This article examines the architecture of public access and of private digital networks in order to establish in what ways they might be subject to regulation, alter the authority of the national state, and have positive or negative impacts on liberal democracy and on the political potential of civil society. Two of the key issues explored in this context are the meaning of regulation, which is likely to be quite different from our historically grounded understandings of state regulation, and, second, (...) the sharp and often overlooked differences between public access and private digital networks. (shrink)

This is an ethnographic and theoretical exploration of the `shadows': vast transnational networks of goods, services, people and exchanges that flow outside formal and legal state channels and international laws. These networks involve millions of people and more than a trillion dollars yearly worldwide, and my research demonstrates these are more formalized, integrated and rule-bound than traditional studies have suggested. Thus, `shadow' networks broker political, economic and social power that can rival many of the world's states, and they are profoundly (...) implicated in world markets. This article explores core characteristics and cultures defining extant extra-state systems, and the power and potentialities for social sovereignty they wield. Investigation into shadow realities prompts a reassessment of the basic theoretical ideas concerning the nexus of legality/illegality, state/non-state and formal/non-formal power relations defining the world today. (shrink)

Questions of sovereignty are unavoidable when considering the production of social power within the context of modernity and globalization. If sovereignty refers to the existence of a highest or supreme power over a set of people, things, or places, then we ought to question whether sovereignty can be legitimately `located' in an agent like a state. Is not supremacy more accurately associated with the structures of relations that set the terms for - or are constitutive of - a domain of (...) social existence? This social sovereignty offers us a way to understand not only how both state and nonstate actors can together be central to the governance of social domains, but also how communities can fashion sovereign `societies' as opposed to states. The case of globalized financial markets is explored as a pointed example of a transboundary form of social sovereignty. (shrink)

A distinction between basic archetypes of urban form was made by Bruno Fortier: the accumulation city as opposed to the creation city. These archetypes derive from archaeology - being based on the Roman and the Egyptian city - but are interpreted as morphological paradigms, as a set of assumptions and underpinnings determining spatial planning and design. The creation city is described as expression of modernity - the paradigmatic origins of which can be traced back to Descartes’ ideas on the city (...) - analysed as an ontology of destruction, among other things. A conceptual framework connecting the creation city to modernity is presented by interpreting Fortier’s archetypes through the anthropological work of W.T. Jones. Influenced by postmodern cultural analysis and architectural discourse, the paradigmatic importance of the accumulation city seems to increase. It is argued that interest in the accumulation city is related to a discord which is characteristic of modernity but which seems to be denied by the urbanistic modernism of the 20th century. Methodologically, we argue that modernism should be seen as part of a post-paradigmatic phase of modernity rather than as an expression of modernity at its zenith. It is argued that the discord of modernism should not lead to a discussion of modernism and postmodernism as contrary paradigms, but that the understanding of the city oscillates dialectically between these two paradigms. (shrink)