Journal articles on the topic 'Railroad connecting lines'

Abstract This paper points out the possibilities of better exploitation of marine traffic as well as its connection with other kinds of traffic. Special attention is given to the analysis of 1,081 harbors about their availability during the year. The methods and algorithms used in GIS are buffers, cluster, method of interpolations, and network analysis. The methods used for the purpose of conducting numerical analyses are algorithms that served for the analysis of the network, its transport features, and the connectivity with harbors in terms of geospace. The main results found in this research showed that harbors have good connectivity in the first place with road traffic and after that with air and railroad traffic. According to data from 2019, all traffic lines cover 4.1 × 1015 km, and the road traffic has the most significant potential in connection with the harbors. The most connected harbors and airports are in the east coast of North America, west coast, north Europe, southern Europe, south-east Australia, a central part of Oceania, and south-east Africa. The results in the modified Likert scale between airports and harbors showed medium results. The densest road network is located in the eastern part of USA, western and central part of Europe, and east coast of China. The number of possible connected lines between main road nodes and harbors is 0.8 × 109. This type of traffic showed excellent results and connection with harbors. The number of possible connected lines per month between railroads and harbors is 1.3 × 103. This type of traffic showed low connectivity with the harbors. In the end comparison of harbors with air, road and railroad networks were established. The geographical position of harbors was analyzed, and better understanding was performed on a global scale.

Abstract: This article analyzes Colum McCann's biofiction TransAtlantic (2013), which it reads alongside Colson Whitehead's speculative historical fiction The Underground Railroad (2016) in order to bring into sharp focus the kind of cultural, political, and intellectual service that biofiction by or about African Americans can perform. By lifting the veil from the mechanisms of oppressive power, these two novels expose common structures that were operational during the slave trade in Africa as well as the "starve trade" in Ireland. My main conceptual building block is Ian Baucom's model of two poles of realism ("actuarial" and "melancholy"), which I expand to suggest that McCann and Whitehead complicate this polarity, allowing the actuarial mode to integrate liberation strategies for the oppressed and nuancing the melancholy mode to circumvent the risk of sentimentalism. In both cases, the strength of interracial agency and intersectional thought points toward lines of flight from the actuarial-melancholic binary.

The article reveals the problem of formation of the railway system of the Southern Urals in connection with its intensive industrial development in the late XIX – early XX centuries. New railway lines connected Ural metal-lurgical plants with coal and iron ore deposits, opening new exits from the Urals to Siberia, the Volga region and the western provinces of Russia. The author has revealed four main stages of development of the railway system of the Southern Urals: at the first stage lines were built to serve Zlatoust artillery factories, at the second stage the construction of approaches to the Siberian railroad through the Southern Urals was carried out, at the third stage the construction was connected with the resettlement policy of P.A. Stolypin, at the fourth stage long lines were built in a short period of time, connected with the strengthening of delivery of raw materials to de-fense factories in the conditions of the First World War. Conclusion dwells upon the fact that in the South Urals the struggle of two concepts of transport development of the region was most sharply manifested – the Urals as a transit corridor between European and eastern regions of the country and the Urals as a self-sufficient transport system, satisfying, first of all, the demands of the local economy and population.

Plans for Establishment of Cable-Cars in Kalisz Between 1900 and 1914 Plans for opening tramway lines in Kalisz were first discussed at the beginning of the XX century. Electric narrow gauge, horse tram and electric trams later on should have connected the main railroad station with city centre and public utilities. First proposal came even before the opening of the newly constructed Warsaw – Kalisz railway (1901). Another project of town cable cars was proposed a few years later, but with no result. Following decades of the XX century saw redirection of ideas towards urban public transport, when cable-car proposals were finally replaced by a bus connection. To prepare this study, presenting an historical outline of the abovementioned, never materialized projects, author used the documents gathered in the State Archive in Łódź, studies concerning the economic, urban and social situation of the city, press reports and local guides and plans from the period under examination. Offering a brief overview of the topic, this work aims at promoting a need for detailed historical studies on this issue in Kalisz.

Cirebon merupakan batas barat dari konsesi yang diperoleh Semarang Cheribon Stoomtram Maatschappij (SCS) dalam membangun dan mengoperasikan kereta api kelas tiga atau trem, sedangkan batas timurnya adalah kota Semarang. Permasalahan yang diangkat pada tulisan ini adalah bagaimana keterkaitan antara penempatan Stasiun SCS di kota Cirebon dengan fungsinya sebagai stasiun akhir. Penelitian ini bertujuan memahami keterkaitan antara lokasi dan fungsi Stasiun SCS sebagai stasiun akhir. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah metode deskriptif analisis, dengan pendekatan keruangan. Pengumpulan data dilakukan melalui studi pustaka dan arsip, serta pengamatan lapangan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa penempatan Stasiun Kereta Api SCS di Kota Cirebon terintegrasi dengan keberadaan pelabuhan. Kondisi ini menunjukkan lebih jauh bahwa penempatan Stasiun SCS di Kota Cirebon dipengaruhi oleh aspek ekonomi yang menjadi tujuan pembangunan jalur-jalur kereta api oleh SCS.
 Cirebon is the western boundary of the concession obtained by the Semarang Cheribon Stoomtram Maatschappij (SCS) in constructing and operating a third-class train or tram, whereas the eastern border is Semarang. The issue of this research concerned with the connection between the placement and function of SCS Stations in Cirebon as final stations. The research aimed to comprehend the connection between the location and function of SCS Stations as final stations. The research method used was descriptive analysis with a spatial approach. Data collection was carried out by literature and archive study, and field observations. Research results indicate that the placement of the SCS Train Stations in Cirebon was integrated with the existence of a harbor. Such condition suggest further that the placement of SCS stations in Cirebon was influenced by economic aspects which were the objectives of the development of railroad lines by SCS.


 
 
 The paper presents an analysis of functioning of roadway and railway networks in the context of logistics flows. The interaction of road vehicles and railroad cars within the given territories was characterized. The provided spatiotemporal modelling allows comparing the configuration of roadways and railways from the peripheral settlements to the regional capitals. The points that form transport links with the administrative centres of each studied territory were identified. A comparative topological analysis of the given lines of roadway and railway transport within the Ukrainian-Polish borderland employed quantitative (distance, time) and qualitative (curvature, travel speed) modelling parameters, characterizing the relationship of the borderland territories in two neighbouring countries of Eastern Europe. Relative indicators, which include curvature and speed, were estimated. A database of settlements based on accessibility to the city by road and rail transport was created, taking into account the top-10 centres of territorial communities, or hromadas, in Lviv Oblast and Subcarpathian Voivodeship. Alternative modes of transport for travelling from a centre of territorial community to the regional centre in Ukraine and Poland were highlighted. The study compared the settlements with low transport accessibility to the regional capital (oblast, voivodeship), taking into account the functioning of the roadway and railway networks. Social-geographical problems of the given territories were identified based on the analysis of topological indicators of each transport connections. I found that the network system of transport infrastructure in Subcarpathian Voivodeship is low-dense, especially in mountainous areas. Also, there was analyzed high accessibility of suburban settlements to the city of Rzeszów. In Lviv, connection between the suburbs and the city centre can be called problematic. Within the studied borderland areas, there were also found cases of disuse of the existing railway stations for passenger traffic. Variants that would promote the development of public transport in the Lviv Oblast have been proposed, based on the example of the transport model in Subcarpathian Voivodeship. Applied developments include the need to build the Opillia-Roztocze highway, assignement of high-speed electric trains from remote areas to the regional capital.
 
 

Nowadays, in many countries around the world, abandoned railways are considered as important resources that can be recovered and converted into greenways, thanks to their specific adaptability to this function. With its about 1000 km of dismantled lines, Sicily is the Italian region where the abandonment of railways is more evident. Nevertheless, to the present day, only about 20 km have been converted in greenways. As a recovery action requires large investments, it is necessary to determine a priority list based on the actual suitability of a track to be converted. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to define and apply a methodology, based on multi-criteria analysis associated with geographical information system (GIS), for the assessment of different suitability degrees of an abandoned railway to be converted in greenway for agro-touristic and cultural use of the land. The work was developed on two abandoned railway lines, sited in the province of Syracuse, embedded in landscapes of great value thanks to the existence of natural areas and cultural heritage. The applied method attributes great importance to the quality of the landscape that is considered in the same way as the intrinsic characteristics of the track. Several indicators were weighed and spatially mapped to describe the local resources at the margin of the track and the characteristics of the stretches of the two lines. The GIS analysis allowed obtaining various intermediate maps containing the necessary information for drawing the ultimate maps, which showed the suitability of each line to be converted in greenway. The results showed that the suitability level depends on the specific characteristics of the railroad and its marginal values, as well as on the quality of the landscape and the development opportunities that it offers. The creation of greenways can thus become a support to make easier the integration between the landscape and the growing demands of land, economic and tourist development, while maintaining intact the rural land and favoring its connection with the urban centers. The study, although referred to specific territorial areas, is generally valid from a methodological point of view and can be applied in other contexts.

