The Arts of Logistics at the Queen Mary University in London

Jesse will be presenting his work at The Art of Logistics conference hosted by the Queen Mary University  in London on June 4, 2016. 

https://www.artsoflogistics.com/

Logisticality & Territorial Form

If logistics has a form, it might be most evident at the scale of territory. Beyond the simultaneous technical, political, and physical aspects of territory, time is a factor as well. Logistics, as both a branch of knowledge and an area of work, is fundamentally concerned with the management (measure & control) of things in space and over distance (land, terrain, time) and thus is fundamentally a territorial concern. Between the protocols and calculations of management and the contingencies of things on the ground is a murky and slack mediating layer of logistics that allows the former to exist in the latter. Logistics and its forms enable this through a host of specific strategies that employ elements of architecture, infrastructure, and planning.  These in turn prompt questions about the aspects of territorial form more generally. This presentation will argue that territorial form has a specific set of properties driven by logistics and characterized by the tendencies of logistics, including illegibility, contingency, incompleteness, fugitivity, and topologicality. I develop these features by first plotting polarities between image of form and between territory and landscape. Crossing these terms yields four categories, including territorial form (e.g. as opposed to territorial image, landscape form, or landscape image). By developing a case for some of the properties of territorial form and its relationship to logistics, I argue for an understanding of the condition of logistics more generally. Referring to this condition as logisticality, the article concludes with initial hypotheses relating to topology, calculation, and specification. 

5th Holcim Forum for Sustainable Construction

Jesse and Jason Young (University of Tennessee) served as organizers for the "Metropolitan Scale" workshop as part of the 5th Lafarge Holcim Forum for Sustainable Construction in Detroit, Michigan. More information can be found here.

Jesse's book, The Rule of Logistics, available for pre-order.

You can find the link here. 

Jesse mentioned in UC Berkeley CED press release

More information here.

Indexical Landscapes at Art Center College in Pasadena.

Jesse will be presenting his work at the upcoming event at Art Center College in Pasadena. 

http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2015/10/06/indexical-landscapes-symposium-art-center-college-of-design-october-29/

From the description: 

"Our streets stream data from embedded sensors, our metropoles splinter into districts defined by delivery logistics or crime data, while our contested zones yield their secrets to drone surveillance. Our cities and metropolitan regions are code-spaces, algorithmic landscapes, with layers of data and informational networks laid atop, and often spilling over, their traditional geographic boundaries. “Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City,” a concurrent exhibition in Art Center for Design’s gallery, will feature projects that explore these new forms and practices of digital urbanity. Yet even without their datified dressings, our landscapes have long been shaped using techniques and technologies that render them “intelligent” and intelligible – either to we humans who inhabit them, or to the various tools we use to cultivate, navigate, and operationalize them. So many of our landscapes – from factory farms and container ports, to libraries and factories, to airwaves and railways and codifed urban “zones” – materialize, and even render perceptible, the logics behind their own organization, management, and use. This panel discussion examines myriad such “indexical landscapes,” those spaces shaped to refer to their own organized content and operative logics."

Daniels Fora with Neil Brenner and Richard Sommer at the University of Toronto.

Jesse will take part in a discussion at the University of Toronto with Neil Brenner and Richard Sommer. 

https://www.daniels.utoronto.ca/events/lecture/daniels-fora/2015-10-22/uber-urbanism

From the description:

"What is a "global city”? Are distinctions such as urban and rural, society and nature, or city and suburb still useful? When almost all the earth’s surface is subject to human technological intervention, is it time for a new way of understanding urbanization?

Four decades ago, the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre prophesized that the complete urbanization of society was inevitable. Today, we have come to accept a process of global urbanization derived from a set of complex relationships — political, economic, environmental, among others — that bring diverse territories together.  Yet, particularly for those who plan and design cities, there remains a deeply held belief in the value of making distinctions between “cities” as dense agglomerations of culture and capital, and other urbanizing territories.

Part of the Daniels Fora series, “Uber Urbanism” will critically examine the central role that the concept of “city” has in framing how we understand (and study) urbanism, and whether or not cities are a unique “species" among the world’s geographies."

Turbulent Circulation: Toward a Critical Logistics at the University of Toronto

Jesse will be speaking at the Turbulent Circulation: Toward a Critical Logistics workshop hosted by the University of Toronto on October 9-11, 2015. 

http://www.uc.utoronto.ca/events/turbulent-circulation-%E2%80%93-toward-critical-logistics

Post Empirical Urbanism Conference at Daniels School of Architecture, University of Toronto

Jesse will be presenting his work at the Post Empirical Urbanism Conference at Daniels School of Architecture, University of Toronto on February 27, 2015. 

https://www.daniels.utoronto.ca/events/2015/02/27/after-empirical-urbanism

From the description

"A new empirical urbanism has emerged over the past two generations, drawing habits of mind and methods of observation from the natural and social sciences, and making use of emerging forms of statistical and visual analysis. Such practices take observation, systematic documentation, and artful analysis of the city, as given, as a precondition to any designed intervention. For our purposes Empirical Urbanism is a framework for revealing the sometimes hidden philosophical assumptions, and design alibis among a diverse group of urban theories and practices that, while often thought to represent opposing ideologies, share an empirical approach.

This symposium will interrogate this trend, asking how urbanism as an art and a set of practices may gain from more explicitly deciphering the relationship between the ways we characterize the past and present city, and how we go about projecting alternate futures for it. Our title notwithstanding, we do not imagine an end to empirical urban research. Rather, the discussion and debates we hope to sponsor have the aim of repositioning observation-based practice, and airing new approaches to seeing and designing the city."

Jesse will be presenting his work at The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam

“The Infrastructural Buildings of Walmart and the Mormon Church, The Politics of Urban Religious Architecture Conference,” The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, October 2014.