What can global spaces and infrastructure teach us about the current mutations in the relation between capital and sovereignty? How do heterogeneous actors and qualities of power work on each other in these spaces, producing peculiar yet fragile articulations? In what ways does information reproblematise the production and governance of the spatial?
Drawing on his recent research on the digitalisation and technological reconfiguration of the port of Piraeus in Greece, Andreas Makris interviews Sandro Mezzadra. Together they revisit some of the critical concepts that Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have produced in their fascinating work over the last decade, and reflect on the contemporary politics of logistical operations and infrastructure. The discussion is preceded by a short introduction that attempts to set the scene by narrating Piraeus’ complex arrangements and recent events.
The podcast is part of Andreas’ recent research project funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Entitled ‘Becoming-digital: Logistical media, territorial mutations and the production of information space in the port of Piraeus, Greece’, this project was awarded an RSE Saltire Early Career Fellowship and involved a placement at the University of Bologna.
Andreas Makris is a PhD student in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews.
Sandro Mezzadra is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Bologna.
Τι μπορούμε να διδαχθούμε από παγκόσμιους χώρους και υποδομές, όπως το λιμάνι του Πειραιά, για τις σύγχρονες μεταλλαγές της σχέσης ανάμεσα στο κεφάλαιο και την κυριαρχία; Πώς διαρθρώνονται οι ετερογενείς δρώντες παράγοντες και ποιότητες εξουσίας σε τέτοιους χώρους και ποιο είναι το υλικό υβριδικό πολίτευμα που παράγουν; Με τι τρόπους η ανάδυση της πληροφορίας ως ιστορικής παραγωγικής δύναμης επαναπροβληματικοποιεί την παραγωγή και διακυβέρνηση του χωρικού;
Εκκινώντας από την πρόσφατη έρευνά του σχετικά με την ψηφιο-ποίηση και τον τεχνολογικό μετασχηματισμό του εμπορικού λιμανιού του Πειραιά, ο Ανδρέας Μακρής συζητά με τον Δημήτρη Μ. Μόσχο για την πολιτική των υποδομών της εφοδιαστικής. Χρησιμοποιώντας τον Πειραιά και τις παγκόσμιες οικολογίες των logistics ως σημείο εισόδου σε μια ευρύτερη συζήτηση για τις πολλαπλές μεταβάσεις που εκτυλίσσονται σε πλανητικό επίπεδο, η συζήτηση ανοίγεται σε ζητήματα όπως οι μετασχηματισμοί του ελληνικού κράτους και της επικράτειάς του, τα οικονομικά και πολιτικά αποτελέσματα που παράγονται από τις πλατφόρμες και αντίστοιχα ψηφιακά μέσα, τον ρόλο της πληροφορίας και του υπολογισμού στους παραδοσιακούς γεωπολιτικoύς σχηματισμούς και σε αυτούς που ενδεχομένως έρχονται.
Το podcast είναι μέρος του πρόσφατου ερευντικού πρότζεκτ του Ανδρέα που χρηματοδοτήθηκε από τη Royal Society of Edinburgh. Φέροντας τον τίτλο ‘Becoming-digital: Logistical media, territorial mutations and the production of information space in the port of Piraeus, Greece’ (Γίγνεσθαι-ψηφιακό: Ψηφιακά μέσα της εφοδιαστικής, εδαφικές μεταλλαγές και η παραγωγή του πληροφοριακού χώρου στο λιμάνι του Πειραιά), το πρότζεκτ αυτό υποστηρίχθηκε από το πρόγραμμα υποτροφιών RSE Saltire Early Career Fellowships και συμπεριέλαβε τη συνεργασία με το Πανεπιστήμιο της Bologna και τον καθηγητή Sandro Mezzadra.
Ο Ανδρέας Μακρής είναι υποψήφιος διδάκτορας στη Σχολή Γεωγραφίας και Βιώσιμης Ανάπτυξης στο Πανεπιστήμιο του St Andrews.
Ο Δημήτρης Μ. Μόσχος είναι υποψήφιος διδάκτορας στη Σχολή Πολιτικών Επιστημών στο Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο.
The Radical Urban Lab and GOSSIP at the School of Geography and Sustainable Development proudly present:
Dr Paul Griffin (Northumbria University)
Spatial Politics, Solidarity Infrastructures, and Unemployed Organising
This talk will reflect on the politicisation of unemployment across UK towns and cities in the early 1980s. With a particular focus on trade union and community organising, the presentation will reflect on the role of Unemployed Workers’ Centres in articulating opposition to deindustrialisation, redundancies, and long-term unemployment. Focusing upon centres as ‘solidarity infrastructures’ allows an analysis that considers the quieter acts of care and advice alongside organising practices and campaigning. This paper revisits these histories through archives and oral histories of unemployed organising and includes reflections on the People’s March for Jobs 1981, the emergence of TUC Unemployed Workers’ Centres and wider unemployed resistances. In doing so, it connects with ongoing works across social movement studies and labour geographies, as well as related works focusing upon the politics of working-class presence within urban environments.
