Guerrilla‐style Defensive Architecture in D etroit: A Self‐provisioned Security Strategy in a Neoliberal Space of Disinvestment

Self‐provisioning has long been an important component of urban political economic processes. However, it has recently become a central feature of grassroots urban governance strategies as well. In tumultuous cities of the twenty‐first century, with governments either unwilling or unable to effectively enforce zoning laws, police neighborhoods or manage infrastructure, some householders have begun performing these services instead. This article examines one subset of self‐provisioning practices that has emerged in southwest D etroit where residents have taken steps to secure abandoned housing as a means of exerting social control over their living environment. These actions embody many contradictions and ethical dilemmas, and the intimate scale of action has left the structural production of disinvestment in places like D etroit largely unchecked. Nevertheless, these guerilla‐style spatial interventions have emerged as critically important response strategies helping residents reduce their vulnerability and stabilize their blocks even as other nearby areas continue to experience decline.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108307/1/ijur12158.pd

A framework for human microbiome research

A variety of microbial communities and their genes (the microbiome) exist throughout the human body, with fundamental roles in human health and disease. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Human Microbiome Project Consortium has established a population-scale framework to develop metagenomic protocols, resulting in a broad range of quality-controlled resources and data including standardized methods for creating, processing and interpreting distinct types of high-throughput metagenomic data available to the scientific community. Here we present resources from a population of 242 healthy adults sampled at 15 or 18 body sites up to three times, which have generated 5,177 microbial taxonomic profiles from 16S ribosomal RNA genes and over 3.5 terabases of metagenomic sequence so far. In parallel, approximately 800 reference strains isolated from the human body have been sequenced. Collectively, these data represent the largest resource describing the abundance and variety of the human microbiome, while providing a framework for current and future studies

Structure, function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group. The definitive version was published in Nature 486 (2012): 207-214, doi:10.1038/nature11234.Studies of the human microbiome have revealed that even healthy individuals differ remarkably in the microbes that occupy habitats such as the gut, skin and vagina. Much of this diversity remains unexplained, although diet, environment, host genetics and early microbial exposure have all been implicated. Accordingly, to characterize the ecology of human-associated microbial communities, the Human Microbiome Project has analysed the largest cohort and set of distinct, clinically relevant body habitats so far. We found the diversity and abundance of each habitat’s signature microbes to vary widely even among healthy subjects, with strong niche specialization both within and among individuals. The project encountered an estimated 81–99% of the genera, enzyme families and community configurations occupied by the healthy Western microbiome. Metagenomic carriage of metabolic pathways was stable among individuals despite variation in community structure, and ethnic/racial background proved to be one of the strongest associations of both pathways and microbes with clinical metadata. These results thus delineate the range of structural and functional configurations normal in the microbial communities of a healthy population, enabling future characterization of the epidemiology, ecology and translational applications of the human microbiome.This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants U54HG004969 to B.W.B.; U54HG003273 to R.A.G.; U54HG004973 to R.A.G., S.K.H. and J.F.P.; U54HG003067 to E.S.Lander; U54AI084844 to K.E.N.; N01AI30071 to R.L.Strausberg; U54HG004968 to G.M.W.; U01HG004866 to O.R.W.; U54HG003079 to R.K.W.; R01HG005969 to C.H.; R01HG004872 to R.K.; R01HG004885 to M.P.; R01HG005975 to P.D.S.; R01HG004908 to Y.Y.; R01HG004900 to M.K.Cho and P. Sankar; R01HG005171 to D.E.H.; R01HG004853 to A.L.M.; R01HG004856 to R.R.; R01HG004877 to R.R.S. and R.F.; R01HG005172 to P. Spicer.; R01HG004857 to M.P.; R01HG004906 to T.M.S.; R21HG005811 to E.A.V.; M.J.B. was supported by UH2AR057506; G.A.B. was supported by UH2AI083263 and UH3AI083263 (G.A.B., C. N. Cornelissen, L. K. Eaves and J. F. Strauss); S.M.H. was supported by UH3DK083993 (V. B. Young, E. B. Chang, F. Meyer, T. M. S., M. L. Sogin, J. M. Tiedje); K.P.R. was supported by UH2DK083990 (J. V.); J.A.S. and H.H.K. were supported by UH2AR057504 and UH3AR057504 (J.A.S.); DP2OD001500 to K.M.A.; N01HG62088 to the Coriell Institute for Medical Research; U01DE016937 to F.E.D.; S.K.H. was supported by RC1DE0202098 and R01DE021574 (S.K.H. and H. Li); J.I. was supported by R21CA139193 (J.I. and D. S. Michaud); K.P.L. was supported by P30DE020751 (D. J. Smith); Army Research Office grant W911NF-11-1-0473 to C.H.; National Science Foundation grants NSF DBI-1053486 to C.H. and NSF IIS-0812111 to M.P.; The Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 for P.S. C.; LANL Laboratory-Directed Research and Development grant 20100034DR and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency grants B104153I and B084531I to P.S.C.; Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) grant to K.F. and J.Raes; R.K. is an HHMI Early Career Scientist; Gordon&BettyMoore Foundation funding and institutional funding fromthe J. David Gladstone Institutes to K.S.P.; A.M.S. was supported by fellowships provided by the Rackham Graduate School and the NIH Molecular Mechanisms in Microbial Pathogenesis Training Grant T32AI007528; a Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada Grant in Aid of Research to E.A.V.; 2010 IBM Faculty Award to K.C.W.; analysis of the HMPdata was performed using National Energy Research Scientific Computing resources, the BluBioU Computational Resource at Rice University

