In this paper I seek to initiate a research agenda on mega-urban airs that comprehends their atmospheres as simultaneously meteorological and affective, an agenda which seeks to apprehend megacity air/atmospheres in their vitality, corporeality and expressiveness. This paper attunes to the close and expressive substances that make up immersion in a material-affective ecology of a place, the qualities of the city that seep and imbue its material and biological fabric with affect. There is a growing body of work and literature (...) to aid us from traditions in continental aesthetic theory, French urban sociology and architecture, and an emergent cultural geographic field of atmospheric enquiry. The paper develops such an approach to megacity air in three main ways. First, air tells us about difference. In the testimony of pollutants and choking effluvium, an analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not in a constellation of megacity inequality. The atmosphere puts the megacity apart from other urban and political forms. Second, closely related to the issues that circulate around a geopolitics of verticality and the technocratic security concerns of volumetric conceptions of territory, air/atmospheres constitute an environmental ecology of security threats and crisis that thwart megacity life and justify environmental policies as ‘security’. Third, the paper argues how megacities are increasingly productive of secessionary atmospheres, often by removal and exclusion, which are not entirely separate from other atmospheric security concerns. (shrink)

By excavating the ambiguities of the helicopter’s machinic-prosthetic view, a perspective which may be distant and abstract, while also near and viscerally present, this article will explore how megacity security is increasingly waged and consumed. The article argues that megacity security marches to the rotator-beat of the police helicopter, fuelled by military technophilia and in a context of the biopolitical desertion of the megacities’ most vulnerable. The article takes three aspects, visually expressed and constituted through aerial-helicopter security. Drawing from (...) several megacity examples including Mumbai, Lagos, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the first resolves megacity confusion with legibility. In the following section the article examines the mobilization of the security gaze, and the final section explores how helicopter visuality may hold or territorialize megacity space. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Chief Judge Achilles and Judge Hera – uniqueness of proceedings – the nature of judicial decision-making – the judicial order of Mega-city One – source of judicial power – judicial styles – qualities required for judicial office – context of judicial action – requirement of reflection – interpretation and meaning in enforcement of law – adjudicative models – law as horrific – legal theories – Hans Kelsen – Justice Hercules – Jacques DerridaJudge Howard – critical assessment of judicial order of (...) Mega-city One – Hans Kelsen, positivism and democracy – merging of law fondatrice and law conservatrice – the “soul of the law” – fracture of the Rule of Law – fascism – comparisons with fascist regimes of twentieth Century Europe – signifiers in judicial uniform – consequences of dissent – reasons for, and consequences of, resignationChief Judge AchillesJudge HeraJudgement delivered 3 March 2138.Grand Hall of Justice, Mega-city One. (shrink)

This short note considers the migration of the skyscraper from New York and Chicago to Asia and its absence in the emerging megacities of the Global South. Following 9/11, many commentators assumed that the skyscraper was finished, but this was clearly not the case, with super-tall construction now accelerating. However, the distributions of contemporary skyscrapers show us that there are shifts in global power and also in urban form.

Introduction. Cities play a key role in the development of countries and regions. The authors of the article emphasize the importance of the largest cities’ development, which is based on an industrial model that has not exhausted its potential. The authors show possibilities of urban development on the basis of the industrial sector effective functioning in order to improve the citizens’ welfare, meet their needs and improve the life quality. In this regard, the authors formulate a hypothesis that the largest (...) Russian cities developing according to the industrial model have and are able to realize their potential in order to improve the life quality, preserve and increase the population on their territory. The authors set a goal: to identify the possibilities for developing industrial-type megalopolises to improve the population’s life quality of the (PLQ). Methods. The authors use the following information base: strategic documents of different levels, statistical data, scientific literature, analytical documents, and expert assessments of the megalopolises’ development. The authors also use an industrial model for developing the largest cities; they determine conditions under which the potential of megacities can be realized to improve the citizens’ life quality and carry out an analysis of the demographic and social situation in the largest Russian industrial cities. The authors evaluate some approaches and theses of the study as exemplified by the following cities with a million-plus population: Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Chelyabinsk, and Omsk and they group the cities according to the signs of growth and decline, which is illustrated by favorable or unfavorable demographic trends. To confirm the identified trends and problems of the largest cities, the authors provide the results of expert assessments on the population’s life quality and the state of the urban environment and emphasize the need for a systemic integrated development of the largest cities of industrial type to improve the life quality of the population of megalopolises. The scientific novelty of the study consists in substantiating the prospects for the socio-economic development of the largest industrial cities of Russia on the basis of an industrial model that provides for the technological transformation of the economy, the use of agglomeration effects, the formation of a friendly urban environment for residents and the achievement of socialization of urban space. Results and conclusions. As a result of the analysis and typology of the largest cities by functional specialization, two groups of cities were identified: one group with signs of demographic growth, the second with signs of decline. The cities of the first group have a greater economic potential, opportunities for agglomeration, provide more comfortable living and consolidation of the population on their territory. On the contrary, cities with signs of decreasing have fewer opportunities (resources), are less diversified, the urban environment in them is less comfortable, which is reflected in the citizens’ life quality and is accompanied by the population’s outflow. At the same time, it was revealed that all analyzed cities actively use digital technologies, realizing, in particular, the concept of a «smart city». At the same time, cities with signs of decreasing show high IQ indicators of cities. Taking into account the identified problems, the authors propose promising directions for the development of industrial megalopolises with signs of decline. (shrink)

