Rob Sullivan – författare

This volume argues that the city cannot be captured by any one mode of analysis but instead is composed of the mobile, relational, efficient, sentient, and the phenomenological with all of them cast in new theoretical configurations and combined into one methodological entity. Rather than focusing on any one city or abstract analytical model, this book instead takes a multipronged theoretical and methodological approach to present the city as an intelligent affective organism – a sentient being. It proposes that cities operate on a relational, mobile, and phenomenological basis through the mode of efficiency, calibrated by a profoundly complicated division of labor. Its starting point is that the city is a mobile unit of analysis, from its economic status to its demographic makeup, from its cultural configuration to its environmental conditions, and therefore easily evades our quantitative and qualitative methods of computation and comprehension. Twenty-First Century Urbanism provides planning and urban design academics and students with a multifaceted approach to understanding the development of cities, encouraging the examination of cities through a myriad, non-linear approach.

The Metaphysical City examines the metaphorical existence of the city as an entity to further understand its significance on urban planning and geography. It encourages an open-minded approach when studying cities so as to uncover broader connecting themes that may otherwise be missed.Case studies of New York, Paris, Cairo, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Los Angeles explore a metaphor specific to each city. This multidisciplinary analysis uses philosophical treatises, geographical analysis, and comparative literature to uncover how each city corresponds to the metaphor. As such, it allows the reader to understand the city from six differing points of view.This book would be beneficial to students and academics of urban planning, geography, and comparative literature, in particular those with an interest in a metaphysical examination of cities.

The Metaphysical City examines the metaphorical existence of the city as an entity to further understand its significance on urban planning and geography. It encourages an open-minded approach when studying cities so as to uncover broader connecting themes that may otherwise be missed.Case studies of New York, Paris, Cairo, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Los Angeles explore a metaphor specific to each city. This multidisciplinary analysis uses philosophical treatises, geographical analysis, and comparative literature to uncover how each city corresponds to the metaphor. As such, it allows the reader to understand the city from six differing points of view.This book would be beneficial to students and academics of urban planning, geography, and comparative literature, in particular those with an interest in a metaphysical examination of cities.

Anthropologists, psychologists, feminists, and sociologists have long studied the “everyday,” the quotidian, the taken-for-granted; however, geographers have lagged behind in engaging with this slippery aspect of reality. Now, Rob Sullivan makes the case for geography as a powerful conceptual framework for seeing the everyday anew and for pushing back against its “givenness”: its capacity to so fade into the background that it controls us in dangerously unexamined ways. Drawing on a number of theorists (Foucault, Goffman, Marx, Lefebvre, Hägerstrand, and others), Sullivan unpacks the concepts and perceived realities that structure everyday life while grounding them in real-world cases, such as Nigeria’s troubled oil network, the working poor in the United States, China’s urban villages, and ultra-high-end housing in London and Cairo.In examining the everyday from a geographical perspective, Sullivan ranges widely across time, space, history, geography, Marxian reproduction, the body, and the geographical mind. The everyday, Sullivan suggests, is where change occurs and where resistance to change can begin. By locating the everyday through geography, we can help to make change possible. Whatever the issue, be it struggles over race, LGBT rights, class inequality, or global warming, the transformations required to achieve social justice all begin with transformation of the everyday order.

Anthropologists, psychologists, feminists, and sociologists have long studied the “everyday,” the quotidian, the taken-for-granted; however, geographers have lagged behind in engaging with this slippery aspect of reality. Now, Rob Sullivan makes the case for geography as a powerful conceptual framework for seeing the everyday anew and for pushing back against its “givenness”: its capacity to so fade into the background that it controls us in dangerously unexamined ways. Drawing on a number of theorists (Foucault, Goffman, Marx, Lefebvre, Hägerstrand, and others), Sullivan unpacks the concepts and perceived realities that structure everyday life while grounding them in real-world cases, such as Nigeria’s troubled oil network, the working poor in the United States, China’s urban villages, and ultra-high-end housing in London and Cairo.In examining the everyday from a geographical perspective, Sullivan ranges widely across time, space, history, geography, Marxian reproduction, the body, and the geographical mind. The everyday, Sullivan suggests, is where change occurs and where resistance to change can begin. By locating the everyday through geography, we can help to make change possible. Whatever the issue, be it struggles over race, LGBT rights, class inequality, or global warming, the transformations required to achieve social justice all begin with transformation of the everyday order.

Geography Speaks is an investigation of how geography is informed by speech act theory and performativity. Starting with a critical analysis of how J.L. Austin's speech act theory probed the permeability between fact and fiction, it then assesses oppositional interpretations by John Searle and Jacques Derrida, and in doing so, it explores the fictional aspects within scientific knowledge. The book then focuses on five key aspects of the geographical discipline and analyses them using the theories of speech acts and performance: the performative aspects of the creation of place; speech act performances and geopolitics; acts of cartographical construction as variations of speech act performance; the performative aspects of the creation of public and private space, and, finally; the history of the discipline as a sequence of performative acts that attempt to establish geography as being constitutive of this or that type of disciplinary method or scientific viewpoint. Geography Speaks is an interdisciplinary text with a distinct and clear focus on cultural geography while also synthesizing into geography ideas germane to historiography, the philosophy of language, the history of science, and comparative literature.

