The impossible city: short reflections on urbanism, architecture and violence

This contribution aims to offer some reflections around the notion of contested urbanism that characterize the contemporary process of making and inhabiting cities, discussing the intricate relation between architecture and violence at different scales. Grounding in previous international research and in the work of scholars like Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Eyal Weizman, the text wish to reposition contestation at the centre of an architectural and urban research, addressing the intersection of spatial and temporal aspects of conflicts in the production of the city, where intellectual and spatial categories are able to construct new epistemologies, cities and space in a paradoxical tension

Metaphorizing Burn-out or Missing the Point of the. Project. Exhaustion Otherwise

Invited by “Ardeth” editors, this short text set out to comment the Burn-Out, “Ardeth” Issue #08, in order to critically reflect on it and bring up the notion of precariousness as an ontological condition to complement the understanding of exhaustion. My intention is to reclaim the centrality of exhaustion as generative term and attempting to rectify what I perceived to be reading the whole issue, the refusal to couple the pandemic affective perception of burn-out with the abyss of the anthropogenic condition or the incapacity to move beyond the singular (intended as disciplinary as well as personal) to the planetary (intended as multiplicity and geographical). To achieve this I would suggest, passing to Mbembe, Agamben and Berardi, a return to Deleuze’s work suggesting to reframe it with the question of life, its protection as the central feature of the architectural and urban debate

From Exclusion to Inhabitation: Response to Gray, Benjamin. Citizenship as Barrier and Opportunity for Ancient Greek and Modern Refugees. Humanities, 2018, 7, 72

Spaces of refuge represent the paradoxical encounters between a series of governmental forces, disciplinary knowledge, aesthetic regimes and spatial conditions that tend to arrest, fix in time and space forms of lives. Considering the fact that camps are meant to be the materialisation of a temporal status, spatial and political, the proposition posed by Benjamin Gray’s Citizenship as Barrier and Opportunity for Ancient Greek and Modern Refugees, to look at “citizenship-in-exile” practices in ancient Greece and their forms of “improvised quasi-civic communities”, is welcome as it is refreshing. This short response engages with Gray’s text, addressing two different but interconnected points: in one respect, I hope to rescue Agamben’s work from its linear reading by commenting on the depoliticization of the camp and the critique of its exceptionalism; and, in another, I wish to provoke reflection around the universalising claim of hospitality and full assimilation, by introducing the disruptive terminology of inhabitation. This critical insertion aims to redefine an ethical relationship with the space, as a space of and for life, that Agamben sees as the basis for a new ethics, reversing its status as a productive and active force where the camp, in its paradigmatic reading, and the form of life it generates, helps to think beside the exceptional and move to inhabit such indistinctions

Urbanism of exception: camps and inhabitation

This paper can be considered an attempt to think on what a camp does rather than on what it is. Camps seem to arrest, fix in time and space lives, stripping political agency away from bodies and render bare lives; materialise principle of exclusions, control and spatial precepts of modernism through its heavily loaded political semantics. Camps explicitly determines the other, the unknown and the uncontrolled, the monstrous and the needed. Following what Mezzadra and Neilson, called “the different assemblages of power and the different forces of capital” that shape territories and spaces to answer the question I wish to use somehow playfully the concept of ‘dispossession’ developed by Butler and Athanasiou and the one of inhabitation by Agamben to reflect on the camp as a site, inextricably intertwined with the promise of death, police and disappearance regularly and invariably fulfilled and the incomplete, unfinished possibility of inhabiting. The paper try to suggest that camps are sites where one asks what it means to inhabit in the abyssal ambivalence of resisting death––exhausting and holding onto life

Urbanism of exception: camps and inhabitation

This paper can be considered an attempt to think on what a camp does rather than on what it is. Camps seem to arrest, fix in time and space lives, stripping political agency away from bodies and render bare lives; materialise principle of exclusions, control and spatial precepts of modernism through its heavily loaded political semantics. Camps explicitly determines the other, the unknown and the uncontrolled, the monstrous and the needed. Following what Mezzadra and Neilson, called “the different assemblages of power and the different forces of capital” that shape territories and spaces to answer the question I wish to use somehow playfully the concept of ‘dispossession’ developed by Butler and Athanasiou and the one of inhabitation by Agamben to reflect on the camp as a site, inextricably intertwined with the promise of death, police and disappearance regularly and invariably fulfilled and the incomplete, unfinished possibility of inhabiting. The paper try to suggest that camps are sites where one asks what it means to inhabit in the abyssal ambivalence of resisting death––exhausting and holding onto life

JAG: Reliable and Predictable Wireless Agreement under External Radio Interference

Wireless low-power transceivers used in sensor networks typically operate in unlicensed frequency bands that are subject to external radio interference caused by devices transmitting at much higher power.communication protocols should therefore be designed to be robust against such interference. A critical building block of many protocols at all layers is agreement on a piece of information among a set of nodes. At the MAC layer, nodes may need to agree on a new time slot or frequency channel, at the application layer nodes may need to agree on handing over a leader role from one node to another. Message loss caused by interference may break agreement in two different ways: none of the nodes uses the new information (time slot, channel, leader) and sticks with the previous assignment, or-even worse-some nodes use the new information and some do not. This may lead to reduced performance or failures. In this paper, we investigate the problem of agreement under external radio interference and point out the limitations of traditional message-based approaches. We propose JAG, a novel protocol that uses jamming instead of message transmissions to make sure that two neighbouring nodes agree, and show that it outperforms message-based approaches in terms of agreement probability, energy consumption, and time-to-completion. We further show that JAG can be used to obtain performance guarantees and meet the requirements of applications with real-time constraints.CONETReSens

Forms of (Collective) Life: The Ontoethics of Inhabitation

Is there space for an ontological urban design? Or better still, following the words of Elisabeth Grosz, is there space for an “ontoethics” of the urban? While contributing to the reflection on the role of ethics as a relational practice, this paper is digging back into the notion of forms-of-life in Giorgio Agamben’s political reflections, aiming to foreground a possible ethics of the city. This aims to highlight the implications that ontology and ethics have in constructing a politics of life as they bring differences in how we live, act, what we value and how we produce and design. Particularly, to substantiate such ethics, three key characteristics of an affirmative life are put forward: the capacity to care and to connect; the capacity to repair, endure and hold together; as well as to imagine and experiment alternative life-forces to oppose politics of oppression and capitalist extraction of values