ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates examples as to how the theoretical framework, drawn on Simondon’s information theory, and Deleuze and Spinoza’s ethics, and empirically experienced via ethnographic and autoethnographic methodology, could be applied to the empirical work with regard to housing and security policies. Since it cannot be predicted how information eventually affects bodies, engineered atmospheres, as well as the crime rate reduction interventions (for example in social housing estates) generated as a consequence of security issues, might only be illusory. In fact, one cannot know in advance which ethical direction a body will take in the end, and there is always the possibility of fleeing, the possibility that other unpredictable combinations of bodies (such as criminal activities) will win the fight over space. In this context, the chapter highlights the necessity to give the researcher’s body back to space (and vice versa), enabling her to take an ‘ontologically responsible’ stance. In this way, the researcher’s body is asked to ‘become’ bodies and space’s movements and, only afterwards, to take a political stance as to what ethical direction they shall take. This reduces the risk of assuming demiurgic and categorical, clear-cut positions and opens up to a new urban information ethics.
