Globalization and Modern Identity Practices - Locals and Cosmopolitans in Seventeenth Century Amsterdam

This paper offers a historical analysis of cultural identification among locals and cosmopolitans in Amsterdam, the centre of the seventeenth century world system. Here, the convergence of global processes and local changes, such as increasing monetization, commodification and anonymization of everyday lives generated conditions that contributed to the formation of modern individual and group identities. Early modern globalization gave rise to a “global animus” in Amsterdam and it prompted the city’s political elites to promote a cosmopolitan civic identity, expressed in allegoric art and architecture. On a theoretical level this paper criticizes objectifying or essentializing approaches to cultural globalization and to cultural identity and highlights instead the contradictions and ambiguities involved in the processes of attributing cultural meaning. A discussion of the poetry of Jacob Cats (1577–1660) reveals how local actors attributed contesting cultural meanings to the objects of global trade and how they acculturated them in different ways into their practices of local or cosmopolitan identification

The (Un)availability of Human Activities for Social Intervention: Reflecting on Social Mechanisms in Technology Assessment and Sustainable Development Research

This article considers human activities as a central but deeply problematic aspect of sustainability. We argue that radical reduction in human activities could be an important lever to counter problems such as climate change. However, instead of pursuing a normative hypothesis that human activities ought to be subjected to specific kinds of sustainability measures, we pursue the hypothesis that human activities are largely unavailable for sustainability measures, because as an aggregated global phenomenon they are subject to social mechanisms, which accelerate rather than slow down activities. While social mechanisms are human inventions that render (inter)actions unlikely likely in the first place, they have evolved towards structural and historical embeddedness, which makes them unavailable for any instrumentalized design. The question is, how can we, experts in technology assessment, recognize social mechanisms in strategies to reduce human activities and to achieve a transformative impact on systemic reproduction. Our discussion centers on technical, psychological, and communicative social mechanisms of reproduction, and experiments with ideas of how to utilize social mechanisms and the (un)availability of human activities in technology assessment and sustainable development research

The history and politics of innovation: Interview with Benoît Godin

In this interview for TATuP, conducted at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique in Montreál, Benoît Godin responds to Ulrich Ufer’s questions about the history of the concept of innovation and its uses in present and past discourses on social change

Urban digitization and financial capitalism: How do urban digitization and financial capitalism impact on the local transformation, sustainability and resilience of our cities?

In this interview Saskia Sassen addresses the potentials and pitfalls of urban digitization with a particular focus on the urban manifestations of financial capitalism and the risks of extractivist urban economies.In this interview Saskia Sassen addresses the potentials and pitfalls of urban digitization with a particular focus on the urban manifestations of financial capitalism and the risks of extractivist urban economies

Abstract Smart Space and Concrete Risks

Abstract representations of space in the smart city, like the control rooms of intelligent operation centres, simulate a panoptic gaze in order to legitimate the planning, management and control of urban space. In the corresponding language of quantified risk assessment, smart risks can be presented as objective numerical values whose probability of occurrence can be significantly reduced through smart measures for resilience. In our paper, we argue that the smart city’s technological solutions aim at reducing risk, but, in fact, create the paradoxical situation that measures for technological resilience reduce some technological risks, but reproduce and even amplify risks on technological and social levels at the same time. We illustrate this argument by critically discussing the emerging smart city with a view to the narrative of technological urban improvement for the good life, which is accompanied by acceptability of, and habituation to setbacks, or to potential disruptive impacts on urban services

Critical political economy of the public infrastructure crisis in Lebanon. Interview with Karim Eid-Sabbagh

In this interview, Karim Eid-Sabbagh and Ulrich Ufer discuss how the case of the public infrastructure crisis in Lebanon highlights the importance of including analytical dimensions of critical political economy and global financial dynamics in technology assessment alongside a technology-society-governance perspective - in particular when focusing on the Global South. The Lebanese crisis has built up through long-term structural problems that include the legacies of colonialism, the country's peripheral position in global capital relations, elite nepotism, sectarian strife, and the state's dependency on international donor funding to build and maintain public infrastructure. These have coincided with short-term disintegration and disaster events over the past two years: mass migration, countrywide anti-government protests in fall 2019, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, the destruction of large parts of the country's capital by the devastating explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020, and the spiraling devaluation of the Lebanese currency.In diesem Interview diskutieren Karim Eid-Sabbagh und Ulrich Ufer die Krise der öffentlichen Infrastruktur im Libanon und betonen dabei analytische Dimensionen der kritischen politischen Ökonomie und der globalen Finanzdynamik. Diese sind, neben einer Technologie-Gesellschaft-Governance-Perspektive, auch von Relevanz für die Technikfolgenabschätzung - insbesondere mit Blick auf den Globalen Süden. Die libanesische Krise hat sich durch langfristige strukturelle Probleme aufgebaut, darunter das Erbe des Kolonialismus, die periphere Position des Landes in den globalen Kapitalbeziehungen, Eliten-Nepotismus, sektiererische Kämpfe und die Abhängigkeit des Staates von internationalen Gebermitteln zum Aufbau und zur Erhaltung öffentlicher Infrastruktur. Langfristige Strukturprobleme fielen in den letzten zwei Jahren mit kurzfristigen Desintegrations- und Katastrophenereignissen zusammen: Massenmigration, landesweite Proteste gegen die Regierung im Herbst 2019, Ausbruch der Covid-19-Pandemie Anfang 2020, Zerstörung großer Teile der Hauptstadt des Landes durch die verheerende Explosion im Hafen von Beirut im August 2020 und die rasante Abwertung der libanesischen Währung