CITY DIVIDED
CITY DIVIDED
Explorations of traumatized cities and their inhabitants
"A superb work of fiction that delves into some of the most concerning and potentially frightening realities of our future. A highly inventive, unique dystopia"
K.C. Finn, Readers' Favorite, June 2023
"A captivating, thought-provoking work to make you question the path of humankind and their constant obsession with technology and progress."
Destiny Daniels, Reedsy Discovery, May 2023
2023
All appears hopeful after the mysterious cessation of the authoritarian interconnect supercomputer in 2051. Genocidal warfare (the “Turmoil”), a period inspired by algorithmic stimulation of human grievance via chip implants, has mercifully ended. A majority of citizens have undergone re-education to lessen their destructive computer addictions. And when interconnect re-emerges in 2058, it has mutated and inserts in citizens not violent impulses but a seemingly benign program of ReForm.
Yet, this mutation is not what it seems. Instead, it has implanted in its unaware recipients numbing and fabricated senses of hope and reformation that conceal the continuance of manipulated reality.
Investigator Jared Rohde, confined in a mental institution due to split-brain seizures, is rescued by a colorful band of rebels who seek to combat interconnect’s algorithmic trickery and its mental entrapment of the country’s citizens. During two months of demanding off-grid trekking with his rescuers to avoid surveillance, Jared struggles between re-gaining organic thinking and his addictive longing for computer stimuli. Although the rebels view him as an essential asset, Jared questions his usefulness and faces vexing challenges in finding dependable truth.
In ReForm: Combating the Algorithmic Mutation by Scott Bollens, we experience a near future where independent human thinking is dissolving and a small group of dissidents constitutes the sole challenge to the machine’s ever-mutating reach into the human mind. When Jared faces the ultimate test by the machine, how he reacts will determine the future of interconnect’s domination of human free will. He ends up in a place he could never have imagined.
Amazon
Independent bookstores
2021
2021
Bordered Cities and Divided Societies is a provocative, moving, and poetic encounter with the hearts and minds of individuals living in nine cities of conflict, violence, and healing—Jerusalem, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Barcelona, Bilbao, and Beirut. Based on research spanning 25 years, including 360 interviews and over two and a half years of in-country field research, this innovative work employs a series of concise reflective narrative essays, grouped into four thematic sections, to provide a humanistic, “on-the-ground” understanding of divided cities, conflict, and peacemaking. Incorporating both scholarly analyses based on empirical research and introspective essays, Bollens digs underneath grand narratives of conflict to illuminate the complexities and paradoxes of living amid nationalistic political strife and the challenges of planning and policymaking in divided societies. Richly illustrated, the book includes informative synopses about the cities that provide access for general readers while extensive connections to recent literature enhance the book’s research value to scholars.
"Bollens presents a highly radical new approach to analysing processes of establishing borders and generating cleavages. Drawing heavily on emotional aspects in his interviews, he convincingly radicalizes the methodological armature of ethnographic analyses." —Jürgen Mackert, Universität Potsdam
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During the pandemic,
I became an dystopian urban fantasy novelist
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During the pandemic,
I became an dystopian urban fantasy novelist
ReStart: Stories of the Cairn Age
"ReStart provides a lens through which to view conflicting factions not only in an imagined world but also in the real world today."
Elayne Zalis, author of Reimagining the Twilight Zone
2021
Available Amazon and Atmosphere Press
Computer dictatorship, puritanical humans, and ripped apart urbanity. In post-chaos 2052, a re-programmed investigator seeks to uncover the possibilities for independent human thinking after decades of humankind's addiction to a dominating computer network and catastrophic wars between computer-defined groups.
Investigator Jared Rohde faces vexing challenges in his search for a dependable truth. Individuals struggle between the hard work of re-gaining independent cognition and addictive longing for the personal freedom of un-thinking instinctual reactivity to computer stimuli. As his investigation deepens, Rohde confronts shocking implications for the future of human consciousness.
ReStart presents a future eerily familiar and disturbing, an anthropological narrative of the effects of algorithmic sorting. It has unnerving relevance to today’s post-truth world of manipulated social media, fake news, competing narratives, and conspiracy theories.
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Trajectories of Conflict and Peace: Jerusalem and Belfast Since 1994
Trajectories of Conflict and Peace: Jerusalem and Belfast Since 1994
Routledge 2018
Routledge 2018
TRAJECTORIES is based on 7 months of extensive field research and over 120 new interviews. Investigates the evolution of these two contentious cities during twenty years of both political stasis and change.
Creating peace for a city's intimate enemies is harder than making war.
