August - Liminal Research

Function and Dysfunction

by August October 13, 2022

Our relationships to Information Systems and Information and Communication Technologies Are Not the Same

by August October 13, 2022

Information systems (IS), according to my Information Systems, Services, and Design professor, are not technology dependent. They are what people use to gather, store, process, use, and spread information. They are used to enable processes or solve problems, and they aren’t technology dependent. People, he says, have creative and adaptive relationships with information systems. The history of information systems is the history of growing cities and transactional record keeping. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), however, are technology dependent. They are the bits and pieces of hardware and software that we use to execute information systems, and our relationships with them are instinctively dysfunctional. ICTs are computers and telephones and social media, but they are also ships and artillery, and their history is the history of power relationships.

Books

Dream States, by John Lorinc

by August October 12, 2022

A disappointing effort from a respected journalist.

by August October 12, 2022

Cover image for Dream States, by John Lorinc

I expected more from the senior editor of Spacing. Aside from the obligatory comments on Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project and the COVID-19 pandemic, there is almost nothing in this book I haven’t read before, or that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. It’s 2022—do I really need to read yet another chapter about ShotSpotter like it’s news? Lorinc writes about many of these projects and issues like a newspaper reporter, which is to say we learn a lot about other people’s opinions of them, but precious little about his own. He also cites the work of many “smart city” academics from the late 2010s, and even they are frequently just rehashing material covered better in Adam Greenfield’s 2013 Against the Smart City. What the “smart city” conversation needed from John Lorinc was precise thinking and strong opinions, and what it got instead was a literature review.

Policy

The Residential Is Political

by August October 8, 2022

A perpetual crisis is not a crisis, it is a system.

by August October 8, 2022

Housing crisis is a consistent, predictable outcome of a basic characteristic of capitalist spatial development: housing is not produced and distributed for the purpose of dwelling for all; it is produced and distributed as a commodity to enrich the few. Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended.
David Madden and Peter Marcuse. In Defense of Housing.

It has recently come to light that nearly 40% of Canadian members of parliament are either landlords or otherwise invested in the real estate market, at a time when the cost of shelter, whether renting or purchasing, has become untenable for many Canadians, and government action—when the government has acted at all—has brought little or no relief. Canadians can check this useful list to see if their MP among the forty percent.

Policy

Affordable Housing

by August October 7, 2022

Defining “affordable” is one of the most complicated elements of discussions around “affordable housing.”

by August October 7, 2022

Canada is one among few Western countries to depend nearly entirely on market mechanisms for its housing stock. About 95 percent of Canadian households currently obtain their housing through the open market. However, households living in poverty with poor social safety nets don’t have enough spending power to influence private developers, which means the housing markets tend not to respond to their needs.
“Defining ‘Affordable’,” Katrya Bolger, House Divided: How the Missing Middle Can Solve Toronto’s Affordability Crisis, edited by Alex Bozikovic et. al.

Personal

On Returning to School at 43

by August October 7, 2022

The voice of experience whispering in my ear is a double-edged sword in the classroom.

by August October 7, 2022

It’s a strange thing to be returning to the classroom after nearly 20 years away. I was initially full of all the expected anxieties: will I have difficulty learning the material? Will I still be able to do academic assignments after years of job-oriented work? What will it be like being one of the few, or even the only, middle aged students in a room full of people young enough to be my children?

It’s mostly fine, as it turns out. The workload has been exhausting, because I’m still working full time, but the work itself so far is not especially difficult, and I’m having no real problems sliding back into academic ways of thinking and doing. The age difference between me and my fellow students is a bit more of a barrier, although I do think it’s felt almost entirely on my side. I’m having a hard time not thinking of my fellow students as “kids,” albeit in an affectionate sense, not a derogatory one. And they are smart kids. (I mean, of course they are; they wouldn’t have been admitted to this graduate program if they weren’t intelligent and capable.) I’m in large classes that make seminar-style discussions difficult, but I learn a lot anytime one of them raises their hand to speak or ask a question. We’re a program made up of students from many different undergraduate disciplines, and I genuinely love it when I get to listen to them tackle issues from perspectives that never would … [continue reading] “On Returning to School at 43”

Writing

Academic and Para-Academic Writing

by August October 6, 2022

Para-academic writing aims to communicate the same level of sophisticated thinking as academic writing without the in-group signalling.

by August October 6, 2022

In the final years of my undergraduate degree and throughout my other graduate-level experience, I made a conscious effort to shed most of the trappings of academic writing. I tried to write in simple, clear sentences. I minimized my use of jargon, making sure to use only those technical terms that were absolutely essential to conveying my meaning. I am not intimidated by complex academic writing, and I am as capable as the next person of parsing it. But I have come to see that thinking clearly and writing clearly are linked, and if the goal of academic writing is to communicate clear—albeit sophisticated and sometimes complex—thinking, then by that measure most academic writing fails miserably. I have also come to know what I was aiming for instead as “para-academic” writing, work that is adjacent to the academy but not necessarily of it.

As an example of what I mean, I want to take a brief look at a journal article from the International Journal of E-Planning Research called “Allocation of Residential Areas in Smart Insular Communities: The Case of Mykonos, Greece.” I’m currently doing research for an annotated bibliography on data-driven (or data-assisted) housing discrimination, so this seemed like it might introduce me to some technologies or methods that would be new to me. It didn’t, and I won’t be using the paper, but it’s a good case study for how academic writing fails at communication, but how it can succeed at something else.

I’m going to … [continue reading] “Academic and Para-Academic Writing”