The Archipelago of Contradictions, Contemporary Global Governance and the Crisis of Spatial Capital

From the Open Culture Blog.

Introduction: Method and Orientation

The newsletter fragments assembled in this document read like dispatches from an increasingly fragmented world—a kaleidoscope of interconnected crises that reveal the profound contradictions embedded within contemporary global governance structures. From Venice's struggle against overtourism to the geopolitical machinations surrounding artificial intelligence, from climate governance failures to the rise of surveillance capitalism, these snippets collectively illuminate what Giorgio Agamben might recognize as a global "state of exception" in which traditional forms of democratic participation and spatial justice are being systematically undermined. The present commentary seeks to trace the theoretical and empirical connections between these seemingly disparate phenomena, revealing how they constitute manifestations of what Henri Lefebvre presciently identified as the transformation of space into a commodity under late capitalism (Lefebvre, 1991).

The newsletter’s mosaic of items — from grassroots urban commons in Venice to the logistical fragility exposed by COP30’s choice of Belém, and from gallery closures in the U.S. to experiments in hospital design in Switzerland — composes a vivid snapshot of contemporary political economy and cultural life. Reading these items together permits a synthetic diagnosis: neoliberalization of place and culture produces uneven geographies of exclusion and experimentation; infrastructural malaise and spectacular governance co-exist; and new forms of commoning, design thinking and technological surveillance emerge as contested responses. In what follows I offer an interpretive reading that links the newsletter’s reportage to theoretical traditions (urban political economy, commons scholarship, surveillance studies, and climate politics) and to a small set of canonical texts that help clarify causal relations and policy implications.

The newsletter snippets from August 25-27, 2025, from Monocle, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Rest of World, ArtNews, Semafor and the Economist, offer a kaleidoscopic view of a world grappling with overtourism, economic precarity, climate urgency, and technological disruption. This assemblage—spanning Venice's reclaimed islands to AI chip rivalries in China—mirrors the fragmented yet interconnected nature of late-capitalist globalization, where local initiatives collide with transnational forces. Analytically, these pieces reveal causal interrelations: for instance, mass tourism's economic boon in Venice exacerbates social displacement, echoing broader patterns of uneven development theorized by David Harvey in "The Condition of Postmodernity" (Harvey, 1989), where he argues that capitalism's spatial fixes—reconfiguring places for profit—intensify social inequalities. Harvey's concept of "time-space compression" resonates here, as global mobility compresses distances but amplifies local frictions, such as Venice's dwindling population below 50,000 amid tourist influxes. This commentary explores these themes to unpack their implications.

The Commodification of Urban Space and the Crisis of Belonging

The story of Venice's Poveglia island initiative represents more than a local resistance to overtourism; it embodies what Edward Said's framework might identify as a reverse orientalism—the transformation of European cities into exotic spectacles for global consumption (Said, 1978). Stella Roos's observation that "parts of the lagoon should be run exclusively by and for locals" articulates what Henri Lefebvre conceptualized as the "right to the city"—the fundamental claim that urban space belongs first to its inhabitants rather than to the flows of capital and tourism that increasingly dominate urban governance (Lefebvre, 1968).tandfonline

The Venice case illuminates a broader pattern of what David Harvey (2012) terms "accumulation by dispossession," whereby local communities are systematically displaced not through direct expropriation but through the more subtle mechanisms of market-driven gentrification and tourism-led development. The "497% growth" in bed places documented in the newsletter represents not merely quantitative change but a qualitative transformation of urban space from a site of social reproduction into a machine for capital accumulation.cabidigitallibrary+1

This phenomenon extends far beyond Venice. The newsletter's references to similar struggles in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and other European cities suggest what Michel Foucault might have recognized as a new form of "spatial discipline"—the reorganization of urban space according to the imperatives of tourism capital rather than the needs of resident populations (Foucault, 1977). The emergence of "tourist bubbles," as referenced in the academic literature, represents what Foucault would characterize as a form of spatial biopolitics—the management of populations through the strategic organization of space.mdpi

