Category: smart cities

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CFP> Journal of Peer Production Special Issue #11: CITY – Abstracts due 31 Jan 2017

CFP JOPP Special Issue #11: CITY – Abstracts due 31 Jan 2017

Editors: Penny Travlou, Nicholas Anastasopoulos, Panayotis Antoniadis

Call for papers

One of the welfare state’s key jurisdictions was to tend to housing and public space in benevolent ways. However, under the neoliberal dogma, commodification and gentrification threatens both the right to housing and the right to the city while in recent years, cities have become increasingly militarized and surveyed, resembling battlegrounds where freedom and democracy are under attack. At the same time, recent economic, political, and social crises have activated many counter-forces of resistance and creative alternatives for the grassroots production of food, health services, housing, networking infrastructures, and more.

The role of technology has been contradictory as well. On the one hand, the Internet has enabled some of the most remarkable peer production success stories at a global scale, such as Wikipedia and Free and Open Source Software, among many others. On the other hand, it has empowered huge corporations like Facebook and Google to fully observe and manipulate our everyday activities, and oppressive governments to censor and surveil their citizens.

At the city scale, technology offers opportunities for self-organization, like wireless community networks and numerous bottom-up techno-social initiatives, but also animates the top-down narrative of the “smart city” and the commodification of the “sharing economy as a service” provided by globally active platforms such as Airbnb and Uber. In this situation, peer production in space emerges as a vital bottom-up practice reclaiming citizen participation, and inventing new forms of community.

In this context, some core challenges arise:
– If we choose not tο rely on global players to provide peer production support at a local scale, how could different areas of peer production in the city, digital and physical, interact and support each other?
– What types of governance models can adequately support peer production in the city?

To address those challenges one needs to take into consideration the following:
– Lessons learned from the Internet and how they may be incorporated in the context-specific realities of the city.
– Knowledge-transfer methodologies across different localities.
– Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations (urban studies, media studies, sociology, architecture, cultural geography, informatics etc.).
– Possible collaborations and synergies between activists that fight for the “right to the city” and those that fight for the “right to the Internet”.
-Knowedge/experience transfer between non-urban settings (i.e. intentional communities, ecocommunities, the Transition movement, etc.) and the urban movements.
– Inquiry into research methods and methodologies to be developed and used for analysing ICT-mediated peer production in urban space.

This special issue aims to explore a wide variety of alternative and innovative peer practices, like urban agriculture, food sustainability, solidarity economy, right to the city movements, cooperative housing, community networks, P2P urbanism tactics, co-design practices and more, that are directly reflected in the production of urban space. We are particularly interested in novel combinations of theory, methodologies, and practices that can contribute to peer production in the city and enable new synergies between projects and communities.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Urban commons and peer production
– Case studies of innovative peer practices approached from different perspectives
– Comparative case studies on patterns of commoning and think-global / act-local methodologies
– The regional dimension: examples from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia
– Political issues of autonomy, hegemony, labour, gender, geopolitical and post-colonial perspectives
– Alternative forms of education and learning tools for promoting self-organization and community
– Innovative governance tools for peer production in the city
– Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodological approaches
– Urban studies and the right to the (hybrid) city
– Open source urbanism/architecture
– Recycling/upcycling vs buying: making, consuming or prosuming the city?

Important dates
Abstract submission: 31 January 2017
Notification to authors: 15 February 2017
Submission of full paper: 15 May 2017
Reviews to authors: 15 July 2017
Revised papers: 15 September 2017
Signals due: 10 October 2017
Issue release: October/November 2017

Submission guidelines
Abstracts of 300-500 words are due by January 31, 2017 and should be sent to city@peerproduction.net>. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/. Full papers and materials are due by May 15, 2017 for review. Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words. We also welcome experimental, alternative contributions, like testimonies, interviews and artistic treatments, whose format will be discussed case by case with the editors.

*This special issue was initiated during the Hybrid City III (Athens) conference and developed further during the IASC Urban Commons (Bologna) and Habitat III (Quito) conferences.

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Reblog> Postdoc job on ProgCity project – great opportunity

This is a great opportunity for someone broadly working in the areas of interest specified below…

Post advertised: Postdoc on ProgCity project

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher (14 month contract) to join the Programmable City project.  The researcher will critically examine:

  • the political economy of smart city technologies and initiatives; the creation of smart city markets; the inter-relation of urban (re)development and smart city initiatives; the relationship between vendors, business lobby groups, economic development agencies, and city administrations; financialization and new business models; and/or,
  • the relationship between the political geography of city administration, governance arrangements, and smart city initiatives; political and legal geographies of testbed urbanism and smart city initiatives; smart city technologies and governmentality.

There will be some latitude to negotiate with the principal investigator the exact focus of the research undertaken. While some of the research will require primary fieldwork (Dublin/Boston), it is anticipated it will also involve the secondary analysis of data already generated by the project.

