Follow André Lemos' Carnet de Notes

I only wish I were half as efficient as my friend André Lemos in updating this blog.

His Carnet de Notes is an essential web-publication (mostly in Portuguese)...

Keep it up, André!

Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America (1)

www.ssscla.com . PUCPR . curitiba-brazil . 4-6 March 2009

Surveillance is becoming the omnipresent and ubiquitous element dreamt by sci-fi novelists and writers. What is the influence of urban surveillance and control upon our understanding and experience of space? As urban beings, how do we behave under the constant surveillance of other people, the State and the market? Does this change the way space and place are perceived, built and experienced by us?

These and many other questions bear in mine and other colleagues minds, who wonder what are going to be the implications of the escalating use of surveillance and methods of control for places, for space and for our cities.

With the presence of many scholars from different parts of the world (David Murakami Wood, David Lyon, Nelson Arteaga Botello and Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva), Marta Kanashiro, Fernanda Bruno and I are organising the international symposium Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America, to take place at PUCPR in Curitiba (Brazil), 4-6 March 2009.

Call for papers:

Please send proposed titles and abstracts (no more than 250 words) by December 16th, 2008.

You will be informed of acceptance within a week in order for you to make travel plans as soon as possible.Contributions will be eligible for consideration for a special trilingual issue of Surveillance & Society to be published in early 2010. Please send them to:

rodrigoDOTfirminoATpucprDOTbr . rjfirminoATyahooDOTcoDOTuk

Workshop: augmented city, surveillance and spatial control

A 2-day workshop will take place at PUCPR in Curitiba, sponsored by Fundação Araucária and the Postgraduate Programme in Urban Management, on the 28th and 29th October 2008. Here is the programme of the event (click on the image to see an enlarged figure of the promotional poster, in Portuguese):

“If you wanna know what we know of what is known about you, and what kind of consequences this has upon urban space”...

... take part of the WORKSHOP augmented city, infiltrating technologies: surveillance and control in contemporary society, with the presence of scholars and researchers from UFRJ, UNICAMP, FIC, PUCPR and a representative of the High Command of the Militar Police in the state of Paraná.
On the 28th e 29th October in the Montessori conference room, 1st floor of the Humanities Building (CTCH). Free entrance!

28 de outubro
9h00-9h30: Opening
9h40-10h40: "Distributed surveillance, cartography and the city" - Fernanda Bruno (UFRJ)
10h50-11h50: "Space, technology and the constitution of the augumented city" - Rodrigo Firmino (PPGTU-PUCPR)
12h00-14h00: Lunch
14h00-15h30: "Crime prevention through urban design" - Cel PM Roberson Luiz Bondaruk (High Command of the Militar Police in the state of Paraná)
15h40-16h40: "Freedom, security and violence by the classics in political theory" - Samira Kauchakje (PPGTU-PUCPR)

29 de outubro
9h00-10h00: "The infiltrating city: the configuration of the contemporary territory" - Fábio Duarte (PPGTU-PUCPR)
10h10-11h10: "CCTV: discourses, practices and productions" - Marta Kanashiro (UNICAMP)
11h20-12h20: "Networks, security and community" - Sérgio Czajkowski (FIC, UP, FDB)

Surveilling the internet in Brazil?

The Brazilian Senator, Eduardo Azeredo, has submitted to the chamber a bill that puts serious restrictions to internet freedom in Brazil. This bill (supposedly created to stop cybercrimes) intends to impose identity registrations associated to IP numbers and ISPs. Basically, this will oblige ISPs to inform the identity of all associated internet users (through a ever increasing database of registered users).
Among other restrictions, this will challenge the use of P2P and free access to public wireless networks all over the country. In the words of another blogger (void life): "They want to prohibit the collaborative networks and virtually prevent the dissemination and sharing of information and knowledge through the Internet".
Some Brazilian scholars and activists are heading a protest and an online petition to stop this and other similar bills to be voted by the Congress and the Senate. I will leave a link to the petition on the main page of this blog.

The petition can be signed here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/veto2008/petition.html

More on this...