On the network of electrified railroads and power lines of advanced countries there is an intensive work undergoing on the conversion of traditional insulating structures made of porcelain and glass to new ones - polymeric. In order to minimize mechanical damage, it is necessary first of all to investigate the stress-strain state in the connection zone “end terminal - fiberglass rod”, and on the basis of the results obtained, to develop a number of design solutions that make it possible to provide the required reliability of such connection. The analysis of the stress-strain state and the strength of the joint between the fiberglass rod and the end terminal is of greatest interest, taking into account the viscoelastic properties of the glue (glue creeping). Authors present a method for calculating axis-symmetric glue joints of polymer insulators based on the finite element method. The stress state of the junction zone (“end terminal - fiberglass rod”) is analyzed. Optimum sizes of the glue-joint connection of the insulator are determined taking into account the viscoelastic properties of the glue. The results of testing the models of polymer insulators of the contact network in the temperature range -60 ... + 100 °C are given and the life of tension (suspension), fixation and console polymer insulators is estimated on the basis of the principle of temperature-time analogy. The proposed technique for assessing the stress-strain state of the glued joint of polymer insulators, taking into account the viscoelastic properties of the adhesive, allows to determine the optimal parameters of the end caps, taking into account the time of action of the load on the insulator. An analysis of the experimental curves of durability has made it possible to establish the norms governing the change in the durability of a polymer insulator, depending on the load acting on it. A load, that provides reliable operation of the polymer insulator for 30 years, can be accepted for tension insulators, which is not more than 40 % of the destructive insulator, and for fixative and console - not more than 45 and 50 % respectively.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Cargo flow maps are used to represent the freight traffic on a transportation network. Usually the flows are represented as multicolor ribbons along railroads or highways. Each ribbon is a series of parallel lines. The width of a ribbon corresponds to the total freight traffic on a road segment between each crossroads, while the width of every line inside the ribbon reflects the volume of cargo transportation of a certain type. Ribbons can be placed on the both sides of the line and thus show cargo flows in both directions separately.</p><p>Cargo flow maps are different from the general flow maps and public transit maps. First, the shape of ribbons is restricted by geometry of transportation network, while the flow maps are generated freely between points. Second, the width of every line inside a ribbon (and the total width of each ribbon) depends on the volume of cargo flow, while in public transit maps the width of every line is fixed. These peculiar properties of cargo flow maps impose significant restrictions on the possible layout of resulting lines and ribbons.</p><p>To date, no automated approach for generation of such maps has been presented. In current study we have developed a fully automated workflow for generation of such maps. First, we documented the design principles of cargo flow maps based on the analysis of traditional thematic atlases and related modern cartographic visualizations. Next, we proposed an algorithm for automatic generation of cargo flow maps.</p><p>We start just from a long table with four variables: source, destination, cargo type and cargo volume. Each row therefore corresponds to existing cargo connection. These data are then spread over the transportation network under the assumption that goods between two locations are transported using the shortest route strategy. For each connection the shortest route is calculated using Dijkstra’s algorithm, and all network edges that participate in calculated route accumulate the volume of each cargo type being transported in a specified direction. After the data is spread over the network, we construct its ribbon representation as a series of stacked parallel lines on both sides of each network segment. To resolve graphical conflicts between ribbons at each junction, we solve a minimum covering circle problem for a set of points including the junction point itself and line endpoints of each ribbon adjacent to the junction. The problem is solved for each cargo type separately and the derived circles are then drawn to eliminate overlaps and voids between ribbon edges.</p><p>The described approach was implemented in a prototype web application that utilizes the transportation network taken from Natural Earth dataset (Figure 1). We offer numerous options that can be used to control the visual appearance of ribbons, as well as the query interface that extracts cargo flow data for selected network segment (the yellow stroke near the center of the map in Figure 1) and represents it in a tabular form (the widget at the bottom right in Figure 1). A case study covering the part of central Russia is presented, which demonstrates the potential of cargo flow map as a tool for visual exploration of freight traffic data.</p>

Abstract This study evaluates the structural performance of newly designed and fabricated grid frame-type railroad DCPs (derailment containment provisions) classified as DCP type I, compatible with rapid assembly construction and maintenance on gravel tracks in railway service lines. Previous research only reviewed the durability of the structure under static loading conditions. However, this study proposed an evaluation method considering the importance of assessing the impact performance of the DCPs assembly structure subjected to dynamic impact loads from continuously colliding train wheels; this involved a drop weight test to analyze the behavior of the DCP assembly structure under accumulated impact energy applied to different collision positions. To this end, drop-impact weight tests were conducted to verify the structural performance of the derailment protection system connected to concrete sleepers using post-installed anchors. A test specimen and jig were fabricated to evaluate the structural performance and impact resistance of the anchoring connections. 15 drop weight impact tests were performed, and the resulting behavior under impact energy was analyzed. The results indicated that when a derailed train wheel collides with the DCP frame section, dominant loads act on the base plate anchor, resisting through shear and bearing strength of the anchor bolts. The DCP assembly structure demonstrated sufficient derailment containment performance, even under significant accumulated energy (21.0 kJ; six repeated impacts), with collision loads and displacement levels within acceptable limits. For repeated impact loads (3.5∼7.0 kJ; 1∼2 occurrences), the impact load absorbed by the DCP connection anchor averaged 241.22 kN, and the vertical displacement at the collision point averaged 14.23 mm. This value is 2.62 times (162%) greater compared to the case of a collision on the DCP frame and approximately 13% lower than the impact load that the DCP frame can absorb. Additionally, when a derailed wheel collided directly with the side of the base plate, the embedded anchors in the sleeper were identified as a relatively weak point. Therefore, reducing the base plate width (from 500 mm to 480 mm) to guide collisions toward the DCP frame section, which could absorb greater impact loads, was a more effective design. The test results demonstrated that the newly developed steel grid frame-type DCP combination structure sufficiently resists the impact loads from derailed wheels of high-speed trains traveling at 300 km/h. It effectively restricts excessive lateral movement of derailed trains and provides guiding capability. Furthermore, the drop weight test for the newly proposed DCP combination structure, which also considers impact energy, is deemed more suitable for analysis than conventional testing methods.

<em>As China&#39;s economy has extended, so has its requirement for vitality. Subsequently, China has expanded its local vitality limits and created import procedures for oil and gas. In its global vitality exercises, China has advanced through an arrangement of stages. The reason for this paper is to concentrate on China&#39;s most recent stage: making an overland vitality organize, provided fundamentally by Turkmenistan and turning into the vitality center point of an incorporated Asian market &ndash; China&#39;s &nbsp;later &quot;Silk Road&quot; proposition. This paper additionally inspects the effect of Chinese vitality ventures on the possibilities of Central Asian vitality makers progressing to developing markets.</em> &nbsp; <strong>Introduction</strong> Chinese authorities are hoping to catalyze endeavors to verify bigger volumes of vitality imports from Central Asian providers, particularly Turkmenistan, and elevate ventures associated with the $1-trillion Belt and Road foundation improvement activity. The Energy Charter Treaty goes back to 1991 and was intended to give an unmistakable system to all aspects of cross-outskirt vitality advancement in Eurasia in the post-Soviet time, including venture and travel. Individuals are essentially European and post-Soviet states. China picked up onlooker status in 2001. Albeit Chinese monetary development has moderated, the nation&#39;s interest for vitality stays solid. Oil utilization developed 3.3 percent in 2016, after normal yearly development rates of 5.7 percent from 2005-2015, as indicated by BP. Gas utilization ascended at a 7.7 percent rate in 2016, down altogether from a normal yearly development rate of around 15 percent from 2005-2015. As indicated by the International Energy Agency, China&#39;s interest for gas is estimate to ascend by 8.7 percent every year to 2022. China&#39;s very own vitality holds are unimportant, in this manner it needs to extend access to universal providers. In the meantime, Beijing is concentrating on inclining up overland supplies so as to diminish its reliance on tanker-borne imports that go through the Strait of Malacca, an oceanic chokepoint that could be effectively shut off in a period of potential clash. Chinese consideration is normally concentrating on growing flammable gas supplies from Turkmenistan. Ashgabat supposedly controls the world&#39;s fourth biggest stores of gas, and transported around 30 billion cubic meters (bcm) of it to China in 2016. As indicated by the June 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, China imported around 38 bcm of gas from different nations by means of pipeline in 2016, while another 34.3 bcm of melted petroleum gas (LNG) additionally was imported. Of the gaseous petrol imported by means of pipeline, Turkmenistan represented around 77 percent of China&#39;s all out imports in 2016 by means of the 3,666-kilometer (2,278-mile) Central Asia-China gas pipeline organize. With fares to Iran and Russia having wilted, China is presently Ashgabat&#39;s sole huge buyer of gas, which is making important part of governmental budget income of Turkmenistan. China has just put billions of dollars in attempting to create Turkmen gas fields. In 2009, Turkmenistan got an underlying $3 billion credit from the Chinese Development Bank (CDB) for building up the Galkynysh (otherwise called the South Yolotan-Osman) gas field, and, after two years, got an extra $4.1 billion tranche. In the mean time, a consortium headed by the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) picked up a $10-billion creation sharing understanding (PSA) for Galkynysh field in 2009, and CNPC additionally holds the PSA for Bagtyyarlyk, which covers a few gas fields, including Saman-Depe and Altyn Asr. Under the Galkynysh PSA, Turkmenistan should send out 30 bcm every year to China for a long time. Be that as it may, the two nations need to convey yearly gas conveyances up to 65 bcm per annum &mdash; 30 bcm from Galkynysh, and the rest from the Bagtyyarlyk PSA and other Turkmen sources. <strong>Table 1 :</strong> Natural Gas in China in 2020, Import Requirement &nbsp; Chinese authorities additionally will search for circumstances amid the Ashgabat meeting to tout the Belt and Road activity, which is imagined as a way to grow Chinese fares to Europe and Eurasian states. Chinese exchange with Central Asian expresses nowadays will in general be a single direction road, with crude materials and normal assets streaming to China, and couple of high-esteem products returning return. For instance, Turkmenistan&#39;s imports of Chinese products represent about $815 million out of China&#39;s all out-world fares of $2.3 trillion, or under 0.04 percent. Chinese money related organizations are relied upon to help Chinese organizations in extending Turkmenistan&#39;s rail framework. Another railroad associating Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran opened in 2015, with the main trains making the 14-day venture from beach front Zhejiang Province in China to Tehran in February 2016. Also, the China Railway Corporation (CRC) has proposed a 3,200-kilometer (almost 2,000 mile) Silk Road fast railroad associating the western city of Urumqi in China with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and ending in Tehran. Exchange is additionally expected to improve for China after the finish of the $2-billion, 635-kilometer Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan (TAT) railroad. Turkmenistan finished its area of the railroad with Afghanistan in November 2016. On other hand, Tajikistan have been also fulfilling his obligations concerning this project. Since the first moves of the project until today the progress have been experienced. &nbsp; <strong>Map: New Natural Gas Pipelines going to China</strong> <strong>Methods</strong> To accomplish our objectives, we employ an exploratory research design based on (1) prior research reviews and (2) case analysis. The exploratory research design was selected because it is well-suited for studying material on which little research. Our analysis of China&rsquo;s global energy strategy and its energy relations are informed by an extensive review of a wide variety of materials, including Chinese, English and Russian-language sources, including Chinese and US government documents and reports, academic articles and research papers, international datasets, energy industry specific publications, international lending agency and think tank reports, and news media reporting. To assess the potential impact of China&rsquo;s energy investments on Central Asian exporters, we conduct a comparative case analysis of the impact of similar energy investments, by China, on the political, economic and social development of energy exporters in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Whereas a great deal has been written about Chinese investments abroad, in general, scant attention has been paid to the impact of energy investments on developing countries. However, through careful scrutiny of the existing literature, we ascertain distinct similar effects. To assess China&rsquo;s potential impact on Turkmenistan, we apply the insights of our comparative analysis. &nbsp; <strong>Oil and Gas Production</strong> Turkmenistan is rich in oil and especially gas resources. According to official figures, Turkmenistan&rsquo;s resource base is approximately 71.64 billion tons of oil equivalent, including 53 billion tons located in onshore fields and 18.21 billion tons in the Caspian Sea. The Government of Turkmenistan announced at May&rsquo;s 2017 Turkmenistan Gas Conference its reserves were&nbsp;50.4 trillion cubic meters (tcm). International estimates, however, vary. The&nbsp;2018 British Petroleum (BP) Statistical Review of World Energy&nbsp;indicated that Turkmenistan, as of the end of 2017, had 100 million tons of proven oil reserves and 19.5 tcm of gas. According to the same report Turkmenistan, with a local annual consumption of 28.4 bcm of gas, produced 62 bcm of natural gas in 2017 and exported 33.6 bcm in 2017, 31.7 to China. In May 2018 the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) reported that the accumulated volume of natural gas exported from Turkmenistan to China reached 204 bcm.&nbsp; CNPC did not specify how much of the 204 bcm was produced by TurkmenGas and how much by CNPC. The State Committee of Statistics of Turkmenistan reported a total production of 69.4bcm in 2016.&nbsp;According to Turkmenistan&rsquo;s State Statistics Committee, Turkmenistan produced about 11,397&nbsp;million tons of oil, including gas condensate, in 2016. According to official figures, the Turkmenbashy Complex of Oil Refineries produced 270 thousand tons of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in 2014. Oil &amp; Gas: &nbsp; 2015 2016 2017 2018 (Estimated)[1] Total Local Production 71.9[2] 69.4[3] 62[4] * Total Exports[5] 38.1 37.3 33.6 * Total Imports 0 0 0 * Imports from the US &nbsp; 0 0 0 * Total Market Size 33.8 32.1 28.4 * Exchange Rates 3.5 3.5 3.5 3.5 (total market size = (total local production + imports) - exports) With the drop of the global prices, Turkmenistan&rsquo;s hydrocarbon dependent economy is under pressure. There are dwindling opportunities to purchase exports from the United States and many reports of the Government of Turkmenistan&rsquo;s payment issues with foreign companies throughout the year. Nevertheless, below are the major sectors that have historically attracted foreign companies to Turkmenistan. Exploration and development of oil and natural gas fields, especially Galkynysh (formerly South Yoloten), Osman, Minara, Tagtabazar-I, offshore blocks, and the Central Karakum group of fields. Construction of gas treatment and processing units at the abovementioned fields. Opportunities also exist for gas-to-liquid (GTL) technology providers as Turkmenistan is currently building two GTL plants. <strong>Table 1 </strong>: The Trade, Investment and Energy Legal Relationship between China and Central Asia &nbsp; <strong>China Effect</strong> China&rsquo;s interest in Turkmenistan, the world&rsquo;s fourth-largest holder of natural gas reserves, dates to 1992, when CNPC and Mitsubishi proposed to export Turkmenistan gas to China. The first gas export agreement, however, was sealed fifteen years later in 2007 when Ashgabat and Beijing agreed to construct the 1,833 km long Central AsiaChina gas pipeline, connecting Xinjiang with Turkmenistan and transiting Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Turkmenistan portion of the pipeline was built with Chinese funding and is operated by a set of joint ventures between CNPC and state-owned Turkmenistan companies. In 2009 China began receiving Turkmenistan gas and by 2012 this amount reached 21.3 bcm/y of gas, equivalent to 51 percent of Turkmenistan&rsquo;s total gas exports. This volume is about half the total volume of China&rsquo;s gas imports. In 2008, CNPC and Turkmengaz signed an agreement to increase the volume of Turkmen gas to 40 bcm/y by 2015. In addition to exporting Turkmenistan gas, China has also become active in gas field development and production. In 2009 China provided a $4 billion loan for the first development phase of the South Yolotan gas field, the world&rsquo;s second largest gas field with proven reserves of seven trillion cubic meters, and in 2011 China added a $4.1 billion-dollar loan (US EIA, 2013b). In September 2013 China and Turkmenistan decided to significantly expand the Central Asia-China pipeline to 65 bcm/y by 2020. Even before this agreement was signed, China had become Turkmenistan&rsquo;s leading trade partner in 2012, with $10 billion bilateral trade turnover. &nbsp; <strong>Conclusion</strong> We found that China has utilized both local and worldwide measures to this end. We contended that, in its global exercises, China has experienced an arrangement of dynamic stages, from bringing in beginner to worldwide vitality heavyweight. This article especially centered around the most recent phase of China&#39;s universal vitality technique, which we asserted is to turned into the focal vitality purpose of an organized Asian district. This arrangement requires vitality. After not exactly a time of pursuing Eurasian vitality makers &ndash; especially Turkmenistan, &ndash; China has verified their participation and their vitality assets for its &quot;Silk Road&quot; plan. Our next goal was to comprehend the effect of noteworthy Chinese vitality speculation on energy producing creating nations. We along these lines led a near investigation of the two districts in which such speculation has happened: Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. &nbsp;The example we recognized includes elevated amounts of venture joined with the opening of business sectors for ease Chinese products. This methodology is exceptional and we named it the Chinese vitality collaboration model. While interests in capital-escalated vitality projects and the influx of goods is a boon for incumbent elites and everyday consumers, we found that the Chinese energy cooperation model carries potential disadvantages, particularly for local manufacturing and the development of local competencies.

