Spatial Logic Research Articles

A Tale of Two Cities: the intrinsic spatial logic of courier protests

AbstractProtests differ and so do protest outcomes. This is also the case in food delivery gig work, which is characterised by frequent labour unrest. Various cross-country analyses have pointed to the importance of the national context for the strategies and outcomes of courier protests. However, as the article shows, the protests already differ at the level of different cities. To analyse this, the study argues that the heterogeneity of protests in platform-mediated courier work is due to the spatially distinct logic of the respective cities. The research is based on two case studies of food delivery platforms in Germany, which were investigated with a mixed methods research design consisting of interviews, multi-sited ethnography and a survey. The findings show that the intrinsic logic of the two centres of courier protests studied (Cologne and Berlin) played a central role in the composition of the protesting groups, their strategies and subsequently the outcomes. However, it turns out that intrinsic logics are not homogeneous and in fact may exist in various forms, which can be complementary or in conflict with each other and are supported and realised by different social groups. In addition, the size of the cities also proves to be decisive for the dynamics of the protests.

Integrating space syntax with field observations to understand the spatial logic of park infrastructure

ABSTRACT Park pathway characteristics can influence the movement of visitors and the functional usage of space. This article aims to assess the design of different types of public parks in Cairo, Egypt, through the lens of space syntax, which identifies spatial layout as a primary factor that determines pedestrian movement. We integrate space syntax metrics with field observations to examine the underlying spatial logic of small, medium and large public parks, and compare their three structures based on form and function. The results indicated that the degree of spatial accessibility and degree of control over accessing adjacent walkways were positively associated with movement flows on each walkway segment. However, many park facilities, such as wedding halls and theatres, tended to be randomly distributed due to the heavy commercialisation of the parks, which places facilities based on land availability. Our findings provide insights into the design and management of park environments. Overall, leisure facilities should be provided based on community needs. Noisy activities should be placed in isolated zones to attenuate noise. In addition, activities that serve various people groups should be located along highly accessible pathways to encourage their use.

Spatial logic of scientific research: an exploratory and quantitative analysis of 42 scientific research buildings sited in America and Europe

ABSTRACT Since the nineteenth-century devolution of natural philosophy into disciplines, scientific activity has expanded from single-disciplined research to comprehensive research. The flow of information between different research teams makes scientific research and its places increasingly social, which is no longer limited to the closed laboratory workbench. Reviewing the literature, we found that the development of scientific research buildings experienced a transition from efficiency to openness. And the new organization of research communities and its demand for space put forward higher requirements for scientific research buildings. To deeply explore the design trends of scientific research buildings at this stage, the sample database is established using space syntax and K-means clustering algorithm software to quantitatively analyze spatial layouts of 42 scientific research buildings worldwide from the perspective of sociology and innovation, clustered into five categories. Each category shows a different tendency in terms of accessibility, visibility, and the proportion of public space, and the different spatial configurations and openness somehow reflect the attitude of the research organization or group towards the use of space.

A toolchain for strategy synthesis with spatial properties

We present an application of strategy synthesis to enforce spatial properties. This is achieved by implementing a toolchain that enables the tools CATLib and VoxLogicA to interact in a fully automated way. The Contract Automata Library (CATLib) is aimed at both composition and strategy synthesis of games modelled in a dialect of finite state automata. The Voxel-based Logical Analyser (VoxLogicA) is a spatial model checker for the verification of properties expressed using the Spatial Logic of Closure Spaces on pixels of digital images. We provide examples of strategy synthesis on automata encoding motion of agents in spaces represented by images, as well as a proof-of-concept realistic example based on a case study from the railway domain. The strategies are synthesised with CATLib, while the properties to enforce are defined by means of spatial model checking of the images with VoxLogicA. The combination of spatial model checking with strategy synthesis provides a toolchain for checking and enforcing mobility properties in multi-agent systems in which location plays an important role, like in many collective adaptive systems. We discuss the toolchain’s performance also considering several recent improvements.

