Cogitatio Press (E-Journals)
Not a member yet
2055 research outputs found
Sort by
Dialectical Design Dialogues: Negotiating Ethics in Participatory Planning by Building a Critical Design Atlas
Get PDFThis article explores ‘dialectical design dialogues’ as an approach to engage with ethics in everyday urban planning contexts. It starts from Paulo Freire’s pedagogical view (1970/2017), in which dialogues imply the establishment of a horizontal relation between professionals and amateurs, in order to understand, question and imagine things in everyday reality, in this case, urban transformations, applied to participatory planning and enriched through David Harvey’s (2000, 2009) dialectical approach. A dialectical approach to design dialogues acknowledges and renegotiates contrasts and convergences of ethical concerns specific to the reality of concrete daily life, rather than artificially presenting daily life as made of consensus or homogeneity. The article analyses an atlas as a tool to facilitate dialectical design dialogues in a case study of a low-density residential neighbourhood in the city of Genk, Belgium. It sees the production of the atlas as a collective endeavour during which planners, authorities and citizens reflect on possible futures starting from a confrontation of competing uses and perspectives of neighbourhood spaces. The article contributes to the state-of-the-art in participatory urban planning in two ways: (1) by reframing the theoretical discussion on ethics by arguing that not only the verbal discourses around designerly atlas techniques but also the techniques themselves can support urban planners in dealing more consciously with ethics (accountability, morality and authorship) throughout urban planning processes, (2) by offering a concrete practice-based example of producing an atlas that supports the participatory articulation and negotiation of dialectical inquiry of ethics through dialogues in a ‘real-time’ urban planning process
Coffeehouses (Re)Appropriated: Counterpublics and Cultural Resistance in Tabriz, Iran
Get PDFOver the last decade, traditional coffeehouses have attracted increasing interest in the city of Tabriz, Iran, in the context of consistent state monitoring and restriction of public life—particularly so among non-Persian ethnolinguistic populations. Relying on a combination of ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, and visual documentation), this article explores the everyday life of two coffeehouses in Tabriz through a theoretical lens of third place, counterpublics, and everyday ethics of resistance. Coffeehouses are currently retaining functions as third places; cross-generational venues for preserving cultural, artistic, and linguistic identity as well as institutions of social defiance, resting on elaborate ethical codes and tacit social agreements. Through mechanisms of everyday ethics and cultural practices re-connecting to local history, cultural creativity, and language, insiders are distinguished from outsiders, serving to build trust, security, and solidarity in the context of Iranian state monitoring and restricted social space
Amazon’s HQ2 Site Selection Criteria: The New ‘Gold Standard’ in FDI Decision-Making
Get PDFIn 2017–2018, Seattle-based Tech behemoth Amazon executed a highly publicised location-finding process for a $5 billion investment project, dubbed ‘HQ2’. Owing to the combination of high investment volume and the company’s unique public exposure, the HQ2 process is on course to becoming a basic yardstick for future foreign direct investment (FDI) projects all over the world. This article compiles the company’s previously unpublished site selection criteria and develops an evidence-based system of investment decision arguments which is employed to test the currently dominant approaches in location decision theory—behavioural, neoclassical, and institutional. Our results identify gaps vis-à-vis this emerging ‘Gold Standard’ and we propose the addition of a fourth, project-oriented approach to theory to fill the detected shortcomings. Furthermore, this system equips policymakers with a tool to evaluate their investment attraction strategies based on the decision criteria extracted from the HQ2 process
Disaster, Displacement and International Law: Legal Protections in the Context of a Changing Climate
Get PDFAs the number of people displaced by disaster reaches record highs, this article describes how international law is relevant to disaster displacement, how refugee law is probably not the answer, and synthesises recent developments into contemporary application. New interpretations of international human rights law have advanced legal protections such that planning and preparedness to address future disasters now form an express component of states’ international legal obligations. At the same time, climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, exacerbating factors that cause disaster and displacement and rendering the effective implementation of international law more difficult. The further ‘othering’ of migrants during the Covid-19 pandemic could stymie the realisation of protections as national governments close borders, anti-immigration sentiment is stoked, and economies decline
The Politics of Disaster Risk Governance and Neo-Extractivism in Latin America
Get PDFLatin America is one of the regions facing many disasters with some of the worse impacts. The current governance model has not proven successful in disaster risk reduction. This article aims to theoretically analyse the relationship between ideal regional disaster risk governance (DRG) and the actual production of disaster risk in Latin America. From the so-called ‘vulnerability paradigm’ and a regional standpoint, this analysis contributes to the debate with a specific focus on ‘neo-extractivism.’ Pointing mainly to sociopolitical processes triggered as of the early 2000s in Latin America, ‘neo-extractivism’ relates to a regional ecological-political pattern of intensive natural resource exploitation. The first part of this article presents a regional overview of DRG and its scope in disaster risk reduction, analysing its ineffectiveness through the lens of the neoliberal governmentality problem. The second part deals with the issue of ‘neo-extractivism’ to outline the actual links between the political arena, the development discourse, and the creation of vulnerability and new hazards in the region’s contemporary social processes. We show a correlation between political arrangements and environmental degradation that brings about both disasters and an increase in disaster risk. ‘Neo-extractivism’ foregrounds the political conditions for the implementation of regional DRG and reveals how its projections within the development discourse relate incongruously with the essential factors of disaster risk
