of children with new CV were revealed, differing in duration, intensity, and frequency of lung damage, but having no significant differences in the proportion of severe forms of the disease (1.7-2.8% of cases). Intensive therapy was required in 3.6% of cases, of which only 1/3 was due to the severe course of COVID-19 with a lung lesion volume of up to 100%. In 1/3 of cases, patients had risks of developing severe forms and in 1/3 – other pathology. Severe course of new CV was significantly more often accompanied by the need for respiratory support, anticoagulants and anti-inflammatory therapy. Contributing factors of severe forms and unfavorable outcomes were: pathology of the central nervous system, genetic diseases and malformations, obesity, as well as chronic bronchopulmonary pathology. Mortality in the hospital was recorded only among children with severe underlying conditions (0.1% of cases). D-MVS was registered significantly more often in boys (7 out of every 10 patients), accounting for 1.2% of cases of hospitalization of children with new CV over the entire period. Convalescent PCR-positivity in the outcome of COVID-19 was detected in 1/3 of children, significantly more often during the autumnwinter waves of the pandemic and among patients of high school age.Conclusion: New CV is gradually strengthening its position in the structure of acute respiratory pathology in children. Some of SARS-COV-2 infection cases is accompanied by extensive lung damage, as well as severe systemic inflammation independently or in the other infectious diseases structure, induction of the debut of various somatic pathology is not excluded. The presented data confirm the need for increased attention at high risk of adverse respiratory diseases outcomes children. All severe cases of COVID-19 in children require a personalized approach, taking into account the existing background diseases and possible options for the progression of the process. MIS-C should be considered as a systemic inflammatory response syndrome within the framework of an infectious disease of various etiologies, differentiated with Kawasaki disease and the debut of systemic diseases. The long-term PCR-positivity in the outcome of COVID-19 requires further study to address the need and nature of therapy in order to prevent further spread of infection in the population.Цель: описать бремя COVID-19 в детском многопрофильном стационаре за два года пандемии с учетом возраста, тяжести заболевания, спектра сопутствующей патологии и потребности в интенсивной терапии.Материалы и методы: проведена оценка 6048 случаев COVID-19 у пациентов до 18 лет, госпитализированных с 26 марта 2020 г. по 31 декабря 2021 г. Диагноз подтверждался методом полимеразной цепной реакции амбулаторно или после госпитализации с помощью зарегистрированных в РФ диагностических наборов. Представлены особенности работы детского многопрофильного стационара в новых условиях, динамика госпитализации, возрастная характеристика и тяжесть новой коронавирусной инфекции в процессе развития пандемии. Проведен анализ структуры сопутствующей патологии в зависимости от тяжести течения заболевания, а также потребности и объема терапии в отделении реанимации. Установлены частота и основные характеристики детского мультисистемного воспалительного синдрома в условиях стационара, длительной ПЦР-позитивности и ее влияния на продолжительность стационарного лечения детей.Результаты: распространение SARS-COV-2 в Санкт-Петербурге потребовало кардинального изменения работы детского многопрофильного стационара. За 2 года пандемии выявлено 4 волны госпитализации детей с новой коронавирусной инфекцией, отличавшиеся продолжительностью, интенсивностью, частотой поражения легких, но не имевшие значимых различий по доле тяжелых форм заболевания (1,7–2,8% случаев). Интенсивная терапия потребовалась в 3,6% случаев, из них лишь в 1/3 – по причине тяжелого течения COVID-19 с объемом поражения легких до 100%. В 1/3 случаев у пациентов имелись риски развития тяжелых форм и в 1/ – другая патология. Тяжелое течение новой коронавирусной инфекции значимо чаще сопровождалось потребностью в аппаратной респираторной поддержке, антикоагулянтах и противовоспалительной терапии. Предрасполагающими факторами тяжелых форм и неблагоприятных исходов явились: патология центральной нервной системы, генетические заболевания и пороки развития, ожирение, а также хроническая бронхолегочная патология. Летальность в стационаре была зафиксирована только среди детей с тяжелой сопутствующей патологией (0,1% случаев). Детский мультисистемный воспалительный синдром регистрировался значимо чаще у мальчиков (7 из каждых 10 пациентов), составив 1,2% случаев госпитализации детей с новой коронавирусной инфекцией за весь период. Реконвалесцентная ПЦР-позитивность в исходе COVID-19 выявлена у 1/3 детей, значимо чаще во время осеннезимних волн пандемии и среди пациентов старшего школьного возраста.Заключение: НКВИ постепенно укрепляет свои позиции в структуре острой респираторной патологии у детей. В ряде случаев инфицирование SARS-COV-2 сопровождается обширным поражением легких, а также тяжелым системным воспалением самостоятельно или в структуре других инфекционных заболеваний, не исключена индукция дебюта различной соматической патологии. Представленные данные подтверждают необходимость повышенного внимания к детям групп риска неблагоприятных исходов респираторных заболеваний. Все тяжелые случаи COVID-19 у детей требуют персонализированного подхода с учетом имеющихся фоновых заболеваний и возможных вариантов прогрессирования процесса. Детский мультисистемный воспалительный синдром следует рассматривать как синдром системного воспалительного ответа в рамках инфекционного заболевания различной этиологии, дифференцировать с болезнью Кавасаки и дебютом системных заболеваний. Длительная ПЦР-позитивность в исходе COVID-19 требует дальнейшего изучения для решения вопроса о необходимости и характере терапии с целью предотвращения распространения инфекции в популяции