The scale and diversity of megacities finds analogous scale and diversity in the violence witnessed and experienced in these complexly dense urban sites. From full-scale military invasion to internecine ethnic and tribal conflict, from paramilitary incursions to strategic car bombs, from slum clearance to pervasive everyday low-level violence, from Mafia-led armies to incessant inflictions of violence on the urban poor, and from missile launches to machete attacks, megacities, most unfortunately, have them all. This article contextualizes many of the (...) key concerns and issues addressed by the four main articles in the section; it does so by arguing for some specific historical, genealogical and technological explanations for the range and scale of violence inflicted upon and within megacity sites. The section proleptically discusses megacity phenomena that will be taken up in greater detail in the forthcoming second volume of the New Encyclopaedia Project Megacities: Problematizing the Urban. (shrink)

Taking technological developments in urban mapping and the megacity phenomena of rapid change and sprawling space as its starting point, this essay provides a history of the present through a genealogy of maps of Montpellier in France, a rapidly growing modern city that provides examples from the earliest printed maps of the 16th century through to the most recent innovations in public-sponsored 3D mapping. By tracing the shifting correlations of narrative elements, it places in historical perspective the relationship between those (...) concepts, such as verticality and horizontality, and perception and representation, which are problematized in the contemporary contexts of megacities and digital technology. (shrink)

This article, which introduces the special section on The Urban Problematic, takes as its starting point the ways in which categories associated with the ‘urban’ have broken down, such that the once singular and coherent concept ‘city’ has disintegrated in certain ways: the notion has been demythologized, so that representations of the city must now be regarded as partial and invested; and cities themselves have become opaque and unpredictable both to urban scholars and to governments, planners and various kinds of (...) welfare organizations. The indications of crisis, captured for instance by concerns about the slums, favelas and shanty towns of the world’s megacities, also indicate that much of what counts in modern urban life is in some way connected with the marginal, the unofficial, and the supplemental. The article takes a supplemental view of the current state of urban dwelling. This involves at the same time a longer, more patient, historical view in its attempt to understand the current state of the city as part of a shift in the play of heterogeneous forces. With reference to the articles contained in The Urban Problematic, this introductory article finally draws attention to some of the urgent and critical issues of contemporary urbanism. (shrink)

In a modern, calculative world, the techniques of tracking are everywhere in the ascendant. Enhanced by algorithmic procedures and analytics, they have been incorporated into distributed network systems, augmented by new sensing and locationing technologies, and embedded into mobile devices, urban structures and environments. Simultaneously, new practices of tracking and sensing have emerged across the consumer, state and corporate sectors. These practices are amplified in the case of megacities as they strive to keep pace with rapid urban development. All (...) movement is subordinated to a condition of 'calculative mobilization’, whereby the urban realm is understood through the spatialization of algorithmic operations. And yet, due to their unique large- and multi-scaled accumulations of data-enhanced actors and their complex, stratified modes of proximity and interoperable relationality, the particular densities of megacities challenge conventional spatial formats of movement and positioning. This article offers new formats of analysis for these calculative practices and the agential and ontological status of the hybrid urban entities that they register and engender. It also offers new structuring principles and political orientations, which are particularly urgent as we witness the ascendance of 'Spatial Data Infrastructures’ that are often promoted as participatory and inclusive while remaining largely inaccessible, pursuing proprietary aims, and infused with the potential not only to protect and inform but also to violate. (shrink)

This paper argues that cultural analyses of electric light, including aspects of actor-network theory, may raise the spectre of complexity, but do not do it justice when they omit to provide analysis of the intertwined roles of culture and political economy in the formation of the provision and use of electric light. The essay looks at the marketization of electric power, at outages in the eastern and western US megacities, at the collapse of the public utility model and chaotic (...) implementation of market models in Mumbai, Lagos and other poor megacities, and concludes that while theft of power provides a temporary solution, abandoning centralized market models in favour of microgrids is the only sure way to return agency to slum dwellers. (shrink)

