Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The paper broadly concerns the set of algorithmic processes associated with wireless networks known as ‘digital signal processing’ (DSP). By virtue of its labyrinthine technical complexity, wireless DSP is a worst-case scenario for social science research into software and code. This specific type of real-time computation, however, is vital to the proliferation of wireless services, devices, and products, and hence to the recomposing–shape-shifting urban spaces they inhabit. The paper addresses the problem of accounting for the convoluted nature of the DSP associated with wireless communication. I argue that we can understand what is at stake in DSP only by changing focus away from abstract understandings of code, calculation, and software to specific design processes that fold new configurations of space and movement into wireless network signals. I argue that, at the moment, the ongoing dynamism of wireless networks could be just as important to understand as the altered modes of proximity, intimacy, colocation, and distance associated with wireless technologies such as mobile phones, wireless networks, game controllers, and remote controls. To this end, I frame wireless DSP in terms of intensive movement produced by a centre of envelopment. Centres of envelopment generate extensive changes, but they also change the nature of change itself.

The music industry has been radically transformed by software. As has now been well documented, the development of software formats such as MP3 and the rise of Internet ‘piracy’ have had significant impacts upon intellectual property rights and distribution within the industry, with significant impacts for record companies. This paper explores another part of the musical economy which has also been radically transformed through code, although, to date, this crisis has passed by with very little comment. The paper looks at the recording studio sector and reveals how the introduction of software into the recording process encouraged a vertical disintegration of production in musical agglomerations from the late 1970s onwards and, in so doing, helped leading recording centres to strengthen their hold on the market for recording budgets. However, the impact of software since the mid-1990s has been less benign for such centres. The rise of more affordable digital recording rigs and easier programming protocols represents a democratisation of technology, making available a process that was once accessible only through the facilities and skills provided by a recording studio. Software and code have ushered in a regime of distributed musical creativity, which is having significant impacts on the organisation of the musical economy. As a result, the recording studio sector is undergoing a severe crisis which has produced a spate of studio closures, redundancies, and underemployment within musical agglomerations. As a result, the ‘institutional thickness’ of key recording centres has been significantly depleted in recent years.

Video games are virtual worlds, each with its own, distinctive spatiality. This paper suggests that there are two interrelated conceptual dimensions to the study of video games. First, there are the representational issues concerning the worlds depicted in video games, such as those portraying hypersexualized women or Orientalist depictions of Arab enemies. We suggest, however, that these cultural, sexual, and political representations are not the only forces doing work on the player within the virtual world of a video game. This paper complements a purely representational approach by considering ‘affect’ as a precognitive force which disrupts and delights the player with reactions ranging from fear to joy. We argue that, as the spatiality of video games has evolved from simple two-dimensional to complex three-dimensional worlds; the importance of an affective experience to the player has become paramount. Exploiting and manipulating the player's sensory experience is now the central strategy for many game designers. The paper is divided in two interrelated sections: the first tackles representational issues from culture to violence, while the second section contributes to our understanding of video games as ‘worlds of affect’.

Through a series of interrelated developments, software is imbuing everyday objects with capacities that allow them to do additional and new types of work. On the one hand, objects are remade and recast through interconnecting circuits of software that make them machine readable. On the other, objects are gaining calculative capacities and awareness of their environment that allow them to conduct their own work, with only intermittent human oversight, as part of diverse actant networks. In the first part of the paper we examine the relationship between objects and software in detail, constructing a taxonomy of new types of coded objects. In the second part we explore how the technicity of different kinds of coded objects is mobilised to transduce space by considering the various ways in which coded objects are reshaping home life in different domestic spaces.

This paper is concerned with the way in which airspaces are organised, managed, and understood by virtual representations—software simulations that are tested and used both preemptively and in real time. We suggest that, while airspaces are often understood as simulations themselves—models and blueprints for real-world futures—they are among the most mediated of all contemporary social environments, produced not only through code, but based on scenarios which predict and plan for future events—real vitalities that might come true. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of aeronautical software simulation employed by civilian and military aviation, we explore how code has become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous in response to the challenges set by the mobilities the simulations model and the affective susceptibility of the corporeal body that uses them. The paper explores how software simulations work to structure and mediate behaviour by producing specific emotional and affective experiences in order to prepare the body for future encounters.

