Spatial Theory

"This thesis develops a comparative methodology and research practice enabling the interpretive social study of urban built environments (cross-culturally and diachronically). Its contribution to comparative urbanism is framed specifically as a method for studying the socio-spatial significance of the material presence of the composition of urban form (conceptualised as boundaries) to the interactional process of human inhabitation. This perspective results from formulating a theoretical and conceptual rejoinder to questioning the nature of the role of the built environment as emergent from the human process of inhabiting the world and the functioning of urban life and development. On that basis an empirically operational method (Boundary Line Type (BLT) mapping) for the conceptual remapping and analysis of ground level spatial data on the urban built environment (city plans) is devised, so the comparative socio-spatial study of cities from this perspective through time and across geographical areas and societies or cultures becomes enabled.
This foundational development of a research process and ontology is informed by a material adaptation of a critical realist philosophy of science. The practical and technical implications of executing the mapping process on spatial data of varying nature (archaeological, historical, historically reconstructive, and contemporary maps) are comprehensively worked through. The comparative functional ability of the method is demonstrated by exemplifying two case studies, the cities of Chunchucmil (Mexico, Classic Maya) and Winchester (UK, 16th, 19th and 21st century), on the basis of which two test cases are taken forward for preliminary visualisation and analysis with the aid of Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques. The findings confirm its potential, replicating common expectations about contemporary urban life as well as laying a novel foundation for insights into Winchester’s historical development and Chunchucmil’s archaeology, from which future research and development can burgeon. These are expected to contribute significantly to the deeper understanding of urban life and urbanisation across past and present urban traditions and provide an improved appreciation of urban alternatives which could inform planning and urban design in the long term."

Megaproject Planning and Management: Essential Readings contains the seminal articles from the growing body of research on megaproject planning and management along with an original introduction by the editor, Bent Flyvbjerg. The leading and most cited authority in the field, Flyvbjerg has used crowdsourcing and 25 years of experience to cherry-pick from several hundred articles and books the writings that define the field. This volume will be an indispensable source for those wishing to speak with authority about how megaprojects are prepared, delivered, and fought over. The target audience is students, academics, practitioners, and media pundits alike, as well as communities affected by megaprojects.

"The study of the legal texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls benefits from a theoretical framework that is informed by contemporary legal scholarship. This dissertation undertakes a shift from the comparative approach, which focuses on parallels from either early Christian or early rabbinic sources, through exploration of four theoretical concepts: legal essentialism, intentionality, exclusion, and obligation. Legal essentialism is a new term proposed in chapter 1 as a substitute for previous terminology of “realism” (in contrast to “nominalism,” called “legal formalism” in this study). This essentialism is then demonstrated in four aspects: time, space, hierarchy, and knowledge.
Chapter 2 examines the role of intention in the law as an important prism to understand the tensions created by and solutions found for the sectarians’ legal essentialism. Using the work of Anscombe and Audi, the dissertation defines the concept of intention and separates it from desire and action. A special section examines the idiom “high hand” and distinguishes its biblical usage (primarily in Num 15), and its usage in the sectarian writings, primarily in 1QS.
The concept of exclusion is the focus of chapter 3, primarily through 4QMMT, and with many comparisons to 1QS. Through the work of legal scholars Dan-Cohen and Minow the role of exclusion in constituting the community and reflecting their legal essentialist stance is clarified. The role of emotions and rhetoric of emotions in exclusion is also explored in relation to contemporary theories of law and emotion. Finally, the dissertation distinguishes between permanent-static exclusions based on deformities and temporary-dynamic exclusions based on moral conduct. This distinction demonstrates the previously discussed roles of legal essentialism and intention in the law.
Chapter 4 examines obligation and commitment, borrowing the terms “transcendence” and “renunciation” from Rosabeth Moss Kanter. The tension between obligation to God and obligation to community is described using Kierkegaard, suggesting that this tension is mediated through interpretative authority in the sect.
The final chapter examines the laws of premarital sex in the Pentateuch and in 4Q159, 4QD and 11Q19 to examine the previous issues in a specific case study of legal interpretation and innovation, highlighting different motivations between a sectarian text (4QD) and a non-sectarian text (the Temple Scroll).
The conclusion highlights the benefits of applying contemporary theory in general and legal theory in particular to the study of ancient texts, and especially to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls."

