Abstract:

Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change.

Reference:

Boulton, A., Brunn, S., and Devriendt, L. (2012) “Cyberinfrastructures and ‘smart’ world cities: physical, human and soft infrastructures.” In Taylor, P., Derudder, B., Hoyler, M., and Witlox, F., eds., International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities. Edward Elgar

Abstract:

This article encapsulates my thoughts about how to look, through landscape aesthetics, at an ordinary residential landscape in order to understand the ways in which people make sense of, draw on, and attempt to secure particular landscape visions and dispositions. More precisely, it deals with the articulation of a specific bungalow landscape aesthetic and a specific proprietary sense of property ownership in the Kenwick neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky. The framework adopted calls for a broadening of the purview of landscape aesthetics beyond the domains of “high culture,” elites, and the visual in order to interrogate the workings of ordinary landscapes at the interface of landscape epistemology (a way of seeing) and the tangible, visible scen

Reference:

Boulton, A. (2011) “Property and aesthetics in an ordinary American landscape.” Geographical Review 101(2), 224-42

Abstract:

In this paper, we introduce an approach to identifying and ranking cities in the current Information Age. Mindful of Manuel Castells' call for a “new spatial logic,” we argue that the informational “flow” characteristics of contemporary inter-city connections has to be taken into account when measuring the (relative) “importance” of cities. While recent information-based studies on urban networks are valuable additions to the global urban-systems literature, we would argue that there remains a lack of up-to-date and updatable studies of information flows that acknowledge that these flows are intangible and not simply embodied in people (in the case of airline network analysis) or places (in the case of studies that focus on the physical, enabling infrastructure of electronic communications). In order to understand more about cities and their relative positions in the Information World, we should study not only tangible informational infrastructures and their associated material flows between places, but also the cyberspaces of cities in relation to digital information. To illustrate our approach, we introduce and argue that Web search engine databases comprise appropriate datasets for examining the growing importance of knowledge as a raison d'être for a city's economic ranking on national, regional, and global scales. Based on a quantitative and qualitative hyperlink analysis using the leading and de facto standard Web search engine Google, we derive informational rankings of the world's 100 largest cities in respect to two prominent current issues that are global in scope: the global financial crisis and global climate change. Results include: that traditional, developed Western cities are most prominent in terms of the environmental measures while, in terms of the financial criteria, “new” Asian financial centers are ranked more highly. The paper concludes by outlining an agenda for further work on Web-based informational city rankings.

Reference:

Devriendt, L., Boulton, A.*, Brunn, S., Derudder, B., and Witlox, F. (2011) “Searching for cyberspace: the position of major cities in the Information Age.” Journal of Urban Technology 18(1), 73-92

Reference:

Boulton, A. (2011). “Engineering and the architecture of economic recovery: TARP, the New Deal and the evolving landscapes of crisis.” In Brunn, S., ed., Engineering Earth: Megaengineering Projects. Springer

Abstract:

Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change.

Reference:

Boulton, A., Devriendt, L., Brunn, S., Derudder, B., and Witlox, F. (2011). City networks in cyberspace and time: using Google hyperlinks to measure global economic and environmental crises. In Firmino, R., Duarte, F., and Ultramari, C., eds., Mobile and Ubiquitous Urban Infrastructures: Surveillance, Locative Media and Global Networks. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Reference:

Guest editorial: Just maps: Google’s democratic map-making community? Cartographica 45(1), 1-4. (2010)

Abstract:

This paper is set against the backdrop of an increasingly pervasive discursive coupling of peace with development, and of extremism with underdevelopment. An evolving knowledge economy discourse casts education as both a key determinant of economic development, and as a crucial tool in the battle for “hearts and minds” in a global war against terrorism and extremism. Education for development, and education as anti-extremism are the twin goals of the Filipino CD for Peace – a contribution to the UN-backed International Power Users of ICT (Information Communication Technology) Symposium. In this paper, I examine the ways in which this youth Symposium feeds into and mobilizes powerful logics around the links between education and development/counterterrorism. My argument is that education for development, and one of its articulations, the CD for Peace, are undergirded by and reproduce neoliberal development logics in several overlapping respects. I illustrate the ways in which the language of connection and collaboration reproduces a distinct rationality related both to the transformative potential of (private investment in) ICT and to the production of particular kinds of subjectivities: youth as connected, informed, economically valuable global citizens beyond the reach of extremists. The Power Users project works to (re)construct teenagers as “gurus”; conflict (and poverty, and terrorism) becomes solvable through education and ICT. I show how knowledge economy discourse powerfully constructs youth as learning subjects who come to imagine their own roles and identities in specifically neoliberal ways: not only as learners, but also as advocates for this nexus of technology, education, development and peace.

