The power of locality

No matter how much I may argue in favour of the flow, international urban areas, long distance commmuting..., the place remains strongest. Being close to an area doesn't make you live there. On a global scale approach you are there. Access to the city's highlights are easy. a concert, show, restaurant, stroll in the park, museum, bar are just a short plane ride away. But you miss out on the micro level, without doubt, what constitutes the flavour of the place. What happens on a normal, uneventful day? You miss out on the peasure of walking up and down the same street every day, witnessing the changes, dropping by the same bar, grocery store, video store day after day and living in a local space of flows. Your neighbourhood becomes your city -and you leave out on all the global extravaganza ie. the stuff you would do if you were just a short plane ride away. Geography is stronger than ever and you can truly be at one place at a time only.

No matter how much I may argue in favor of the flow, international urban areas, long distance commmuting..., I am leaving London for Paris and that makes all the difference.

Distance : Death or Tyranny

I went to a conference "The Internet's gold age is over ?" last night hosted by the Economist and RSA. One speaker, Danny Meadows-Klue, in his overly marketised speach was referring to tyranny of distance, at least a dozne times (whether he knows it or not, sentence comes from George Blainey's 1966 book on Australian history).

The issue the conference didn't raise was whether the internet has contributed to the death of distance or whether it circumvates its tyranny.

premise of the space of flows

"The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation and circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polarization of matter , inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns"
Deleuze & Guattari, 1986

provincially global

The more I speak to the London international population (that is to say practically every londoner) the more I realize that they usually come from provincial towns / villages in their country and sidestepped their capital city for London (and some other global cities). Conversely, it is much less common to find people from major cities (Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin...) coming to London unless they've got high powered jobs they couldn't get in their cities -essentially in the advanced-production service firms.

I haven't quite figured out how to interpret and illustrate this but it definitely is interesting and worth some investigation. But I doubt I would be wrong to argue that apart from the alleged managerial elite, migration to global cities originate in provincial cities. It is a theory of extremes : reject where you came from by moving to the whole opposite. Or is it just that other major cities have enough to keep their inhabitants happy.

the flows of music

I usually focus my interests on transnational global flows but the other day a whole other type of flow struck me. It was at the Old Blue Last , where the bar was having a concert promoting a new independent rock magazine. A group from Liverpool came on stage and first thing they said to to get the crowds was "oh come on Shoreditch, we've heard so much about you". This is globally local. They're not talking about any prejudice they may have on London (like is the case in most instances) but about an east-end neibhourhood. They're not so much playing in London than in Shoreditch -and they associate the crowd to the neighbourhood. They were referring to a non spatial element, more human than geographic; a humanised neighbourhood characterized by a specific place in time. Interestinglty, are we in a space of places or of flows. Is Shoreditch made up of Shoreditch (like they say) or by people like themselves who make and change Shoreditch ?

Thankfully (for the group and for myself) the crowd was slightly more low key than your traditional Shoreditch folks. It was a micro locale in a space of flows.

"I don't like it, it's like instant food, you know"

Eva told me this over google chat -referring to instant messaging.
"Wow". I told her. "That's a cool sentence". I agree though I can't quite figure out what it really means and what the relation between chatting and instant food is -apart from the instant. But it is one of those sentences you remember.

Network security

So security / confidentiality is a big deals in companies.

That's why it isn't surprising that my floor is full of confidentiality bins; that you need a pass to go in and out of the toilets and in an out of the office -one reason for which we have to get up every few minutes to let someone in. OK. That's fine.

But when I notice that I could get access to the calendar / inbox of the company's most senior executives (through a simple Outlook manipulation) I didn't understand the confidentiality standards. For this reason, I won't state what company this is, but believe, accessing emails and calendars is a big deal...much bigger than letting a stranger in our bathrooms.

Eurostars and Eurocities

I borrowed this title from Alan Favell's (UCLA) essay on professional mobilities to London. I picked up a friend the other day at Waterloo. It was Friday night, the week's last eurostar from Paris to London. I first noticed that it was probably the first time I wait for someone from a long distance journey (although we could argue it's short distnace -but that's not the point). More importantly, I was moved by the people and international interconnections. There were quite a few french couples in the lot, with one of them working in London, the other probably studying in Paris. One couple moved me whereas the other depressed me. The latter were two young French, the guy looked like an ambitious young jerk keeping his girlfriend in Paris for comfort. No signs of happiness when they saw each other, no hugging or kissing, only a "ca va?" "et toi". There were also friends, waiting to party all week end (I was one of those)and family reunions. But the international flows and connections were fascinating. And similarly to Favell's conclusions, I start to wonder : has distance really disappeared and can London and Paris be considered one same functional area ? Yes for some (that alleged 'managerial elite'), but no way for most of us. Just go and witness the eurostar terminal.

blogs and girlfriends entangled in flows

So I'm in London and my girlfriend, a poor little czech girl (studying biology very hard) is in Prague. We are lucky to see each other relatively frequently (isn't London the capital of eastern Europea after all) and skype has made international communication costless. Despite all this, Eva (that's her name) comes on this blog -though, as a "prague-6 czech girl" she doesn't place networks and flows high on her interest list. Instead, she feels she accesses some kind of diary she wouldn't have otherwise. As much as the telephone-email-chat-videoconferencing-low cost airlines have contributed to shrinking distances, blogs apparently do so in a different, indirect way. And as I hope Eva will be happy to read this blog, I will wait anxiously for her comment.

Ok. Back to work and creating the London's Road Asset Inventory Management System.

glocalization and whirly gig

Glocalization, a much used words thesedays which refers to (1)
the contested restructuring of the institutional level from the national scale both
upwards to supra-national or global scales and downwards to the scale of the
individual body or the local, urban or regional configurations and (2) the
strategies of global localisation of key forms of industrial, service and financial
capital (Swyngedouw, 2004) is applicable in all circumstances.

Whirl-y-gig is a once a month 'hippy communicty rave'party in Hackney, east London (291 Hackney Road). It symbolizes glocalisation. Whil-y-gig brings together a global community to a local event. It takes place in a very local area of the world's greatest global city. The theme and atmosphoere is globally relaxed all the more thanks to the local edge. People travel from far away to spend a whirl-y-gig event. There's nothing quite like it, in London and elsewhere, and that's what makes it the best glocalised gig (www.whirl-y-gig.org.uk)

email flows (2)

To support yesterday's blogs. It's only 4 in the afternoon and no less than 14 emails have already gone through to organize dinner tonight with a bunch of friends. Has email made any decision process so complex ?

email flows and decision

I've just invited a friend to spend the week end in London. Looking back at my emails, I notice it's taken 10 email correspondences (five emails each) to invite her.

Any simple decision involves a surprising amount of email exchanges (my average is 10-12) be it deciding where to go for dinner. No time to think about the sociological reasons for such reasons but I believe (from personal experience) that email, in the workplace at least, are a sort of entertainment, a mini-break from your activities -and thus the more emails you exchange (saying nothing), the better you may feel.