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The Internet has enabled new forms of large-scale collaboration. Voluntary contributions by large numbers of users and co-producers lead to new forms of production and innovation, as seen in Wikipedia, open source software development, in social networks or on user-generated content platforms as well as in many firm-driven Web 2.0 services. Large-scale collaboration on the Internet is an intriguing phenomenon for scholarly debate because it challenges well established insights into the governance of economic action, the sources of innovation, the possibilities of collective action and the social, legal and technical preconditions for successful collaboration. Although contributions to the debate from various disciplines and fine-grained empirical studies already exist, there still is a lack of an interdisciplinary approach.

1. New downtowns : a new form of centrality and urbanity in world society / Ilse Helbrecht and Peter Dirksmeier -- 2. Planning urbanity : a contradiction in terms? / Loretta Lees -- 3. Public space for the 21st century / Jan Gehl -- 4. Waterfront redevelopment : global processes and local contingencies in Vancouver's False Creek / David Ley -- 5. Planning for creativity : the transformation of the Amsterdam eastern docklands / Robert Kloosterman -- 6. From the old downtown to the new downtown : the case of the south Boston waterfront / Susanne Heeg -- 7. Grasping, creating and commercialising trends, styles, and 'zeitgeist' : the role of urbanity with regard to working in flexible, specialised project networks as illustrated by the media industry / Ivo Mossig -- 8. Major town planning projects in urban renaissance : structuring property sales for future urbanity? / Maike Dziomba -- 9. Neighbourlines in the city centre : reality and potential in the case of the Hamburg HafenCity / Ingrid Breckner and Marcus Menzl -- 10. Assessment of the effects of the built environment for the organisation of social processes / Thomas Perry -- 11. Can urbanity by planned? : comments on the development of public spaces in the HafenCity of Hamburg / Claus-C. Wiegandt -- 12. The virtue of diversity / Rolf Lindner.

AbstractIn this article I propose an expanded definition of the categories of "disappearance" and "disappeared" with which to address situations marked by abandonment. In the first movement, I provide a critical description of the scientific literature available about disappearance in several fields, in particular legal and political sociology. Both have gradually constructed an interpretation that, while legally effective, sociologically sensitive, and socially successful, currently find themselves overwhelmed. The second movement confirms that the dominant meaning of disappearance and disappeared has been overwhelmed, and it addresses how that overwhelming affects three of their characteristics: the timeframes of reference for both categories (the past and memory); the anthropological assumptions that underpin the two (the bad death and the (im)possibility of its conventional management); and the normative social frameworks that both take as "a given" (the state and citizenship, and the forms of political agency associated with them). Finally, the third movement deals with different experiences of field research related to very open uses of the idea of disappearance, to gather different efforts of theoretical problematization that currently, and in various fields of social science research, turn disappearance and disappeared into tools for analyzing social forms of abandonment.

This thesis aims to uncover new forms of humanism grounded in a critique of systems that produce and reify race and gender by staging a conversation between six contemporary works of science fiction (SF) written by women from Italy, France, Spain, and the UK, and five acclaimed theorists in the fields of gender, queer, postcolonial, humanist, and cultural studies: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. As outlined in the second chapter, I focus, in particular, on Butler's conception of subjects who 'become' through affective encounters, Braidotti's critical posthumanism, Spivak and Gilroy's respective notions of 'planetarity,' and Halberstam's theory of a 'queer art of failure.' In doing so, this thesis asserts the complementarity of academic and science fictional enquiries into what I view as examples of new forms of humanism that arise from historicised interrogations of systems of race and gender. The first chapter introduces the way in which SF appeals to women writers who embrace the genre's political energy and its anti-racist, anti-sexist, and humanistic potential by tracing a genealogy of European women's SF from the seventeenth century to the present day. The second half of the thesis reads examples of politically charged SF from my corpus alongside the critical theory outlined in the second chapter, in order to demonstrate how SF engages with new forms of humanism through a critique and reformulation of issues of race and gender. I follow this analysis with an exploration of the way in which SF's unique spatial attributes can probe the borders of the planetary humanisms or 'planetarity' proposed by Gilroy and Spivak. I finally assess, by way of a conclusion, the extent to which SF can reassemble and amplify the achievements of these new forms of anti-racist and anti-sexist humanism.