This book is about the trajectories of urban conflict and peace in the politically polarized cities of Jerusalem and Belfast since 1994, how sometimes there has been hopeful change while at other times debilitating stasis and regression. Based on extensive research, fieldwork, and interviews, Scott Bollens shows how seeking peace in these cities is shaped by the interaction of city-based actors and national elites, and that it is not just a political process, but a social and spatial one that takes place problematically over an extended period. He intertwines academic precision with ethnography and personal narrative to illuminate the complex political and emotional kaleidoscopes of these polarized cities. With hostility and competition among groups defined by ethnic, religious, and nationalistic identity on the increase across the world, this timely investigation contributes to our understanding of today's fractured cities and nations.
I am weary of writing more about this important topic--how people do or do not get along in urban settings--from an academic distance. That is why I am at this point and why I am writing this different type of book.
Social science academic tradition asserts that you are not supposed to know who I am.
Out in the streets and gathering places of these cities, the intense and continuing drama of the human soul both overwhelms and connects, putting me in my rightful, miniaturized sense of self
See two minute video on Bollens' research focus:
Among the small number of planning scholars who have devoted their scholarly careers to the study of divided cities, Bollens stands out as one of the most dedicated, thoughtful and insightful. Many of Bollens’s conclusions have been embraced by planning theorists and the scholarly peacemaking world.
Diane E. Davis, Harvard University, in JAPR, 30:3, 2013.
Praise for City and Soul
Bollens has boldly produced a postmodern narrative…. concerned with the psychological dimensions of living in these tormented locales… this is a highly personalized account of Bollens’s own reflections… a heart-wrenching book…(of)… self-reflection and soul-searching in divided cities.
Diane E. Davis, Harvard University, in JAPR, 30:3, 2013.
CITY AND SOUL
Author in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1999
City and Soul (2012)
In this unique book Scott Bollens combines personal narrative with academic analysis in telling the story of inflammatory nationalistic and ethnic conflict in nine cities ? Jerusalem, Beirut, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Bilbao, and Barcelona. Reporting on 17 years of research and over 240 interviews with political leaders, planners, architects, community representatives, and academics, he blends personal reflections, reportage from a wealth of original interviews, and presentation of hard data in a multidimensional and interdisciplinary exploration of these urban environments of damage, trauma, healing, and repair.
CITY AND SOUL reveals what it is like living and working in these cities, going inside the head of the researcher. This approach extends the reader?s understanding of these places and connects more intimately with the lived urban experience. Bollens observes that a city disabled by nationalistic strife looks like a callous landscape of securitized space, divisions and wounds, frozen in time and in place. Yet, the soul in these cities perseveres.
Written for general readers and academic specialists alike, City and Soul integrates facts, opinions, photographs, and observations in original ways in order to illuminate the substantial challenges of living in, and governing, polarized and unsettled cities.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART A: POLARIZED CITIES (interested in reading Part A? -- see below)
1. Introduction
2. Scholarship with an ?I?
3. Soul in the City: Epic Cultures and Urban Fault?lines
PART B: NINE CITIES, NINE SORROWS
4. Sarajevo, Bosnia?Herzegovina ?Urbicide? and Dayton
5. Johannesburg, South Africa: ?Swimming Olympic Style after Years of Drowning?
6. Belfast, Northern Ireland: A Peace? Not Envisioned
7. Nicosia, Cyprus: Surmounting Walls, not Politics
8. Basque Country, Spain: Moving From Etxea to Euskal Hiria
9. Mostar, Bosnia?Herzegovina: The City as War Spoils
10. Barcelona, Spain: An Inclusive Nationalism?
11. Jerusalem, Israel and West Bank: Narrowing the Grounds for Peace
12. Beirut, Lebanon: City in an Indeterminate State, Part I
13. Beirut, Lebanon: City in an Indeterminate State, Part II
PART C: SYNTHESIS
14. Comparing Across Conflicts
15. Cities and National Peace
September 2011 | 288 pages | Paperback: 978?0?415?77923?4
Interested in reading an excerpt from CITY AND SOUL?
Blog on peacebuilding in the city
Scott Bollens is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Irvine, where he holds the Warmington Chair in Peace and International Cooperation. His other books are Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization (2007), On Narrow Ground (2000), and Urban Peace-Building in Divided Societies (1999).
Print interview with Bollens 2012
Bollens books and articles on urban conflict
Healing and dealing with conflict-- Scott on radio
Conflict Healing website--
http://www.conflicthealing.com/radio-show/interviews/
December 5, 2011 listing (click near bottom of dated entry to hear interview).
Building peace in divided cities-- Scott on video
Soldier in "pigeon roost", Corniche el Mazraa, Beirut. 2010.
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