""USING PREDICTIVE MODELLING METHODS AS A WAY OF EXAMINING PAST SETTLEMENT PATTERNS:AN EXAMPLE FROM SOUTHERN POLAND, Anna Łuczak
Undoubtedly, spatial analysis using GIS applications has become increasingly important in archaeological research. Archaeological Predictive Modelling (APM) plays a crucial role among those GIS techniques. The main goal of APM is to create predictive distribution maps of occurrence of archaeological sites on the basis of known archaeological records and their link to environmental or cultural predictors used in modelling. This gives to CRM (Cultural Resource Management) a real opportunity to protect archaeological remains and to prevent them from damage. That is the main concept of North American predictive modelling approaches. On the other hand, developing Archaeological Sensitivity Maps also helps scientists to plan for field surveys. The use of predictive modelling has a different methodological approach in Europe, where it is an attempt to understand settlement patterns and factors that may have influenced site location in the past. The aim of this presentation is to show how valuable a combination of the two mentioned concepts of predictive modelling (North Americans and European) can be to simulate and visualize prediction maps. This is why I chose for this project an area in southern Poland that lies between two river basins: the ones of the Oława and the Ślęza. The examined area is morphometrically quite diversified – from the flat area in the North and close to river valleys, to the hilly area in the central and eastern part. These features of the selected territory suit the predictive modelling method well and give an opportunity to study complex environmental factors that may have influenced past settlement. The archaeological dataset used in modelling comes from the field survey record stored in the database of the Polish Archaeological Record (PAR /Polish name: Archeologiczne Zdjęcie Polski, AZP). For modelling purposes I selected two datasets representing sites from different periods: Neolithic and Medieval (Early and Late). This approach allows to minimize the modelling and analysing effort and also to examine the differences between settlement patterns in these periods. In the preliminary process a variety of environmental and cultural factors obtained using typical GIS procedures were used to determine past settlement preferences. Variables were examined to identify their potential influence on site location. Statistical analysis (e.g. density plots, correlation coefficients, etc.) was used for this purpose. The best subset of factors was selected and included in different types of statistical modelling procedures. After comparing the accuracy of the models, the best modelling method (with stronger predictive power) was chosen. As a result of the analysis the predictive distribution maps of archaeological sites were obtained.""

"The post-industrial city of the global urban era is seen to be defined by increasingly complex social, spatial and temporal relations, characterized by conditions of change and uncertainty, exception and opportunity. This book seeks to explore and critique such conditions, both as the current state of the urban and with regards to claims of current urban theory and research. The various contributions gathered here represent contrasting approaches to understanding the city, drawing as they do from multiple, and inter, disciplinary perspectives. They also draw from a global range of cities, some which might be considered global
cities too. Each paper shares a commitment to elucidating and exploring the complexity of the contemporary metropolis via a (re)consideration of the rhythmic and, increasingly, polyrhythmic nature of everyday urban life. "

The way people develop has a great deal to do with how they adaptively relate to the world and get in tune with each other. They do so, in large part, via living and nonverbal acts such as distancing, spacing, syncing, timing... Distancing is related to the Japanese notion of (ma = space-time; ai = encounter) which integrates the notions of spacing, syncing and timing. Distancing is connected with the construction of an ever better relation with "Other". We propose a three developmental steps in this construction: the genesis of the relation with "Other", which appears to be a symbiotic one at the start (fusion of the S with the O), is progressively transformed in a relation of exteriority (separation of the S from the O) and becomes, at the highest level, a relation of interiority (union or S-O oneness) (Masciotra, 1996). It is only at the last level that distancing becomes an art and the presentation focuses on it. The art of distancing is studied in a discipline (karate) practiced as a DO. DO (Way, Road or Method) implies that the purpose of a practice is not the mastery of the discipline itself. The discipline constitutes a mean, method or way for self-perfection and for achieving a harmonious relationship with the environment and people.

This paper is part of a book review forum on Mark Purcell's "The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy", where I argue that the boundary between childhood and adulthood is deeply problematic and consequently we cannot discount the political agency of children, particularly in building a more autonomous version of democracy.