A Modeling and Verification Method of Cyber-Physical Systems Based on AADL and Process Algebra

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are the next generation of intelligent systems that integrate information control devices with physical resources. With increasingly close connections between CPS components and frequent interactions, potential defects grow exponentially, rendering the operating environment of CPS unreliable. Therefore, research on methods and theories to ensure the correctness, safety and reliability of CPS is not only an important research topic but also an inevitable challenge. In this paper, we propose a CPS modeling and verification method based on Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) and process algebra to address this challenge. Due to the continuous, time-constrained, stochastic, uncertain and concurrent characteristics of CPS, this paper considers both flexibility and rigor in the modeling process. We first extend the ability of AADL to describe the multiple characteristics of CPS and propose Hybrid Probability-AADL (HP-AADL). Second, this paper introduces conditional execution, conditional interruption and probability operators into Temporal Calculus of Communication Systems (TCCS) and designs a new formal modeling language Hybrid Probability-Temporal Calculus of Communication Systems (HP-TCCS). However, HP-AADL is a semi-formal modeling language that cannot be directly used for formal verification, it cannot strictly guarantee the quality of the established CPS models, including its functional correctness and safety. Therefore, this paper proposes transformation rules from HP-AADL to HP-TCCS, which enables model checking of CPS models described in HP-AADL within HP-TCCS. Additionally, this paper designs a new formal specification language HPAT-Spatial Temporal Logic (HPAT-STL) based on Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) and Spatial Logic, which characterizes the temporal, probabilistic and spatial properties of CPS model. To achieve formal verification of HP-TCCS model and HPAT-STL formulas, this paper proposes a model checking algorithm HPAT-Model Checking Algorithm (HPAT-MCA). Finally, we discuss a typical CPS example to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in ensuring correct, safe and reliable CPS.

The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks

ABSTRACT Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imagined pasts. These projects are mutually exclusive and animate contemporary geopolitics. Second, we conceptualise the spatial logic of great power rivalry in the Second Cold War. In contrast to the first Cold War, when great powers sought to incorporate territory into blocs, the US and China currently compete on a global scale for centrality in four interrelated networks that they anticipate will underpin hegemony in the 21st century: infrastructure (e.g. logistics and energy), digital, production and finance. We review the state of competition in each network and draw two broad conclusions: (1) this mode of competition makes it difficult for either side to conclusively ‘win’ the Second Cold War, and (2) many countries are likely to remain integrated with both the US and China.

Latency, uncertainty, contagion: Epistemologies of risk-as-reform in crime forecasting software

A shift in crime analysis software used by municipal police departments in the US is currently underway from simpler predictive models to criminal ‘risk’ forecasting that uses data not specific to crime to direct police to areas with ‘environmental risk factors’ such as bars, transit stops and mental health facilities. Through analyses of interviews with developers, industry professionals and law enforcement as well as published statements, this article offers a detailed examination of how the function and premises of ‘data-driven’ policing are altered by this turn to epistemologies of risk. I argue that the latent presence of ‘disorder’ supplements visible aberrations of ‘order.’ Statistical indeterminacies are called upon to justify a range of police interventions, and a focus on arenas of contagion supplements the spatial logic of containment. These turns reveal that the paradigm of ‘risk’ participates in the cooptation by technocratic reform of critiques exposing the problematic geographies of policing. I therefore suggest a shift away from critique oriented by revealing spatial bias in purported objectivity and towards interventions in the operationalization of indeterminacy itself and the vision of public life that undergirds and is enacted by this software.