The possibilities provided by the mesh telecommunication network on the railways are examined in the article. Mobile terminal radio stations located on trains are considered as repeaters and moving base radio stations for trains outside the coverage area of base stations of the network. Such a mesh network is represented both as the main communication network on railway lines equipped with an insufficient number of radio base stations and as a backup option in the event of a base station failure on one hand or a decrease in the signaltonoise ratio at the terminal station due to a breakdown on the train on the other hand. The results of a theoretical mathematical calculation of the increase in the effective coverage area of a radio network gained from the use of mesh technology are presented. The results of modeling of the mesh network on the railroad are also presented together with the dependencies of the probability of communication from such factors as: the number of trains on the railway line, the number and range of the base stations, the range of terminal stations, the capacity of the network and the limitation on the number of retransmissions. For the case of using a mesh network as a backup option when a railway line is fully covered with base stations, the results of simulating the time of establishing a connection via a retransmission in the area of a base station failure are presented. Comparison of the possibilities provided by firstorder mesh networks (with one repeater between the terminal and base stations) and more capacious (second and higher orders by the number of allowable repeaters) is presented. As a radio communication standard for mesh network modeling, the application of DMR (Digital Mobile Radio) is considered as a promising one for railway communications, requiring a small number of base stations.

<strong>ANNOTATION</strong> The article provides information about the emergence of railway transport and its introduction into Central Asia. Also, it was analyzed that during the years of independence, unprecedented works were carried out in the field of development of railway transport, economy and technology, as a result of efficient management of resources, along with all types of transport in Uzbekistan. <strong>Key words:</strong> discovery, railway, efficiency, economy, independence. &nbsp; <strong>&nbsp;INTRODUCTION</strong> In the history of mankind &ldquo;In 1814, the English designer and inventor George Stephenson created the first steam engine. When a steam locomotive was tested on a railway track, it moved at a speed of 10 km per hour, pulling 8 wagons behind it ... In 1825, George Stephenson managed to build the first railway between the two cities. 1825 is indicated as the date of the appearance of the first railway transport in many literatures[1]. But as can be seen from the above quotation, on this day a railway was built between the two cities and railway traffic began. Therefore, in our opinion, it is correct to say that intercity rail communication was established in 1825 and the mass use of this type of transport began[2]. The construction of the first railway to the territory of Central Asia was carried out in 1880 in the direction from the Caspian Sea to Kyzyl-Arbot, and it was completed in 1881. This railway, which went down in history under the name Kaspiyorti (Transcaspian), was delivered to Ashgabat in 1885, and to Chorzhoy in 1886. Two years later, in May 1888, the trains left for Samarkand. In 1896, the initial section of the railway was moved to the port city of Krasnovodsk, which could receive large ships. From there, the railway continued leading to Samarkand. At the station Ursatyevsk (now Khovos) the road forks. One to Tashkent, the other to the Ferghana Valley. Both routes were completed in 1899. In 1900, the Marv-Kushka railway was launched in a southerly direction. Thus, important strategic regions of Central Asia were covered by the railway.[3] &nbsp; <strong>DISCUSSION AND RESULTS</strong> In 1901, the construction of the Orenburg-Tashkent railway began. Construction started on both sides was completed in January 1906 and thus Central Asia joined the rail network with other regions for the first time. It should be noted that this road was of great importance in the life of the peoples of Central Asia. The peoples of the region, including Uzbekistan, still use this road. The launch of the Orenburg-Tashkent railway further increased trade and freight traffic between Russia and its former colony, the Central Asian region. Naturally, the number of cotton products exported from the region increased. It should be noted that the railway and railway transport, that is, steam locomotives, were new to the local population[4]. In 1917, the government of the Soviets, which came to power in the place of the Russian Empire, radically changed the country&#39;s economy from the first years. It introduced completely new ways of doing business. Property took on a new form and meaning. Private property was completely abolished, and its place was taken by the form of collective, or rather, state property. All industries were fully and directly controlled by the state. Including rail transport. Of course, this policy had its negative and positive consequences. It can be said without hesitation that in the days of the former union, along with all other modes of transport, rail transport developed significantly. Since the 1920s, most of the Central Asian railways have been undergoing reconstruction, reconstruction and repair work. Together with these works, the construction of new railway lines was started. Of great importance in the development of the region was the connection of the Turkestan-Siberian railway with a length of 1452 km, which remained in history under the name &quot;Turksib&quot; and put into operation in 1929-1931, with the railway of Uzbekistan[5]. Along with the development of railways, the locomotives and wagons moving along it were also improved. During this period, the movement of new European-style steam locomotives will be launched on the railways of Uzbekistan. The power, speed and other technical capabilities of this type of steam locomotives were much higher than those of their predecessors. This has affected the efficiency of rail transport. Also during these years, steam locomotives began to be used on the railways of Central Asia, superior to steam locomotives in terms of efficiency. In world practice, the first passenger and freight transportation by trains with locomotive traction was launched on the Central Asian Railway in 1931 on the Ashgabat-Dushak and Ashgabat-Bamu lines. A new branch of railway transport began to emerge in Central Asia - car building. For the first time in 1935, car repair stations were built at the stations of Termez, Karshi and Khovost. Carriage depots were built in the cities of Samarkand, Kogon, Kogon. The construction of these production and repair enterprises became important in meeting the demand for wagons necessary for the operation of the Central Asian railway transport. The development of the wagon services industry continued in subsequent years. In the future, this served as a solid basis for the creation of its own car building in independent Uzbekistan[6]. Of great importance in the victory of the former state of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. had the creation of a railway road network through the Central Asian region, connected with other union republics. Hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of industrial enterprises were evacuated to Uzbekistan by rail from areas threatened by the enemy. More than a million of our ancestors went to fight the enemy along these roads. Also, weapons, clothes, food and other things necessary for the front were sent by rail[7]. It is known that &ldquo;the normative component of the procedure is connected with the sphere of practical activity. Its obvious areas of influence are economics and technology. The principle of leadership in them is the optimal and efficient management of resources. If understood in this sense, then we will not be mistaken if we say that over the years of independence, railway transport, like all types of transport in Uzbekistan, has reached its literal peak of its development. As a result of optimal and efficient resource management aimed at improving the economy and technology, unprecedented work has been carried out in the field over the years of independence, and a unified railway system has been created in Uzbekistan[8]. Although independence is a great value, the countries that gained independence faced a number of problems. In particular, the inconvenience caused by problems with roads and communications put countries in a very difficult situation. The most important of them was the transfer of existing roads and railways connecting the country&#39;s territories with the territory of neighboring states. This problem also appeared in Uzbekistan. Part of the railway leading to Karakalpakstan and the Khorezm and Surkhandarya regions remained on the territory of Turkmenistan, and the railway connecting the Ferghana Valley remained on the territory of Tajikistan. These countries, which are rightfully our neighbors and brothers, did not interfere with the movement of our trains on their territory. However, they were allowed under certain conditions. A large transit fee was charged for each wagon. This led to a decrease in the economic efficiency of the movement of our passenger and freight trains on these roads. Then in this place the issue of security was always on the agenda. When our trains run through the territory of a foreign country, various dangers and illegal actions are more likely. Therefore, trains were left for hours for inspection at the border and customs posts. Those who traveled in passenger trains were particularly hard hit[9]. Those who traveled at that time on passenger trains are probably well aware that our trains passing through the territory of neighboring countries were stopped and inspected four times: the first, when leaving our territory; the second when entering the territory of a neighboring country; the third - when leaving the territory of a neighboring country; fourthly, when entering the territory of our country. Four hours passed when one hour remained, and eight hours when two hours remained. So, the movement through neighboring countries was inefficient in all respects. The only way to solve this problem was to build new railways connecting the regions in our territory. It should be noted that Uzbekistan managed to successfully solve this problem in stages. To this end, in recent years, work has been carried out on the construction of a new railway in three directions, in unique conditions. With the commissioning of the construction of the electrified Angren-Pop railway, the railway coverage of all regions of our country has been practically completed. Thus, the total length of railways in our country has reached 6,500 kilometers. But the work didn&#39;t stop there. Another important task of electrifying railways was set before our railroad workers. Nowadays, the process of electrification of railways in Uzbekistan continues at a rapid pace. After all, the electrification of railways has many advantages. First, electric locomotives are more reliable, convenient and efficient than diesel locomotives. The country has more opportunities for the production of electricity than for the production of petroleum products. Of course, there are also environmental issues. Because the pollution rates of electric locomotives are also low[10]. &nbsp; <strong>CONCLUSION</strong> When it comes to electric locomotives, the Afrosiab high-speed electric train comes to mind, which has been running since October 8, 2011 on the route Tashkent-Samarkand-Tashkent (now Tashkent-Bukhara-Tashkent). After all, this electric train has all the amenities for passengers. These amenities are hard to describe in words. Those who have visited it at least once as a passenger will feel it with their body. The softness of the seats of the electric train, the noiselessness when driving at high speed, the absence of outside noise, the high level of passenger service in the car and other amenities are all at their best. The most important thing is that if earlier you traveled to your destination in 5-6 hours, then on the Afrosiab high-speed electric train you will reach your destination in just over two hours. All this is a vivid expression of the creative changes taking place in railway transport. There is no doubt that in the near future electric trains similar to high-speed electric trains will ride &quot;Afrosiab&quot; will be launched on all railway lines of Uzbekistan. <strong>REFERENCES</strong> Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Akromkulov Azim Sheralievich, and Zayniddinov Diorbek Zafarovich.&nbsp; Reforms in the Fields of Communication and Transport and Their Social Impact.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education.&nbsp;Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 227-230. Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Allamurodov Kamoliddin Bakhtiyorovich, Toshkhojaev Khalilkhoja Khakimkhojaevich. Prospects of Development of Communication and Transport System in Uzbekistan. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 342-346. Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Abdimurodov Namoz Shaydullaevich, Savriddinov Sardor Sirojiddinovich. The Development of Automotive and Road Engineering Industries in a Deterministic Relationship. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 338-341. Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Ergashev Zakhriddin Muradkabilovich, and Saidov Abukarim Abdurahimovich. &nbsp;The Influence of the Transport and Communication System on Social Relations.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education.&nbsp;Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 209-212. Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Odilov Nurbek Omonjon o&rsquo;g&rsquo;li, and Odilov Shuhrat Khusniddinovich.&nbsp; The Social Importance of Roads and the Great Creative Works Being Carried Out in the Field of Road Construction in Uzbekistan.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 205-208. Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Bozorov Zufarboy Azamatovich, Eraliev Nurlan Dzhanibekovich. The Role of Civil Aviation in the Social Development of Countries. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 347-350. Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich. The Importance of Sea Transport in the Communication System. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. 2023. Volume 2 Issue 1, 272-275. Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Mehmanov Zikrillo Mirzokhidovich, and Sobirov Ogabek Navro&rsquo;zbekovich. &nbsp;The Role of the Category of Chance in the Analysis of Social Life.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education.&nbsp;Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 246-249. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; [1] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Akromkulov Azim Sheralievich, and Zayniddinov Diorbek Zafarovich.&nbsp; Reforms in the Fields of Communication and Transport and Their Social Impact.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education.&nbsp;Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 227-230. [2] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Allamurodov Kamoliddin Bakhtiyorovich, Toshkhojaev Khalilkhoja Khakimkhojaevich. Prospects of Development of Communication and Transport System in Uzbekistan. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 342-346. [3] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Ergashev Zakhriddin Muradkabilovich, and Saidov Abukarim Abdurahimovich. &nbsp;The Influence of the Transport and Communication System on Social Relations.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education.&nbsp;Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 209-212. [4] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Abdimurodov Namoz Shaydullaevich, Savriddinov Sardor Sirojiddinovich. The Development of Automotive and Road Engineering Industries in a Deterministic Relationship. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 338-341.&nbsp; &nbsp; [5] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Ergashev Zakhriddin Muradkabilovich, and Saidov Abukarim Abdurahimovich. &nbsp;The Influence of the Transport and Communication System on Social Relations.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education.&nbsp;Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 209-212. [6] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Odilov Nurbek Omonjon o&rsquo;g&rsquo;li, and Odilov Shuhrat Khusniddinovich.&nbsp; The Social Importance of Roads and the Great Creative Works Being Carried Out in the Field of Road Construction in Uzbekistan.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 205-208. [7]Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Bozorov Zufarboy Azamatovich, Eraliev Nurlan Dzhanibekovich. The Role of Civil Aviation in the Social Development of Countries. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 347-350.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; [8] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich. The Importance of Sea Transport in the Communication System. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. 2023. Volume 2 Issue 1, 272-275.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; [9] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich, Mehmanov Zikrillo Mirzokhidovich, and Sobirov Ogabek Navro&rsquo;zbekovich. &nbsp;The Role of the Category of Chance in the Analysis of Social Life.&nbsp;Web of Semantic: Universal Journal on Innovative Education.&nbsp;Volume 2 Issue 2, (2023), 246-249. [10] Salimov Bakhriddin Lutfullaevich. The Importance of Sea Transport in the Communication System. WEB OF SYNERGY: International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. 2023. Volume 2 Issue 1, 272-275.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.Shaping the City: Environmental ImaginariesIn a sense, the flâneur is the product of a utopian imaginary of the city. According to Shields, Walter Benjamin used the flâneur as a literary device to make sense of the changing modern city of Paris: The flâneur is a hero who excels under the stress of coming to terms with a changing ‘social spatialisation’ of everyday social and economic relations which in the nineteenth century increasingly extended the world of the average person further and further to include rival mass tourism destinations linked by railroad, news of other European powers and distant colonies. This expanding spatialization took the form of economic realities such as changing labour markets and commodity prices and social encounters with strangers and foreigners which impinged on the life world of Europeans. (Fancy Footwork 67)Through his writing, these new spaces and inhabitants were made familiar again to those that lived there. In consequence, the flâneur was seen as a heroic figure who approached the city like a wilderness to be studied and tamed:Even to early 20th-century sociologists the flâneur was a heroic everyman—masculine, controlled and as in tune with his environment as James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohican braves were in their native forests. Anticipating the hardboiled hero of the detective novel, the flâneur pursued clues to the truth of the metropolis, attempting to think through its historical specificity, to inhabit it, even as the truth of empire and commodity capitalism was hidden from him. (Shields Flanerie 210)In this way, the flâneur was a stabilising force, categorising and therefore ordering the city. However, flânerie was also a transgressive act as the walker engaged in eccentric and idle wandering against the usual purposeful walking practices of the time (Coates). Drawing on this aspect, flânerie has increasingly been employed in the humanities and social sciences as a practice of resistance as Jamie Coates has shown. This makes the flâneur, albeit in a refigured form, a useful tool for transgressing strict socio-ecological conventions that affect the contemporary city.Marginalised groups are usually the most impacted by the strict control and ordering of contemporary urban spaces in response to utopian imaginaries of who and what belong. Marginalised people are discouraged and excluded from living in particular areas of the city through urban policy and commercial practices (Shaw 7). Likewise, certain non-human others, like birds, are allowed to inhabit our cities while those that don’t fit ideal urban imaginaries, like bats or snakes, are controlled, excluded or killed (Low). Defensive architecture, CCTV, and audio deterrents are often employed in cities to control public spaces. In London, the spiked corridor of a shop entrance designed to keep homeless people from sleeping there (Andreou; Borromeo) mirrors the spiked ledges that keep pigeons from resting on buildings (observed 2012/2014). On the Gold Coast youths are deterred from loitering in public spaces with classical music (observed 2013–17), while in Brisbane predatory bird calls are played near outdoor restaurants to discourage ibis from pestering customers (Hinchliffe and Begley). In contrast, bright lights, calming music and inviting scents are used to welcome orderly consumers into shopping centres while certain kinds of plants are cultivated in urban parks and gardens to attract acceptable wildlife like butterflies and lorikeets (Wilson; Low). These ways of managing public spaces are built on utopian conceptions of the city as a “civilising” force—a place of order, consumption and safety.As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is important to re-examine these conceptions of urban environments and the assemblage of environmental imaginaries that interact and continue to shape understandings of and attitudes towards human and non-human nature. The network of goods, people and natural entities that feed into and support the city mean that imaginaries shaped in urban areas influence both urban and surrounding peoples and ecologies (Braun). Local ecologies also become threatened as urban structures and processes continue to encompass more of the world’s populations and locales, often displacing and damaging entangled natural/cultural entities in the process. Furthermore, conceptions and attitudes shaped in the city often feed into global systems and as such can have far reaching implications for the way local ecologies are governed, built, and managed. There has already been much research, including work by Lawrence Buell and Ursula Heise, on the contribution that art and literature can make to the development of environmental imaginaries, whether intentional or unintentional, and resulting in both positive and negative associations with urban inhabitants (Yusoff and Gabrys; Buell; Heise). Imaginaries might be understood as social constructs through which we make sense of the world and through which we determine cultural and personal values, attitudes and beliefs. According to Neimanis et al., environmental imaginaries help us to make sense of the way physical environments shape “one’s sense of social belonging” as well as how we “formulate—and enact—our values and attitudes towards ‘nature’” (5). These environmental imaginaries underlie urban structures and work to determine which aspects of the city are valued, who is welcomed into the city, and who is excluded from participation in urban systems and processes. The development of new narrative imaginaries can question some of the underlying assumptions about who or what belongs in the city and how we might settle conflicts in ecologically diverse communities. The reimagined flâneur then might be employed to transgress traditional notions of belonging in the city and replace this with a sense of “becoming” in relation with the myriad of others inhabiting the city (Haraway The Trouble). Like the Benjaminian flâneur, the postmodern version enacts a similar transgressive walking practice. However, the postmodern flâneur serves to resist dominant narratives, with a “greater focus on the tactile and grounded qualities of walking” than the traditional flâneur—and, as opposed to the lone detached wanderer, postmodern flâneur engage in a network of social relationships and may even wander in groups (Coates 32). By employing the notion of the postmodern flâneur, writers might find ways to address problematic urban imaginaries and question dominant narratives about who should and should not inhabit the city. Building on this and in reference to Haraway (Cyborgs), the notion of a cyborg flâneur might take this resistance one step further, not only seeking to counter the dominant social narratives that control urban spaces but also resisting anthropocentric notions of the city. Where the traditional flâneur walked a pet tortoise on a leash, the cyborg flâneur walks with a companion species (Shields Fancy Footwork; Haraway Companion Species). The distinction is subtle. The traditional flâneur walks a pet, an object of display that showcases the eccentric status of the owner. The cyborg flâneur walks in mutual enjoyment with a companion (perhaps a domestic companion, perhaps not); their path negotiated together, tracked, and mapped via GPS. The two acts may at first appear the same, but the difference is in the relationship between the human, non-human, and the multi-modal spaces they occupy. As Coates argues, not everyone who walks is a flâneur and similarly, not everyone who engages in relational walking is a cyborg flâneur. Rather a cyborg flâneur enacts a deliberate practice of walking in relation with naturecultures to transgress boundaries between human and non-human, cultural and natural, and the virtual, material and imagined spaces that make up a place.The Posthuman City: Cyborgs, Hybrids, and EntanglementsIn developing new environmental imaginaries, posthuman conceptions of the city can be drawn upon to readdress urban space as complex, questioning utopian notions of the city particularly as they relate to the exclusion of certain others, and allowing for diverse socio-ecological communities. The posthuman city might be understood in opposition to anthropocentric notions where the non-human is seen as something separate to culture and in need of