About pavements, and seeing Homeless Cartographers gesticulating wildly

Day 2,427, 11:52 Published in South Africa South Africa by Luc Praetor


Republished for sanity's sake

It’s a lecture about pavements. Could I have even dreamed up an event that sounded more mind-numbing?

On this cold and dry July night, the little Gauteng Has-Bean Gallery and cafe, as part of the University of Johannesburg “Urban Talk" eLectures, has drawn a multitude municipal bureaucrats, business owners, artists, developers, students, urban nuts, activists, anarchists... Why on eRepublik would all these people be so interested in pavements?

Within a short while the answer becomes clear, as Dominique Lessing delivers a surprisingly riveting overview of the role of pavements in social control.

Lessing is a "legal eRepublik geographer" who specialises in “virtual virtual property and its relationship to the politics of make-believe political urban space." Her new book sounds similarly recondite: Rights of Passage—Pavements and the Regulation of eRepublik Public Flow.

However, much like his earlier work on homelessness, Asteria dispossession, and eR community gardens, Lessing adeptly straddles abstract academia and on-the-ground activism.

“What is an ePavement for?" she begins, and it’s soon apparent this seemingly benign question holds the seeds of intense eR workaday conflict.

As Prelen, the ever critical reviewer, piped in, "She's using the big words again, at least some of the LP players might get some of it!."

~ Another article consumed for eRepublik use