The most recent reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make use of ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs). These are tools to represent possible future world greenhouse gas emissions. There are four RCPs. Only the most aggressive, RCP 2.6, gives a chance of keeping global average temperature rises […]
The Focus E15 campaign was established to challenge Newham Council’s policies of expelling the poor and vulnerable of London to towns and cities hundreds of miles away. The Labour-run council claim that there is no housing in Newham. This is a lie. Thousands of properties lie empty and boarded up in this borough of east London. The campaign began […]
Deception and Propaganda in Social Media A year after the revelations by Edward Snowden, more or less everybody is aware of the astonishing extent of online surveillance. An outcome of this increased awareness is the development of various protective measures, including encryption practices, privacy protection measures as well as the […]
Chileans have lived, since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990, in a neoliberal democracy with essentially two sides to its dominant governance. On the one hand, Chile has recovered its democratic tradition with a multi-party system and regular elections, but on the other hand it has followed a […]
Public debate on digital media tends to be organised in “either-ors.” Such polarisation allows for clarifying positions, but it doesn’t do justice to the messy dynamics of everyday digital practice. Paolo Gerbaudo’s recent contribution on internet activism in OT24 is no exception. He contrasts what he calls a “cyber separatist […]
This issue of the Occupied Times was hand-folded at the London Action Resource Centre (LARC) in Whitechapel. For a little over two years now, following the eviction of the St Paul’s protest camp and moves by the OT towards full independence from any affiliation, we have been meeting at LARC […]
They seem like a very teenage expression of rebellion, but I’ve seen a pin badge around London that nonetheless shocks me every time: “I’ve never kissed a Tory”. I’ve tried to pick apart its meaning. No doubt it’s intended as a cipher of just how deeply one’s political commitment goes. […]
The city of Leeds was once a Victorian powerhouse of capital accumulation, high employment, rich industrialists and grand civic architecture. Today the city centre markets itself as a haven for financial services, high-end shopping, and innovative PFI schemes. The financial crisis of 2008 has caused this story to stutter, but […]
“Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start.” Raymond Williams Both sides of the debate, now in vogue on the left, around how far culture is to blame for gentrification are limited, which suggests the question itself may be the wrong one. Those who seek to explain gentrification through […]
Everyone has their favourite gentrification horror story. The Hackney cafe which took over an Asian Women’s Advice Centre and used the language of advice pamphlets to advertise their overpriced fry-ups. The ‘Champagne and Fromage’ bar which pushed the ‘foodie’ transformation of Brixton’s Granville Arcade – rechristened ‘Brixton Village’ – into […]