Performing the Digital Self: Understanding Location-Based Social Networking, Territory, Space, and Identity in the City

Expressions of territoriality have been positioned as one of the main reasons users alter their behaviors and perceptions of spatiality and sociality while engaging with location-based social networks (LBSN). Despite the potential for this interplay to further our understanding of LBSN usage in the context of identity, very little work has actually been done towards this. Addressing this gap in the literature is one the chief aims of the article. Drawing on an original six-week study with 42 participants utilizing a bespoke LBSN entitled ‘GeoMoments’, our research explores: (1) the way that territoriality is linked to self-identity; and (2) how this interplay affects the interactions between users as well as the environments they inhabit. Our findings suggest that participants affirmed their self-identity by selectively posting and claiming ownership of their neighborhood through the LBSN. Here, the locative decisions made related to risk, hierarchies, and the users’ relationship to the area. This practice then led participants to discover and interact with the digital information overlaying their physical environments in a playful manner. These interactions demonstrate the perceived power structures that are facilitated by identity claims over a virtual area. In the main, our results reaffirm that territoriality is a central concept in understanding LBSN use, while also drawing attention to the temporality involved in user-to-user and user-to-place interactions pertaining to physical place mediated by LBSN

Re-conceptualising Territorial Cohesion Through the Prism of Spatial Justice : Critical Perspectives on Academic and Policy Discourses

Peer reviewe

Transcultural engagement with Polish memory of the Holocaust while watching Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau

Kornblumenblau (Leszek Wosiewicz 1989) is a film that explores the experience of a Polish political prisoner interned at Auschwitz I. It particularly foregrounds issues related to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in its diegesis. Holocaust films are often discussed in relation to representation and the cultural specificity of their production context. However, this paper suggests thinking about film and topographies, the theme of this issue, not in relation to where a work is produced but in regards to the spectatorial space. It adopts a phenomenological approach to consider how, despite Kornblumenblau's particularly Polish themes, it might address the transcultural spectator and draw attention to the broader difficulties one faces when attempting to remember the Holocaust. Influenced particularly by the writing of Jennifer M. Barker and Laura U. Marks, this paper suggests that film possesses a body ¬¬- a display of intentionality, beyond those presented within the diegesis, which engages in dialogue with the spectator. During the experience of viewing Kornblumenblau, this filmic corporeality draws attention to the difficulties of confronting the Holocaust in particularly haptic ways, as the film points to the unreliability of visual historical sources, relates abject sensations to concentrationary spaces and breaks down as it confronts the scene of the gas chamber

Schools and skills of critical thinking for urban design

© 2017, © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper explores possible ways in which urban design can engage with critical thinking and critical theory. After a brief explanation of the terms, with particular attention to the Frankfurt School of thought, it provides various answers to the question as to whether urban design is critical or not. One categorization applied to planning critical theory is then used to explain the potential for employing critical theories in urban design. Critical thinking skills are then argued to be helpful for enriching the literature of urban design in order to achieve better practice. The conclusion is that urban design can benefit from critical creativity, which is an embodiment of critical thinking within the limits imposed onto creativity. In this paper, the ways in which urban design can engage with both critical theory and with critical thinking are explored in order to achieve better critical creativity in the field

Transformative sensemaking: Development in Whose Image? Keyan Tomaselli and the semiotics of visual representation

The defining and distinguishing feature of homo sapiens is its ability to make sense of the world, i.e. to use its intellect to understand and change both itself and the world of which it is an integral part. It is against this backdrop that this essay reviews Tomaselli's 1996 text, Appropriating Images: The Semiotics of Visual Representation/ by summarizing his key perspectives, clarifying his major operational concepts and citing particular portions from his work in support of specific perspectives on sense-making. Subsequently, this essay employs his techniques of sense-making to interrogate the notion of "development". This exercise examines and confirms two interrelated hypotheses: first, a semiotic analysis of the privileged notion of "development" demonstrates its metaphysical/ ideological, and thus limiting, nature especially vis-a-vis the marginalized, excluded, and the collective other, the so-called Developing Countries. Second, the interrogative nature of semiotics allows for an alternative reading and application of human potential or skills in the quest of a more humane social and global order, highlighting thereby the transformative implications of a reflexive epistemology.Web of Scienc

The mirage of the metropolis: city imaging in the age of digital chorography

Even as cities evolved geographically, the basis of city imaging (as codified by Kevin Lynch) remained relatively stable for over half a century. More recently, digitally driven transformations in urban life challenge the continued relevance of established city-imaging paradigms. Although digital navigation and mapping devices are readily at hand to neutralize any disorienting predicaments, the ability to image cognitively the wider urban environment remains integral to the construction of a meaningful sense of place. Towards the objective of reconciling city imaging with the place-making challenges of the contemporary metropolis, this paper explores the potential for innovating modes of urban mapping and representation. Specifically, the digital re-envisioning of the historical mapping practice of ‘chorography’ is positioned within Fredric Jameson’s challenge for a new aesthetic of cognitive mapping that enables the situational representation of the individual within the vaster totality. In doing so, the paper contributes to the wider adaptation of urban discourse to digitally propelled shifts in urban life

Ibicaba revisitada outra vez: espaço, escravidão e trabalho livre no oeste paulista

Ibicaba Farm, property of Senator Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro during the 19th century, was the subject of studies that focused on the experience with the sharecropping system. This article intends to undertake a revisit to Ibicaba through new lenses of observation. At first, it tries to insert Vergueiro's farm in the context of the changing World-economy of the first decades of the nineteenth century, and then highlight the importance of the spatial dimension of reality in this historical context. In the following two subitems, which constitute the core of the article, an analysis is made of the protocols - especially spatial - of control of the workers, used by the Vergueiros in order to extract the maximum of labor from slaves and sharecroppers, as well as the strategies that captives and immigrants used to escape from this surveillance. Finally, a brief recapitulation of the main points exposed and some considerations about the tensions that emerged in Ibicaba during the studied period are made.A Fazenda Ibicaba, propriedade do Senador Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro ao longo do século XIX, foi objeto de estudos que enfocaram a experiência com o sistema de parceria que ela abrigou. Este artigo pretende revisitar Ibicaba por meio de novas lentes de observação. Em um primeiro momento, buscar-se-á inserir a fazenda de Vergueiro no contexto de mudança pela qual a Economia-mundo passava nas primeiras décadas do Oitocentos para, em seguida, salientar a importância que a dimensão espacial da realidade cumpria nesse contexto histórico. Nos dois subitens seguintes, que constituem o núcleo do artigo, analisam-se os protocolos - sobretudo espaciais - de controle da mão de obra utilizados pelos Vergueiro, com vistas à máxima extração de trabalho de escravos e colonos, bem como as estratégias de que cativos e imigrantes lançaram mão para escapar dessa vigilância. Faz-se, ao fim, uma breve recapitulação dos principais pontos expostos e algumas considerações sobre as tensões que emergiram em Ibicaba durante o período estudado