Söderström, Ola

2018, De Dardel, Julie, Söderström, Ola

Within the neocolonial context of ‘Plan Colombia’ in the early 2000s, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took position in the heart of the Colombian penitentiary administration to lead a reform based on the US ultra-punitive penal regime. This paper analyzes how the reform was set up on the ground, shedding light on the partially divergent expectations of both governments. Drawing on recent literature on the mobility of policies and built forms, the paper argues that the introduction of US-inspired prisons in Colombia is a striking case where a mobile policy and a traveling architectural type coincided and complemented each other.

2017-6-8, McFarlane, Colin, Söderström, Ola

Smart urbanism seems to be everywhere you turn. But in practice the agenda is an uncertain one, usually only partially developed, and often more about corporate-led urban development than about urban social justice. Rather than leave smart urbanism to the corporate and political elites, there are opportunities now for critical urban scholarship to not only critique how it is currently constituted, but to give shape to a globally oriented alternative smart urban agenda. An ambition like this means taking the ‘urban’ in ‘smart urban’ much more seriously. It means foregrounding the knowledges, political priorities and needs of those either actively excluded or included in damaging ways in mainstream smart urban discourses. We outline steps towards an alternative smart urbanism. We seek to move beyond the specific to the general and do so by drawing on radically different initiatives across the Global North and South. These initiatives provide tantalizing openings to a more socially just use of digital technology, where urban priorities and justice drive the use—or lack of use—of technology.

2016-4-14, Söderström, Ola

2015-6-19, Söderström, Ola

2018, Bonollo, Leonardo, Söderström, Ola, Fall, Juliet, Panese, Francesco

Ce travail cherche à pénétrer les facteurs, les logiques et les modalités qui activent L’imaginaire d une époque et en déterminent la spécificité des formes et des fonctions. La période abordée est l’Époque des Empires: nous sommes effectivement convaincus que les évènements historiques et sociaux liés à l’impérialisme ont joué un rôle fondamental pour la construction de l’imaginaire global d’un monde désormais fermé, étant tout proche de sa conquête et de son exploration complète. Plus concrètement cette thèse tend à démontrer si et comment l’imagination d’une ère reflète des formes culturelles historicisables, en quelque sorte un style laissant trace aussi bien des facteurs culturels, politiques et économiques du moment que des «innervations psychotechniques du social» dont parlait W. Benjamin. Notre analyse se veut essentiellement consacrée au Colonial Office Visual Instructions Committee, voire au phénomène impérial britannique. Mais la portée du projet ainsi que l’importance des institutions et des personnages impliqués donnent aux archives COVIC une valeur paradigmatique au sein des rapports entre l’imagination géographique et la propagande politique. Cependant, la dispersion matérielle des sources et des documents iconiques, tout comme l’absence de ce que Derrida a défini «les principes de l’archivage », ont comporté la nécessité d’une reformulation des modalités d’étude et des catégories de classement, ce qui a abouti à une idée de post-archives. Cette nouvelle approche marque une distance aussi bien par rapport aux pratiques herméneutiques utilisées par les instituts traditionnels de la conservation de la pensée que par rapport aux nouvelles formes d’imagination et de mémoire produites dans les archives en ligne contemporaines. Bien que l’imagination soit une voie privilégiée associée aux activités visuelles et aux représentations iconographiques, la complexité du phénomène en question, suspendu entre signe logo-visuel et représentation mentale, a imposé l’analyse d’autres formes de représentation. Ce sont effectivement la peinture, la photographie, le cinéma, la géographie, l’histoire matérielle et de la pensée ainsi que la littérature qui ont permis d’identifier le point de rupture avec l’Ancien Scopic Régime, traditionnellement associé à la modernité illuministe, et c’est justement cette rupture qui s’avère être la cible de ces pages. Touchant différents domaines d’études, tels que la critique littéraire, l’épistémologie, la géographie et l’histoire de l’art, notre thèse s’ouvre donc sur des méthodologies variées. La méthode que l’on a le plus utilisée est indéniablement le constructivisme, car cette méthode enjambe aisément plusieurs disciplines et exploite sans effort toute superposition potentielle relative à des expériences juxtaposées ou insistant sur le même phénomène. Mais si, comme Starobinski, on considère l’imagination comme une faculté propre à la conscience, voilà que le lien direct avec la phénoménologie de Husserl se révèle également évident., This thesis investigates the factors, the logics and the modalities that activate the imagination of an era and determine the specificity of its forms and functions. The period considered is the Age of Empire, in the belief that the historical and social events linked to imperialism were decisive in constructing the imagination, on a global scale, of an essentially closed world, as the complete exploration and conquest of this world was nearing. More concretely, this thesis aims at demonstrating whether and how the imagination of an era reflects historicizable cultural forms, something similar to a style that would bear as much trace of the cultural, political and economic factors of the moment, as of those that Benjamin defined as the “psycho-technical innervations of the social”. The case study examined here – the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee – narrows down the focus of this analysis only to the British imperial phenomenon. However, the scope of the project and the importance of the institutions and personalities involved confer to the COVIC archive a paradigmatic value in the relations between geographical imagination and political propaganda. Nevertheless, the physical dispersion of the textual and visual sources, combined with the lack of those that Derrida defined as the “principles of the archive”, implied the necessity to reformulate the modes of study and the archiving categories themselves into a new concept: the post-archive. All of this underscores the distance from both the hermeneutic practices of traditional thought-preserving establishments and the new forms of imagination and memory produced in contemporary online archives. Although imagination is predominantly associated with visual activities and iconographic representations, the complexity of this phenomenon – suspended between verbo-visual signs and mental representations – has demanded the analysis of other forms of expression. Painting, photography, cinematography, geography, material history and history of thought, as well as literature, allow us to identify this brief period as the moment of fracture with the Ancien Scopic Régime, traditionally associated with the Enlightenment modernity. This fracture is the real objective of these pages. Working at the intersection of different areas of study, between literary criticism, epistemology, geography and art history, this thesis takes a varied methodological approach. Constructivism is undoubtedly the most used approach, because of its great versatility in creating bridges between disciplines and exploiting any possible overlapping between contiguous experiences or experiences that call upon the same phenomenon. But if we follow Starobinski and consider imagination as a faculty proper to consciousness, then the point of contact with Husserl’s phenomenology will appear just as evident.