Reference:

Boulton, A. (2010). Education for development, CD for Peace: producing the ‘globally competitive’ child. Geoforum 41(2), 329-36

(Download PDF of author copy)

Note: Secondary authorship with Stan Brunn, Lomme Devriendt, Ben Derudder and Frank Witlox. (2010).

Abstract:

Geographers use a variety of economic, social, and demographic data to measure the importance of global cities and the linkages between cities. We analyze the importance and connectedness of European cities using hyperlinks, or the electronic information provided by the Google Search engine. Hyperlinks are Web sites representing information that is produced; they are especially useful in measuring the impact of contemporary crises. We use the phrases economic slowdown and global financial crisis to derive a Global Financial Score (GFS) for 16 core, semiperiphery and peripheral European cities and global warming and climate change to derive a Global Environmental Score (GES). London and Paris are in the European core; Rome, Dublin, Madrid and Prague are in the semiperiphery; while Tallinn, Riga, and Belgrade are in the periphery. A strong positive relationship exists between the GES and GFS. We examine the linkages of the 16 cities to the 100 largest world cities and illustrate, with "clockgrams," the linkages London, Brussels and Athens have with other world cities. We calculated the number of linkages each of the 16 cities had with other world cities to identify Europe's urban cores, semiperipheries, peripheries, and deep periph eries. New York is in the core of both the economic and environmental maps. Some world cities are in the semiperiphery of one category and periphery of another. Milan, Istanbul, and Delhi are in the deep periphery for the GFS while Toronto and Athens are for the GES. Hyperlinks represent valuable databases to measure the impact of crises and regional and global urban linkages.

Reference:

Brunn, S., Devriendt, L., Boulton, A., Derudder, B., and Witlox, F.  (2010). Networks of European cities in worlds of global economic and environmental change. FENNIA: International Journal of Geography 188(1), 37-49

Reference:

Boulton, A. (2010) ‘Making Poverty: A History.’ Journal of International Development.

Equal authorship with Stan Brunn, Lomme Devriendt, Ben Derudder and Frank Witlox.

Available [web page/HTML format]: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb308.htm

Abstract:

This study explores the ways in which country music has engaged with geopolitical issues surrounding the War on Terror. Using the idea of “popular geopolitics” as its theoretical point of departure, the intertext between the attitudes and understandings articulated in a corpus of “patriotic” post-9/11 country hits and those expressed in broader geopolitical discourse is considered. Although, on occasion, the sentiments expressed in country music work to disrupt dominant understandings, it is shown that country music has chosen to frame the War on Terror in ways that concur broadly with official (i.e. Bush administration) geopolitical discourse.

Reference:

Reference:

Boulton, A. (2008).‘The Making of Global City Regions: Johannesburg, Mumbai/Bombay, São Paulo, and Shanghai.’ Urban Geography 29(8), 835-6

Boulton, A. and Zook, M. (forthcoming). “Landscape, Locative Media and the Duplicity of Code”. In Johnson, N., Schein, R., and Winders, J. eds., Companion to Cultural Geography. Wiley-Blackwell.

Graham, M., Zook, M. and Boulton, A.* (forthcoming). “Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Brunn, S., Boulton, A. and Devriendt, L. (forthcoming) “Assessing the Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on Major and Minor Cities in South and Southeast Asia.” In Dutt, A., ed., Regional Resources and Urban Perspectives in the 21st Century: A Felicitation to Professor Baleshwar Thakur. Cambridge University Press