The contention that space preferences determine spatial behaviour, and the claim that these preferences may be elicited from behavioural data are examined. Since not all behaviour is discretionary and not all choices are based on preferences, both the manner and the situations in which a preference-based approach is applied should be carefully selected. Conceptually it appears that revealed space-preference modelling reflects consistency of spatial choice rather than preference-based laws of spatial behaviour.

An attempt is made to clarify some of the confusion about the notion of accessibility by examining the limitations, strengths, and conceptual bases of distance, topological, gravity, and cumulative-opportunity measures of accessibility. In their aggregate and disaggregate states the measures are practical, enabling measurement into the future and measurement with a minimum of data, but the assumptions that all nodes are potential destinations and that all origins are known severely restrict the meaning and uses of the measures. Time - space measures of accessibility do not make these assumptions although they are data hungry, retrospective, and share with the other measures the narrow conception of accessibility as a property of the built environment. It is proposed that accessibility be thought of as a vacancy in an activity routine and that it be measured in terms of the disruption involved in creating it.

"Some lines from the Introduction:

Heidegger understands modern technology above all as a metaphysical project. Modern technological devices, from the “manual technology and manufacture” of the industrial age to the revolutions made first by the “engine technology” and then by what Heidegger (1998h:132–133) calls the ruling determination of modern technology as “cybernetics” (i.e. the rise and irruption of the systems of maximum possible automation of command), all manifest a peculiar mode of revealing that is not just total in nature, but an ever-growing imperial drive structured to constantly reach towards global enlargement and intensification. Eventually such technological unfolding leads to a diversity of phenomena, including the worldwide homogenization of modes of living, the constant mobilization of cultural and economic practices, the global circulation of information, goods, capital, people, and knowledge, the establishment of colossal stocks of energy with massive potentiality of destruction as well (with the weapons of mass destruction), and the commodification and productisation of all aspects of life from nature to culture, from genetic information to consumption culture – even a certain insensibility with regard to tragedies of suffering (for instance through the television spectacles of war and catastrophe), as Haar adds (1993:80; see also Gillespie 1984:128; 6 Mugerauer 2008:xv-xviii). In spite of the seemingly diverging characters, the former phenomena are nothing but epiphenomena of the age defining metaphysical scaffolding of technological revealing; it is the ‘framework’ of calculative drive, the technological revealing of ‘enframing’, which allows for multiple set of phenomena to emerge. As will be later shown in more detail, such sense of unity is first and foremost typical for a metaphysical mechanism of unfolding operative throughout the 2300 year tradition of Western thinking, a mechanism still being constitutive for the contemporary technological ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and self-heightening ‘machination’ (Machenschaft) of all things.

It is the planetary outcome of such a technological mode of unfolding, which according to Peter Sloterdijk (2009) was first initiated and started as a ‘mathematical globalization’ – as a project that in Heideggerean reading was boosted into its technological form by early modern philosophers and mathematical physicists – further proceeding as a ‘terrestrial globalization’, finally leading to an age of ‘planetary globe’, which eventually turned the earth into a mere planet under totally penetrable networks of orderings (Thrift 2008:234–235; Morin 2009; See also Heidegger 1998h:133; Dallmayr 2005:44; Radloff 2007b:36–48). As the thesis will show, the contemporary planetary unfolding was first initiated by the latent ground of thought behind the metaphysical formulations of early Greek philosophers, further boosted by the mathematical developments of early modern thinkers, finally coming forth as cybernetic systems of ordering cast upon the planet. In such a planet, conceived as a mass of matter wandering in empty universe, everything is called to be useable, penetrable, mouldable, ‘decodable’ and mobile.

Some comments on the work:

http://progressivegeographies.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/heidegger-and-globalisation/

http://philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/heidegger-and-globalization/

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For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of Political Science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the Perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect Political Science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public Sociology and public Anthropology as well as dissonant movements in Economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic Social Science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing in the context they are facing them. Today, Phronetic Social Science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This essay provides a genealogy of efforts to connect Political Science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The essay concludes with implications for realizing a more political Political Science by way of taking a phronetic approach.