(in English):
http://www.nardol.org/2008/7/18/the-new-brazilian-internet-surveillance

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2006/11/11/holding-the-line-for-internet-freedoms-in-brazilian-cyberspace/

(in Portuguese):
http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/por-que-o-projeto-sobre-crimes-na.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/projeto-de-lei-de-crimes-na-internet-um.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/leia-o-absurdo-artigo-do-senador.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/lei-de-crimes-na-internet-perguntas.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/08/senador-azeredo-no-responde-pergunta.html

CALL FOR PAPERS - Brazilian Journal of Urban Management

And here is the call for paper for URBE's first two issues. More information (in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French) available at www.pucpr.br/cursos/programas/ppgtu/urbe_e.php

"The editors of urbe (Brazilian Journal of Urban Management), a journal by the Postgraduate Programme in Urban Management from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), would like to invite contributors to submit original papers to be considered for publication in the journal’s two first issues, to be launched in 2009. Urbe will consider papers with a preferential focus on the following thematic areas: Urban and regional development; Urban economy; Urban epistemology; Natural resources management; Public management; Governance and urban networks; Electronic governance; Urban mobility; Urban planning; Municipal strategic planning; Public policy; Information systems; Urban and regional sustainability; Urban law; Urban sociology; Urban geography; Perception and urban landscape; Urban design.

We would like to invite contributors to send their original scientific work, respecting the editorial norms (www.pucpr.br/cursos/programas/ppgtu/urbe_e.php) in the following formats: theoretical study, essay, critical review, report of an experiment or report of a research. Papers will be accepted in four languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish or French.

The deadline for papers considered for issues 01 and 02 (to be launched in 2009) is the 15th December 2008. Submissions can be done to the editors via e-mail, urbe@pucpr.br, and respecting the journal’s editorial norms (which can be found in Portuguese and English)."

Creative Urban Regions

Creative Urban Regions: Harnessing Urban Technologies to Support Knowledge City Initiatives.
Book launched last February and edited by Tan Yigitcanlar, Koray Velibeyoglu and Scott Baum, with many contributions by different scholars about knowledge-based urban developments. The official description of the book goes like that:
"In a knowledge economy urban form and functions are primarily shaped by global market forces rather than urban planning. As the role of knowledge in wealth creation becomes a critical issue in cities, urban administrations and planners need to discover new approaches to harness the considerable opportunities of abstract production for a global order.Creative Urban Regions: Harnessing Urban Technologies to Support Knowledge City Initiatives explores the utilization of urban technology to support knowledge city initiatives, providing scholars and practitioners with essential fundamental techniques and processes for the successful integration of information technologies and urban production. Converging timely research on a multitude of cutting-edge urban information communication technology issues, this Premier Reference Source will make a valuable addition to every reference library."
This book can be found at:
http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?id=7433

Information, Knowledge and Value

It’s coming out the book "informação, conhecimento e valor" (information, knowledge and value) by my colleague Ruy Sardinha Lopes (Architecture school, USP São Carlos). Only in Portuguese for now.
I haven’t had the opportunity to lay my hands on this book yet, but I know the excellent PhD thesis of which this book stems from. Thus, despite different formatting and updates from the book to the thesis, this work must have maintained the same high level of the research which it comes from.

It is of especial interest to this blog as it helps us think through the importance of discussions which poses central attention to ICTs as a ‘technical fix’, disembodied from its intrinsic historic and, more importantly, social roles. It also contributes with indirect considerations about the (re)construction of concepts and ideas of territorialisation, urbanisation, spatialisation, even relating itself (without admitting so) to the important group of socio-constructivist theories such as social construction of technologies.

In the author’s words (in Portuguese, from the abstract of his PhD thesis):
"Esta tese analisa o papel da informação, do conhecimento e das novas tecnologias de informação e comunicação (TICs) no atual estágio do capitalismo, em curso desde o final da década de 1960. Reconhece a centralidade econômica destes elementos e as mudanças significativas na lógica do sistema de acumulação e reprodução capitalista, embora se contraponha àqueles que advogam tratar-se do surgimento de uma nova ordem societária "pós-capitalista" ou que atribuem às novas tecnologias, notadamente às redes eletrônicas, papel democratizante e emancipador [...] Analisa também a dialética entre a vocação "desterritorializante" do capital, sua busca por maior flexibilidade e liquidez, e as necessidades "territoriais" dos poderes locais e das infra-estruturas tecnológicas que lhes dão sustentação Aborda, por fim, as subjetividades geradas por esse processo e a possibilidade destas se contraporem ao estado atual das coisas".