Software is receding and rescaling island space, assembling islands in new configurations of territoriality and governance. Paying attention to software-supported mobility, sovereignty and place-making offers a key terrain for thinking about the contemporary rescaling of Caribbean states, island territories, and the imaginary ‘offshore’ economies within them. Travel and leisure destinations, especially in the Caribbean, are being disembedded from national territories and repackaged as unique natural enclaves connected to global metropolitan transport, media, and data flows. Through a discussion of Zaha Hadid's masterplan for a new resort on Dellis Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands, the author explores how state space, informational space, and tourist space are converging in new fantasies of mobility, accessibility, and island paradise. The new software- supported spatialities, theorized as urban or metropolitan, are actually affecting remote Caribbean islands and other dispersed enclaves as much as (though in different ways than) ‘advanced’ urban regions. Indeed, as Caribbean states and territories adjust to complex new infrastructures and architectures of mobility, the deformations and refoldings of space described here may precociously prefigure processes of postcolonial urbanism that are restructuring private property, cyberspatial property, and state territory in other parts of the world.

The extensive punishment of debtors through foreclosure, and federal and state support for forbearance by lenders and loan servicers, are key features of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States of America. From a Foucauldian perspective, foreclosure and forbearance give rise to questions about the production and reproduction of subprime mortgage debt through disciplinary and governmental power relations—questions that are neglected in the dominant understanding of subprime as an anomalous and unregulated market realm where predatory lenders preyed on borrowers. In addressing these questions I make a two-stage argument. First, I show subprime to have been largely unexceptional in the ways in which it was governed as a legitimate and highly profitable part of a mass mortgage market prior to the crisis: legal processes of foreclosure combined with disciplinary technologies for the calculation of risk and the calling up of responsible, entrepreneurial, and self-disciplined financial subjects. Second, it follows that forbearance, as an apparently progressive response to the crisis, is actually deeply ambivalent and more politically problematic than activists and supporters typically acknowledge. Forbearance does suspend disciplinary norms, opening up space for disagreement over whether lenders should be coresponsible with borrowers for the reproduction of mortgages into the future. But, simultaneously, forbearance closes down the prospects for coresponsibility beyond immediate debt rescheduling, and reinforces the legal, calculate, and self-disciplinary operation of power.

Whereas policy makers and industry advocates have hailed the growth of the subprime mortgage market in the US as evidence that financial innovation can more efficiently price and absorb credit risk, the 2007 mortgage crisis provides an opportunity to revisit the nature of financial risk. This paper employs a forensic analysis of the development of the subprime market from the 1980s through 2007 to argue that, in a competitive environment marked by the greater integration between housing finance and capital/equity markets, financial innovations provide new opportunities to hedge risk even as they collapse the barriers to rivalries between firms. This has changed the terrain for risk assessment, promoting new modes of financial competition that have intensified systemic risk and extended it to a widening set of firms, households, and communities.

Although high levels of population mobility are often viewed as a problem at the neighbourhood level we know relatively little about what makes some neighbourhoods more mobile than others. The main question in this paper is to what extent differences in out-mobility between neighbourhoods can be explained by differences in the share of mobile residents, or whether other neighbourhood characteristics also play a role. To answer this question we focus on the effects of the socioeconomic status and ethnic composition of neighbourhoods and on neighbourhood change. Using data from the Netherlands population registration system and the Housing Demand Survey we model population mobility both at individual and at neighbourhood levels. The aggregate results show that the composition of the housing stock and of the neighbourhood population explain most of the variation in levels of neighbourhood out-mobility. At the same time, although ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands are shown to be relatively immobile, neighbourhoods with higher concentrations of ethnic minority residents have the highest population turnovers. The individual-level models show that people living in neighbourhoods which experience an increase in the percentage of ethnic minorities are more likely to move, except when they belong to an ethnic minority group themselves. The evidence suggests that ‘white flight’ and ‘socio-economic flight’ are important factors in neighbourhood change.

