Francesca Artioli (2013): The Navy and the city: conflict, cooperation and political competition in the urban governance of Toulon, Urban Research & Practice, 6:1, 75-94
Abstract
This article contributes to the debate about urban governance in specialized European cities, by focusing on the interplay between changes in national defence policies and local initiatives. It is based upon qualitative research carried out in Toulon, a mid-sized French city and the biggest military port on the Mediterranean Sea. Firstly, it explains how the emergence of a new urban agenda aimed at diversifying the city from its military function challenged existing relations between the city and the Navy. As a con- sequence, new areas of conflict and cooperation can be observed. Secondly, it shows how political strategies adopted by elected officials respond to the need to legitimize the new agenda and to constrain the Navy to participate in it, while managing the mili- tary constituency. Despite a political discourse that proclaimed convergence of interest between the city and the Navy, the existence of a major conflict concerning the use and control of space doomed the partnership to a (partial) failure.
John Spencer serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies as the Modern War Institute and Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project. He is a retired Army major who served twenty-five years as an infantryman, including two combat deployments to Iraq.
This is the third article provided by the Head- quarters Supreme Allied Commander Trans- formation (HQ SACT) NATO Urbanization Project Team for The Three Swords Magazine.
This article presents Phase II-development of a capstone concept for urban operations-which was de- livered to the Military Committee (MC) at the end of November 2018.
https://www.jwc.nato.int/images/stories/_news_items_/2019/three-swords/NATOUrbanization_2035.pdf
by Alexandre Vautravers
International Review of the Red Cross, Volume 92 Number 878 June 2010
Abstract
Armies have traditionally avoided cities and siege operations. Fighting for and in cities is costly, slow, and often inconclusive. But sometimes they are unavoidable, either because they are located on main road or rail junctions or because of their value as political and/or economic prizes. Urban expansion in both north and south has made cities today the main theatres of military and humanitarian operations. Armies' structures, equipment, and doctrines are undergoing a process of adaptation. Manoeuvre has given way to fire power and protection for the troops as the decisive elements of military power. While heavy fire power does considerable damage and causes civilians to flee their homes, operations using protection techniques are only suitable for stabilization. Moreover, their success depends essentially on the willingness of troops to make sacrifices, and on support from the public.
https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/irrc-878-vautravers.pdf
by Major Steven P. Goligowski, USA, 61 pages. 1995
This monograph examines the contemporary environment of military operations on urbanized terrain (MOUT) and explores key issues that the US Army must resolve to improve its ability to conduct major operations in urban environments. From the analysis and discussion of these issues, the monograph draws conclusions about the sources of these issues and makes recommendations for implementing possible courses of action to resolve the issues.
Abstract
Algorithms and software are starting to catch the interest of social scientists and humanities scholars, having become somewhat of a buzzword in media and communication studies during the past years. Yet we are only at the beginning of understanding how algorithms and computation more broadly are aecting social life and the production and dissemination of knowledge as we know it. The introductory chapter sketches the contours of an algorithmic media landscape as it is currently unfolding by focusing on the ways in which Facebook friendships are programmatically organized and shaped through algorithmic systems. The chapter introduces the concept of “programmed sociality” to draw attention to software and computational infrastructure as conditions of possibility for sociality in digital media.
Abstract
Algorithms exist and operate on multiple levels. They are technical as much as they are social, cultural as much as they are functional. The chapter examines the multiplicity of algorithms, arguing for an expanded view on algorithms that takes it variable ontology into account. Providing the conceptual groundwork by merging perspectives from computer science, social sciences, and the humanities, the chapter explains the dierent meanings of algorithms as technical entities, and phenomena of social concern, respectively. Algorithms do not merely have power and politics; they are fundamentally productive of new ways of ordering the world as part of a much wider network of relations and practices. Oering a rich overview of critical algorithms studies, the author suggests that the multiplicity of algorithms is not about providing dierent perspectives on one static object called an algorithm but about realizing how the algorithm is already many things at once.
Abstract
If algorithms are multiple and variable in nature, how can they be known? The chapter draws on the concept of the black box as a heuristic device to discuss the nature of algorithms in contemporary media platforms, and how we might attend to and study algorithms, despite, or even because of, their seemingly inaccessible or secretive nature. Framing algorithms as eventful, understood as constituents that co-become, the author suggests, somewhat paradoxically, that algorithms are not always important. Rather, their agency emerges as important only in particular settings or constellations. The chapter argues that by shifting attention away from asking what and where agency is, to when it is mobilized and on whose behalf, we may begin to interrogate the black box not as an ontological or epistemological claim but, ultimately, a political one as well.
Abstract
Algorithms play a fundamental role in governing the conditions of the intelligible and the sensible online. If users provide the data, the techniques, and procedures to make sense of it, to navigate, assemble, and make meaningful connections among individual pieces of data is increasingly being delegated to various forms of algorithms. In the case of the world’s biggest and most used social media platform, Facebook, algorithmic mechanisms shape the concerted distribution of people, information, actions, and ways of seeing and being seen. The chapter investigates how this kind of algorithmic intervention into people’s information-sharing practices takes place and what are the principles and logics of Facebook’s algorithmic governance. Through an analysis of the algorithmic logics structuring the ow of information and communication on Facebook’s news feed, the argument is made that the regime of visibility constructed imposes a perceived threat of invisibility on the part of the participatory subject.
Abstract
Given the centrality of algorithms in the media landscape, how do they aect people’s everyday lives? Drawing on 35 interviews with social media users about their encounters with algorithms online, the chapter considers the barely perceived transitions in power that occur when algorithms and people meet. When do people encounter algorithms, and what responses and imaginations do these encounters generate? Analyzing specic situations in which users notice algorithmic mechanisms at work and start reecting and talking about them, the chapter shows how the algorithmic output of social media becomes culturally meaningful, as seen in the ways that people form opinions about specic systems and act strategically around them. The notion of the algorithmic imaginary is put forward to suggest that it might not always matter what the algorithm is but rather how and when people imagine and perceive algorithms as this is what shapes their orientations toward platforms.
Abstract
Algorithmic power and politics stems in part from how algorithms acquire the capacity to disturb and to compose new sensibilities as part of situated practices, particularly in terms of how they become invested with certain political and moral capacities. Looking at how algorithms materialize in the institutional setting of the news media, the chapter considers how algorithms are made to matter. Based on eld observations and 20 interviews with digital editors and managers at leading Scandinavian news organizations the chapter explores how institutional actors are responding to the proliferation of data and algorithms. The analysis shows how, on the one hand, news organizations feel the pressure to reorient their practices toward the new algorithmic logic governing the media landscape at large. On the other hand, algorithms work to disturb and question established boundaries and norms of what journalism is and ought to be.
Abstract
When conceptualizing the power and politics of algorithms it is important to blend an understanding of their material substrates with an understanding of the multiple ways of perceiving, feeling, acting, and knowing which congeal around algorithms as an object of social concern. The concluding chapter revisits some of the key questions of the book and looks at how algorithmic power and politics can be understood if power and politics are not necessarily about imposing force from above. The chapter serves to summarize the key contributions of the book in terms of: (1) providing an understanding of algorithms that is not committed to one ontological position, but instead sees algorithms in terms of a multiple and variable ontology, (2) helping to identify forms of algorithmic power and politics and (3) oering a theoretical framework for the kinds of work that algorithms do and the landscapes they help to generate.