Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • canned applause

    Pandemic humour, Polish style, via a UK colleague whose roots are in that country: Translation: “Doctors are clapping disease out of the patient. Firefighters are clapping the fire out of the forest. The teacher is clapping knowledge into pupils.” For all its ongoing troubles, Poland is apparently still a country capable of recognising performative bullshit…

  • unknowable differences populating an imagined horizon

    Struggling to write on sociological topics (or indeed on anything that engages significantly with social dimensions, whether academically or otherwise)? David Beer is, too: … beyond the problems of the speed of change and a lack of focus, there is also a sense that the thing I’d normally be analysing – society – will not…

  • 06MAY20 / accessions

    Some goodies from Meatspace Press.

  • In search of a dialectical utopianism : Harvey (2000), Spaces of Hope

    Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press. Focussing here, for reasons presumably obvious to long-term readers of this site, on Chapters 8 (“The spaces of Utopia”, p133-81) and 9 (“Dialectical utopianism”, p182-95) of what is now a vintage part of the David Harvey canon. Reading these pieces really brought home just how…

  • “A sterile and decontextualised narrative”: Grossi & Pianezzi (2017), Smart cities: Utopia or neoliberal ideology?

    Grossi, G., & Pianezzi, D. (2017). “Smart cities: Utopia or neoliberal ideology?”. Cities, 69, 79-85. Pretty simple paper, this one, in the sense that it does exactly what it says on the tin; the specific case (Genoa, Italy) is not of great relevance to me right now, but I want to drag some quotes out…