April 3, 2023 12pm – 1pm Lapworth laboratory (IRV: 208) Irvine Building University of St. Andrews
On November 24, 25 and 30 over 70,000 academics in 150 universities across the UK are going on strike over attacks on pay, working conditions and pensions. The Radical Urban Lab supports the strikes and will be cancelling all its activity over these dates.
Find more about the UCU strikes here and here on the UCU website. The longer the picket line, the shorter the dispute!
A shorter version of this article was used in the author’s keynote speech at the RC21 conference in Athens, August 24, 2022.
“I shall continue on the path of building more solid democratic institutions”. – PM Konstantinos Mitsotakis, August 8, 2022 “The economic and military tyranny of today has been established”. – John Berger, Hold Everything Dear, 2006
It is a moving occasion for me to be here in this room, not because of who is here–please do not get me wrong, it is wonderful to know and feel we are finally among friends that we have not seen for a while, for reasons only too obvious. But it is also a moving occasion because of the where and then when we meet.
The where, of course, we all know: we are in the historic campus of the Athens Polytechnic, right in the heart of the Exarcheia neighbourhood. And as for the when? We are here right when our neighbourhood is coming under attack. Those of you who made your way here through Exarcheia this afternoon will have surely seen that what was once its square is now a barricaded mass, a construction site for a new metro stop guarded 24/7 by scores of riot police. For those of you who have not visited Athens for a while, or those who may have heard so much about the neighbourhood’s past but only happen to visit now for the first time, this image must surely come as a shock. This is equally a shock to those who frequent Exarcheia more often: an unprecedented situation, and the reason why I have decided to dedicate this intervention to Exarcheia and its square in particular.
At the time when the so-called “first place” (the home) and the “second place” (the workplace) merge, the future of third places is thrown wide open: anything and anywhere that is not private or corporate is severely questioned and pushed to become at least one of the two. It is in this context that Lurfova’s report has a rare urgency. Her perambulation starting with the Stalin Plaza in Prague and her drawing of lessons on what post-communist nostalgia might signal for the current state affairs in the Czech society (and beyond) is an apt reminder of a cunning ability of third places: the ability not only to preserve public memory and emit nostalgia but to tell us, in the process of so doing, much about the current status quo. And Lurfova’s report has become even more urgent and timely as Russian imperialism is invading Ukraine and as Western imperialism is fanning the flames of the present war while confronting the spectres of its own imperialist past. From the toppling of slave trader statues in Bristol to the struggle against the regeneration of public spaces in Athens, people are fighting for their right to representation in third place present and past. This report is an apt reminder of what is at stake in this struggle.
Julia Lurfová’s report is the final product of her engagement with the St Andrews Research Internship Scheme (StARIS) and her collaboration with all other RUL members, which is ongoing. The StARIS Scheme offers the opportunity for undergraduate students to enhance their learning experience by working on academic research projects. Julia’s report also ties into a broader exploration of Third Place under the auspices of the Radical Urban Lab.
Introducing the case of the Stalin plaza
For a brief period of seven years, an imposing granite monument of the Soviet Union’s Generalissimo, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, surrounded by archetypes of Soviet and Czechoslovak citizens, towered over the city of Prague. The statue was the winner of a 1949 competition honouring Stalin’s 70th birthday, commissioned by the Czechoslovak communist political party chaired by Klement Gottwald. At the time, Stalin – as Czechoslovakia’s “liberator” from Nazi Germany – was becoming a near-sacred and hence frequently monumentalized figure among communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Eventually finished in 1955, the socialist realist monument of Stalin in Prague became the world’s largest depiction of the Soviet leader. But it did not loom for long. As a result of Khrushchev’s 1956 confidential speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” that heavily criticized the Stalinist regime and provoked a gradual wave of de-Stalinization, the monument was toppled in 1962.
In 1991, a giant red Metronome was erected on the pedestal left bare after Stalin’s statue was demolished by explosives. The Metronome, as a reminder of time’s passage and finiteness, mocks the propagandist narrative of a Soviet-Czech partnership “for all eternity”. Ticking from East to West, the symbol of freedom bridges the two worlds in the newly-independent Czech Republic. Six decades later, in the nation’s collective memory, the place once dominated by Stalin’s monument continues to be strongly associated with the demolished landmark, kept alive through narrative accounts. Nowadays, among Czechs, the term “Stalin” refers to the plaza around the Metronome, turned into a meeting point popular among young people and an open air cultural hub hosting a variety of DJ and film-screening events, beer gardens, and a pop-up bar during the summer months.