More details on the post and how to apply can be found on the university HR website.  Closing date: 5th December.

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Reblog> smart cities in the making: a new research project involving @ProfGillian

This is good news to belatedly share:

smart cities in the making: a new research project

I was really happy to hear from the Economic and Social Research Council last week that they are going to fund a research project that a great bunch of OU colleagues put together with me: Nick Bingham, Matt Cook, Parvati Raghuram, Sophie Watson and Oliver Zanetti.

Read more on Gillian’s blog.

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Contested Cities conference ~ July 2016, Madrid

Saw this via Gillian Rose on Twitter, looks interesting!

As part of our upcoming Conference in Madrid (July 4-7, 2016), the Contested Cities network and its partners invites contributions for a radical mixed- and multi-media exploration of contestation and cities. Our goal is simple – to challenge people everywhere to see cities and the struggle for their past, present and future in a new light, and to do so by gathering an international set of creative projects in one place. We think we can do that in part by using all of the new audio and visual tools at our disposal. We have some ideas ourselves, but are looking globally for those who want to join in.
We encourage and actively seek contributions from amateurs and professionals alike – expert videographers who may be amateur urbanists, expert urbanists who are amateur photographers, people who wear multiple hats comfortably, data visualization nerds, map geeks, audioheads, visual artists and everyone in between. If you are someone new to both thinking about cities and visualizing them, and simply had a moment of inspiration and now have a provocative project they want to show someone, send us your project! 
Accepted projects will be shown via slideshow at the Congress, and we hope to invite some of the best submissions for an international book project. We may also build a web version, but will ask permission before posting your work.
All “authors” will be invited to attend, but alas we cannot cover registration fees. There is no fee for submission.

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Gillian Rose on the shared visual imagination of drones / smart cities – great post

Gillian Rose has blogged about Derek Gregory’s recent lecture(s?) at Cambridge, which sounded interesting and provocative. It’s a great blogpost – I encourage people to read it.

I hadn’t thought of the similarities of visual imagination, or (systems of) visuality, across and between (military) drones and ‘smart cities’, but Gillian’s points make sense.

I was struck especially by this great point:

advocates of both smart cities and drone warfare share an absence of historical narrative so that their technologies can be seen as new, modern, better and more desirable.  (Which of course conveniently ignores various histories of failure, imprecision, rejection and unreliability.)

This seems especially important, and is a tactic/ approach shared by the kinds of computing R&D that I’ve studied and written about… it’s that lack of historical narrative ~ the ‘any-when’-ness, that facilitates some of the ways in which computing researchers have employed particular kinds of visual grammar to render particular kinds of possible future (in the) present.

Anyway – have a read…

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Reblog> New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Interesting new book highlighted by Colin McFarlane, including contributions by Rob Kitchin (and team) and Jennifer Gabrys…

New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin and myself have just published a new edited book on the ‘smart city’ debate. The book, Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge), is a critical examination of the claims, drivers, imaginaries and consequences of smart city discourses.

As we all know, there is an incredible amount of hype and noise made about smart cities, much of it by multinational corporations like IBM and Cisco in their effort to sell expensive ‘urban solutions’. In this book, we sought to take this debate on by bringing together a group of critical, international and interdisciplinary researchers.Smart urbanism

The book examines how smart city initiatives are being rolled out, and makes a series of arguments that seeks to advance a critical research agenda. It finds, for example, that the discourse is often in reality a justification for the latest round of neoliberal development and displacement. It finds a common tendency to place far too much faith in technology, with far too little attention to the actual urban context. It also finds that most of the time, and despite high profile cases such as Rio’s control room, the smart city discourse is little more than discourse, bolstered by pervasive imagery that globally circulates and effectively constitutes a powerful form of marketing.

But the book also finds openings in the smart city discourse, including in the actions of social movements, civil society groups, and critical researchers to use or promote digital technologies in more socially and ecologically relevant ways. In these efforts, it is urbanism and social justice that inform whether or not digital technologies are useful, as opposed to the positivist view that technology can be added to cities awaiting ‘enhancement’ through sensors, dashboards and real-time data management. But as the book shows, it would be far too simple to argue that there is an ‘alternative’ smart city discourse that opposes a ‘mainstream’ discourse, partly because the various overlaps between what may initially appear mainstream and alternative, and partly because many critical initiatives with digital technology reject the entire smart city discourse altogether while others seeks to reframe it.