Commons, tourism and the politics of “local-only” spaces — Poveglia as practical politics

The account of Poveglia Per Tutti — Venetians crowdfunding to lease an abandoned island for local use rather than luxury redevelopment — is a crisp example of civic community action that both resists and is shaped by tourist capitalism (Roos, 2025). The phenomenon appears to instantiate what Elinor Ostrom described as locally governed commons — site-specific institutions for collective provisioning that can, in certain circumstances, outperform crude privatisation or top-down municipal capture (Ostrom, 1990). Yet Poveglia is also a symptom: the retreat towards sanctified “local-only” pockets signals a failure of metropolitan governance to reconcile mass-tourism’s fiscal imperative with long-term resident retention (cf. MacCannell’s insight into tourism as a staged economy of authenticity).

Two analytical points follow. First, Poveglia is both corrective and compensatory: it protects social reproduction for a shrinking resident population but does not substitute for structural policy reforms (tax regimes, housing supply, anti-speculation measures) required to reverse resident flight (Roos, 2025; ). Second, there is ambivalence in such localist remedies: they may reconstitute a bounded “right to the city” (Harvey, 2012) for some citizens while leaving the larger political economy (platform-mediated short-term lettings, cruise-driven footfall, fiscal dependence on tourist spend) untouched. The political strategy therefore must be twofold: defend and scale commons-building practices while pressuring for redistributive urban policy.

Urbanism and the Quest for Exclusivity: Cultural Reclamation Amid Economic Pressures

The opinion piece on Venice's Poveglia island, transformed into a "Venetian-only green oasis" via crowdfunding, underscores a cultural pushback against overtourism's commodification of space. Economically, tourism has sustained Venice for centuries, yet it drives resident exodus, reducing the population to a fraction of its peak and threatening the city's authenticity—a phenomenon akin to what philosopher Henri Lefebvre termed the "production of space" under capitalism, where places become abstract commodities (Lefebvre, 1991). Lefebvre's triad of perceived, conceived, and lived space illuminates Poveglia: conceived as a tourist-free haven, it revives lived communal bonds, countering the perceived invasion by outsiders. Socially, this fosters "tighter-knit communities," but risks exclusivity, paralleling affluent London's private squares or New York's Gramercy Park, where access keys symbolize class barriers.

Associatively, this echoes Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" (1972), where Marco Polo describes Venice-like metropolises as palimpsests of memory and desire; Calvino writes, "Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears" (Calvino, 1974, p. 44), capturing Poveglia's dual role as a dream of respite and a fear of further isolation. Policy-wise, Venice's €5 entry fee and cruise ship bans represent incremental interventions, but as the snippet notes, they fail to stem tourist flows, highlighting policy inertia in addressing root causes like global inequality. Research by Milano et al. (2019) in "Overtourism and Tourismphobia" documents similar grassroots resistances in Barcelona and Amsterdam, causally linking them to neoliberal urban policies that prioritize economic growth over social equity. Thus, Poveglia's success could inspire scalable models, but without broader redistribution, it risks entrenching privilege, per Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986).

The Digital Panopticon and Surveillance Capitalism

The extensive coverage of artificial intelligence geopolitics reveals another dimension of contemporary spatial control. Shoshana Zuboff's concept of "surveillance capitalism" provides a crucial framework for understanding how digital platforms have transformed not merely economic relations but the fundamental nature of urban experience itself (Zuboff, 2019). The competition between the United States and China over AI infrastructure represents what we might term a "digital colonialism"—the extension of imperial logic into the realm of data extraction and algorithmic control.mdpi

The documentation of AI-driven surveillance systems in cities from Mexico City to various Chinese urban centers reveals how digital technologies are being deployed to create what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980) might recognize as "control societies"—spaces where power operates not through direct coercion but through the continuous modulation of behavior and movement. The expansion of surveillance systems to "113,000 cameras" in Mexico City, for instance, represents more than a quantitative increase in monitoring capacity; it constitutes what Michel Foucault would identify as the materialization of panoptic power in urban space.

