RGS-IBG 2024
(En) coding Care into Digital Urbanism: Vignettes of Collective Practices
August the 27th 2024, at Royal Geography Society, London
Presented at RGS Panel:
Emerging Work in Feminist Digital Geography 2: Digital (re)mediations of urban life [DGRG]
Abstract
The tech-entrepreneurial model behind the computation of urban processes is (re)producing what has already been identified as a technocratic, solutionist, and commodifying logic of urban planning. Within this logic, not only is caring not a prerequisite of urban production, but decades of practice show that technocrat-capitalist urbanism is diminishing the spaces, infrastructure, and socio-economic relations that were co-produced to generate care.
Facing a spectrum of criticism for violating the right to the city, 'black-boxed' governance, datafied surveillance of urban space, privatized internet infrastructure, exploitative platform labor, and patriarchal structures of everyday urban living, the current interface between digitalization and the city at the grassroots level is undergoing various degrees of (re)imagination and transformative practices that revive around care.
Conceptually, viewing care as both politics and practice, this paper focuses on how care is being (re)imagined and performed through grassroots digital urbanism. Analytically, the paper identifies three trajectories of encoding care into computational urbanism: (1) refusing (2) commoning (3) (re)appropriating.
Empirically, the paper examines various practices that have been conceptualized and performed within the non-corporate digital urbanism setting in Europe using vignettes. The first vignette is about refusing the structural setting and building alternative grassroots digital urbanism in Berlin. The second vignette provides an in-depth analysis of the digital platform Commonfare, as the practice of commoing in Milan and Amsterdam. The third vignette presents spotlights of digital-city-making practices by civil society initiatives, mainly from the Code for Germany network of civic tech “labs”.
Ultimately, we advance a feminist theorisation of digital urbanism, which addresses the necessity of reclaiming technology for social purposes and consequently invokes a ‘minor theory of revolution' and a 'politics of interdependence'(Care Collective, 2020).
CfP:
Refusal and the Computational City - From (de)coding the machine to (en)coding care
Special Issue for the journal Digital Geography and Society
Niloufar Vadiati and Maja-Lee Voigt
Big tech companies are more than just vague corporate ideas drifting in a cloud. They have gradually become our neighbors, shaping spaces and futures (Berlin VS Amazon 2023; Solnit/Schwartzenberg 2018). Promising the most convenient ‘solutions’ to transform increasingly tech-driven cities, corporations influence what is on the map; how place-based politics are designed; and, ultimately, who gets to participate in decision-making-processes about our living-together of tomorrow (Mattern 2021; Shaw/Graham 2017).
In these often tech-euphoric times, bottom-up reclamations and cyberfeminist approaches to ‘hack’ the urban have become important and critical voices (Maalsen 2022; Sollfrank 2018): their organizing based on the principles of commoning, sovereignty, and feminist positionality refuse the looming tech-solutions to multiple crises (Vadiati 2022; Voigt 2023). Sovereignty, especially, has been contested among major and resistant forces. Sadowski (2021: 1732) foresees the fundamental shift of technology companies in moving beyond treating “the city merely as a place to extract value from and start thinking of it as also a space to exercise dominion over”. The bottom-up urban sovereignty discourse challenges that and aims to reclaim control over technology, space, and the politics between them (Lynch 2020; Pierri/Lüning 2023). It meets the growing privatization of public goods in the interest of capitalist goals with drafts of alternative resources and worlds.
Be it as activists, educators, hackers, tinkerers, artists, practitioners, and/ or academics: (digital) grassroots collectives have long been pioneers of opening the black box, building informational infrastructures, and creatively thinking through the entanglement of the interspace between the analog and the digital. In the urban context, however, this is often a balancing act. Grassroots movements stand between fighting for a right to the (digitally accessible) city and initiating or fueling gentrification processes with their creative capital (Tonkiss 2013). Although they mostly resist the dominant techno-political settings of a
platformization of cities, they similarly feed into its entrepreneurial, solutionist, and techno-deterministic “fix-thinking” (Carraro 2023: 2). Often enough, grassroots collectives fill gaps of the neoliberal city with unpaid care-work and infrastructure. Therewith, they repair and reproduce what might need revolutionary change instead.