Here’s the list of contributors and chapter titles:

  1. IntroductionAndrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane and Simon Marvin
  2. Smart cities and the politics of urban dataRob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle
  3. IBM and the visual formation of smart citiesDonald McNeill
  4. The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and a 100 other utopias in IndiaAyona Datta
  5. Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town: Beyond the rhetoricNancy Odendaal
  6. Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart cityJennifer Gabrys
  7. Smart-city initiatives and the Foucauldian logics of governing through codeFrancisco Klauser and Ola Söderström
  8. Geographies of smart urban powerGareth Powells, Harriet Bulkeley and Anthony McLean
  9. Test-Bed as urban epistemologyNerea Calvillo, Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier and Wolfgang Pietsch
  10. Beyond the corporate smart city?: Glimpses of other possibilities of smartnessRobert G. Hollands
  11. ConclusionsColin McFarlane Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin
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Reblog> New paper: Locative media and data-driven computing experiments @syperng & @robkitchin

A really interesting paper by Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Leighton Evans, definitely worth a read.

New paper: Locative media and data-driven computing experiments

Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Leighton Evans have published a new paper entitled ‘Locative media and data-driven computing experiments‘ available as Programmable City Working Paper 16 on SSRN.

Abstract

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged’ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote big data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another, and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.

Keywords: Data analytics, computing experiments, locative media, location-based social network (LBSN), staging, urban future, critical data studies

The paper is available for download here.

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Reblog> New project: Citizen-related data privacy/protection concerns arising from the development of smart cities

This new project with Rob Kitchin seems really interesting >>

New project: Citizen-related data privacy/protection concerns arising from the development of smart cities

Prof. Rob Kitchin has recently been awarded a research contract by the Department of the Taoiseach to examine citizen-related data privacy/protection concerns arising from the development of smart cities.  More specifically, the research is to help inform the work of the new Government Data Forum, an initiative of Dara Murphy TD, the Minister for EU Affairs and Data Protection.  The research is to:

  • Identify, document and summarise key developments in the area of smart cities in Ireland, at EU level and internationally;
  • Identify and report on concerns and challenges for citizens regarding key data protection, data privacy and associated issues that arise in the context of smart cities
  • Identify and report on best practice initiatives that have been undertaken to address these issues.

The project will run for two months from October 1st to November 30th and result in a detailed report setting out the main data privacy/protection issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives.

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Round-up of the Programmable Cities Data & the City Workshop by @mhaklay

A great couple of posts offering an overview of the Data & the City workshop over at NUIM just before the RGS-IBG conference last week, very much worth reading:

Data and the City workshop (day 1)

Data and the City workshop (day 2)

Plus, there are some videos of the first session over on the Programmable Cities website. Here’s Rob Kitchin offering an interesting and informative overview of histories and key issues for studying data in/and cities:

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Reblog> CFP An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

Over on the OII blog for the ‘Connectivity, Inclusion and Inequality Group’, Jo Shaw has posted an interesting CFP for the AAG in San Francisco next year. Andy Merrifield will make an awesome discussant!

CfP at AAG 2016: An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

After presenting our paper on the same theme at ICCG 2015 in Palestine, myself and Mark Grahamare planning a session for the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting in San Francisco during Spring 2016. The session aims to provide a space for discussion and research that seeks to ask what a ‘right to the city’ looks like in our increasingly digital world. Interested contributors should read the call for papers below and drop myself or Mark an email to express interest.

 

An Informational Right to the City? Rethinking the Production, Consumption, and Governance of Digital Geographic Information

Organisers: Joe Shaw and Mark Graham (University of Oxford)
Discussant: Andy Merrifield

Henri Lefebvre (2003:251) once talked of the right to information as a complement to the right to the city. Since then, information communication technologies have become integrally embedded into much of everyday life. The speed of these developments has also obfuscated many changes and processes that now envelop and define the urban experience. This includes changes in systems of abstract spatial representation through geographic information, and the economies surrounding this information as a commodity. The representations which are produced and mediated through this digital information are now contributing to an urban space that is densely digitally layered (Graham, M., M. Zook, and A. Boulton. 2013). These digital ‘abstract’ spaces are essential to the production and re-production of our socio-economic world (Lefebvre, 1991). From Wikipedia to Google Maps and TripAdvisor, the code and content that relates to a building is now potentially as important as its bricks and mortar. These processes raise new questions of spatial justice and the urbanization of information: Which spaces are seen, and which are hidden? How is information produced, for whom, and who consumes it? How does information change material places? Who are the powerful actors in these events, and who are powerless? And finally, is the broader concept of an ‘informational right to the city’ now required? If so, how should it be envisioned and put into practice? This session invites submissions concerned with the production, consumption, and governance of urban geographic information, and it encourages research and reflections that seek to rethink what informational rights we have in our hybrid material/digital cities.

 

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. (D. Nicholson-Smith & D. N.- Smith, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford : Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (2003). Henri Lefebvre: key writings. (S. Elden, E. Lebas, & E. Kofman, Eds.). New York: New York.
Graham, M., Zook, M., & Boulton, A. (2013). Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(3), 464–479.

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words to Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk) or Joe Shaw (joe.shaw@oii.ox.ac.uk) by Friday 2nd October 2015. Successful submissions will be contacted by 9th October 2015 and will be expected to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 29th 2015.