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The calculus of telescopic urbanism

Arabindoo, P; (2013) The calculus of telescopic urbanism. City , 17 (4) 504 - 509. 10.1080/13604813.2013.812355. Green open access

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Abstract

Developing Amin's invocation of a telescopic urbanism as more than a visual metaphor, this paper seeks to rethink its epistemological and methodological focus, resisting at the same time the tendency to oversimplify the relationship between the different optics he outlines. Threatened by a dominant meta-narrative of a numerically driven calculus, this paper identifies an opportunity in Amin's telescopic urbanism to reject the 'big-data' approach to the city. In this context, it challenges the narrow assumptions about planetary urbanization rooted in a quantitative veneer and a statistical dependency that is arbitrary and ahistorical. Moving beyond our current obsession with the ethos of enumeration, it identifies the need for a situated knowledge that accommodates the statistical alongside the anecdotal outlining not just a thesis on the urban poor but also rethinking the episteme of the city as a machine for learning. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Type: Article
Title: The calculus of telescopic urbanism
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2013.812355
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2013.812355
Language: English
Additional information: © 2013 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1405119
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