Channeling Politics: Shaping shorelines & cities in the Netherlands, 1990-2010

Water-oriented real estate development has emerged as a leading urban investment strategy over the past few decades. But business interests are only part of the story, and the political possibilities created when soil is turned into streams and lakes or when land-based construction is given an aquatic focus are vast. As this study of water politics in Amsterdam shows, bringing water back to the forefront of urban planning today is creating an entirely new spatial terrain of action in the city where ideas of class, nature, sexuality, and security collide in tenacious, sometimes troubling, and often inspiring ways. This study of changing land-water relationships in and around Amsterdam between 1990 and 2010 accomplishes two objectives. First, at the empirical level, I tease out the many significant and surprising ways that water-oriented urban development has become a hotbed of political maneuvering. Shoreline debates cut through some of the most contentious issues of the day, from welfare restructuring and anti-gay violence to monument preservation and global warming. I explain that, while these shifts are partially emerging through professionalized planning sectors as expected, they owe much to the elusive and quotidian interaction of residents, activists, and passers by with houses, vistas, parties, relics, cameras, and neighbors that, by happenstance or design, have recently begun circulating through the watery spaces of town. And I show that long-overlooked institutional and cultural dependencies stemming from bureaucratic specializations and urban lore significantly shape the opportunity structures surrounding water, a phenomenon that helps explain the high degree of informal water-oriented investment taking hold in Amsterdam as elsewhere. Second, from a theoretical perspective, this empirical study of water politics in Amsterdam shows that these re-appropriations of water in urban life are radically altering some of the most fundamental expectations about the essence, meaning, and import of cities, both as a lived reality and as an epistemic category. Long-standing assumptions about the places of freedom in the city, the embodied casings of urban history, and the relationship between town and country no longer hold. The empirically rich chapters in this book explore these three issues in turn and, in so doing, explain how, why, and to what political ends watery spaces in the city once thought dangerous, degrading, and irrelevant have come to appear habitable, luxurious, and profitable, or vice versa

Channeling Politics: Shaping shorelines & cities in the Netherlands, 1990-2010

Water-oriented real estate development has emerged as a leading urban investment strategy over the past few decades. But business interests are only part of the story, and the political possibilities created when soil is turned into streams and lakes or when land-based construction is given an aquatic focus are vast. As this study of water politics in Amsterdam shows, bringing water back to the forefront of urban planning today is creating an entirely new spatial terrain of action in the city where ideas of class, nature, sexuality, and security collide in tenacious, sometimes troubling, and often inspiring ways. This study of changing land-water relationships in and around Amsterdam between 1990 and 2010 accomplishes two objectives. First, at the empirical level, I tease out the many significant and surprising ways that water-oriented urban development has become a hotbed of political maneuvering. Shoreline debates cut through some of the most contentious issues of the day, from welfare restructuring and anti-gay violence to monument preservation and global warming. I explain that, while these shifts are partially emerging through professionalized planning sectors as expected, they owe much to the elusive and quotidian interaction of residents, activists, and passers by with houses, vistas, parties, relics, cameras, and neighbors that, by happenstance or design, have recently begun circulating through the watery spaces of town. And I show that long-overlooked institutional and cultural dependencies stemming from bureaucratic specializations and urban lore significantly shape the opportunity structures surrounding water, a phenomenon that helps explain the high degree of informal water-oriented investment taking hold in Amsterdam as elsewhere. Second, from a theoretical perspective, this empirical study of water politics in Amsterdam shows that these re-appropriations of water in urban life are radically altering some of the most fundamental expectations about the essence, meaning, and import of cities, both as a lived reality and as an epistemic category. Long-standing assumptions about the places of freedom in the city, the embodied casings of urban history, and the relationship between town and country no longer hold. The empirically rich chapters in this book explore these three issues in turn and, in so doing, explain how, why, and to what political ends watery spaces in the city once thought dangerous, degrading, and irrelevant have come to appear habitable, luxurious, and profitable, or vice versa

Planning by intermediaries: making cities make nature in Amsterdam

This analysis of urban wetland restoration in the Netherlands examines how theories of distributed agency are changing the way planners approach city-building tasks. Illusions of a static, prehuman nature are falling by the wayside, and the negative environmental consequences of urban expansion are gaining notoriety. Green Design strategies that, among other things, espouse bringing nature back into the city alleviate many problems. But ecoconscious planners working on Amsterdam’s IJburg neighborhood have set their sights higher by attempting to turn cities into nature’s womb. And instead of making this nature directly through nurseries and fisheries, planners are instead working to create a field of action that will spontaneously create wild nature at a considerable distance from planners’ hands. In reviewing these experiments, this paper shows how planners marshal lake currents, plant spores, and flying birds alongside bulldozers and cranes to build homes and make wetlands.