Property, which is taken to be intrinsic to human thought and action, serves as the regulative ideal of the constitutional state and the rule of law. This is not really a historical foundation but rather an ethical obligation, a constitutive form of the moral order. The concept of the individual is defined by not being but having; rather than to a “deep” metaphysical and transcendental unity, in other words, it refers to a “superficial” entity endowed with property or possessions, defined increasingly today in “patrimonial” terms as shareholder.

news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20014068-248.html

Building stairwell in Bushwick, New York.

Rooftop in Bushwick, New York.

As critique, political ecology seeks to expose flaws in dominant approaches to the environment favored by corporate, state, and international authorities, working to demonstrate the undesirable impacts of policies and market conditions , especially from the point of view of local people, marginal groups, and vulnerable populations. It works to “denaturalize” certain social and environmental conditions, showing them to be the contingent outcomes of power, and not inevitable.

… In this sense, political ecology is something that people do, a research effort to expose the forces at work in ecological struggle and document livelihood alternatives in the face of change.

Archived: 01.07.2008

Archived: 06.14.2010

On 4/30/2010, after 160 years of operation, St. Vincent's Hospital was closed. ( www.svcmc.org/body.cfm?id=32 )

According to the Villager ( www.thevillager.com/villager_353/editorial.html ):
"The hospital serves the West Side and Lower Manhattan from Chinatown and Battery Park City up to the West 50s. It is also the only regional trauma center below 114th St. on the West Side. Last year, St. Vincent’s gave over $36 million in charity care, and its emergency department saw 61,368 visits. The hospital also provides critical AIDS/H.I.V. treatment, geriatric care and mental-health services."

"In advertising ... all women are not created equal." (WTF?!)

WHERE: Senate, Omni Shorham

WHAT: What do the much-critiqued ‘classics’ on democracy, civic engagement, the public sphere, and education (by scholars such as Habermas, Dewey, Putnam and others) have to offer critical urban geographers? The urban spaces, forms of social interaction, and modes of education that these scholars theorized are quite different than those that many urban geographers seek to understand today. Public life increasingly plays out in both material and virtual/digital spaces, with interactions and deliberations mediated through purportedly interactive ‘web 2.0’ media, including social networking technologies and interactive mapping technologies. Past geographical critiques of the public sphere emphasized the exclusionary nature of abstract liberal visions, drawing on empirical and embodied accounts of spatial life. In the disembodied world of the digital age, how do we bring our empirical research to bear on these new/old questions of collaboration, civic engagement and democratic space? What is geography’s contribution to democratic theory in the age of web 2.0?

Discussant – Robert Lake, Rutgers University

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YouTube Nation
Bruce D’Arcus – Miami University of Ohio

Dominant theories on the intersections of democracy and the public sphere were the product of a media environment dominated first by print media, and later by radio and television typically produced by large multinational capital for the largely passive consumption of viewers and listeners. Indeed, Habermas’ historical narrative of the evolution of the public sphere suggests its gradual demise in the face of the pressures of corporate concentration. Even more recent critics of this thesis have often based their arguments on the role that alternative media may play in constituting the dialog that is understood to be at the heart of a vibrant public sphere. In each case, however, the cultural product of this media is largely read-only. Yet, some commentators have argued, new media forms associated with the internet complicate the relation between the production and consumption of mediated meanings.

This paper considers this argument by way of an examination of connections between new media, social networking technologies, and concrete space. I examine how conservative activists in the United States have used new media such as online video website YouTube to present particular representations of a resurgent political movement. On one hand, I argue, these new media do change the content and character of political representation and dialog by complexifying the relation between the production of space, and the production of mediated political representations. On the other hand, I suggest the challenge they present is as much to theory and methodology as it is to our understanding of changing empirical circumstances.

Cyberdominance and the Digital Footprint: Young People as Objects of Domination and Subjects of Power in the Cybercity
Gregory Donovan – CUNY Graduate Center

This paper aims to unpack the material forms and practices of the U.S. war doctrine of “cyberdominance,” and its entailments with urban youth at multiple scales. This paper will argue that through decentralized information flows, the cybercity affords new environments for education, self-expression, and civic engagement as well as new environments for surveillance and control — simultaneously challenging and enabling the realization of cyberdominance. As young people’s urban geographies blend with cyberspatial mediums, specifically the Semantic Web (SW), their digital footprints are increasingly recorded, commodified, and aggregated by state and non-state actors. Enabled by the increasing propertization of cyberspace, the SW in part symbolizes a neoliberal restructuring of cyberspace through its privileging of informational control over informational literacy. Under this restructuring, information is semantically coded and mapped for “automatic” circulation across various proprietary environments. Intertwined with the privatization and segregation of urban environments through “gating” and private governance practices, the SW affords the contradictory prospect of a mass public conducive to cyber-dominance, alongside a cascade of publics organized around situated interests that challenge cyber-dominance. This paper will conclude with a discussion of a PAR project, in progress, that engages NYC youth in producing their own social network site as a means of enhancing informational literacy and cyber-environmental consciousness. Through their participation, young people investigate how cyberdominance shapes, and is shaped by, their experiences with property, privacy, and security in the cybercity — and propose strategies for re-imagining such dominance according to their situated interests.