The smooth concrete surfaces of the plaza have also been repurposed by the city’s skaters. In 1970s communist Czechoslovakia, skating emerged as an important anti-establishment subculture resisting the totalitarian regime, which recently became the subject of ‘King Skate’, a 2018 documentary directed by Šimon Šafránek. Skating remains pivotal to both Prague’s urban youth culture and to Stalin, “a square with no boundaries and no regulations”. However, the future of skaters at Stalin – and, as a matter of fact, of the public space as a whole – came under threat in September 2019, when the city temporarily closed the plaza in order to structurally refurbish it, while also re-opening a longstanding debate on potential commercial development in the area. Critics of proposals to replace the Metronome with a church or an aquarium have condemned these developments as pathways towards “cultural amnesia”, attempting to erase the contentious yet critically important history of the place within the Czech landscape of memory. Skaters and other Prague locals have since protested the closure and the redevelopment discourse by organising a ‘Save Stalin Plaza’ protest. “[D]on’t touch the genealogy, don’t touch the heritage of this place”, urges urban architect and local skateboarder Martin Hrouda. “Keep it like it is.”
Stalin Monument in Letná Park, Prague. Source: Pichova, 2008, p. 618.
Stalin plaza nowadays. Source: U/U Studio and Kevin Loo for Design Disco, 2019.
The literature on platform labour has addressed affective labour mostly in relation to online platforms like Facebook, in which unpaid tasks are carried out in a seemingly seamless environment of entertainment, leisure and fun. Most users that carry out this unpaid affective labour do not even realise that the content they are producing and the digital interactions that they take part in are labour practices and that these are in fact part of the production process. In that sense, large digital companies extractivism of digital social relation is fundamental to the critique of contemporary digital capitalism.
My research interest lies in expanding that critique to include different types of platforms, including those that involve offline work. In the past years I have conducted research on platforms that manage offline work, including delivery, transport, domestic work and care, and short-term rentals as part of the PLUS project https://project-plus.eu/. The research was conducted in London from 2019-2022 and included interviews with platform workers and participants observation in Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb. In the context of this rearach, I came across several care and affective practices that emerge within and around those platforms determining how labour relations are organised and how inequalities of class, gender, ethnicity and race are produced. Thus I tried to explore the following questions:
How can we include reproductive labour and work-life balance in our analyses of this type of platform labour?
How can we rethink affective labour in these platforms from an intersectional gender perspective?
How is algorithmic control impacting work-life balance and on affective labour emerging within and/or around these platforms?
Nelli Kambouri is a political scientist currently working as a senior research fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies, Department of Social Policy, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, in Athens Greece.
The Radical Urban Lab at the School of Geography&Sustainable Development is delighted to welcome Prof Colin McFarlane (Durham), author of Fragments of the City (California UP, 2021) on September 27, at noon in the Forbes room (1st floor, Irvine building, School of Geography and Sustainable Development).
Colin’s talk is kindly co-hosted with GOSSIP (the School’s Geographies of Sustainability, Society, Inequalities and Possibilities Group).
All welcome!
Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change.
In Fragments of the City, Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice.
In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world’s major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.
As a response to migration and fears regarding diminishing border controls globally, governments and international organisations increasingly experiment with digital technologies and biometrics for border and migration management. The unequivocal aim of contemporary migration management is to prevent people from reaching the global north. In this report, Sofia Sanz-Kimura spells out the risks and benefits of these technologies and their implications for humanitarian border management. Biometric border and immigration management and the widespread use of facial recognition technologies are radically transforming our traditional understanding of public spaces and freedom of movement.
The report is the final product of Sofia’s engagement with the St Andrews Research Internship Scheme (StARIS) and her collaboration with Evie Papada. The Scheme offers the opportunity for undergraduate students to enhance their learning experience by working on academic research projects. Sofia’s report ties into the broader aims of the Critical Understanding of Preventive Policing (CUPP) an international and interdisciplinary research project funded by Nordforsk, managed by Dr Evie Papada and Dr Antonis Vradis.
1. Introduction
Since the early 2000s, there has been a rise in the deployment of biometric technologies in humanitarian border management and refugee settings. This has come as refugee crises have exacerbated globally, with refugees, particularly from Africa, Asia and the Middle East fleeing their native countries to escape political, racial, or religious persecution, war, famine, and other disasters, and to seek safety and opportunity. In this report, I will explore the benefits and risks of the use of biometric technologies in monitoring the movement of refugees and asylum seekers. I will first briefly define biometrics and explain the history of biometrics in humanitarian aid. I will then discuss the benefits of using biometric technologies in such a context, particularly highlighting its usefulness for verification and identification, its registration speed, and its prevention of fraud. I will then consider the risks of the use of biometric technologies in humanitarian aid, particularly emphasising the issues of consent, exclusion, reliability, reusability, and data security. Finally, I will provide recommendations for future uses of biometric technologies in refugee settings.