This essay deals with technologies, techniques, business models and legal structures governing telecommunications infrastructures. Megacities are especially vulnerable to shifting agencies in telecoms provision. This paper addresses the relation of the economics of growth, built-in obsolescence and product life cycles with the complex determinations of telecommunications governance in relation to the physical environment of megacities. It argues that an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ must be integrated into considerations of both ecological critique and analyses of telecommunications infrastructure and business (...) practice. (shrink)

One of the features of some megacities is the production of a current terror set up on dull, rambling, chaotic and terrifying scenarios. In this sense, the city is machinery torturing human bodies and bringing them under a regular condition administered by imaginaries which do not always coincide with reality but determine thoughts, emotions and behaviors that are crystallized on an urban rhetoric. This article aims to contrast an imaginary dangerous city that generates a peculiar dynamism of Bogota and (...) list some immediate token effects on communication of its inhabitants. (shrink)

Cities are inextricably bound to their human denizens, although this human dimension is complicated by the emphasis on scale, speed, and progress that often dominates the semiotics and discourses of urban competition. In a profoundly ambivalent movement, various aspects of human “livability” are highlighted in the “quality of life” components of cities rankings and planning, while at the same time the “megacity” trend in planning and semiosis constantly threatens to overwhelm precisely that human livability. We can thus detect two broad (...) and fundamentally-opposed semiotic trends, namely, the confidently cosmopolitan trend that emphasizes urban growth and the positive effects these are assumed to have on quality of life; and the dehumanizing trend that emphasizes the human cost of urban growth and its technological components. The profound ambivalence that this indicates, needs to be figured into urban discourses towards a more holistic and balanced account. (shrink)

In dialogue with Bishop and Phillips’ concern to establish what the category of the urban might mean in the context of megacities, this piece offers four provocations in the spirit of developing their analysis. The first is the need to attend to the specifics of megacities; the second insists on the importance of including those who navigate them in the analysis; the third is a concern to unwind different forms of urban traction, and the fourth is a need (...) to be mindful of the intersecting logics of translocality. Drawing on my own empirical research into the urban translocalities drawn by the flip-flop trail, it concludes that globalization is less solid and more fragile and shifting than many of its theorists suggest. (shrink)

This article approaches the recent work of pre-eminent Indian conceptual artist Vivan Sundaram, Trash, as a supplement to dominant representational practices of, and within, the Indian megacity. Re-purposing tropes that motivate both popular and specialist discourses, Sundaram’s recent ensemble rehearses the discursive construction of the megacity-as-waste, by representing an urban totality through elaborate, ordered arrangements of garbage. Working collaboratively with waste-pickers who are members of the non-governmental organization Chintan: Environmental and Research Action Group in New Delhi, the artist sorts, re-assembles (...) and scales the found-objects of Trash into detailed models of a monumental urban landscape. Through a close reading of its formal aspects, the entry examines Trash’s reflection on logics of planned obsolescence which govern both the work as well as fantasies of economic nationalism premised on dualistic images of the global/mega-city. (shrink)

Solutions to the urban problems of the future must assume the new reality of megacities. The inevitable technological progress must find a balance with the ‘bio-ecological' recovery of the natural environment. In the vertical bionic city, all these occur; bio intelligence and giant structures of the city are merged into a single. These structures try to survive by relying on working together as a single organism alive, as ants work in their nest. What makes them so efficient? What makes (...) them work all together? What will be the future form of our building environment? Our future habitable environment is more likely to be in a vertical built form, against the horizontal city form. There are many reasons to believe that the new vertical cities will be more sustainable than the conventional horizontal cities. If this logic is accepted as the future scenario, then the question facing all planners and architects today is: Should we take this built form and make it more socially accepted, physically habitable, and human? This paper examines some of the key implications of this scenario, and the criteria for the design and planning of our future sustainable built environment as the vertical cities in the sky. (shrink)

Low-carbon innovation is usually depicted as an exemplar of pursuit of the common good, in both mainstream policy discussion and the emerging orthodoxy of transition studies. Yet it may emerge as a key means of intensifying inequality. We analyse low-carbon innovation as a social and political process through the prism of differential risk-classes, focusing on the pivotal global case of emergence of the Chinese middle-class in seaboard megacities, especially regarding the profound challenges of urban e-mobility transition. This approach shows (...) emergence of this still-forming sociopolitical grouping as tightly and complementarily coupled with the assembling of innovations that meaningfully tackle global risks, such as climate change, while also intensifying existing inequalities. Misrecognition of the duality of low-carbon innovations as both moral technologies and as relatively expensive consumer products has the potentiality to be a key mechanism of this process, thereby serving to reproduce, constitute and legitimize inequalities in novel and unexpected ways. (shrink)