A Spatial Logic for Simplicial Models

Collective Adaptive Systems often consist of many heterogeneous components typically organised in groups. These entities interact with each other by adapting their behaviour to pursue individual or collective goals. In these systems, the distribution of these entities determines a space that can be either physical or logical. The former is defined in terms of a physical relation among components. The latter depends on logical relations, such as being part of the same group. In this context, specification and verification of spatial properties play a fundamental role in supporting the design of systems and predicting their behaviour. For this reason, different tools and techniques have been proposed to specify and verify the properties of space, mainly described as graphs. Therefore, the approaches generally use model spatial relations to describe a form of proximity among pairs of entities. Unfortunately, these graph-based models do not permit considering relations among more than two entities that may arise when one is interested in describing aspects of space by involving interactions among groups of entities. In this work, we propose a spatial logic interpreted on simplicial complexes. These are topological objects, able to represent surfaces and volumes efficiently that generalise graphs with higher-order edges. We discuss how the satisfaction of logical formulas can be verified by a correct and complete model checking algorithm, which is linear to the dimension of the simplicial complex and logical formula. The expressiveness of the proposed logic is studied in terms of the spatial variants of classical bisimulation and branching bisimulation relations defined over simplicial complexes.

The spatial logic of health: Managing waste, water and infrastructure in later medieval Bologna

Medieval Bologna was a vibrant and dynamic city with hundreds of artisans, craftsmen, students, government officials (and other professionals), as well as animals, all sharing the same streets, neighborhoods, and waterways. As this paper will show, medieval officials were highly concerned with keeping their city and its environs, safe and healthy, and devoted significant amounts of time and resources to achieve these goals. Using Bologna as a case study, this article maps in GIS over one hundred regulations from the city’s urban statutes from 1245-67, to examine public health strategies. In doing so, it will demonstrate that medieval officials in Bologna employed a spatial logic as they created health regulations and oversaw the construction and maintenance of infrastructure. This spatial logic was grounded in an understanding of movement and an awareness of how, where, and when people, animals, goods, water, and waste moved through the city. In this way, the knowledge of space and movement were critical aspects of public health strategies which officials deployed to maintain a healthy and working city.

Afterlives in captivity: Indigeneity and penal deportation in southeastern South America

ABSTRACT This study analyzes intersections between penal deportation and Indigenous captivity in southeastern South America during the eighteenth century. Via records on Lincompani, a cacique taken captive in the southern borderlands of Buenos Aires and exiled to the Malvinas Islands alongside other prison laborers (presidiarios), it highlights the scale of penal deportation within the early Americas and connects the practice to the formation of geopolitical borders. As colonial officials banished purported criminals to borders, rather than across them, and banished male Indigenous captives from one borderland to another, these forced migrations reinforced territorialized spatial logics and contributed to Indigenous land dispossession. Drawing upon a half century of records from Malvinas, the article also analyzes convicts' and captives' experiences of penal deportation, highlighting instances when their shared status as presidiario may have superseded or been subordinated to ethnic distinctions, considering the gendered logics that shaped their banishment, and reflecting upon the narration of their actions via colonial records.

Development and territory branding: loyalty of the worldview of cities to create cultural exchange and recognition of identity

The general objective of the research is to analyze the development and territory brand: fidelization of the worldview of cities to create cultural exchange and recognition of identity. In this sense, the historical journey of Local Development is described from the economic-dominant thought and its relationship with Marketing, from a critical, inductive-descriptive methodology. One of the outstanding features of the late 20th century is the emergence of the spatial dimension as a fundamental referent of the economy and politics, both nationally and globally. In this sense, spatial variables are increasingly determinant with the location of production, trade flows and sociopolitical aspects of development. Also in Latin America, as in the rest of the world, a new spatial logic is permeating economic, political and social processes, constituting a fundamental concern of Marketing management, aimed at achieving business objectives of the territories through Brand-Territory.