In the Interest(s) of Many: Governing Data in Crises
Get PDFThe use of digital technologies, social media platforms, and (big) data analytics is reshaping crisis management in the 21st century. In turn, the sharing, collecting, and monitoring of personal and potentially sensitive data during crises has become a central matter of interest and concern which governments, emergency management and humanitarian professionals, and researchers are increasingly addressing. This article asks if these rapidly advancing challenges can be governed in the same ways that data is governed in periods of normalcy. By applying a political realist perspective, we argue that governing data in crises is challenged by state interests and by the complexity of other actors with interests of their own. The article focuses on three key issues: 1) vital interests of the data subject vis-à-vis the right to privacy; 2) the possibilities and limits of an international or global policy on data protection vis-à-vis the interests of states; and 3) the complexity of actors involved in the protection of data. In doing so, we highlight a number of recent cases in which the problems of governing data in crises have become visible
Informal Disaster Governance
Get PDFScholars and practitioners are increasingly questioning formal disaster governance (FDG) approaches as being too rigid, slow, and command-and-control driven. Too often, local realities and non-formal influences are sidelined or ignored to the extent that disaster governance can be harmed through the efforts to impose formal and/or political structures. A contrasting narrative emphasises so-called bottom-up, local, and/or participatory approaches which this article proposes to encapsulate as Informal Disaster Governance (IDG). This article theorises IDG and situates it within the long-standing albeit limited literature on the topic, paying particular attention to the literature’s failure to properly define informal disaster risk reduction and response efforts, to conceptualise their far-reaching extent and consequences, and to consider their ‘dark sides.’ By presenting IDG as a framework, this article restores the conceptual importance and balance of IDG vis-à-vis FDG, paving the way for a better understanding of the ‘complete’ picture of disaster governance. This framework is then considered in a location where IDG might be expected to be more powerful or obvious, namely in a smaller, more isolated, and tightly knit community, characteristics which are stereotypically used to describe island locations. Thus, Svalbard in the Arctic has been chosen as a case study, including its handling of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, to explore the merits and challenges with shifting the politics of disaster governance towards IDG
The ‘Analogue City’: Mapping and Acting in Antwerp’s Digital Geographies
Get PDFThis article discusses digital geographies by tracing, mapping, and revealing a series of spaces bounded by a multiplex digital infrastructure. By proposing ‘descriptivism’ as a complementary approach to digital mapping, this work discloses the city of Antwerp as the intertwining of visible and invisible networks. The ‘Analogue City’ is the title of both a design workshop and of a collective act of mapping that progressively reveals the city of Antwerp as a set of different spaces of information flows. By engaging the notion of mapping as object and practice, this work describes the production of a multi-scale and multi-space representation, as a process of collective and performative cartography. Through the combination of different scales, spaces, and mapping techniques, the city of Antwerp is unfolded as the result of security, mobility, and social networks. As a mapping operation, the ‘Analogue City’ is a threefold object: (a) an interactive, intentionally large map; (b) a series of mapping interventions throughout the city; and ultimately (c) a temporary exhibition
Re-Conceptualizing Safety of Journalists in Bangladesh
Get PDFJournalists are currently facing a multitude of threats. Commonly, these are considered in terms of harassment and bodily harms such as incarceration and murder of journalists. In the Bangladeshi case we argue that the parameters for evaluating what constitutes safety for journalists go beyond conventional wisdom. On the basis of in-depth interviews of 23 Bangladeshi journalists, we argue that the concept of journalists’ safety has three intertwined dimensions. First, journalists’ safety incorporates avoiding bodily harm (imprisonment, enforced disappearance, and so forth), and harassment, as well as economic and career threats. Second, in order to remain safe, journalists undertake various tactics including compromising the objectivity of news in a regime where security apparatus and pro-government journalists work in tandem to surveil and intimidate non-partisan journalists. Third, the tactics used by journalists decrease public faith in the media and the media can no longer play a watchdog role. We argue that one needs to reconceptualize the safety of journalists within these three intertwined dimensions
Living Apart Together? The Organization of Political Parties beyond the Nation-State: The Flemish Case
Get PDFThis article aims to contribute both theoretically and empirically to the study of political parties in the EU context, focusing on party organisation. Theoretically, it draws on insights from various literatures to develop a novel typology of multilevel party organisation specific to the EU context. It argues that parties are goal-seeking actors that choose their organisation based on a cost-benefit analysis, involving both party characteristics and the institutional context. Empirically, the article applies this framework on the Flemish political parties. It finds that rational goal-seeking behaviour cannot fully account for parties’ organisational choices. Results show that normative and historical considerations play a crucial role in parties’ cost-benefit analysis. It therefore calls upon future research to expand the number of comparative studies and to further assess parties’ goal-seeking behaviour regarding their multilevel organisation