The Meanings of Deindustrialization

The point of departure for any discussion of deindustrialization must be respect for the despair and betrayal felt by workers as their mines, factories, and mills were padlocked, abandoned, turned into artsy shopping spaces, or even dynamited. While economists and business leaders often speak in neutral, even hopeful, terms such as restructuring, downsizing, or creative destruction, metaphors of defeat and subjugation are more appropriate for the workers who banked on good-paying industrial jobs for the livelihoods of their families and their communities

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Mexico City Morphologies

This essay uses Google Earth images to examine urban morphologies in Mexico City. Vertical views of the world embraced by cartographers and planners have long legitimated claims to authority, truth, and temporal power. Since its introduction in 2008, Google satellite view has only reinforced such presumptions, particularly given the company's entangled relations with the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, aerial photographs provide an undeniably useful source for architects and urbanists to study city form and metropolitan expansion. The vertical view is particularly valuable for its capacity to illuminate spatial relations that are otherwise difficult to trace on the ground, but which nonetheless shape everyday human experience. The goal of this essay is to discern a range of city forms in the rapidly expanding metropolis, and to contemplate the ways in which urban morphology frames everyday life in one of the world's largest conurbations. It is part of a longer-term study of Mexico City's urbanism based on fieldwork, mapping, and spatial analysis

Mexico City Morphologies

This essay uses Google Earth images to examine urban morphologies in Mexico City. Vertical views of the world embraced by cartographers and planners have long legitimated claims to authority, truth, and temporal power. Since its introduction in 2008, Google satellite view has only reinforced such presumptions, particularly given the company's entangled relations with the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, aerial photographs provide an undeniably useful source for architects and urbanists to study city form and metropolitan expansion. The vertical view is particularly valuable for its capacity to illuminate spatial relations that are otherwise difficult to trace on the ground, but which nonetheless shape everyday human experience. The goal of this essay is to discern a range of city forms in the rapidly expanding metropolis, and to contemplate the ways in which urban morphology frames everyday life in one of the world's largest conurbations. It is part of a longer-term study of Mexico City's urbanism based on fieldwork, mapping, and spatial analysis

TrAIN open lecture: the known city

The TrAIN Open series is a forum for invited speakers to present exhibition, publication, and research projects in the form of lectures, discussions and screenings. Taking place at fortnightly intervals on Wednesday evenings during the academic term, the series is open to the public, as well as staff and students across the University of the Arts London. Since its inception leading practitioners have continued to contribute to the series and it has become an opportunity to establish lasting dialogue with those who share an interest in transnational art. Despite the uncanny nature of the city, we do everything we can to convince ourselves that we understand it. Nowhere is this more the case than in those professions dedicated to divining and prophesying the urban through the gentle arts of persuasion. This lecture examines a range of visual tropes deployed over the last century by architects, planners, social reformers, investors, and marketers to render the city known--and indeed knowable. Through maps, ideographs, diagrams, photographs, and trade films, we will trace the visual registration of powerful urban narratives that reveal the organization of an urban episteme. We will also review the emergence since the 1960s of a critical discourse of urbanism among artists and activists whose interventions, détournements, and insurgent geographies raise fundamental questions about what we can and cannot know of our cities

Landscape Entanglements: Toward a Descriptive Project for Planning Research

The conceptual dyad of urban/rural has long formed the basis of the planner’s description of space. However, the terms themselves are increasingly insufficient to describe the world in which we live, presenting as overdetermined and reductive signifiers. In this photographic essay, we use Google Earth satellite images to examine a series of locations where descriptors such as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ falter against manifold, shifting, and unstable landscape forms. We draw on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the abstract spaces of capitalism, globalization, and urbanization, which he argued are dialectically produced through their interaction with landscape. However, where Lefebvre contended that abstraction instantiates in more or less discrete typological forms, we argue that abstract space only becomes intelligible under conditions of ‘entanglement,’ where qualities such as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ become momentarily comprehensible at the instant we observe or describe them. In the end, holding the world still long enough to describe it reveals crucial patterns and relations, but always at a cost, always with the risk of reduction, simplification, and overdetermination. Such pitfalls are inevitable in research; however, they become all the more prevalent as the terms we use to describe the world become less and less applicable, and as the accumulation of anomalies compels us to build new models and to tell new stories.