Hackathons as Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the “New” Economy

Hackathons, time-bounded competitive events where participants write computer code and build apps, have become a popular means of socializing tech students and workers to produce “innovation” despite little promise of material reward. Although they offer participants opportunities for learning new skills and face-to-face networking, and set up interaction rituals that create an emotional “high,” potential advantage is even greater for the events’ corporate sponsors, who use them to outsource work, crowdsource innovation, and enhance their reputation. Ethnographic observations and informal interviews carried out at seven public hackathons held in New York City during the course of a single school year show how the format of the event and sponsors’ discursive tropes, within a dominant cultural frame reflecting the appeal of Silicon Valley, reshape unpaid and precarious work. Writing code and building apps for free becomes an extraordinary opportunity, a ritual of ecstatic labor, and a collective imaginary for fictional expectations of innovation that benefits all. Despite participants’ dual emphasis on the pleasures of participating and the benefits they hope to derive, hackathons are a powerful strategy for manufacturing workers’ consent in the “new” economy

Estudio jurisprudencial sobre el derecho al trabajo de los vendedores ambulantes en Bogotá

Artículo de ReflexiónEl presente artículo de investigación presenta el resultado de la realización de una revisión jurisprudencial en torno a los pronunciamientos de las Altas Cortes acerca del derecho al trabajo de los vendedores ambulantes, su importancia se enmarca en la vulneración constante que se ha ido presentando frente al derecho de los vendedores ambulantes y en el conflicto que se da entre este derecho y el derecho que tienen los ciudadanos en general a disfrutar del espacio público.INTRODUCCIÓN 1. DESARROLLO JURISPRUDENCIAL 2. CONSIDERACIONES DEL AUTOR 3. CONCLUSIONES 4. REFERENCIASPregradoAbogad

‘Fourth places’: the Contemporary Public Settings for Informal Social Interaction among Strangers.

This paper introduces ‘fourth places’ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside ‘third places’ (Oldenburg 1989). Through extensive empirical fieldwork on where and how social interaction among strangers occurs in the public and semi-public spaces of a contemporary masterplanned neighbourhood, this paper reveals that ‘fourth places’ are closely related to ‘third places’ in terms of social and behavioural characteristics, involving a radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity, and social comfort. However, the activities, users, locations and spatial conditions that support them are very different. They are characterized by ‘in-betweenness’ in terms of spaces, activities, time and management, as well as a great sense of publicness. This paper will demonstrate that the latter conditions are effective in breaking the ‘placelessness’ and ‘fortress’ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make ‘fourth places’ sociologically more open in order to bring strangers together. The recognition of these findings problematizes well-established urban design theories and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space. Ultimately, the findings also bring optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into how to design more lively and inclusive public spaces. Keywords: ‘Fourth places’, Informal Public Social Settings, Social Interaction, Strangers, Public Space Design

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

Postface 1 : De la tour d’ivoire à la plate-forme entrepreneuriale : une vision postfordiste des universités urbaines

Les plans d’extension actuels des universités urbaines à travers le monde expriment de grandes ambitions, tant au niveau institutionnel que territorial. En s’engageant dans la compétition mondiale pour l’argent et la gloire, les universités se transforment en entités plus grandes, plus audacieuses et plus complexes, orientées vers leur propre expansion. Bien qu’elles aient toujours été dépendantes des gouvernements pour ce qui est des financements et de l’accès aux terrains, dans l’économie p..

Où en est l’autogestion yougoslave ?

Zukin Sharon. Où en est l’autogestion yougoslave ?. In: Autogestions, NS N°1, 1980. Métamorphoses, utopies et expérimentations autogestionnaires. pp. 111-122