Picturing urban subterranea: embodied aesthetics of London’s sewers

As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London’s sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London’s sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London’s main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes bodyspace interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality

Place Hacking: Tales of Urban Exploration

Urban exploration is a practice of researching, discovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas within built environments. Through charting the rise to prominence of a London urban exploration crew between 2008 and 2011, of which I became an active member, I posit that urban explorers are one of many groups reacting to increased surveillance and control over urban space by undertaking embodied urban interventions in the city that undermine clean spatio/ternporal narratives. The primary research questions stem from my attempts to interrogate the practice from the inside out: Who are urban explorers? What does it involve? Why do they do it? What do they think it will accomplish? While the thesis focuses primarily on 220 explorations undertaken with my primary ethnographic group in London between 2008 and 2011, it also speaks to the urban exploration "scene" that has developed over the past twenty years in cities all over the world. The results that emerge from the research both compliment and complicate recent work within geography around issues of surveillance, resistance, hacking and urban community building and lays out a new account, never before outlined in such detail, of the tales of urban exploration taking place in contemporary cities ." across the globe. This visual ethnography is comprised of text (75,000 words), photographs (200) and video (10 shorts). The ethnographic video components can be found on the Place Hacking video channel located at http://vimeo.com/channels/placehacking or on the DVD in the back of this document. I suggest watching all 10 short videos before reading the thesis.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Digging up and digging down:urban undergrounds

This article explores the intersections between history, urban geography and archaeology in the context of the question “are we all archaeologists now?” Amongst scholars doing research around questions of space and place, increasingly consideration is being given to vertical architectures, including tunnelling infrastructures. The vertical stretch of human imagination and habitation, even upward, inevitably involves excavation that triggers encounters with material remains of the past. However, the construction of subterranean realms also creates archaeologies of the future. Here we outline the significance of a dovetailing of disciplines through vertical stretch

Chainless Bike Drive

The focus of this project was to design a drive system that could replace the conventional chain drive system, improving on both the efficiency and reliability, in addition to being low cost and lightweight. This report will provide background into why this group chose this as the subject of their project, as well as challenges faced throughout the design process. The design developed was a drive shaft driven by a system of pinions and gears, with a freewheel mechanism that allowed the system to coast when not pedaling. Due to cost and time constraints, only a prototype was created, with additional research into materials selection and testing of our design. Despite this, there is still an enormous amount of potential to explore from this project as to alternatives to the traditional chain and sprocket drive shaft. We would like to thank our advisor David Peters for guiding us through this project, as well as Dr. Greg Morscher for assisting us with the materials selection software

RF Properties and Their Variations in a 3D Printed Klystron Circuit and Cavities

Presently, the manufacturing of active RF devices like klystrons is dominated by expensive and time consuming cycles of machining and brazing. In this article we characterize the RF properties of X-band klystron cavities and an integrated circuit manufactured with a novel additive manufacturing process. Parts are 3D printed in 316L stainless steel with direct metal laser sintering, electroplated in copper, and brazed in one simple braze cycle. Standalone test cavities and integrated circuit cavities were measured throughout the manufacturing process. Un-tuned cavity frequency varies by less than 5% of intended frequency, and Q factors reach above 1200. A tuning study was performed, and unoptimized tuning pins achieved a tuning range of 138 MHz without compromising Q. Klystron system performance was simulated with as-built cavity parameters and realistic tuning. Together, these results show promise that this process can be used to cheaply and quickly manufacture a new generation of highly integrated high power vacuum devices.Comment: 8 pages, 16 figure

Parent-Adolescent Sexual Communication and Adolescent Safer Sex Behavior: A Meta-Analysis

Parent-adolescent sexual communication has received considerable attention as one factor that can positively impact safer sex among youth; however, the evidence linking communication to youth contraceptive and condom use has not been empirically synthesized

Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement: Reflections on White’s \u3ci\u3eFreedom Farmers\u3c/i\u3e

First paragraphs: Landmark: 1. An object or feature of a landscape . . . that is easily seen and recognized from a distance, especially one that enables someone to establish their location. Synonyms: mark, indicator, guiding light, signal, beacon, lodestar. 2. An event or discovery marking an important stage or turning point in something. Synonyms: milestone, watershed . . . major achievement. (“Landmark,” n.d., para. 1 & 4) Dr. Monica White’s Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement stands literally as a landmark, ushering in a new era of community-based scholarship with and for agrarian justice. From here on out, scholars, activists, practitioners have a lodestar from which to research, practice, and advocate for food, farm, and racial justice: Dr. White’s framework of “collective agency and com­munity resilience” (CACR). Food studies scholars from across and beyond academic disciplines are in strong consensus as to the importance of this pivotal book—a manuscript that draws upon and advances rural sociology, history, agri-food studies, Black history, cooperative economics, and more. In this set of reflections on Freedom Farmers, McCutcheon lauds how the work is a “love letter” to past, present, and future Black farmers, and the powerful pedagogical potential of such celebration. Reese recounts how the book excavates the erased histories of Black women leaders and farmers, showing us how to “re/see the world” through this powerful lens. Babb calls the text a gift that “flips the script” to provide informative and inspirational narratives of food justice and food sovereignty in action. Hall commends how the book “pushes us to participate in the remaking of our communities with honesty, resilience, solidarity, and love.” Sarmiento notes how, even as the book critiques structural racism, it offers a generous, affirmative vision of resistance and agency. Wilson concurs that the book opens radical possibilities for hope, particularly in the classroom. I would also point readers to Cynthia Greenlee’s (2018) Civil Eats interview with Dr. White, which highlights how the book sheds light on the over­looked role of Black farmers in the Civil Rights movement, resurgence of Black agriculture and scholarship on it, and the ongoing necessity of affirming collective agency in the fight against racism at large..