The book can be found at:
https://www.saraiva.com.br/produto/produto.dll/detalhe?pro_id=2592291&ID=42F947857D8081010132E0369

http://www.idealshop.com.br/loja/produtos_descricao.asp?lang=pt_BR&codigo_produto=792861

A Necessary Man - 6

PART VI: MORE ON MILTON SANTOS

See also:
"Geographer with a Cause" (http://www.brazzil.com/pages/p07jul01.htm)
"Um encontro: Gilberto Gil e o Professor Milton Santos" (http://www.gilbertogil.com.br/sec_textos_view.php?id=12&language_id=1)
"Recent Joaquim Nabuco Chairs in Brazilian Studies" (http://www.stanford.edu/group/las/people/nabuco_faculty_former.html)

Some of his more than 300 papers (languages other than Portuguese, mostly in chronological order):

• LA NATURE DE L'ESPACE (1997) Milton Santos Géographies en liberté GÉOGRAPHIE.
• "L'administration et l'amenagement de l'espace: le cas du Brèsil", Développement et Civilisations nº 29, mars, Paris, França, 1967, pp. 109-116.
• "Villes et économie urbaine dans les pays sous-développés", Revue de Géographie de Lyon, Lyon, França, 1968.
• "Vers une classification des villes en pays sous-développés, instrument indispensable en géographie appliquée", Congrés et Colloques de l'Université de Liège, vol. 48, 1968, pp. 277-284.
• "Projet d'étude de l'organisation urbaine dans les pays sous-développés", Bulletin de Liaison Cartographie et Statisque nº 1, Alger, jan/avril, 1968.
• "Natureza de la urbanizacion y problemas de su planificacion", Cuadernos de la Sociedad Venezolana de Planificacion, nº 69, nov., Caracas,1969, pp. 48-66.
• "La ciudad como modelo de desarrollo", Cuadernos de la Sociedad Venezolana de Planificacion, nº 69, nov., Caracas, 1969, pp. 27-47.
• "Une approche théorique du développement de la ville", Bulletin de Liaison Cartographie et Statisque nº 6, Alger, out/dez, 1969.
• Aspects de la géographie et de l'économie urbaine des pays sous-développés, 2 fasc (100 e 92 p.), Centre de Documentation Universitaire (CDU), Paris, França, 1969.
• "Une nouvelle dimension dans l'étude des réseaux urbains dans les pays sous-développés", Annales de Géographie, ano 79, nº 434, Paris, França, 1970, pp. 425-445.
• "Géographie et interdisciplinarité", Développement et Civilisations nº 45/46, set/dez, Paris, 1971, pp. 22-32.
• "Modernisation, Metropolisation et Développement", Développement et Civilisations, vol. XXI, nº 2/3, Paris, 1971, pp. 23-32.
• "Villes et métropoles incomplètes: possibilités et processus de promotion", Revue de Géographie Alpine, tome LIX, nº 4, Grenoble, 1971, pp. 525-532.
• "Analyse régionale et aménagement de l'espace: vers une méthode d'étude des forces 'externes' d'élaboration des sous-espaces dans les pays sous-développés", Revue Tiers Monde, Presses Universitaires de France, tome XII, nº 45, jan/mars, 1971, pp. 199-203.
• "Urban crisis or epiphenomenon?", Proceedigs of the International Population Conference, Liège, Bélgica, 1973, pp. 287-291.
• "Economic development and urbanization in underdeveloped countries: the two-flow systems of the urban economy and their spatial implications", In: Urbanization and the development process, D. McKee and Leahy eds., The Free Press, New York, 1973.
• Underdevelopment and poverty: a geographer's view, The Latin American in Residence Lectures, University of Toronto, Canadá, 1972-1973, 1975.
• L'espace partagé, Editions Librairies Techniques, M. Th. Génin, Paris, França, 1975.
• "The periphery in the pole, the case of Lima, Peru", In: H. Rose and G. Gappert, The Social Economy of Cities, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, USA, 1975, pp. 335-360.
• "Space and domination: a marxist approach", International Social Science Journal, vol. XXVII, nº 2, pp. 346-363 (também em edição francesa, pp. 368-386), 1975.
• Société et espace: la formation economique et social comme théorie et comme méthode", Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, vol. LX, 1º de setembro, Paris, França, 1977, pp. 261-276.
• "Society and Space: social formation as theory and method", Antipode, vol. 9, nº 1, fevereiro, 1977, pp. 3-13.
• "The spatial dialectics: the two circuits of the urban economy in underdeveloped countries", Antipode, vol.9, nº 3, dezembro, Worcester, USA, 1977, pp. 49-60.
• De la société au paysage: la signification de l'espace humain", Hérodote, nº 9, jan/mar., Paris, França, 1978, p. 66-73.
• "Rêve et cauchemar: problèmes spatiaux de la transition dans la periode technologique: le cas de Tanzanie", Revue Tiers Monde, tomo XIX, nº 75, jul/set., Paris, França, 1978, pp. 563-572.
• La Noción de Espacio, Cuadernos de la Cooperativa de Estudiantes de Geografia, Universidad de Los Andes, Merida, Venezuela, 1978.
• The shared space: the two circuits of the urban economy and its spatial repercussions, Methuen, Londres, 1979.
• "Research for the urban future: the case of Latin America", Congress Proceedings, 22nd. Internacional Geographical Congress, Ottawa, Canadá, 1979, pp. 125-129.
• "The cities of the third world: industrialization and spatial repercutions" Papers/Communication 22nd. International Geographical Congress, agosto, Montrel, 1979, pp. 10-17.
• "Structure, totalité, temps. L'espace du monde d'aujourd'hui", Espaces-Temps nº 18-19-20, nº special: Une geographie à visage humaine? Espaçe/Marxisme. Traces, empreintes, pistes, jan. 1981, pp. 103-122.
• Pour une géographie nouvelle. Editions Publisud, Paris, 1985, (2ª edição, 1986). "Spatial Dialectics: "The two circuits of urban economy in underdeveloped countries", Antipode: a radical journal of geography, vol. 17, nº 2 e 3.
• Espace et Méthode, Publisud, Paris, 1990.
• "Modernisation, milieu tecnico-scientifique et urbanisation au Brésil", in Annales de Géographie, Paris, 1991.
• "Temps-Monde et Espace-Monde. Relever le défi conceptuel", in Strates 7, 1992-1993.
  "Raison universelle, raison locale. Les espaces de la rationalité", in Espaces et Sociétés nº 79, 1995, pp. 129-135.