With rapid worldwide urbanization it is urgent that we understand processes leading to the protection of urban green areas and ecosystems. Although natural reserves are often seen as preserving ‘higher valued’ rather than ‘lower valued’ nature, it is more adequate to describe them as outcomes of selective social articulation processes. This is illustrated in the Stockholm National Urban Park. Despite strong exploitation pressure, a diverse urban movement of civil society organizations has managed to provide narratives able to explain and legitimize the need for protection—a ‘protective story’. On the basis of qualitative data and building on theories of value articulation, social movements, and actor-networks, we show how activists, by interlacing artefacts and discourses from cultural history and conservation biology, managed to simultaneously link spatially separated green areas previously seen as disconnected, while also articulating the interrelatedness between the cultural and the natural history of the area. This connective practice constructed holistic values articulating a unified park, which heavily influenced the official framing of the park's values and which now help to explain the success of the movement. In contrast to historically top-down-led designation of natural reserves, we argue that the involvement of civil society in protecting nature (and culture) is on the rise. This nonetheless begs the question of who can participate in these value-creating processes, and we also strive to uncover constraining and facilitating factors for popular participation. Four such factors are suggested: (i) the number and type of artefacts linked to an area; (ii) the capabilities and numbers of activists involved; (iii) the access to social arenas; and (iv) the social network position of actors.

The author makes the case for studying intermediary organisations as a window on the shifting governance of water and energy services in Europe today. He explores the notion of intermediaries and intermediation in a wide range of literatures and demonstrates how the governance concept can provide focus to the term, indicating how intermediaries can influence the pursuit of collective goals under shifting governance structures and processes. Against this conceptual backdrop, the author sets out the key governance challenges emerging from the ongoing transformation of sociotechnical systems (addressing water and energy services) in terms of changing relations between the state and the utility, between service provider and user, between infrastructure and urban systems, and between infrastructure and the environment. Empirical illustration of the emergence of intermediaries in the water sector across Europe, the relational nature of their work, the interests they pursue, and the impacts they are having is provided.

This paper performatively decentres the role of mainstream gay consumption in contemporary thought about the economic and social lives of lesbians and gay men in the Global North. It is simultaneously critical and reparative in outlook. This paper critically engages with recent writing on homonormativity, suggesting that this work presents ‘homonormativity’ as an all-encompassing structure that becomes politically unassailable. In parallel with an analysis of contemporary lesbian and gay life as being complicit in the reproduction of various normativities, this paper takes the innovative and reparative stance of considering how such spaces and practices also produce interdependent relationships across social difference. Drawing on the recent work of Gibson-Graham (2006, A Postcapitalist Politics University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) this paper considers the prospects for outlining the diversity of lesbian and gay economic practices, with the performative ambition of making existing noncapitalist practices more visible and viable. To this end, the paper examines a number of gay spaces and practices to consider the different forms of enterprise, transactions, and labour that take place within them. On the basis of its preliminary inventory of diverse gay economic practices and spaces, this paper proposes that there are many aspects of contemporary urban gay life that already offer alternatives to the homonormative practices of neoliberalism.

Rescheduling of daily activities and associated travel in response to unforeseen events such as travel delays is receiving increased attention in the context of traffic management. In this paper we describe the results of a stated adaptation experiment held among a large sample of individuals through a web-based questionnaire, to estimate parameters of such dynamic behaviour. In the experiment subjects indicated their response to a reduction in available time for a planned activity in a number of hypothetical situations. A mixed logit model was used to estimate subjective preferences for adapting in certain ways conditional upon activity attributes and socioeconomic variables. The results indicate that location and transport-mode adaptations are rare compared with duration adjustment or postponing (or cancelling) the activity dependent on the relative size of reduced time. Socioeconomic variables and activity attributes also play a significant role.