Category Archives: City

Medellín: Who’s Afraid of Hip-Hop?

My article on hip-hop and violence in Medellín is now out: Héctor Pacheco walked down the steep hillsides of his barrio in Medellín, Colombia to wish his aunt a happy birthday. Pacheco—a local rapper nicknamed “Kolacho”—had spoken at a public … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Boundaries, City, Drugs, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Security, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Medellín: Who’s Afraid of Hip-Hop?

Narco-Geographies, Part III: Urban Speculation and Spectacle

(Final post in a three-part series, Part I, Part II)  The policies that have made Panama into a commercial and financial global entrepôt have also made this small country into an ideal beachhead for entrepreneurial narcotraffickers. The seemingly ethereal nature … Continue reading

Posted in City, Development, Drugs, Elites, Guy Debord, Illegality, Political Economy, Spatiality, Spectacle | Comments Off on Narco-Geographies, Part III: Urban Speculation and Spectacle

Cities in Conflict

The news site openDemocracy.net has launched a special series on “Cities and Conflict.” With stuff on spatial resistance, warspace, security, military urbanism, and urban uprisings, the series should be of interest to geographers, urbanists, and the spatially inclined in general. … Continue reading

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Visualizing Space and Injustice in Palestine

In an old post about the potential political capacities of the infographic, I wrote: “If Guy Debord was right in highlighting that social relations between people are increasingly mediated by images and representations, then can the infographic be a popular … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Boundaries, City, Critique, Everyday Life, Guy Debord, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Maps, Media, Primitive Accumulation, Scale, Security, Spatiality, Spectacle, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Visualizing Space and Injustice in Palestine

Meanwhile… Actual Living Mayans: Zapatistas Retake the Plazas

After months (years?) of people talking about Mayans in the past tense, as a bygone civilization that predicted the end of the world, tens of thousands of Zapatistas quietly filed out of the mountains in southern Mexico and flooded into … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Bandits, City, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

The New Aesthetic Part III: The Network

This final installment on the New Aesthetic (Part I: Seeing Like a Machine; Part II: Writing Like a Drone) considers the awkward physicality of the Internet as a thing. If the New Aesthetic is that “structure of feeling” produced by … Continue reading

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The New Aesthetic Part II: Writing Like A Drone

My first post on the “New Aesthetic”—that weird, sometimes unsettling irruption of digital phenomena into real life, particularly into our visual culture—described it as a “structure of feeling,” a term coined by cultural critic Raymond Williams. For him, a structure … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Art, City, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Raymond Williams, Security | 2 Comments

The New Aesthetic Part I: Seeing Like A Machine

You know how sometimes you learn about something you had never heard of before and then you start seeing it everywhere? The New Aesthetic has been one of those things for me since Derek Gregory turned me on to it (sue … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Assemblages, Boundaries, City, Everyday Life, Media, Networks, Science & Tech., Spectacle | 2 Comments

David v. David: Graeber and Harvey in Conversation

[vimeo video_id=”41997338″ width=”600″ height=”337″ title=”Yes” byline=”Yes” portrait=”Yes” autoplay=”No” loop=”No” color=”00adef”] Sponsored by Verso Books and The CUNY Center for Place, Culture and Politics. (ᔥ David Harvey)

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Interweb Motley #1

Inaugurating a new weekly installment of worthy links from around the Internet is this week’s “Interweb Motley.” Benjamin Kunkel reviews Paper Promises by Philip Coggan and Debt by David Graeber for the London Review of Books. (Kunkel, a rising Marxist “rapporteur” … Continue reading

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