2017, Söderström, Ola

This Chapter aims to identify the reach and limits of concepts developed within actor-network theory (ANT) for understanding contemporary transformations in urban planning and development. It focuses on the analysis of urban government at a distance through the role of three important mediators: models, images and discourses. I argue that ANT's focus on intermediaries and translation procedures in the construction of translocal planning assemblages is heuristically powerful. However, to better understand the relatedness of urban policies, urban and planning studies need to look beyond these classic ANT tools. In particular, we need a broader reception of ANT as well as the resources of other approaches to capture the role of global urban policymaking, computer-generated images and post-coloniality.

2016, Söderström, Ola

Ola Söderström engages in a geographical investigation of the relationship between the urban milieu and psychosis, with a focus on young people with mental illnesses in Lausanne, Switzerland. The chapter describes a broader shift in contemporary health care, which has entered a ‘post‐asylum’ era due to the de‐institutionalisation of services. Söderström reverses the perspective of mainstream studies in psychiatry by engaging with the experiential aspects of urban space to describe a set of design features that he sees as conducive to a wider ‘landscape of caring,’ which takes into account the emotional and sensorial needs of people with mental health issues. Söderström attends to the subtleties of urban environments, from scale to atmosphere and rhythm, as well as demonstrating that responding to the challenge of designing for people with psychotic troubles opens up the possibility of crafting spaces that are inclusive of all.

2017-7-19, Söderström, Ola, Söderström, Dag, Codeluppi, Zoé, Abrahamyan Empson, Lilith, Conus, Philippe

The background of this study is recent work on the correlation between urban living and psychosis. It is part of a larger interdisciplinary research project using an experience-based approach to the city-psychosis nexus. The aim of this paper is to investigate how, soon after a first episode of psychosis, patients manage urban factors of stress. Methodologically, it is based on video-elicitation interviews of urban walks and ethnographic observations in a community care centre in the city of Lausanne, Switzerland. It shows that patients use three tactics: creating sensory bubbles; programming mobility; and creating places of comfort. On the basis of these findings, the paper discusses how the approach and results of our study can inform strategies of recovery that are both user-driven and take into consideration the importance of places and situations in the city in the phase following a first episode.

2016-11, Söderström, Ola, Abrahamyan Empson, Lilith, Codeluppi, Zoé, Söderström, Dag, Baumann, Philipp S., Conus, Philippe

Primarily on the basis of epidemiological studies, recent research in psychiatry has established a robust link between urban living and psychosis. This paper argues first, that an experienced-based approach, moving beyond epidemiology, is needed in order to enable more fine-grained understandings of the city/psychosis nexus. The second part of the paper presents preliminary fieldwork results based on video-elicitation sessions with first-episode patients with psychotic disorders. These results lead to the generation of a series of hypotheses for further research on the role of density, sensory overload and social interaction as factors in the onset of non-affective psychoses. The conclusion discusses the insights gained from viewing the city as an experiential milieu rather than as a set of substances. We argue that such insights enable, on the one hand, observation of the role of specific places and situations - and thus to unpack ‘the city’; and, on the other, to envisage the urban milieu as a nexus of possible sites of recovery.

2016, Klauser, Francisco, Söderström, Ola