This digital transformation of urban governance operates through what Zuboff identifies as the "extraction" of behavioral surplus from daily life, transforming routine urban activities into raw material for predictive algorithms. The newsletter's references to AI-powered "behavioral modification" systems reveal how contemporary urban governance increasingly operates through what we might term "algorithmic biopolitics"—the management of populations through predictive technologies rather than traditional disciplinary institutions.geografskipregled.pmf.unsa

Surveillance, security, and the urban public sphere — Mexico City cameras

The report that Mexico City will deploy some 30,000 new cameras (Zabludovsky, 2025; ) should be read through a surveillance studies lens (Foucault; Zuboff). CCTV expansion often sells itself as crime-control, yet it reshapes civic life: normalizing constant visibility changes public behaviour, concentrates data power in municipal hands, and risks mission creep (from law-enforcement to political monitoring). Democratic safeguards (transparent procurement, independent oversight, strict data-retention limits) are essential to prevent surveillance infrastructures from entrenching inequality and eroding civil liberties.

Climate Governance and the Reproduction of Global Hierarchies

The extensive coverage of COP30 preparations in Belém reveals the profound inadequacies of contemporary multilateral governance structures in addressing the climate crisis. The newsletter's documentation of Brazil's struggles to prepare adequate infrastructure for the climate conference serves as a metaphor for the broader contradictions within global climate governance—the expectation that Global South countries will host discussions about solutions to a crisis primarily created by Global North consumption patterns.journals.sagepub

The concept of "climate debt," implicit in many of the newsletter's climate-related stories, reflects what postcolonial theorist Ramachandra Guha (2000) has characterized as "the environmentalism of the poor"—the recognition that environmental degradation is fundamentally intertwined with patterns of global inequality. The newsletter's references to climate finance mechanisms reveal how contemporary environmental governance often reproduces rather than challenges existing global hierarchies.

The failure of multilateral climate governance documented in the newsletter reflects what Antonio Gramsci might have recognized as a crisis of hegemony—the inability of existing global institutions to secure consent for their legitimacy in the face of accelerating ecological crisis (Gramsci, 1971). The rise of alternative governance mechanisms, from regional climate agreements to municipal climate networks, suggests what political theorist James C. Scott (1998) might identify as forms of "resistance" to the "high modernist" pretensions of global climate governance.

Climate Crises and Policy Preparedness: From Belém to the Marshall Islands

Brazil's COP30 in Belém highlights policy unpreparedness for global events in under-resourced cities, with sanitation deficits and favela vulnerabilities exposing social inequities. Economically, Lula's $1bn investment aims to showcase Amazonian stakes, but skyrocketing accommodations—simple rooms at "tens of thousands of US dollars"—reveal market failures in equitable hosting. This causally stems from climate migration and deforestation, as Naomi Klein argues in "This Changes Everything," where capitalism's extractivism perpetuates crises: "The real solutions... demand everything from ending corporate free trade to reversing privatizations" (Klein, 2014, p. 464).

The Marshall Islands' parliament fire, amid rising seas, associatively evokes Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942), symbolizing absurd resilience; Camus' call for rebellion against futility resonates in proposals for "amphibious architecture" (Camus, 1955, p. 123). Policy implications include innovative designs, like those in Switzerland's SCDH hospital simulations, blending functionality with human-centeredness—echoing Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) on adaptive urbanism. Socially, these snippets underscore vulnerability in small nations, per Amartya Sen's capability approach, where climate denies "freedoms to achieve" (Sen, 1999, p. 3).

COP30 in Belém — spectacle, state capacity, and climate justice

Bryan Harris’s dispatch on Belém captures the uncomfortable juxtaposition of symbolic site-selection and practical incapacity: a city chosen because it visually dramatizes the Amazon’s vulnerability is nonetheless short of hotels, sewage, and basic services required to host thousands (Harris, 2025; ). This contradiction maps onto two causal dynamics. First, symbolic staging of climate summits (Klein’s This Changes Everything is relevant) can generate political theatre without solving distributive deficits; second, state capacity (infra-logistics, sanitation, equitable housing) is endogenous to inclusion — global summits often amplify existing inequalities and sometimes produce rent-extraction (airbnb arbitrage, floating ship-hotels) rather than durable local improvements.

