Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and imperial power

This paper takes the development of the British town planning movement as its starting point to explore a series of challenges for the discipline’s historiography. The emergence of the professional field involved the circulation of ideas beyond the metropolitan core to colonial territories with spatial interventions that were deemed both physically and morally beneficial. The paper explores the role played by the discipline in developing spatialized forms of ethnic and racial differentiation within colonial territories. I conclude that British planning has largely ignored its own historiography, including the colonial legacy, enabling the discipline to assert its role as a socially progressive profession.

A nanopore ion source delivers single amino acid and peptide ions directly into the gas phase

A technology for sequencing single proteins would expand our understanding of biology and improve the detection and treatment of disease. Approaches based on fluorosequencing, nanopores, and tunneling spectroscopy are under development and show promise. However, only mass spectrometry (MS) has demonstrated an ability to identify amino acids with minimal degeneracy. We envision sequencing a protein by fragmenting it and delivering its constituent amino acids into a mass spectrometer in sequential order, but existing ion sources employ a background gas that scrambles the spatial ordering of ions and degrades their transmission. Here we report an ion source comprising a glass capillary with a sub-100 nm diameter pore that emits amino acid ions from aqueous solution directly into vacuum. Emitted ions travel collision-less trajectories before striking a single-ion detector. We measured unsolvated ions of 16 different amino acids as well as glutathione and two of its post-translationally modified variants.

Architecture and/as Choreography: Concepts of Movement and the Politics of Space

Dance projects exploring and interpreting architecture through choreography have become increasingly popular over the past two decades. This article takes a similar but theoretical approach, using the concept of choreography as a lens to look at the underlying scripts that shape the ways in which subjects move in, and are being moved by, architecture. Typically associated with the field of dance, choreography refers to spatial ordering principles, evoking highly political questions of authorship and authority, interpretation, improvisation, appropriation, accessibility, inclusion, and exclusion. Applying historical and comparative analysis, this article focuses on seminal examples from the fields of 20th-century Western dance and architecture. By mapping out evolving concepts and constellations of architecture and/as choreography, it aims to help create awareness of the spatial politics of architecture and their historical situatedness.

Unnatural Pumas and Domestic Foxes: Relations with Protected Predators and Conspiratorial Rumours in Southern Chile

Human–wildlife conflicts involving protected predators are a major social and environmental problem worldwide. A critical aspect in such conflicts is the role of state institutions regarding predators’ conservation, and how this is construed by affected local populations. These interpretations are frequently embodied in conspiratorial rumours, sharing some common traits related to wild and domestic categories, spatial ordering and power relations. In southern Chile, a one-year, multi-sited ethnographic study of human–animal relations in and adjacent to protected areas was undertaken, foregrounding conspiratorial rumours concerning protected predators. Through an analysis of this study and related international cases, this article argues that the uncritical dismissal of rumours and the categories used to interpret such conflicts have detrimental impacts on the conservation of wild predators. Such rumours should be understood as significant comment devices within human–animal relations and the power dynamics that frame human groups affected by them.

Зависимость люминесцентных свойств упорядоченных групп Ge(Si) наноостровков от параметров ямок на структурированной поверхности подложки "кремний на изоляторе"

This paper presents the results of studies of the luminescence properties of structures with Ge(Si) quantum dots (QDs), in which a pit-patterned surface of silicon on insulator substrate served both for the spatial ordering of QDs and for the formation of a two-dimensional photonic crystal. It is shown that by choosing the parameters of pit-patterned substrate (the diameter of the pits and the period of their location), it is possible to provide a significant increase of intensity of the QD luminescence signal in the near-IR range. This enhancement is associated with interaction of spatially ordered QD emission with the modes of a photonic crystal formed by the pattern of pits. The effect of amplification of the luminescence signal persists up to room temperature.

After Englobement

This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk’s anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt’s fatalistic view of the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a succession of spatial epochs, arguing that the modern era can best be understood as the achievement of a centuries-long path toward a unified global space of nihilistic anarchy—a development that he comes to refer to as englobement. The legacy of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity can be seen most urgently today by its influence on the emergent right-wing identitarian and neo-Eurasian movements, which seek to transform Schmitt’s pessimistic nostalgia for a prior mode of spatial ordering into an expansionist geopolitics. The author maintains that, against that legacy, Sloterdijk proposes “spherology,” a unique practice of spatial anthropology through which he teases out an art of writing at the service of experience, seeking to understand the phenomenon of human togetherness not in terms of determinate political or territorial forms but as a function of shared spaces (spheres) set up and stretched out through shared living in them. By affirming and potentially informing the ever-renewable possibility of lived extendedness in local-shared enclosures, Sloterdijk’s theorization of the spatial constitutes a compelling countercurrent or immunological defense against the forces of nostalgia and resignation that feed into reactionary spatial thought.

Narrative Disorientation and Beckett's Bureaucratic Space

This essay investigates political implications of narrative space in Samuel Beckett's closed-space narratives, arguing for a narratological understanding of these spatial politics. It focuses on Imagination Dead Imagine, a text that radically disorients reader engagement with narrative space. In this text, Beckett collides bureaucratic narrative logic, which compartmentalises and accounts for all details of narrative space, against trenchantly anti-bureaucratic grammar, in which sentence structure disrupts and undermines spatial ordering. This dialectical relationship between bureaucratic narrative voice and unstable grammar critiques the logic that, in Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical sense, defines the bureaucratic nation-state. By associating narrative space and its inhabiting characters with the bureaucratic logic of modernity, Imagination Dead Imagine enacts and examines what Agamben calls the state of exception, inscribing politics onto the bare life of characters. While the text avoids direct reference to these historical conditions, its structure performs and resists the politics implicit in those conditions.