A Necessary Man - 5

PART V: THE PHILOSOPHER OF GEOGRAPHY
[From the text "Milton Santos (1926-2001), A Necessary Man" (2001), by Miguel Panadero Moya Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha]

For some time already, the health of professor Milton Santos, called the philosopher of Geography by some colleagues, had required serious care. Finally his health became worse in the last weeks of last June, and on the twenty-fourth he passed away. The sun, in its apparent annual displacement, had fled to the other tropic, leaving Sâo Paulo with the "friagem" of its subtropical winter, at the time his burial was taking place in the Cemetery of Peace, in the first hours of that Sâo Paulo afternoon, accompanied by many friends and colleagues. The press of the great city gave testimony of his disappearance. The network of internet users immediately covered the planet with the news of the event. The Brasilian Association of Geographers would thank later the messages of sympathy received from all parts of the world. Milton Santos left an incomparable body of work in the geographical and humanistic environments. He was an intellectual committed to society and the excluded, a citizen that gathered the knowledge of the world of his time to think of the needs of his country, of the role of intellectuals and of the contribution of geography to the comprehension of our material and social environment. A hopeful man, he wrote a few days before dying that "By definition, an intellectual life and the refusal to assume ideas do not combine… The true intellectual is the man who seeks, tirelessly, the truth, but not only to enjoy it intimately, but to tell, write, and support it in public", and therefore "intellectual activity is never comfortable"

He noticed that "observers of the university, in the past and in the present, fear for their present destiny, since protest demonstrations derived from its practices are rare, leaving, at times, the impression that the academy may prefer the situation of mere witnesses of history, instead of assuming a role of guide in search of better roads for society"; "when the intellectuals reject that duty, whatever the circumstances, a cloak of darkness covers social life, as the possible debate turns, by nature, false"; and finally, "the authentic strength of the university comes from the academic spirit shared by professors and students…" and "the outer strength of the university… is fatally injured if the ideas and practices of the academic spirit are abandoned in favour of pragmatic considerations".

The above lines belong to his article called "O intellectual anónimo", published at the beginning of June in the Sâo Paulo press as a contribution to the needed university reformation, when he was fighting against the progress of his illness. Milton Santos was a necessary man. The reproduction of his words here, as a small sample of his message, a universal message in so far as it transcends the territorial context where they were written, seems to us a small testimony of the homage he deserves.