At the same time, techno-urban practices from the bottom up also remind us to tend to a world “in which carelessness reigns” (The Care Collective 2020: 1; Mattern 2018; Kouki/Makrygianni 2022). Leaning on the works of Sollfrank (2018), Russell (2020), Steele (2021), and D’Ignazio/Klein (2020) (among others) occurring digital, cyber-, and glitch feminisms represent diverse techno-affine and interdisciplinary practices, counter-strategies to oppressions as well as political standpoints which celebrate creative ways to “live, here and now” (Carraro 2023: 6). Centering digital joy, community-building, and survival strategies, these approaches of refusing the computational city constitute a new relational geography of transformation and prefiguration among urban denizens. Here, refusal has shown to be a crucial practice that does not simply reject technology. Instead, “it asks for multiplicity, difference, and co-existence, rather than fixed systems of logic that organise and tie socio-political lives to undeclared algorithmic biases and colonial histories” (transmediale 2021). Refusing, therefore, embodies a critical engagement with how we know (about technology) (Tuck/Wayne 2014; Simpson 2007). It demands collective responsibility and negotiations of otherwise politics in an increasingly unequal smart society.
This special issue seeks to draw together a diverse range of essays that addresses prefigurative grassroots urbanism in the context of post-digital cities. In it, we would like to amplify voices which usually do not get much visibility in the (academic) discourses around technocapitalist urbanism and strategies against it. Whether you are a practitioner, activist, self-declared cyberfeminist, part of a collective, digital advocate, academic or urbanist_a, we gently invite you to think with us about the following questions:
• What kinds of actions, activists, and alliances embody the right to digital urbanism and practices of care in cities? With what kinds of caveats and complexities?
• What are the geographies of bottom-up, cyber-, techno, hackfeminist practices today and how are they inscribed into urban spaces and materialities – from streets to screens and in between?
• What are places and arenas of negotiations about the future (smart) city? Who is involved? Who is not?
• What methods and care-ful-ness should we apply for a more entangled practice of city-building in the future? How to acknowledge the various spatial settings from virtual and analogue worlds? How to sensitively embed anxieties, trauma, and uncertainties of everyday urban life today?
• And: What do counter-tech-urbanisms (from the bottom up) look like?
We believe we are in desperate need of collective and hopeful imaginaries that resist the corporate-dominated and colonialist narratives of (digitized) worlds to come. With this special issue, we would like to start a conversation that goes beyond the gates of the
academy, recognizing that we cannot understand the city from analyses alone. Thus, we are looking forward to articles jointly building a new vocabulary around movements of refusal in cities, from (de)coding the machine to (en)coding care.
Image by Maja-Lee Voigt
RC21 Call for Paper: Digital Platforms as Urban Infrastructure: the question of governance and alternatives to current models
Nicolás Palacios and Niloufar Vadaiti
Abstract
Digital platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit or PedidosYa, are mediating every urban interaction. What almost seems as omnipresence, can be understood as the infrastruturalization of digital platforms (Plantin et al., 2018). Despite the already established concept of infrastructure as a fixed territorial technology, digital platforms can act as urban infrastructure through offering processes that enable circulation within cities (Richardson, 2023).
This session contests the growing infrastructural role of platforms in their current form, taking into account that most of the major existing platforms are privately owned with a solutionist-entrepreneurial governance structure. As Graham (2020) stated, digital platforms ‘remain un-democratic, and usually distant, organisations with no interest in promoting local voices or investing in local priorities’ (p. 456). On the other side, we believe equating state-run platforms as the only solution is reductionist, as e.g. within authoritarian states, these critical platforms run as technocratic-surveillance governance models (Huang and Tsai, 2022), producing new governance challenges, power bargaining between the authority and urban subalterns, as well as exploitation of peripheral communities.
However, as much as platforms have turned into 'infrastructures for the extraction of place-based value’ (Stehlin, 2018) or political control, they are also enabling spaces that ‘can create, intentionally or not, new forms of collective practices through which cities function’ (Richardson, 2018). For instance, despite most of the services provided by these platforms rely on a ‘steady supply of replaceable migrant labour’ (van Doorn 2023, p. 172), far from workers lacking agency, migrants and refugees, and their everyday practices are constantly shaping the cities and infrastructures we rely on (Fawaz et al., 2018), through practices of repair, resistance and even optimization of platforms/infrastructures (Qadri & D’ignazio, 2023). Other instances, such as glitches in platforms (Leszczynski, 2020) cause unexceptional openings onto speculation for alternative governance, small-scale creative disorientations in political settings underpinning platform mediated urban life, particularly in the global south (da Costa Lage & Rodrigues, 2021; Morales Muñoz & Roca 2022).