From a governance perspective, the Belém case suggests three lessons: (1) host-city selection must weigh absorptive capacity and leave legacies of public goods; (2) donor financing should be conditional on transparent local investments in sanitation and affordable housing; (3) procedural justice must be central — delegations from Global South states ought to have bargaining power when logistic costs fall disproportionately on the hosting population. Failure to heed these will convert climate diplomacy into a performative, exclusionary spectacle.

Geopolitical Fragmentation and the Return of Empire

The coverage of US-China geopolitical competition reveals how contemporary global governance is increasingly characterized by what Carl Schmitt (2003) might recognize as a return to "friend-enemy" distinctions that undermine the possibility of universal institutions. The competition over artificial intelligence, semiconductor technology, and digital infrastructure represents more than economic rivalry; it constitutes what we might term a "new imperial rivalry" for control over the technological foundations of contemporary social life.

The documentation of trade wars, tariff regimes, and technology export controls reveals how global economic integration is being selectively "decoupled" along geopolitical lines. This process represents what political economist Susan Strange (1996) might have recognized as the "retreat of the state" from global governance coupled with its "return" in the form of nationalist competition.

The fragmentation of global governance documented in the newsletter reflects what Giovanni Arrighi (2010) identified as a broader crisis of American hegemony and the transition toward what he termed a "post-Westphalian" world order. The rise of alternative institutions, from BRICS mechanisms to regional trade agreements, suggests what political theorist Robert Cox (1987) might characterize as the emergence of "counter-hegemonic" forms of global governance.

Technological and Geopolitical Tensions: AI, Trade, and Surveillance

Snippets on China's AI self-reliance and US tariffs interrelate economically with policy weaponization, as in Trump's threats against India and Brazil. This evokes Graham Allison's "Thucydides Trap" (Allison, 2017), where rising powers clash; Allison warns of "structural stress" leading to war (p. xvi). Socially, OpenAI's India office and wrongful death suit raise ethical AI concerns, per Zuboff's "Surveillance Capitalism" (2019): "It declares human experience as free raw material" (Zuboff, 2019, p. 8).

Culturally, Virginia Nieto's design ethos—prioritizing color and harmony—contrasts tech's disruption, echoing Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) on aura loss.

The Biopolitics of Migration and Territorial Control

The coverage of immigration policies, from US deportations to European border controls, reveals how contemporary governance increasingly operates through what Giorgio Agamben (1998) would recognize as the production of "bare life"—the reduction of human beings to biological existence stripped of political significance. The documentation of "third country" deportation agreements, for instance, reveals how contemporary sovereignty operates not through the direct control of territory but through the management of human mobility across global space.

The rise of anti-immigration politics documented throughout the newsletter reflects what Étienne Balibar (2004) has characterized as "neo-racism"—forms of exclusion that operate not through biological categories but through cultural and civilizational distinctions. The newsletter's references to the "securitization" of migration reveal how contemporary states increasingly govern through what Michel Foucault might have recognized as "security dispositifs"—mechanisms that organize social life around the management of risk and threat.

Demographic Reversals and Connectivity: Faroe Islands' Model

The Faroe Islands' brain drain reversal—via tunnels, 5G, and family subsidies—demonstrates policy-driven social cohesion, boosting under-40s by 3,000. Economically, this leverages EU subsidies and fishing rights for a €61,800 GDP per capita, causally inverting migration theories like Everett Lee's push-pull model (Lee, 1966). Culturally, it fosters self-assurance, with local products outselling globals, akin to Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" (1983) on national identity.

Associatively, this mirrors Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), where isolation breeds introspection; Ishiguro's clones, like Faroese youth, return after wanderlust. Implications for depopulating Europe (e.g., Latvia's losses) suggest replicable models, but as the snippet notes, wealth enables this—highlighting global inequities per Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (2014).