A Necessary Man - 4

PART IV: THE POWER OF PLACE
[From the text "Milton Santos (1926-2001), A Necessary Man" (2001), by Miguel Panadero Moya Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha]

Theoretical matters did not set Milton Santos apart from actuality or social commitment. Intellectual observation of the situation of regional environment was a constant in his work. For him, Latin America had shown sufficient proof of having accepted external modernisation models; with the resulting social, territorial, economic, and political contradictions and distortions which characterize such behaviour. This vision was always with him. The population of the various Latin-American countries had to face the challenge of increasing the importance of certain autoctonous values, where social values should take precedence over technology. Geography should not content itself only with being critical, he wrote, but should be analytical and not just discursive in order to be useful and also used. He added, "Criticism can even be destructive, as long as it has something to propose, explicitly or implicitly, without which it would not contribute to the advance of knowledge."

Milton Santos visited the University of Castilla-La Mancha on two more occasions during the last decade of the twentieth century. At the start of that decade, the documents that would be debated in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 in the World Conference on Environment and Development were being prepared. His thinking was an adequate reflection on the first of these last visits to Castilla-La Mancha to participate in the 1994 course on Urban Environment, which our regional university holds every summer. His proposals about environmental social components would be developed a year later in the paper "A questao do medio ambiente: desafíos para construçao de uma perspectiva interdisciplinary", included in the volume of Anales de Geografía de la Universidad Complutense, homage to Professor Joaquín Bosque. His second stay took place in March, 1997 at the end of the winter in Cuenca, to participate in the IV America Latina Group Congress organised by the Association of Spanish Geographers (AGEAL). The illness that would end his days was already visible at this time.

In his last visit, Milton Santos developed a definition of territory as a banal aggregate of spaces, a question that he had integrated in his speech of acceptance of the doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Barcelona some months earlier. The formulations stated here would appear later in his last writings, making up the conceptual nucleus of the work "O papel ativo de la geografía; um manifesto", his last intellectual bequest, presented at the international community of geographers in Florianápolis, Brasil, a little later, at its "XI Encontro Nacional" in July, 2000. In Castilla-La Mancha, again, Milton Santos offered an approach to the comprehension of territory by analysing the process of changes that this geographical object has suffered throughout the history of Humanity. The course of an organization that in the beginning was the result of isolated community actions characterized by a high degree of organic solidarity, to the appearance of the States-Nation in the last centuries with their new forms agreed upon, and eventually the present moment where absolute internationalisation and globalisation have been imposed. A time, our time, in which the hegemonic actors are transnational businesses and supranational institutions, that impose a new regionalisation governed by money violence and information.

To puzzle out the meaning of the concept of territory as a geographical object he proposed to dispossess it of its material sense and consider it as a "thing used", retake the Perrouxian idea of "banal space", to understand it like a space of all the institutions, all the businesses, all the persons, setting it apart from the view of private spaces, or businesses, institutions and concrete persons. In his redefinition of the goals of the discipline he suggested reflection on dialectical pairs; upon "territory and world", important due to the existence of extreme modernity activities; upon "place and world" that include the influence of the routine on the upper scales; and upon "place and territory", and "territory and social formation". This methodological approach would allow us to understand our complex reality. On the one hand, the structure of the processes of the division of labour on a global scale, that is derived from rigid economic and decisional verticality and is responsible for the sphere of "global work", compared to the more plastic expressions produced in the horizontal relations in territory encouraged by "local work"; and on the other hand, the meaning of the existence of a territory of the quotidian associated with the scientific-technical-informational period, in which world society is currently embedded. His two last books reveal the content of his intellectual worries to the edge of the century change; the penultimate, "Por uma otra globalizaçâo. Do pensamento unico à consciência universal" (2000), and "O Brasil. Territorio e sociedade no inicio do seculo XXI" (2001). Both, published by the Brasilian editorial Record, provide "a portrait of the new quantities and above all of the qualities of the territory that…already used by society gains current uses, that overlap and permit the reading of interruptions in the physiognomy of regions. Certain regions are more utilized in a particular historic moment than in others. Therefore each region does not receive modernisations nor their dynamic actors in a uniform way, crystallising old uses and awaiting new rationalities".