Detours are the straight way to success on the Internet (Matt Locke at Polis summer school – guestblog)

How do you catch the attention of young people in a world, where the amount of information available is so massive, indeed,, for all practical reasons, infinite? That is the question Matt Locke, commissioning editor on Channel 4, is facing everyday, as he works with the channel’s section for teenagers, producing content about the choices you face as a teenager, trying to grasp the world of grown-ups, that they are about to enter

Farlig og forførende fortid eller oplysende og fascinerende historie?

Hvis menneskers historietolkninger er baggrund for deres nutidige handlinger, må man med beklemmelse konstatere, at nogle menneskers historiebagage ser ud til at kunne misbruges til mord, vold og terrorisme

Light violence at the threshold of acceptability

This paper shows how residential high-rise developments in London deteriorate the living conditions for existing residents and set a legal precedent for distributing harm unevenly across the population. The paper unpacks the contentious decision-making process in one of several local planning applications in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets that ended in a spur of high-profile public planning inquiries between 2017 and 2019. The Enterprise House inquiry shows how, among other things, a loss of daylight, sunlight and outlook, and an increased sense of enclosure, affect already marginalised residents in neighbouring buildings disproportionately, elevating light to a legal category for assessing harm and addressing social injustice in the vertical city. The paper adopts a forensic approach to interrogate four instances during the public inquiry, in which numerical evidence of material harm resulting from a loss in daylight, sunlight and outlook was made to appear and disappear. The translation of scientific evidence into legal evidence is performed through the act of claiming ‘truthful’ representations of ‘real life experiences’ of light in digital visualisations. By revealing how material harm resulting from vertical development is normalised and thus naturalised in the planning inquiry, the paper demonstrates how ‘light’ violence is exercised in vertical development

Historie(r) i livets tjeneste - en appel fra Friedrich Nietzsche

Hvad vi gemmer, og hvad vi glemmer, hvad vi kasserer og hvad vi arkiverer, det hele afslører, hvordan vi forholder os til al den tid, der er før dette nu lige nu. Det gælder for den gamle og det gælder barnet. Det gælder for den enkelte og det gælder det store fællesskab

Rethinking urban lighting: geographies of artificial lighting in everyday life

PhDIn this thesis I study the role of artificial lighting in the everyday urban life of older residents living in the London Borough of Newham. Newham’s light infrastructure is currently undergoing change as the borough’s entire 19,000 street lamps are being re-placed with Light Emitting Diodes and as a range of regeneration projects provide public spaces designed with new lighting. By increasing visibility and encouraging everyday activity into the evening, the Council claims that the changes in public light-ing will provide ‘eyes on the streets’ and encourage ‘eyes from the windows’ of build-ings, contributing to increasing ‘natural surveillance’. The Council’s avowal of every-day practices in streets and in homes, has made me question how lighting affects the way older residents move through streets and carry out domestic practices as dark-ness falls. The study explores how light planning, lighting design and everyday, rou-tine practices in the public realm and inside homes co-produce the urban, lit environ-ment. Two major contributions of the thesis lie in the (post)phenomenological ap-proach I develop to study everyday experiences of urban lighting, and the methodo-logical framework I employ to research such practices, which combines mobile and visual methods. I have conducted 11 in-depth interviews with nine different planners and designers, 12 walk-along interviews with 22 residents between 58 and 79 years old, and a collaborative photography project with 14 residents between 68 and 96 years old. As I show how older residents experiences different lighting technologies, layers of light, and different lit spaces in their neighbourhoods, I discuss how urban lighting makes them see, feel and carry out routine practices in particular ways. Based on my findings, I argue that urban lighting shapes what, and how, people see, but how people see depends on how they negotiate changes in lighting. In a range of examples where residents mould the urban, lit environment or respond to lighting in different ways, I show how they play and active part in co-producing ways of seeing. I argue it is crucial that light planners and lighting designers recognise such co-constitutive role of everyday practices in order to ensure better lighting for our future cities

Design din elevsamtale så der opstår historisk læring

Skal historiedidaktikken udvikles, har både forskere og lærere brug for at kende eleverne godt fx ved at interviewe elever om deres oplevelser med historie og fortidsfortællinger

The role of outer membrane proteins and lipopolysaccharides for the sensitivity of escherichia coli to antimicrobial peptides

Bacterial resistance to classical antibiotics is emerging worldwide. The number of infections caused by multidrug resistant bacteria is increasing and becoming a serious threat for human health globally. In particular, Gram-negative pathogens including multidrug resistant Escherichia coli are of serious concern being resistant to the currently available antibiotics. All Gram-negative bacteria are enclosed by an outer membrane which acts as an additional protection barrier preventing the entry of toxic compounds including antibiotics and antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). In this study we report that the outer membrane component lipopolysaccharide (LPS) plays a crucial role for the antimicrobial susceptibility of E. coli BW25113 against the cationic AMPs Cap18, Cap11, Cap11-1-18m2, melittin, indolicidin, cecropin P1, cecropin B, and the polypeptide antibiotic colistin, whereas the outer membrane protease OmpT and the lipoprotein Lpp only play a minor role for the susceptibility against cationic AMPs. Increased susceptibility toward cationic AMPs was found for LPS deficient mutants of E. coli BW25113 harboring deletions in any of the genes required for the inner part of core-oligosaccharide of the LPS, waaC, waaE, waaF, waaG, and gmhA. In addition, our study demonstrates that the antimicrobial activity of Cap18, Cap11, Cap11-1-18m2, cecropin B, and cecropin P1 is not only dependent on the inner part of the core oligosaccharide, but also on the outer part and its sugar composition. Finally, we demonstrated that the antimicrobial activity of selected Cap18 derivatives harboring amino acid substitutions in the hydrophobic interface, are non-active against wild-type E. coli ATCC29522. By deleting waaC, waaE, waaF, or waaG the antimicrobial activity of the non-active derivatives can be partially or fully restored, suggesting a very close interplay between the LPS core oligosaccharide and the specific Cap18 derivative. Summarizing, this study implicates that the nature of the outer membrane component LPS has a big impact on the antimicrobial activity of cationic AMPs against E. coli. In particular, the inner as well as the outer part of the core oligosaccharide are important elements determining the antimicrobial susceptibility of E. coli against cationic AMPs

Fortid i vor tid. Anakronisme som vilkår og metode

Er fortiden virkelig helt og for altid forsvundet? Dette tilsyneladende meningsløse spørgsmål bliver sat til debat i artiklen

‘Tales from other people’s houses’: home and dis/connection in an East London neighbourhood

This paper explores what it means to live together in the city through a focus on home and urban public space in East London. It develops a conceptual framework for understanding home as a site of dis/connection – both connected to and disconnected from – the wider estate, street, neighbourhood and city. Drawing on a series of home-city biographies with residents living on different housing estates, we explore what makes a city ‘liveable’ for its diverse residents within and across domestic and public spaces; how home-city dis/connections shape ideas and experiences of living together; and the importance of sensory, material and social contexts of home in shaping residents’ dis/connections with neighbours and the wider neighbourhood. By taking seriously the practices, experiences and imaginings of home as a site of urban dis/connection, we argue that urban scholars can gain a fuller picture of what it means to live together in the city, and understand and challenge inequalities, exclusions and prejudices that shape urban lives