management and control within the human sphere of the city. Instead, the posthuman city is a complex entanglement of hybrid non-human, cultural and technological entities (Braun; Haraway Companion Species). The flâneur who experiences the city through a posthuman lens acknowledges the human as already embodied and embedded in the non-human world. Key to re-imagining the city is recognising the myriad ways in which non-human nature also acts upon us and influences decisions on how we live in cities (Schliephake 140). This constitutes a “becoming-with each other”, in Haraway’s terms, which recognises the interdependency of urban inhabitants (The Trouble 3). In re-considering the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture rather than a colonisation of nature by culture, the agency of non-humans to contribute to the construction of cities and indeed environmental imaginaries must be acknowledged. Living in the posthuman city requires us humans to engage with the city on multiple levels as we navigate the virtual, corporeal, and imagined spaces that make up the contemporary urban experience. The virtual city is made up of narratives projected through media productions such as tourism campaigns, informational plaques, site markers, and images on Google map locations, all of which privilege certain understandings of the city. Virtual narratives serve to define the city through a network of historical and spatially determined locales. Closely bound up with the virtual is the imagined city that draws on urban ideals, potential developments, mythical or alternative versions of particular cities as well as literary interpretations of cities. These narratives are overlaid on the places that we engage with in our everyday lived experiences. Embodied encounters with the city serve to reinforce or counteract certain virtual and imagined versions while imagined and virtual narratives enhance locales by placing current experience within a temporal narrative that extends into the past as well as the future. Walking the City: The Cyber/Cyborg FlâneurThe notion of the cyber flâneur emerged in the twenty-first century from the practices of idly surfing the Internet, which in many ways has become an extension of the cityscape. In the contemporary world where we exist in both physical and digital spaces, the cyber flâneur (and indeed its cousin the virtual flâneur) have been employed to make sense of new digital sites of connection, voyeurism, and consumption. Metaphors that evoke the city have often been used to describe the experience of the digital including “chat rooms”, “cyber space”, and “home pages” while new notions of digital tourism, the rise of online shopping, and meeting apps have become substitutes for engaging with the physical sites of cities such as shopping malls, pubs, and attractions. The flâneur and cyberflâneur have helped to make sense of the complexities and chaos of urban life so that it might become more palatable to the inhabitants, reducing anxieties about safety and disorder. However, as with the concept of the flâneur, implicit in the cyberflâneur is a reinforcement of traditional urban hierarchies and social structures. This categorising has also worked to solidify notions of who belongs and who does not. Therefore, as Debra Benita Shaw argues, the cyberflâneur is not able to represent the complexities of “how we inhabit and experience the hybrid spaces of contemporary cities” (3). Here, Shaw suggests that Haraway’s cyborg might be used to interrupt settled boundaries and to reimagine the urban walking figure. In both Shaw and Shields (Flanerie), the cyborg is invoked as a solution to the problematic figure of the flâneur. While Shaw presents these figures in opposition and proposes that the flâneur be laid to rest as the cyborg takes its place, I argue that the idea of the flâneur may still have some use, particularly when applied to new multi-modal narratives. As Shields demonstrates, the cyborg operates in the virtual space of simulation rather than at the material level (217). Instead of setting up an opposition between the cyborg and flâneur, these figures might be merged to bring the cyborg into being through the material practice of flânerie, while refiguring the flâneur as posthuman. The traditional flâneur sought to define space, but the cyborg flâneur might be seen to perform space in relation to an entangled natural/cultural community. By drawing on this notion of the cyborg, it becomes possible to circumvent some of the traditional associations with the urban walking figure and imagine a new kind of flâneur, one that walks the streets as an act to complicate rather than compartmentalise urban space. As we emerge into a post-truth world where facts and fictions blur, creative practitioners can find opportunities to forge new ways of knowing, and new ways of connecting with the city through the cyborg flâneur. The development of new literary imaginaries can reconstruct natural/cultural relationships and propose alternative ways of living in a posthuman and multispecies community. The rise of smart-phone apps like Story City provides cyborg flâneurs with the ability to create digital narratives overlaid on real places and has the potential to encourage real connections with urban environments. While these apps are by no means the only activity that a cyborg flâneur might participate in, they offer the writer a platform to engage audiences in a purposeful and transgressive practice of cyborg flânerie. Such narratives produced through cyborg flânerie would conflate virtual, corporeal, and imagined experiences of the city and allow for new environmental imaginaries to be created in situ. The “readers” of these narratives can also become cyborg flâneurs as the traditional urban wanderer is combined with the virtual and imagined space of the contemporary city. As opposed to wandering the virtual city online, readers are encouraged to physically walk the city and engage with the narrative in situ. For example, in one narrative, readers are directed to walk a trail along the Brisbane river or through the CBD to chase a sea monster (Wilkins and Diskett). The reader can choose different pre-set paths which influence the outcome of each story and embed the story in a physical location. In this way, the narrative is layered onto the real streets and spaces of the cityscape. As the reader is directed to walk particular routes through the city, the narratives which unfold are also partly constructed by the natural/cultural entities which make up those locales establishing a narrative practice which engages with the urban on a posthuman level. The murky water of the Brisbane River could easily conceal monsters. Occasional sightings of crocodiles (Hall), fish that leap from the water, and shadows cast by rippling waves as the City Cat moves across the surface impact the experience of the story (observed 2016–2017). Potential exists to capitalise on this narrative form and develop new environmental imaginaries that pay attention to the city as a posthuman place. For example, a narrative might direct the reader’s attention to the networks of water that hydrate people and animals, allow transportation, and remove wastes from the city. People may also be directed to explore their senses within place, be encouraged to participate in sensory gardens, or respond to features of the city in new ways. The cyborg flâneur might be employed in much the same way as the flâneur, to help the “reader” make sense of the posthuman city, where boundaries are shifted, and increasing rates of social and ecological change are transforming contemporary urban sites and structures. Shields asks whether the cyborg might also act as “a stabilising figure amidst the collapse of dualisms, polluted categories, transgressive hybrids, and unstable fluidity” (Flanerie 211). As opposed to the traditional flâneur however, this “stabilising” figure doesn’t sort urban inhabitants into discrete categories but maps the many relations between organisms and technologies, fictions and realities, and the human and non-human. The cyborg flâneur allows for other kinds of “reading” of the city to take place—including those by women, families, and non-Western inhabitants. As opposed to the nineteenth century reader-flâneur, those who read the city through the Story City app are also participants in the making of the story, co-constructing the narrative along with the author and locale. I would argue this participation is a key feature of the cyborg flâneur narrative along with the transience of the narratives which may alter and eventually expire as urban structures and environments change. Not all those who engage with these narratives will necessarily enact a posthuman understanding and not all writers of these narratives will do so as cyborg flâneurs. Nevertheless, platforms such as Story City provide writers with an opportunity to engage participants to question dominant narratives of the city and to reimagine themselves within a multispecies community. In addition, by bringing readers into contact with the human and non-human entities that make up the city, there is potential for real relationships to be established. Through new digital platforms such as apps, writers can develop new environmental imaginaries that question urban ideals including conceptions about who belongs in the city and who does not. The notion of the cyborg is a useful concept through which to reimagine the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture, and to reimagine the flâneur as performer who becomes part of the posthuman city as they walk the streets. This article provides one example of cyborg flânerie in smart-phone apps like Story City that allow writers to construct new urban imaginaries, bring the virtual and imagined city into the physical spaces of the urban environment, and can act to re-place the reader in diverse socio-ecological communities. The reader then becomes both product and constructer of urban space, a cyborg flâneur in the cyborg city. This conversation raises further questions about the cyborg flâneur, including: how might cyborg flânerie be enacted in other spaces (rural, virtual, more-than-human)? What other platforms and narrative forms might cyborg flâneurs use to share their posthuman narratives? How might cyborg flânerie operate in other cities, other cultures and when adopted by marginalised groups? In answering these questions, the potential and limitations of the cyborg flâneur might be refined. The hope is that one day the notion of a cyborg flâneur will no longer necessary as the posthuman city becomes a space of negotiation rather than exclusion. ReferencesAndreou, Alex. “Anti-Homeless Spikes: ‘Sleeping Rough Opened My Eyes to the City’s Barbed Cruelty.’” The Guardian 19 Feb. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 &lt;https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile&gt;.Borromeo, Leah. “These Anti-Homeless Spikes Are Brutal. We Need to Get Rid of Them.” The Guardian 23 Jul. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 &lt;https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/23/anti-homeless-spikes-inhumane-defensive-architecture&gt;.Braun, Bruce. “Environmental Issues: Writing a More-than-Human Urban Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 29.5 (2005): 635–50. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flâneur.” Social Anthropology 25.1 (2017): 28–41.Hall, Peter. “Crocodiles Spotted in Queensland: A Brief History of Sightings and Captures in the Southeast.” The Courier Mail 4 Jan. 2017. 20 Aug. 2017 &lt;http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crocodiles-spotted-in-queensland-a-brief-history-of-sightings-and-captures-in-the-southeast/news-story/5fbb2d44bf3537b8a6d1f6c8613e2789&gt;.Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.———. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Oxon: Routledge, 1991.Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Hinchliffe, Jessica, and Terri Begley. “Brisbane’s Angry Birds: Recordings No Deterrent for Nosey Ibis at South Bank.” ABC News 2 Jun. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 &lt;http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-06/recorded-bird-noise-not-detering-south-banks-angry-birds/6065610&gt;.Low, Tim. The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. London: Penguin, 2002.Neimanis, Astrid, Cecilia Asberg, and Suzi Hayes. “Posthumanist Imaginaries.” Research Handbook on Climate Governance. Eds. K. Bäckstrand and E. Lövbrand. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015. 480–90.Schliephake, Christopher. Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014.Shaw, Debra Benita. “Streets for Cyborgs: The Electronic Flâneur and the Posthuman City.” Space and Culture 18.3 (2015): 230–42.Shields, Rob. “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie.” The Flâneur. Ed. Keith Tester. London: Routledge, 2014. 61–80.———. “Flânerie for Cyborgs.” Theory, Culture &amp; Society 23.7-8 (2006): 209–20.Yusoff, Kathryn, and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2.4 (2011): 516–34.Wilkins, Kim, and Joseph Diskett. 9 Fathom Deep. Brisbane: Story City, 2014. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991.