Infrastructure, peripheral revitalization, and the Faroe exception

The Faroe Islands’ reversal of brain drain is instructive precisely because it combines physical connectivity (undersea tunnels), digital connectivity (5G), social policy (generous parental leave, housing support) and a cultural project of self-valorization (Phelan, 2025; ). This integrated policy package aligns with comparative work on peripheral development: connectivity alone is necessary but not sufficient; pairing it with social transfers and place-based cultural strategies produces durable returns (Putnam’s social capital and more recent regional development literatures). The Faroes are not a universal model — their small scale and specific fiscal endowments matter — but they nevertheless exemplify how infrastructural investments, when combined with social policy, can reverse migratory flows.

Art Market Turmoil: Economic Downturns and Cultural Shifts

The spate of US gallery closures—Tanya Bonakdar, Blum, Venus Over Manhattan—signals an economic contraction in the art world, with global sales falling for two years straight. This reflects broader market volatility, where art, as a luxury asset, suffers from reduced collector spending amid inflation and geopolitical tensions. Socially, it disrupts cultural ecosystems, forcing pivots to "lucrative luxury goods" at auction houses, commodifying art further. Pierre Bourdieu's "The Field of Cultural Production" theorizes this as a struggle within autonomous (artistic) and heteronomous (economic) poles; closures indicate the latter's dominance, where "economic capital increasingly determines symbolic capital" (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 37).

Causally, this downturn interrelates with policy shifts, such as potential US tariffs exacerbating global trade frictions, as seen in Semafor's snippets on Trump-era duties. Associatively, it recalls Thorstein Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899), critiquing conspicuous consumption; Veblen notes how art signals status, but in recessions, "pecuniary emulation" wanes (Veblen, 2007, p. 75). Non-fiction like Sarah Thornton's "Seven Days in the Art World" (2008) documents similar cycles, predicting reinvention via fairs like Frieze. Culturally, this could democratize art if digital platforms rise, but risks widening access gaps, per UNESCO reports on cultural industries (UNESCO, 2022).

Cultural economy in contraction — the US gallery closures

The item on widespread gallery closures (Monaghan-Coombs, 2025) reads as a localized instance of a broader re-regulation and financialization of culture. Market contraction — falling global art sales for consecutive years — intersects with a shift in collector behaviour and an interpenetration of luxury markets into auction houses (Artsy and trade commentaries cited in the piece). At a theoretical level this is rentierization: cultural production becomes increasingly mediated by speculative capital and “conspicuous acquisition” logic, making mid-level cultural intermediaries vulnerable (Bourdieu’s cultural field is instructive here).

Policy implications are straightforward but hard: cultural ecosystems require public subsidy models that support risk-taking and non-commodified practice (artists’ residencies, VAT exemptions, acquisition programs), otherwise the field bifurcates into star-led commercial circuits and precarious grassroots scenes. The newsletter’s note that some actors see these closures as opportunity for reinvention is valid — crises often precipitate institutional innovation — but systemic remedies require public policy, not only marketistic entrepreneurship.

Theoretical Synthesis: Toward a Spatial Theory of Contemporary Crisis

The phenomena documented in this newsletter collection can be understood as manifestations of what we might term a "spatial crisis of capitalism"—the exhaustion of territorial expansion as a solution to capitalism's internal contradictions, coupled with the intensification of spatial competition and control. This crisis manifests simultaneously at multiple scales: the local (gentrification and displacement), the national (border controls and surveillance), and the global (climate change and geopolitical fragmentation).

Henri Lefebvre's analysis of the "production of space" under capitalism provides a crucial framework for understanding these interconnected crises (Lefebvre, 1991). For Lefebvre, space under capitalism is not merely a container for social relations but is itself actively produced through the contradictions between use value (the human need for spatial appropriation) and exchange value (the commodification of space for profit). The various crises documented in the newsletter—from overtourism to climate change—can be understood as manifestations of this fundamental contradiction.

Michel Foucault's analysis of "biopolitics" provides another crucial theoretical resource for understanding how contemporary governance operates through the management of populations in space (Foucault, 2007). The surveillance systems, climate policies, and migration controls documented in the newsletter all represent forms of what we might term "spatial biopolitics"—the organization of territory and mobility to manage populations according to governmental rationalities.