Urbanity has been a key concept to describe western cities since the beginning of the 20th century. But the importance of urbanity is no longer self-evident in global cities since the pivotal moment of 1980/90, when we witnessed the acceleration of flux, the emergence of megacities and the transformation of capitalism. At the same time, urban heritage became of greater interest. Then, as urbanity weakened, it began to be defended by public policies, local commitments and activists in a new (...) way: as collective memories and palimpsest traces. In this article, I consider two examples in the French city of Saint-Etienne to illustrate the heritagization of urbanity: an exhibition about the memory of Algerian miners, and the dramatic demolition of a high-rise building that created a great stir because of its local symbolic significance. These two examples show that urbanity keeps a great place in the imaginary of urban dwellers, including the elites. From a general point of view, we try to preserve the values that we attach to cities, perhaps more than trying to preserve the cities themselves. (shrink)

Urbanity has been a key concept to describe western cities since the beginning of the 20th century. But the importance of urbanity is no longer self-evident in global cities since the pivotal moment of 1980/90, when we witnessed the acceleration of flux, the emergence of megacities and the transformation of capitalism. At the same time, urban heritage became of greater interest. Then, as urbanity weakened, it began to be defended by public policies, local commitments and activists in a new (...) way: as collective memories and palimpsest traces. In this article, I consider two examples in the French city of Saint-Etienne to illustrate the heritagization of urbanity: an exhibition about the memory of Algerian miners, and the dramatic demolition of a high-rise building that created a great stir because of its local symbolic significance. These two examples show that urbanity keeps a great place in the imaginary of urban dwellers, including the elites. From a general point of view, we try to preserve the values that we attach to cities, perhaps more than trying to preserve the cities themselves. (shrink)

Introduction. The article is devoted to identifying features of spatial placement of health clinics in megacities and assessing the degree of compliance/ deviation with standards of pedestrian accessibility. Methods. The theoretical and methodological basis of the research is scientific ideas in the field of regional economics, spatial and normative analysis. Scientific novelty of the research consists in as- sessing availability and saturation of territories by health clinics, in the context of features of their spatial placement, taking into account the (...) estab- lished regulatory requirements. Results. The place of the megacities of Ural Federal District among the megacities of Russia has been determined according to the conditions affecting availability of health clinics for the population. When carrying out a cartographic analysis of spatial placement of health clinics in Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk, district features of the cities studied were established, which made it possible to identify the existing problem areas characterized by an im- balance in the level of infrastructure facilities acces- sibility in relation to the regulatory requirements. The authors show the uneven coverage of clinic service areas, which reduces pedestrian and transport accessibility for citizens when receiving medical services. The features and differences of territorial localization of clinics in the actively built- up areas of Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk are revealed. Conclusions. The results obtained can be applied in the framework of determining priorities for implementing spatial transformations of studied territories and the authorities’ decision-making in order to increase medical services availability. (shrink)

The genealogy of ethics starts in the polis. Plato and Aristotle had an optimistic view of polis life, even though Plato was born shortly after the plague of Athens, an experience that left a deep imprint in his society, and interestingly not a very good opinion of democracy. The idea of the polis as the ideal locus for human flourishing can be contested because we do not share the same face-to-face form of life with the ancient polis-dwellers. Contemporary megacities (...) do not harbor an agora in which citizens debate current affairs. Such debates have shifted to social media. It is worth investigating the value of face-to-face interaction even today. Despite the risk of spreading airborne lung diseases like the Corona virus, the possibility of face-to-face interactions allows the cultivation of attention necessary for ethics. Knowing your neighbor by acquaintance, seeing her face every day can make pedestrians better attuned to the need to protect her in times of the pandemic, by maintaining distance and wearing a mask. If this is indeed the case, then it has implications for urban design: urban density can be designed in a way that affords functional proximity and more humane neighborhoods. (shrink)

The language that global justice theorists use to characterize global poverty, the terms of duty and charity, are detached discourses that fail to capture the reality of poverty as most people currently experience it, as slum dwellers living on the outskirts of the world’s megacities. In contrast, the language of alienation better captures the experience of global, urban poverty. This article’s aim is to draw from Hannah Arendt to form a new idea of alienation that responds to the specific (...) conditions of urban, global poverty. Arendt posits alienation in terms of the ‘loss of the world’: the deprivation of durable material structures and lasting institutions that are the preconditions for political speech and action. The language of alienation evidences how the problem of poverty is one of a lack of meaningful work, the kind of work that creates a livable world. (shrink)

This paper examines the presentsupply of milk to the urban inhabitant ofMexico City, paying particular attention tocurrent themes of market liberalization,sustainable development, and democratization.This is facilitated by an infrastructure withinand without the metropolitan zone and coexistswith a large importation of milk from theinternational market, much being sold at lowprices to low income groups. Reduced statequality regulation has enabled the use of theseimports in industrialized milk products. Giventhe integration of international and nationalsources in milk supply, simply increasingMexican production will not reduce (...) imports, andthe NAFTA trade pact is unlikely to address theresource exploitation problems faced bynational production. (shrink)