Introduction Since the early 2000s, and especially since the onset of COVID-19 and long periods of lockdown, board games have seen a revival in popularity. The increasing popularity of board games are part of what Julie Lennett, a toy industry analyst at NPD Group, describes as the “nesting trend”: families have more access to entertainment at home and are eschewing expensive nights out (cited in Birkner 7). While on-demand television is a significant factor in this trend, for Moriaty and Kay (6), who wouldn’t “welcome [the] chance to turn away from their screens” to seek the “warmth and connection you get from playing games with live human family and friends?” For others, playing board games can simply be about nostalgia. Board games have a long history not specific to one period, geography, or culture. Likely board games were developed to do two things – teach and entertain. This remains the case today. Historically, miniature versions of battles or hunts were played out in what we might recognise today as a board game. Trade, war, and science impacted on their development, as did the printing press, which allowed for the standardisation of rules. Chess had many variations prior to the fifteenth century. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution allowed for the mass production of board games, boosting their popularity across nations, class, and age (Walker 13). Today, regardless of or because of our digital lives, we are in a “board game renaissance” (Booth 1). Still played on rainy days, weekends, and holidays, we now also play board games in dedicated game board cafés like the Haunted Game Café in America, the Snakes and Lattes in Canada, or the Mind Café in Singapore. In the board game café Draughts in the UK, customers pay £5 to select and play one of 800 board games, including classics like Monopoly and Cluedo. These cafes are important as they are “helping manufacturers to understand the kind of games that appeal to the larger section of players” (Atrizton). COVID-19 caused board game sales to increase. The global market was predicted to increase by US$1 billion in 2021, compared to 2020 (Jarvis). Total sales of board games in Australia are expected to reach AU$86 million in 2023, an almost 10 per cent increase from the preceding year (Statista "Board Games – Australia"). The emergence of Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform which funds new board games, is filling the gap in the contemporary board game market, with board games generating 20 per cent of the total funding raised (Carter). Board games are predicted to continue to grow, with the global market revenue record at US$19 billion dollars in 2022, a figure that is expected to rise to US$40 billion within 6 years (Atrizton). If the current turn towards board games represents a desire to escape from the digital world, the Internet is also contributing to the renaissance. Ex-Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton hosts the popular Web series TableTop, in which each episode explains a board game that is then played, usually with celebrities. The Internet also provides “communities” in which fans can share their enthusiasm, be it as geek culture or cult fandom (Booth 2). Booth provides an eloquent explanation, however, for the allure of face-to-face board games: “they remind us of our face-to-face past, and recall a type of pre-digital luddism where we can circle around the ‘campfire’ of the game board” (Booth 1-2). What makes a board game successful is harder to define. Phillip Orbanes, an American game designer and former vice-president of research and development at Parker Brothers, has attempted to elucidate the factors that make a good board game: “make the rules simple and unambiguous … don’t frustrate the casual player … establish a rhythm … focus on what’s happening off the board … give ‘em chances to come from behind … [and] provide outlets for latent talents” (Orbanes 52-55). Orbanes also says it is important to understand that what “happens off the board is just as important to the experience as the physical game itself” (Orbanes 51). Tristan Donovan contends that there are four broad stages of modern board games, beginning with the folk era when games had no fixed author, their rules were mutable, and local communities adapted the game to suit their sensibilities. Chess is an example of this, with the game only receiving the fixed rules we know today when tournaments and organisations saw the need for a singular set of rules. Mass production of games was the second stage, marking “the single biggest shift in board game history – a total flip in how people understood, experienced and played board games. Games were no long[er] malleable objects owned by the commons, but products created usually in the pursuit of profit” (Donovan 267). An even more recent development in game boards was the introduction of mass produced plastics, which reduced the cost of board game construction and allowed for a wider range of games to be produced. This was particularly evident in the post-war period. Games today are often thought of as global, which allows gamers to discover games from other regions and cultures, such as Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995), a German game that may not have enjoyed its immense success if it were not for the Internet. Board game players are broadly categorised into two classes: the casual gamer and the hobby or serious gamer (Rogerson and Gibbs). The most popular game from the mass production era is Monopoly, the focus of this article. The History of Monopoly Monopoly was designed and patented by American Elizabeth Magie (1866-1948) in 1902, and was originally called The Landlord’s Game. The game was based on the anti-monopoly taxation principles of Henry George (1839-1897), who argued that people should own 100 per cent of what they make and the land should belong to everyone. Land ownership, considered George, only benefitted land owners, and forces working people to pay exorbitant rent. Magie’s original version of the game was designed to demonstrate how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. Renters in Australia’s property market today may recognise this side of ruthless capitalism. In 1959 Fidel Castro thought Monopoly “sufficiently redolent of capitalism” that he “ordered the ­destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba” (McManus). Magie, however, was not credited with being the original inventor of Monopoly: rather, this credit was given to Charles Darrow. In 2014, the book The Monopolist: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World's Favorite Board Game by Mary Pilon re-established Magie as the inventor of Monopoly, with her role and identity unearthed by American Ralph Anspach (1926-2022), an Adam Smith economist, Polish-German refugee, and anti-Vietnam protestor. According to Pilon, Magie, a suffragette and progressive economic and political thinker, was a Georgist advocate, particularly of his anti-monopolist policies, and it was this that informed her game’s narrative. An unmarried daughter of Scottish immigrants, she was a Washington homeowner, familiar with the grid-like street structure of the national capital. Magie left school at 13 to help support her family who were adversely impacted upon by the Panic of 1873, which saw economic collapse because of falling silver prices, railroad speculation, and property losses. She worked as a stenographer and teacher of Georgist single tax theory. Seeking a broader platform for her economic ideas, and with the growing popularity of board games in middle class homes, in 1904 Magie secured a patent for The Landlord’s Game, at a time when women only held 1 per cent of US patents (Pilon). The original game included deeds and play money and required players to earn wages via labour and pay taxes. The board provided a circular path (as opposed to the common linear path) in which players circled through rental properties and railroads, and could acquire food, with natural reserves (oil, coal, farms, and forests) unable to be monopolised. However, she created two sets of rules – the monopoly rules familiar to today’s players, and anti-monopoly rules in which tensions over human greed and altruism could be played out by participants. Magie started her own New York firm to manufacture and distribute the game, continued the struggle for women’s equality, and raged against wealthy monopolists of the day such as Andrew Carnegie (Pilon). By the late 1920, the game, mostly referred to as the ‘monopoly’ game, was popular, but many who played the game were playing handmade versions, likely unaware of the original Landlord’s Game. In 1931, mass-produced versions of the game, now titled Finance, began to appear, with some changes, including the ability to purchase properties, along with rule books. Occurring at the same time as the emergence of fixed-price goods in large department stores, the game, which now included chance cards, continued to be popular. It was Charles Darrow who sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers, even if he did not invent it. Darrow was introduced to one of the variants of the game and became obsessed with the game, which now featured the Community Chest and Free Parking, but his version did not have a set of rules. An unemployed ex-serviceman with no college education, Darrow struggled to provide for his family. By 1932, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, with housing prices collapsing and squatting common in large American cities. Befriending an artist, Darrow sought to provide a more dynamic and professional version of the game and complete it with a set of rules. In 1933, Darrow marketed his version of the game, titled Mr Monopoly, and it was purchased by Parker Brothers for US$7,000 in 1935. Magie received just US $500 (Farzan). Monopoly, as it was rebranded, was initial sold for $2 a game, and Parker Brothers sold 278,000 games in the first year. In 1936, consumers purchased 1.7 million editions of the game, generating millions of dollars in profits for Parker Brothers, who prior to Monopoly were on the brink of collapse (Pilon). Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists also reveals the struggle of Ralph Anspach in the 1970s to sell his Anti-Monopoly board games, which Parker Brothers fought in the courts. Anspach’s game sought to undermine the power of capitalist monopolies, which he had witnessed directly and negatively impact on fuel prices in America in the early 1970s. Hence the aim was to produce a game with an anti-monopolist narrative grounded in the free-market thinking of Adam Smith. Players were rewarded by breaking monopoly ownerships of utilities such as railroads and energy and metal reserves. In preparing his case against Parker Brothers, Anspach “accidentally discovered the true history of the game”, which began with Magie’s Landlord’s Game. Magie herself had battled with Parker Brothers in order to be “credited as the real originator of the game” and, like Anspach, reveal how Parker Brothers had changed the anti-capitalist narrative of the game, making it the “exact opposite” of its original aims (Landlordsgame). Anspach’s court room version of his battle with Parker Brothers was published in 2000, titled Monopolygate: During a David and Goliath Battle, the Inventor of the Anti-Monopoly® Game Uncovers the Secret History of Monopoly®. Monopoly Today Monopoly is now produced by Hasbro. It is the highest selling board game of all time, with an estimated 275 million units of Monopoly sold (Lee). Fan bases are clearly large too: the official Monopoly Facebook accounts report 9.9m likes (Facebook), and 68% of American households report owning a version of Monopoly (Statista "Which"). At the end of the twentieth century it was estimated that 550 million, or one in 12 people worldwide, had played the game (Guinness World Records "Most Popular"). Today it is estimated that Monopoly has been played by more than one billion people, and the digital Monopoly version has had over 100 million downloads (Johnson). The ability to play beloved board games with a computer opponent or with other players via the Internet arguably adds to the longevity of classic board games such as Monopoly. Yet research shows that despite Monopoly being widely owned, it is often not played as much as other games in people’s homes (d'Astous and Gagnon 84). D’Astous and Gagnon found that players in their study chose Monopoly to play on average six times a year, less than half the times they played Cluedo (13 times a year) or Scrabble (15 times). As Michael Whelan points out, Magie’s original goal was to make a statement about capitalism and landlords: a single player would progress round the board building an empire, whilst the others were doomed to slowly descend into bankruptcy. It was “never meant to be fun for anyone but the winner” (Whelan). Despite Monopoly’s longevity and impressive sales record, it is perhaps paradoxical to find that it is not a particularly popular or enjoyed game. Board Game Geek, the popular board game Website, reports in 2023 that the average rating for Monopoly by over 33,000 members is just 4.4 out of 10, and is ranked the 23,834th most popular game on the site (Board Game Geek). This is mirrored in academic studies: for example, when examining Orbane’s tenets for a good board game, d’Astous and Gagnon (84) found that players' appreciation of Monopoly was generally low. Not only is appreciation low for the game itself, it is also low for player antics during the game. A 2021 survey found that Monopoly causes the most fights, with 20% of households reporting “their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behaviour”, leading to players or even the game itself being banned (Lemore). Clearly Orbane’s tenet that the game “generates fun” is missing here (Orbanes 52). Commentators ask why Monopoly remains the best-selling board game of all time when the game has the “astonishing ability to sow seeds of discord” (Berical). Despite the claims that playing Monopoly causes disharmony, the game does allow for player agency. Perhaps more than any other board game, Monopoly is subjected to ‘house rules’. Buzzfeed reported 15 common house rules that many people think are official rules. In 2014 the official Monopoly Facebook page posted a video claiming that “68% of Americans have never read the official game rules” and that “49% of Americans had admitted to playing with their own ‘house rules’”. A look through these rules reveals that players are often trying to restore the balance of power in the game, or in other words increase the chance that a player can win. Hasbro has embraced these rules by incorporating some of them into the official rules. By incorporating players' amendments to the game, Hasbro can keep the Monopoly relevant. In another instance, Hasbro asked fans to vote on new tokens, which led to the thimble token being replaced with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This was reversed in 2022 when nostalgic fans lobbied for the thimble’s return. Hasbro has also been an innovator by creating special rules for individual editions: for example, the Longest Game Ever edition (2019) slows players down by using only a single dice and has an extended game board. This demonstrates that Hasbro is keen to innovate and evolve the game to meet player expectations. Innovation and responsiveness to fans is one way that Hasbro has maintained Monopoly’s position as highest-selling board game. The only place the original Monopoly rules seem to be played intact are at the official competitions. Collecting and Nostalgia The characteristics of Monopoly allow for a seemingly infinite number of permutations. The places on the board can be real or fictional, making it easily adaptable to accommodate different environments. This is a factor in Monopoly’s longevity. The number of Monopoly editions are endless, with BoardGameGeek listing over 1,300 versions of the game on its site. Monopoly editions range from collector and commemorative editions to music, television, and film versions, actor-based editions, sports club editions, editions tied to toy franchises, animal lover editions, country editions, city editions, holiday editions, car brand editions, motor bike editions, as well as editions such as Monopoly Space, editions branded to popular confectionary, Ms Monopoly, and Go Green Monopoly. Each of these contain their own unique modifications. The Go Green version includes greenhouses, dice are made from FSC-certified wood from well-managed forests, tokens are made with plant-based plastic derived from sugarcane, a renewable raw material, and players can vie to have monopolistic control over renewable energy firms, solar farms, and bike paths. Licencing agreements allows Hasbro to leverage two sets of popular culture fans and collectors simultaneously: fans of Monopoly and its different versions, and fans of the Monopoly branded collectable, such as the Elvis Collector’s edition and Breaking Bad Monopoly. Apart from licencing, what else explains the longevity of Monopoly? Fred Davis demonstrates that nostalgia is an important sociological phenomenon, allowing consumers to re-imagine the past via iconic items including toys. Generation Y, also known as Millennials or digital natives, a cohort born between 1982 and 1994 who have grown up with technology as part of their everyday lives, are particularly interested in ‘heritage-inspired’ goods (Marchegiani and Phau). These consumers enjoy the past with a critical eye, drawn by the aesthetic properties of nostalgic goods rather than a direct personal connection (Goulding 575). Popular culture items are a site of widespread collecting behaviour (Geraghty 2). Belk argues that our possessions are used to construct our social selves. Collectors are a special kind of consumer: where consumers use and discard goods as needed, collectors engage with goods as special objects to be maintained and preserved (Belk 254), which is often achieved through ritualistic behaviour (McCracken 49). This is not to say that items in a collection are removed from use entirely: often being used in the normal manner, for example, clothing collectors will wear their items, yet take care of them in the a way they see akin to conservatorship (Hackett). Collections are often on display, often using the flexibility of the Internet as showground, as is the case with Neil Scallon’s world record collection of Monopoly’s 3,554 different versions of the game (World of Monopoly). Monopoly has low barriers to entry for a collector, as many sets retail at a low price-point, yet there are a few sets which are very expensive. The most expensive Monopoly set of all time retailed for US$2 million, and the cost was mainly borne out of the luxurious materials used: “the board is made from 23 carat gold, rubies and sapphires top the chimneys of the solid gold houses and hotels and the dice have 42 full cut diamonds for spots” (Guinness World Records "Most Expensive"). Conclusion The recent resurgence in board game popularity has only served to highlight Monopoly’s longevity. Through clever marketing and leveraging of nostalgia and popular culture fandoms, Hasbro has managed to retain Monopoly’s position as the number one board game, in sales figures at least. Despite its popularity, Monopoly suffers from a reputation as a conduit for poor player behaviour, as one person triumphs at the downfall of the other players. The game dynamics punish those whom fortune did not reward. In this regard, Elizabeth Magie’s initial aim of teaching about the unfairness of capitalism can be considered a resounding success. In re-establishing her role as a feminist and inventor at the turn of the century, embraced by progressive left-wingers of the 1930s, her story as much as that of Monopoly is a valuable contribution to modern popular culture. References Atrizton. Board Games Market – Global Outlook &amp; Forecast 2023-2028. 2023. Belk, Russell W. "Collectors and Collecting." Handbook of Material Culture. Eds. Christopher Tilley et al. London: Sage, 2006. 534-45. Berical, Matt. "Monopoly Is a Terrible Game. Quit Playing It." Fatherly 4 Mar. 2020. Birkner, Christine. "Get on Board." Adweek 3-10 Apr. 2017: 7. Board Game Geek. "Monopoly." 2023. Booth, Paul. Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games. Bloomsbury, 2015. Buzzfeed. "15 Monopoly Rules That Aren't Actually Rules: Settled That 'Free Parking' Debate." Buzzfeed 27 Mar. 2014. Carter, Chase. "Tabletop Games Have Made over $1.5 Billion on Kickstarter." Dicebreaker 13 Dec. 2022. D'Astous, Alain, and Karine Gagnon. "An Inquiry into the Factors That Impact on Consumer Appreciation of a Board Game." Journal of Consumer Marketing 24.2 (2007): 80-89. Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. Donovan, Tristan. "The Four Board Game Eras: Making Sense of Board Gaming’s Past." Catalan Journal of Communication &amp; Cultural Studies 10.2 (2018): 265-70. Facebook. "Monopoly." 1 Mar. 2023. Farzan, Antonia Noori. "The New Monopoly ‘Celebrates Women Trailblazers,’ But the Game’s Female Inventor Still Isn’t Getting Credit." Washington Post 11 Sep. 2019. Geraghty, Lincoln. Cult Collectors. Routledge, 2014. Goulding, Christina. "Romancing the Past: Heritage Visiting and the Nostalgic Consumer." Psychology and Marketing 18.6 (2001): 565-92. Guinness World Records. "Most Expensive Board Game of Monopoly." 30 Jan. 2023. ———. "Most Popular Board Game." 30 Jan. 2023. Hackett, Lisa J. "‘Biography of the Self’: Why Australian Women Wear 1950s Style Clothing." Fashion, Style and Popular Culture 9.1-2 (2022). Johnson, Angela. "13 Facts about Monopoly That Will Surprise You." Insider 27 June 2018. Landlordsgame. "Landlord's Game History, Monopoly Game History." 2021. Lee, Allen. "The 20 Highest Selling Board Games of All Time." Money Inc 11 Mar. 2023. Lemore, Chris. "Banned from Game Night: ‘Monopoly’ Leads to the Most Fights among Family, Friends." Study Finds 2021. Marchegiani, Christopher, and Ian Phau. "Personal and Historical Nostalgia—a Comparison of Common Emotions." Journal of Global Marketing 26.3 (2013): 137-46. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. McManus, James. "Do Not Collect $200." New York Times, 2015. 10. Moriarity, Joan, and Jonathan Kay. Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us about Life. Sutherland House, 2019. Orbanes, Phil. "Everything I Know about Business I Learned from Monopoly." Harvard Business Review 80.3 (2002): 51-131. Pilon, Mary. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game. Bloomsbury, 2015. Rogerson, Melissa J., and Martin Gibbs. "Finding Time for Tabletop: Board Game Play and Parenting." Games and Culture 13.3 (2018): 280-300. Statista. "Board Games – Australia." 25 Mar. 2023. ———. "Which of These Classic Board Games Do You Have at Home?" Statista-Survey Toys and Games 2018 (2018). Walker, Damian Gareth. A Book of Historic Board Games. Lulu.com, 2014. Whelan, Michael. "Why Does Everyone Hate Monopoly? The Secret History behind the World's Biggest Board Game." Dicebreaker 26 Aug. 2021. World of Monopoly. "Neil Scallan's World Record List of Official Monopolu Items." 2016.