Edward Said's critique of "orientalism" remains relevant for understanding how Global South countries and populations are represented within contemporary governance discourses (Said, 1978). The newsletter's coverage of climate conferences, development policies, and geopolitical competition reveals how "Third World" spaces continue to be constructed as objects of intervention rather than subjects of self-determination.

Three structural threads tie the disparate items together:

1. Commodification of place and attention. Tourism, art markets, and summit staging are all economies of attention and place, and neoliberal logics convert civic goods into monetizable spectacles. (MacCannell; Bourdieu).

2. Unequal infrastructural capacity. From Belém’s sanitation gaps to Deutsche Bahn’s degradation, the newsletter repeatedly evidences how public infrastructures mediate citizens’ life chances — and how state capacity is politically uneven.

3. Contestation: commons, design, and civic experiment. Poveglia, the Swiss hospital design simulation, and the Faroes’ policy mix show that civic innovation often arises bottom-up or through small public–private experimentation — but scaling such experiments requires redistributional political will.

Conclusion: Prefigurative Politics and Spatial Justice

Despite the generally pessimistic picture that emerges from these newsletter fragments, there are also glimpses of what political theorist James C. Scott (1998) might recognize as "hidden transcripts" of resistance—from Venice's Poveglia initiative to various climate justice movements documented throughout the collection. These initiatives suggest possibilities for what we might term "prefigurative politics"—the creation of alternative spatial practices that embody the social relations that activists seek to achieve.

The theoretical framework developed in this commentary suggests that effective responses to contemporary crises must address their spatial dimensions—the ways that power operates through the organization of territory, mobility, and place. This requires moving beyond conventional approaches to political change that focus primarily on state institutions toward what Henri Lefebvre called "the right to the city"—the collective appropriation of urban space by its inhabitants.

Such an approach would need to address simultaneously the local dynamics of gentrification and displacement, the national dynamics of surveillance and border control, and the global dynamics of climate change and geopolitical competition. It would require what political theorist Nancy Fraser (2014) has called "boundary-spanning" forms of politics that can operate across multiple scales simultaneously.

The item collection thus serves not merely as documentation of contemporary crises but as a call for new forms of spatial politics adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century. As Walter Benjamin (1968) wrote in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the task is not merely to understand the forces of domination but to "blast open the continuum of history" through practices that prefigure alternative possibilities. In our contemporary context, this might mean learning to see space itself as a site of political struggle and transformation.

In conclusion, these snippets portray a world of adaptive resilience amid crises, where economic imperatives often undermine social fabrics, per Polanyi's "double movement" (Polanyi, 1944). Yet, initiatives like Poveglia or Faroe tunnels suggest agency, urging policies that balance growth with equity. As Hannah Arendt philosophized in "The Human Condition" (1958), action in plurality can reclaim the public realm (Arendt, 1998, p. 198)—a hopeful thread in this 2025 tapestry.

The newsletter items point to an agenda for scholars and policymakers: study and support institutional forms of commoning (Ostrom) that protect residents from commodifying pressures; treat high-profile events (COPs) not merely as symbolic but as vehicles for durable public infrastructure investment; adopt democratic governance protocols around surveillance; and design integrated connectivity-plus-welfare packages for peripheral regeneration. These cases are not isolated curiosities — they are diagnostic: cities, cultural institutions, and states are being re-made by intersecting political-economic and technological forces, and the choices made now will shape social reproduction for decades.

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[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Research, Perplexity, ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Grok, xAI, tools (September 1, 2025). The featured image has been generated in Canva (September 1, 2025).]

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Footnotes

1. https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/attachments/73823228/8a3b1639-5040-4380-9d64-3b8ee0725b9d/Newsletter-September-1-2025.docx

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16. https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/2/4/104/pdf?version=1539599986

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https://www.overtourismvenice.mit.edu

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Surveillance Capitalism I: How digital platforms watch, track & control you

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