Advances on Smart Cities and Smart Buildings

Modern cities are facing the challenge of combining competitiveness on a global city scale and sustainable urban development to become smart cities [...]

As cidades falam? (Tradução)

Tradução do artigo da Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology na Universidade de Columbia, Saskia Sassen, para a publicação Public Culture, Durham, v. 25, n. 2, de julho de 2013. Sassen (5 de janeiro de 1947) é uma socióloga holandesa-americana conhecida por suas análises da globalização e da migração humana internacional e seus impactos no contexto urbano. Publicou 12 livros, juntos traduzidos para mais de 20 idiomas, como The Global City (Princeton University Press, [1991] 2. ed., 2001), no qual desenvolveu o termo “cidade global”. Ela recebeu diversos prêmios e menções, incluindo 12 doutorados honoris causa, e foi selecionada como uma das principais pensadoras globais em diversas listas. Mais recentemente, recebeu o Prémio Príncipe de Astúrias 2013 nas Ciências Sociais e foi nomeada Membro Estrangeiro da Real Academia das Ciências da Holanda. A Revista Prumo agradece a generosidade da autora em ceder a autorização para tradução e publicação deste artigo.

Co-living (as a way of life): The Urbanism of the New Urban Crisis in Los Angeles and Beyond

The 21st century global city is in the midst of a new urban crisis: while it holds an increasing monopoly on employment opportunities, it has become harder to access. In this article, I argue that young urban aspirants are still accessing the global city in crisis through the practice of co-living. Co-living can be understood as an emergent collection of residential commoning practices employed by in-bound urbanites to access in-demand parts of the city and attain employment, housing and community. Through a relational ethnographic case study of the PodShare co-living space in the global city of Los Angeles, I argue that co-living is as an urbanism arising to stabilize the new urban crisis on both the level of the individual and the city, guiding individuals to grin at their condition and be increasingly mobile between multiple global cities in an attempt to maximize their chances of securing longer-term residency.

Toward a Realism of the World-System: John Lanchester’s Capital and the Global City

This essay explores how John Lanchester’s Capital adapts classical realism to represent the contemporary global city; it pays particular attention to how London’s position in the world-system disrupts Lukácsian totality. Because the novel attends to the complexity and extensiveness of the world-system, it depicts the city not as a representative totality but as embedded in the global circuits of capital, shaped by the influences of inward migration and global finance. In this the novel has affinities with many fictions of the global periphery, for instance portraying the city as at once socially fragmented and structurally connected. Furthermore, the novel departs from classical realism in its closure; though the 2008 financial crisis is omitted from the novel, it overshadows the entire plot, and its absence emphasizes the lack of finality in the story of this phase of capitalism itself. In demonstrating the temporal and spatial unknowability of contemporary capital, Lanchester’s novel both affirms the capacity of realism to trace deep systemic connections and reveals the fragility of its construction of a social totality, positing a realism attendant to its own perspectival limits within the world-system.