Online shopping is all the rage these days and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming. At Spectre Studios, sculptor David Johnson sells flexible plastic action figures of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy and plans to produce a figure of Jack the Ripper in the future. Although some might think that making action figures of serial killers is tasteless, Johnson hastens to assure the potential consumer that he does have standards: “I wouldn’t do Osama bin Laden . . . I have some personal qualms about that” (Robinson). At Serial Killer Central, you can buy a range of items made by serial killers themselves, including paintings and drawings by Angelo Buono (one of the “Hillside Stranglers”) and Henry Lee Lucas. For the more discerning consumer, Supernaught.com charges a mere $300 for a brick from Dahmer’s apartment building, while a lock of Charles Manson’s hair is a real bargain at $995, shipping and handling not included. The sale of murderabilia is just a small part of the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture over the last twenty-five years. This industry is, in turn, a prime example of what Mark Seltzer has described as “wound culture,” consisting of a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1). According to Seltzer, the serial killer is “one of the superstars of our wound culture” (2) and his claim is confirmed by the constant stream of movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, t-shirts, and a tsunami of ephemera that has given the figure of the serial murderer an unparalleled degree of visibility and fame in the contemporary American public sphere. In a culture defined by celebrity, serial killers like Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are the biggest stars of all, instantly recognized by the vast majority of Americans. Not surprisingly, murderabilia has been the focus of a sustained critique by the (usually self-appointed) guardians of ‘decency’ in American culture. On January 2, 2003 The John Walsh Show, the daytime television vehicle of the long-time host of America’s Most Wanted, featured an “inside look at the world of ‘murderabilia,’ which involves the sale of artwork, personal effects and letters from well-known killers” (The John Walsh Show Website). Featured guests included Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime Victim Assistance Office in Houston, Texas; ‘Thomas,’ who was horrified to find hair samples from “The Railroad Killer,” the individual who killed his mother, for sale on the Internet; Elmer Wayne Henley, a serial killer who sells his artwork to collectors; Joe, who runs “Serial Killer Central” and sells murderabilia from a wide range of killers, and Harold Schechter, a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Despite the program’s stated intention to “look at both sides of the issue,” the show was little more than a jeremiad against the murderabilia industry, with the majority of airtime being given to Andy Kahan and to the relatives of crime victims. The program’s bias was not lost on many of those who visited Joe’s Serial Killer Central site and left messages on the message board on the day The John Walsh Show aired. There were some visitors who shared Walsh’s perspective. A message from “serialkillersshouldnotprofit@aol.com,” for example, stated that “you will rot in hell with these killers,” while “Smithpi@hotmail.com” had a more elaborate critique: “You should pull your site off the net. I just watched the John Walsh show and your [sic] a fucking idiot. I hope your [sic] never a victim, because if you do [sic] then you would understand what all those people were trying to tell you. You [sic] a dumb shit.” Most visitors, however, sympathized with the way Joe had been treated on the show: “I as well [sic] saw you on the John Walsh show, you should [sic] a lot of courage going on such a one sided show, and it was shit that they wouldnt [sic] let you talk, I would have walked off.” But whether the comments were positive or negative, one thing was clear: The John Walsh Show had created a great deal of interest in the Serial Killer Central site. As one of the messages put it, “I think that anything [sic] else he [John Walsh] has put a spark in everyones [sic] curiousity [sic] . . . I have noticed that you have more hits on your page today than any others [sic].” Apparently, even the most explicit rejection and condemnation of serial killer celebrity finds itself implicated in (and perhaps even unwittingly encouraging the growth of) that celebrity. John Walsh’s attack on the murderabilia industry was the latest skirmish in a campaign that has been growing steadily since the late 1990s. One of the campaign’s initial targets was the internet trading site eBay, which was criticized for allowing serial killer-related products to be sold online. In support of such criticism, conservative victims’ rights and pro-death penalty organizations like “Justice For All” organized online petitions against eBay. In November 2000, Business Week Online featured an interview with Andy Kahan in which he argued that the online sale of murderabilia should be suppressed: “The Internet just opens it all up to millions and millions more potential buyers and gives easy access to children. And it sends a negative message to society. What does it say about us? We continue to glorify killers and continue to put them in the mainstream public. That’s not right” (Business Week). Eventually bowing to public pressure, eBay decided to ban the sale of murderabilia items in May 2001, forcing the industry underground, where it continues to be pursued by the likes of John Walsh. Apart from highlighting how far the celebrity culture around serial killers has developed (so that one can now purchase the nail clippings and hair of some killers, as if they are religious icons), focusing on the ongoing debate around the ethics of murderabilia also emphasizes how difficult it is to draw a neat line between those who condemn and those who participate in that culture. Quite apart from the way in which John Walsh’s censoriousness brought more visitors to the Serial Killer Central site, one could also argue that few individuals have done more to disseminate information about violent crime in general and serial murder in particular to mainstream America than John Walsh. Of course, this information is presented in the unimpeachably moral context of fighting crime, but controversial features of America’s Most Wanted, such as the dramatic recreations of crime, pander to the same prurient public interest in crime that the program simultaneously condemns. An ABCNews.Com article on murderabilia inadvertently highlights the difficulty of distinguishing a legitimate from an illegitimate interest in serial murder by quoting Rick Staton, one of the biggest collectors and dealers of murderabilia in the United States, who emphasizes that the people he sells to are not “ghouls and creeps [who] crawl out of the woodwork”, but rather “pretty much your average Joe Blow.” Even his family, Staton goes on to say, who profess to be disgusted by what he does, act very differently in practice: “The minute they step into this room, they are glued to everything in here and they are asking questions and they are genuinely intrigued by it . . . So it makes me wonder: Am I the one who is so abnormal, or am I pretty normal?” (ABCNews.Com). To answer Staton’s question, we need to go back to 1944, when sociologist Leo Lowenthal published an essay entitled “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” an essay he later reprinted as a chapter in his 1961 book, Literature, Popular Culture And Society, under a new title: “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Lowenthal argues that biographies in popular magazines underwent a striking change between 1901 and 1941, a change that signals the emergence of a new social type. According to Lowenthal, the earlier biographies indicate that American society’s heroes at the time were “idols of production” in that “they stem from the productive life, from industry, business, and natural sciences. There is not a single hero from the world of sports and the few artists and entertainers either do not belong to the sphere of cheap or mass entertainment or represent a serious attitude toward their art” (112-3). Sampling biographies in magazines from 1941, however, Lowenthal reaches a very different conclusion: “We called the heroes of the past ‘idols of production’: we feel entitled to call the present-day magazine heroes ‘idols of consumption’” (115). Unlike the businessmen, industrialists and scientists who dominated the earlier sample, almost every one of 1941’s heroes “is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time: either he does not belong to vocations which serve society’s basic needs (e.g., the worlds of entertainment and sport), or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially productive agent” (115). Lowenthal leaves his reader in no doubt that he sees the change from “idols of production” to “idols of consumption” as a serious decline: “If a student in some very distant future should use popular magazines of 1941 as a source of information as to what figures the American public looked to in the first stages of the greatest crisis since the birth of the Union, he would come to a grotesque result . . . the idols of the masses are not, as they were in the past, the leading names in the battle of production, but the headliners of the movies, the ball parks, and the night clubs” (116). With Lowenthal in mind, when one considers the fact that the serial killer is generally seen, in Richard Tithecott’s words, as “deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies” (144), one is tempted to describe the advent of celebrity serial killers as a further decline in the condition of American culture’s “mass idols.” The serial killer’s relationship to consumption, however, is too complex to allow for such a hasty judgment, as the murderabilia industry indicates. Throughout the edition of The John Walsh Show that attacked murderabilia, Walsh showed clips of Collectors, a recent documentary about the industry. Collectors is distributed by a small company named Abject Films and on their website the film’s director, Julian P. Hobbs, discusses some of the multiple connections between serial killing and consumerism. Hobbs points out that the serial killer is connected with consumerism in the most basic sense that he has become a commodity, “a merchandising phenomenon that rivals Mickey Mouse. From movies to television, books to on-line, serial killers are packaged and consumed en-masse” (Abject Films). But as Hobbs goes on to argue, serial killers themselves can be seen as consumers, making any representations of them implicated in the same consumerist logic: “Serial killers come into being by fetishizing and collecting artifacts – usually body parts – in turn, the dedicated collector gathers scraps connected with the actual events and so, too, a documentary a collection of images” (Abject Films). Along with Rick Staton, Hobbs implies that no one can avoid being involved with consumerism in relation to serial murder, even if one’s reasons for getting involved are high-minded. For example, when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison in 1994, the families of his victims were delighted but his death also presented them with something of a problem. Throughout the short time Dahmer was in prison, there had been persistent rumors that he was in negotiations with both publishers and movie studios about selling his story. If such a deal had ever been struck, legal restrictions would have prevented Dahmer from receiving any of the money; instead, it would have been distributed among his victims’ families. Dahmer’s murder obviously ended this possibility, so the families explored another option: going into the murderabilia business by auctioning off Dahmer’s property, including such banal items as his toothbrush, but also many items he had used in commission of the murders, such as a saw, a hammer, the 55-gallon vat he used to decompose the bodies, and the refrigerator where he stored the hearts of his victims. Although the families’ motives for suggesting this auction may have been noble, they could not avoid participating in what Mark Pizzato has described as “the prior fetishization of such props and the consumption of [Dahmer’s] cannibal drama by a mass audience” (91). When the logic of consumerism dominates, is anyone truly innocent, or are there just varying degrees of guilt, of implication? The reason why it is impossible to separate neatly ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expressions of interest in famous serial killers is the same reason why the murderabilia industry is booming; in the words of a 1994 National Examiner headline: “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” Christopher Sharrett has suggested that: “Perhaps the fetish status of the criminal psychopath . . . is about recognizing the serial killer/mass murderer not as social rebel or folk hero . . . but as the most genuine representative of American life” (13). The enormous resistance to recognizing the representativeness of serial killers in American culture is fundamental to the appeal of fetishizing serial killers and their artifacts. As Sigmund Freud has explained, the act of disavowal that accompanies the formation of a fetish allows a perception (in this case, the Americanness of serial killers) to persist in a different form rather than being simply repressed (352-3). Consequently, just like the sexual fetishists discussed by Freud, although we may recognize our interest in serial killers “as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by [us] as a symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering” (351). On the contrary, we are usually, in Freud’s words, “quite satisfied” (351) with our interest in serial killers precisely because we have turned them into celebrities. It is our complicated relationship with celebrities, affective as well as intellectual, composed of equal parts admiration and resentment, envy and contempt, that provides us with a lexicon through which we can manage our appalled and appalling fascination with the serial killer, contemporary American culture’s ultimate star. References ABCNews.Com. “Killer Collectibles: Inside the World of ‘Murderabilia.” 7 Nov. 2001. American Broadcasting Company. 9 May 2003 http://www.abcnews.com&gt;. AbjectFilms.Com. “Collectors: A Film by Julian P. Hobbs.” Abject Films. 9 May 2003 http://www.abjectfilms.com/collectors.html&gt;. BusinessWeek Online. 20 Nov. 2000. Business Week. 9 May 2003 http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_47/b3708056.htm&gt;. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” On Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1977. 351-7. The John Walsh Show. Ed. Click Active Media. 2 Jan. 2003. 9 May 2003 http://www.johnwalsh.tv/cgi-bin/topics/today/cgi?id=90&gt;. Lowenthal, Leo. “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961. 109-40. National Examiner. “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” 7 Jun. 1994: 7. Pizzato, Mark. “Jeffrey Dahmer and Media Cannibalism: The Lure and Failure of Sacrifice.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 85-118. Robinson, Bryan. “Murder Incorporated: Denver Sculptor’s Serial Killer Action Figures Bringing in Profits and Raising Ire.” ABCNews.Com 25 Mar. 2002. American Broadcasting Company. 27 Apr. 2003 http://abcnews.com/&gt;. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Sharrett, Christopher. “Introduction.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 9-20. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Schmid, David. "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php&gt;. APA Style Schmid, D. (Nov. 2004) "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php&gt;.