In the latter part of the C20th, a series of seminal books were written which examined Los Angeles by the likes of Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Allen Scott, Michael Dear, Frederick Jameson, Umberto Eco, Bernard-Henri Levy, and Jean Baudrillard which have been hugely influential in thinking about cities more broadly. The debates which were generated by these works have tended to be very heated and either defensive or offensive in approach. A sufficient amount of time has since passed that a more measured approach to evaluating this work can now be taken. The first section of this book, 'Contra This and Contra That', provides such a critique of the various theories applied to Los Angeles during the last century, balancing the positive with the negative. The second part of the book is an investigation of L.A. as it exists on the ground today. While political, the theoretical stance taken in this investigation is not mounted as a platform from which to advocate a particular ideology. Instead, it encompasses cultural as well as economic issues to put forth a view of L.A. which is coherent and cogent while at the same time considering its multi-layed, complex and ever-changing qualities. It concludes by arguing that sectored off and 'totalizing' visions of the city will not do as instruments of urban analysis and that only a theory as mobile as its target will do: one that replicates the polymer nature of this place. It proposes that, extending that theory to the world beyond this particular city, only a theory that models itself on the mobile and polymer nature of the world, while still retaining a sense of the actual and the real, will do as an instrument with which to comprehend the world. In doing so, this book is not only a model by which to think through Los Angeles, but as a model by which to think through other world cities.

Geography Speaks is an investigation of how geography is informed by speech act theory and performativity. Starting with a critical analysis of how J.L. Austin's speech act theory probed the permeability between fact and fiction, it then assesses oppositional interpretations by John Searle and Jacques Derrida, and in doing so, it explores the fictional aspects within scientific knowledge. The book then focuses on five key aspects of the geographical discipline and analyses them using the theories of speech acts and performance: the performative aspects of the creation of place; speech act performances and geopolitics; acts of cartographical construction as variations of speech act performance; the performative aspects of the creation of public and private space, and, finally; the history of the discipline as a sequence of performative acts that attempt to establish geography as being constitutive of this or that type of disciplinary method or scientific viewpoint. Geography Speaks is an interdisciplinary text with a distinct and clear focus on cultural geography while also synthesizing into geography ideas germane to historiography, the philosophy of language, the history of science, and comparative literature.

In the latter part of the C20th, a series of seminal books were written which examined Los Angeles by the likes of Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Allen Scott, Michael Dear, Frederick Jameson, Umberto Eco, Bernard-Henri Levy, and Jean Baudrillard which have been hugely influential in thinking about cities more broadly. The debates which were generated by these works have tended to be very heated and either defensive or offensive in approach. A sufficient amount of time has since passed that a more measured approach to evaluating this work can now be taken. The first section of this book, 'Contra This and Contra That', provides such a critique of the various theories applied to Los Angeles during the last century, balancing the positive with the negative. The second part of the book is an investigation of L.A. as it exists on the ground today. While political, the theoretical stance taken in this investigation is not mounted as a platform from which to advocate a particular ideology. Instead, it encompasses cultural as well as economic issues to put forth a view of L.A. which is coherent and cogent while at the same time considering its multi-layed, complex and ever-changing qualities. It concludes by arguing that sectored off and 'totalizing' visions of the city will not do as instruments of urban analysis and that only a theory as mobile as its target will do: one that replicates the polymer nature of this place. It proposes that, extending that theory to the world beyond this particular city, only a theory that models itself on the mobile and polymer nature of the world, while still retaining a sense of the actual and the real, will do as an instrument with which to comprehend the world. In doing so, this book is not only a model by which to think through Los Angeles, but as a model by which to think through other world cities.

This volume argues that the city cannot be captured by any one mode of analysis but instead is composed of the mobile, relational, efficient, sentient, and the phenomenological with all of them cast in new theoretical configurations and combined into one methodological entity. Rather than focusing on any one city or abstract analytical model, this book instead takes a multipronged theoretical and methodological approach to present the city as an intelligent affective organism – a sentient being. It proposes that cities operate on a relational, mobile, and phenomenological basis through the mode of efficiency, calibrated by a profoundly complicated division of labor. Its starting point is that the city is a mobile unit of analysis, from its economic status to its demographic makeup, from its cultural configuration to its environmental conditions, and therefore easily evades our quantitative and qualitative methods of computation and comprehension. Twenty-First Century Urbanism provides planning and urban design academics and students with a multifaceted approach to understanding the development of cities, encouraging the examination of cities through a myriad, non-linear approach.

Data mining provides a set of new techniques to integrate, synthesize, and analyze tdata, uncovering the hidden patterns that exist within. Traditionally, techniques such as kernel learning methods, pattern recognition, and data mining, have been the domain of researchers in areas such as artificial intelligence, but leveraging these tools, techniques, and concepts against your data asset to identify problems early, understand interactions that exist and highlight previously unrealized relationships through the combination of these different disciplines can provide significant value for the investigator and her organization.