Situated GeoWeb Participation: A Qualitative Assessment of OpenStreetMap Contributors
Josef (“Joe”) Eckert – University of Washington

OpenSteetMap.org (OSM) is a widely cited example of the burgeoning geoweb 2.0 movement, seeking to spatially crowdsource street-level geographic information for the globe. The recent State of the Map conference for OSM participants held this year in Amsterdam was the first annual meeting that dedicated a day to emergent business interests in relation to the project. Recent literature on volunteered geographic information calls for an understanding of how user participation functions in these practices. While some research has been done on the nature of open-source software projects, the emerging neogeography literature to date has been largely devoid of economic consideration. However, there is a lack of attention to the political economies localized to a single project in neo-geography literature. This paper utilizes participant observation fieldwork from the conference as well as in-depth interviews to understand the resulting subjectivities created by the complex interplay between members of non-profit foundation at the helm of the OSM project, the business interests of for-profit companies utilizing OSM data, and those participants that simply want to “get on with the mapping.” I argue that treating participants as situated within specific economic networks is essential to our understanding of user participation in geoweb based projects. I suggest that while mapping within this project is actualized at the scale of the individual, user participation in practice is shaped by the fiscal networks required to power a transnational geoweb project and that attention to unique networks may provide a more in-depth understanding of differences in participant motivation.

Desperately seeking the public sphere: After school programs and civic life
Sarah Elwood & Katharyne Mitchell – University of Washington

In this paper we rethink notions of the public sphere, in relation to schools and after-school programs in the United States. Habermasian notions of the ideal public sphere as a site where rational individuals can freely deliberate issues of the common good have been strongly critiqued by many scholars. Much of this discussion, however, has focused on existing sites and on adults. Liberal democratic accounts of schools as sites for subject formation have offered a similarly idealistic view of schools as a public sphere, and tended to theorize young people as unformed subjects within these spaces. Drawing from research at a YMCA-sponsored after school program with young teens in South Seattle, we investigate the types of power relations, hegemonic assumptions, inclusions and exclusions that emerge when young people form their own deliberative publics, as part of a collaborative map-making project. We suggest that these deliberative spaces provide an important opportunity for young people to share, examine, and rethink their own knowledge, but that these spaces are also limited in significant ways.

A definition of political ecology for technonature would emphasize the biocultural configurations that are emerging and those that are possible according to particular constellations of actors, technologies, and practices. The political ecology of technonature would study the actual and potential biocultural arrangements linked to technoscience, particularly along the axes of organicity-artiflciality and reality-virtuality. It would examine discourses and practices of life and the extent to which they are conducive to new natures, social relations, and cultural practices. It is important that the ethnographies of technonature not focus on elite contexts only or on their impact on nonelite communities; they should also explore the locally constituted cultural and material resources that marginalized communities are able to mobilize for their adaptation or hybridization in the production of their identities and political strategies

By environmentalism I refer to all forms of collective behavior that, in their discourse and in their practice, aim at correcting destructive forms of relationship between human action and its natural environment, in opposition to the prevailing structural and institutional logic. By ecology, in my sociological approach, I understand a set of beliefs, theories, and projects that consider humankind as a component of a broader ecosystem and wish to maintain the system’s balance in a dynamic, evolutionary perspective.

In my view, environmentalism is ecology in practice, and ecology is environmentalism in theory . . .

From The Power of Identity (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II), p 133:

The ecological approach to life, to the economy, and to the institutions of society emphasizes the holistic character of all forms of matter, and of all information processing. Thus, the more we know, the more we sense the possibilities of our technology, and the more we realize the gigantic, dangerous gap between our enhanced productive capacities, and our primitive, unconscious, and ultimately destructive social organization.

Photo: Michael Oman-Reagan
(http://religionandtechnology.com)

The term does not differentiate between scientific ecology and political ecology; it is built on the model of (but in opposition to) “political economy.” It is thus used to designate, by opposition to the “bad” philosophy of ecology, the understanding of ecological crises that no longer uses nature to account for the tasks to be accomplished, it’s used as an umbrella term to account for what succeeds modernism according to the alternative “modernize or ecologize.”

From the Politics of Nature, p4:

Political ecology is said to have to do with “nature in its links with society.” But this nature becomes knowable through the intermediary of the sciences; it has been formed through networks of instruments; it is defined through the interventions of professions, disciplines, and protocols; it is distributed via data bases; it is provided with arguments through the intermediary of learned societies.

The protection of an individual is fundamental to today’s society and business freedom should never come above that of person’s dignity and that is what this trial has shown.

I agree, entirely, with the first part of that statement — but when the prosecutor argues “… and that is what this trial has shown” I have to ask myself: what trial is he talking about? Whose dignity is being protected here? Certainly not the dignity of a wired society who is likely to face greater surveillance and censorship as a result of this irresponsible ruling. And, certainly not the dignity of that poor boy who can not “delete” his memories of that horrible act of violence. Of all the serious privacy issues associated with the practices of corporations like Google (see here) and Facebook (see here), and governments like the U.S. (see here and here) and China (see here), how does this qualify as a triumph for privacy when it has the potential to further erode individual privacy on the Internet?

Peter Fleischer is quoted in the Telegraph as saying he found it ironic that “as privacy director I have been found guilty of breaching privacy.” With respect to Fleischer, that’s not ironic — it’s to be expected that the person in charge of privacy policies for the most prominent global information company would find himself (fairly or unfairly) held accountable for those policies. What’s ironic is that three Google executives were convicted for violating privacy laws in an instance where they actually didn’t violate anyone’s privacy, and that conviction has the potential to further compromise individual privacy. Now, that’s irony.

Labour MP Tom Watson said it best in the Telegraph:

This is the biggest threat to internet freedom we have seen in Europe. The only people who will support this decision are Silvio Berlusconi and the governments of China and Iran. It effectively breaks the internet in Italy.

Hyper-gentrification.

2nd Avenue and 2nd Street.

Orchard Street, between Houston and Stanton.

Economy Candy Store on Rivington.