Andrew Boulton

City networks in cyberspace and time : using Google hyperlinks to measure global economic and environmental crises

Personal data has been widely used as it became a fundamental tool for the development of various activities in the public and private domain. The automation of information processing has become indispensable due to increasing demands from a mass society, to the point that today, in many circumstances, it would be unthinkable not to take advantage of this resource1. The technology applied to information processing, on the other hand, increases the risk of invasion of privacy and control over individuals through the misuse of personal information, what encouraged the emergence of legal institutes capable of counterbalancing this absTRacTBy adopting a necessary multidisciplinary approach ICTs for Mobile and Ubiquitous Urban Infrastructures: Surveillance, Locative Media and Global Networks focuses on ICTs and new urban infrastructures to discuss how the world has been revolutionized. Discussions developed here, both theoretical and analytical, are all connected with global networks of signs, values and ideologies, locative media that gives us the freedom of spatial mobility and the possibility of creating and recreating places, and the surveillance artefacts which permeate our daily life and allow a hypothetical total control of space.Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change.

Crowd-Sourced Augmented Realities: Social Media and the Power of Digital Representation

Everyday lives are increasingly experienced with reference to, and produced by digital information. This information ever more includes crowd-sourced and social media content that mediates interactions with and between places and individuals. Ranging from Yelp reviews of restaurants, to check-ins to points of interest, to uploading image and video records of events, these digital practices and performances have emerged as key moments in the process of place-making.

PROPERTY AND AESTHETICS IN AN ORDINARY AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

This article encapsulates my thoughts about how to look, through landscape aesthetics, at an ordinary residential landscape in order to understand the ways in which people make sense of, draw on, and attempt to secure particular landscape visions and dispositions. More precisely, it deals with the articulation of a specific bungalow landscape aesthetic and a specific proprietary sense of property ownership in the Kenwick neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky. The framework adopted calls for a broadening of the purview of landscape aesthetics beyond the domains of “high culture,” elites, and the visual in order to interrogate the workings of ordinary landscapes at the interface of landscape epistemology (a way of seeing) and the tangible, visible scene.

Assessing the Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on Major and Minor Cities in South and Southeast Asia: A Hyperlink Analysis

We used the number of volume of hyperlinks, that is, electronic data from Google, for 19 large cities in South and Southeast Asia to demonstrate their national (in the case of India), regional, and extraregional linkages. The results can be used to illustrate the degree of intraregional and interregional flows of information about the global financial crisis between major and minor cities within South and Southeast Asia and other major global economic powers. Singapore, without doubt, is the major city in these regions. Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, Bangkok, Delhi, and Mumbai are in a second category; Lahore, Karachi, Kolkata, and Dhaka are in yet another category. Indian cities exhibit strong national linkages. The accompanying tables, maps, and graphs illustrate the vast contrasts between cities in these two regions.

Engineering and the Architecture of Economic Recovery: TARP, the New Deal, and the Evolving Landscapes of Crisis

The New Deal represents a megaengineering project par excellence, which transformed the infrastructure, economy and landscape of the United States for generations. Few cities, towns or National Parks are unmarked by the infrastructural imprints of Great Depression-era construction projects. In this chapter, I reflect on the key features of the economic recovery plans instigated by Presidents Bush and Obama, with particular emphasis on their (dis)continuities with the engineering projects of the New Deal. I suggest that the change in focus from employment and infrastructure (via engineering) associated with the New Deal, to the architecture of financial markets can be understood with reference to the “financialization” of the global economy since the 1970s in ways that have fundamentally reformulated notions of economic crisis and, therefore, recovery. I proceed by suggesting how the engineering of economic recoveries relates to two other megaengineering tropes: the Pyramid (standing in for physically spectacular megaengineering projects) and the cloud (virtual engineering projects). I show that the articulation between the spaces of the plan and the spaces of the laborer are common dimensions of the megaengineering project in general. As with the megaengineering projects of the Pyramid and the cloud, those of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) enroll many millions of people in the processes of meaning making. These recovery plans, and recovery plans past, are busy producing and reproducing lasting imprints, and contested places, in the landscape and the collective imagination of the U.S.

My (Second) Life’s Mission: Landscapes of Virtual Reality Proselytization

Place and faith, bodies and bandwidth, the material and the virtual constitute a vibrant landscape of Christian mission work within the virtual reality world of Second Life. Worship, ministry and missional work are increasingly taking on hybrid forms as traditionally place-based (and locationally discrete) notions such as the church and fellowship are rethought in light of emerging technologies and remediated modes of engagement with religious practice, performance and ideas. Recognizing the huge, growing, and global nature of the online audience, churches and activists of various kinds are increasingly engaging with digital technologies as necessary and cost-effective means to engage believers, mobilize missionaries, and reach potential converts wherever they work and play – including online. I examine a recent iteration of the online proselytization movement: the virtual reality mission. Drawing on ethnographic research with believers, ministers and missionaries within a virtual reality world, I discuss the complex ways in which participants navigate “first life” and Second Life notions of place, faith and the church in pursuit of souls to save (and likeminded individuals for social interaction). Geographical literatures around scale and place suggest a methodological framework in which “virtual” religious places, subjectivities and belief systems are commensurable with and intrinsic to their “real” world counterparts. I proceed by situating the virtual reality mission movement within a broader online missional context. Finally, I move iteratively between case study material and critical geographical scale literatures extant in order to conceptualize place and faith within a virtual reality world.