Dixiecratic Dreaming and Disavowal in Plaquemines Parish: Leander H. Perez Memorial Park

ABSTRACT This paper situates a park commemorating Plaquemines Parish segregationist “Judge” Leander Perez, whose political career spanned from 1919 until his death in 1969, in the changing landscape of post-Civil Rights era white supremacist ambitions. Opened by the parish in 1979, officially closed in 1984, and re-established by residents of a nearby majority-white neighborhood under another name in 2020, the site’s uses reflect shifting iterations of white spatial logics oriented toward maintaining power through racialized exclusion (Lipsitz 2007). As a ruin, Leander H. Perez Memorial Park’s trajectory contrasts those of nearby plantation manors that were similarly dedicated as heritage sites in the late 1970s. Park brochures, archival newspaper articles, and ethnographic interviews illuminate the ways in which the park’s representations of Perez made continuities of the Antebellum plantation racial order too legible for comfort for those who benefited from the political philosophy he represented. I elaborate “commemorative concealment” as a way of recognizing an assortment of practices through which dominant groups in a racial hegemony maintain power by hiding continuities of past exclusions in the heritage landscape.

Dominant Development Indexes’ Construction of Gender and Challenges for Recognizing Everyday Activism for Peace and Security

Developed organizations have increasingly garnered numerous indicators to measure gender and development outcomes. Yet, measurements themselves reflect a logic of the arenas where development occurs and can be captured, and therefore reflect where women are imagined to predominantly exist. Based on the analysis of 1,298 indicators across 15 major development databases covering African countries, this article argues that mainstream development organizations predominantly understand gender in terms of institutional sites. Sometimes these were sites for intervention, or a place for institutional ‘betterment’ (a hospital, a work place, and a school). Other times, these sites were conceptualized as natural places where women would be (the family and the nation state). We identify the spatial logics underpinning these development indicators, and link them to larger historical gendered and racialized colonial logics organizing diverse social, economic, and cultural lives, where economic and institutional sites are promoted, a more nuanced and relational one is displaced. Ultimately, these spatial imaginings extend to the larger context of where debates about peace and security are situated—namely in largely individual, state-driven, and institutional-centric ways.

Топологическая рефлексия медиареальности: от образа к тексту

The article is devoted to the study of media reality. The thesis is postulated that media reality has a special spatial logic of its development. Media reality, according to the views of modern analysts, is located in the space between the text and the image. One of the productive methods of its study is topological reflection. This type of reflection includes the problem of positioning the researcher himself in the text and language. It is concluded that the «iconic turn» of modern mass culture requires its own textual analysis by means of philosophy.

Theorising the memescape: The spatial politics of Internet memes

AbstractDespite the increasing centrality of Internet memes for everyday political circulations and practices, their emergent implications as low-cultural artefacts of global politics have received little theoretical attention. In this article, I develop a critical theory of memes to provide a conceptual apparatus to understand the global political implications and possibilities of this pop-cultural phenomenon. I argue that, in order to attend to the emergent implications of memes and consider their differentiations from other pop-cultural phenomena, we need to unpack the spatial logic through which memes emerge and circulate. Analysing this spatial logic through the concept of the ‘memescape’ and deploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of striated and smooth spaces, this article articulates the spatial logic of the memescape as comprising rhizomatic, decentralised circulations of digital content; nomadic, playful, and humorous disruptions of once-stable signs; and affective congregations of a multiplicity of subjects. Through two examples exploring how these smooth spatial tendencies produce divergent political potentials in the resistant memes of Indigenous digital communities and reactionary memes of the Alt-Right, I conclude that the global politics of the memescape is open-ended and undetermined which requires careful and nuanced political and ethical attention to actualise its futures for emancipatory horizons.

Translocal networked public spheres: Spatial arrangements of metropolitan Twitter

In this study, we theoretically conceptualize and empirically investigate translocal spatial arrangements of networked public spheres on social media. In digital communication networks, actors easily connect with others globally, crossing the borders of cities, nations and languages. However, the spatial notions evoked in public sphere research to date remain largely territorial. We propose a theoretical framework drawing on Löw’s sociology of space, which highlights the relational and translocal nature of spatial arrangements. In a case study of the translocal interaction network of Berlin Twitter users, we demonstrate how this framework can be leveraged empirically using network analysis. Despite the overall network of Berlin’s Twittersphere spanning the whole world, we find territorialized as well as deterritorialized translocal communities. This points to the simultaneity of territorial and networked spatial logics in digital public spheres.

Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

Holy green: silwan, design knowledge, and the 1967 making of Jerusalem's Old City Walls National Park

ABSTRACT One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, at the heart of which lies the City of David archeological site. Much scholarship focuses on the contemporary tensions that arise from its two contradictory identities: an East Jerusalem Palestinian residential community and a Jewish symbol of a mythical past. This article, by contrast, explores a largely overlooked historical moment that has been key to the shaping of these dynamics: the declaration within merely six weeks after the 1967 war of an Israeli national park around the Old City Walls. The article explores how an unrealized British colonial plan for a green belt around the historic walls of Jerusalem was updated in 1967 by Israeli landscape architects using cutting-edge North American environmentalist ideas. Their blueprint, we argue, was crucial to the shaping of the ‘holy basin’s’ spatial logic, landscape imaginaries, and legal structures, necessary to understand the current turn of events. In this process, we highlight the centrality of incorporating longer-term perspectives in the study of contemporary urban realities, bringing into closer dialogue scholarship on present-day urbanism with historical studies of planning and cities.

Global South growth machines? A political-economic view of urban redevelopment and dispossessions in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT The dynamics of urban redevelopment processes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), especially around retail spaces, have gained currency among scholars. Some scholars frame these processes as state-led, informed by party politics, clientelism and meddling, and often resisted by traders and residents. Drawing from Growth Machine theory, this article uses a qualitative case study of the Takoradi Central Market (TCM) in Ghana to reframe this conversation in two important ways. First, it takes a broader view of these redevelopment processes by arguing they are constitutive of often-overlooked neoliberal processes that are disciplining the political-economic and spatial logics of people and spaces across sub-Saharan Africa. The TCM case illustrates the (mis)aligned spatial, economic, and political motives driving various actors within Ghana’s neoliberal placemaking processes that foster accumulation and dispossession around retail spaces under the cover of civic boosterism. Second, rather than simply focusing on local resistance and activism, the article orients us toward a relational understanding of the conflict that exits between market traders and the state by interrogating the embedded alliances and conflicts within and between different actors as they pursue their myriad (mis)aligned economic, spatial, and political motives. It is these inherent conflicts and alliances, and the neoliberal urban redevelopment contexts within which they occur, that must remain central to urban research and policy discourses in SSA.

Reconfigured securityscapes in Louis Trichardt: Possibilities, limitations, and contradictions

Insecurity, violence, and xenophobia manifest at different geographic scales of the South African landscape threatening to compromise, reverse, derail, and contradict the envisaged democratic processes and gains in the country. Since the dawn of the new democracy in 1994, the South African landscape has witnessed surges of different scales of violence, protests, riots, looting, criminality, and vigilantism in which question marks have been raised with respect to the right to the city or urban space and the right to national resources and opportunities, i.e., access, use, distribution and spread of social, economic, environmental, and political resources and benefits. Louis Trichardt is a small rural agricultural town located in the Makhado municipality of Vhembe District in Limpopo Province, South Africa. In the study, this town is used as a securityscapes lens of analysis to explore urban conflict and violence. The relative importance index (RII) was used to measure the barriers and solutions to advance safe neighborhoods' settlements and built environment areas in the study area. In this way, issues influencing the performance of reconfigured securityscapes in Louis Trichardt were explored by highlighting how new town neighborhood securityscape initiatives and activities are contributing to space, place, and culture change management transitions. The discussion pressure and pain points revolve around the widening societal inequalities, deepening poverty, influx of (ll)legal migrants and migrant labor, lingering xenophobia, and failure to embrace the otherness difficulties in the country. Findings highlight the options for urban (in)security, social (in)justice, and (re)design in post-colonies possibilities, limitations, and contradictions of securityscapes in (re)configured spaces of Louis Trichardt. Policy and planning proposals to improve safety and security spatial logic and innovation are explored. The critical role of community and local neighborhood watch groups in complementing state security and private registered security systems is one way of tackling this matter.