While platform alternatives are constantly emerging, grassroots practices such as platform coops are fighting for survival, for economic viability, and to be operationally up-scalable, while trying to be horizontal and inclusive.
Taking these struggles and challenges into consideration, we propose dismantling the digital platform as urban infrastructure, drawing together a diverse range of essays, stories and vignettes that are based on practised hope, observed paradoxes, while contributing to prefigurative alternative governance for digital platforms.
DCS-Panel: Performative Researching on Urban Digital Sovereignty, Tales of Barcelona and Berlin
April the 14, 2023 at HCU
The state-corporate version of the smart and platformized city with the privatised and monopolised ownership of intellectual property, data and technological infrastructure seems to be far from a panacea for urban denizens. Thus various grassroots forms of autonomy, digitalself-determination and hacking inrelation to digitalinfrastructures, technologies and data have emerged by civil society entities and social movements, pursuing sovereignty over urban living of digital process.
Conceptualising urban digital sovereignty, this panel brings tree research projects into a conversation. The panel intends to go beyond exploring the practices of digital sovereignty in their respective urban context by positioning the researcher as an activist within these practices. It is particularly interested in the performative research methods, creative techniques, and careful maneuver they have taken during their empirical work/activism.
Session 47- Grassroots Digital Urbanism, Refusal, Sovereignty, and the Glitch
June 23rd, 2024
Abstract
The dominant forms of digital urbanism, the disciplinary and top-down digital mediation of smart cities by city governments and the monopolist and entrepreneurial digital platformisation by giant tech companies, are being contested among many right-to-the-city and technological sovereignty activists, refusing to be excluded from the ‘backend’ of algorithmically foreclosed urban making.
Telling the tales of how these grassroots practices of computational urbanism are being unfolded and inter-related in the city of Berlin, Germany, this presentation explores how the refusal toward ubiquitous digital mediation of urban living and urban processes are being unfolded across space, body, power, and labor.
Cities in Custody: Urban Development as Spatial Proxy of Ideological Coloniality
A contribution to the “Kin City” series of the Berliner Gazette.
Understanding the role of the urban development paradigm – and its particular ecological dimension – after the inception of the Islamic Republic (IR) is an important part of unpacking the enduring system of oppression in Iran. The IR has established a model of coloniality based on an interpretation of the Shiite political system. This framework relies on multiple modes of domination and exploitation that combines economic capitalism, resource extractivism, multilateral social repression, and militarization to operate within urban territories. In the following discussion, we will explore how different modes of urban development have been at the forefront of spatializing this colonial logic of IR.
In the course of the 1979 revolution in Iran, when neither the workers nor the capitalist class had been able to establish and maintain their political “order” and institute a coherent socio-economic narrative (Vahabi, 2022), the Islamist forces seized control. By integrating themselves into the existing colonial regime and using populist tactics, they orchestrated significant social upheavals that led to the emergence of a state based on Shiite Islamic principles that claimed to be the counterforce to Western imperialism.
The evolution of revolutionary change and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) facilitated the gradual consolidation of fractious ruling elites around a cohesive vision for a political-economic framework. The political system positions the figure of the Supreme Leader at the center of power and authority, overshadowing the power of the elected government. This structure has been economically enabled by the materialization of the notion of Anfal ideology, a mandate of accumulation, confiscation, and extraction.
Full article can be found at BG website.
RC21 Call for Paper: The Spatiality of Care in Resisting/Survival Cities: On The Interface of Digital and Material Space
Nassim Mehran and Niloufar Vadiati,
Throughout the last two decades, several cities in the MENA region have been fluctuating landscapes, between visible modes of resistance against autocracy, technocracy, and neoliberalism and invisible modalities of survival in everyday life under brutal oppression, socioeconomic inequality, and dehumanization. In 2012, Tahrir Square in Cairo spatially embodied the moments of revolution, securitization, collective harassment, and organized anti-harassment operations.
For years, Enghelab (Revolution) Street in Tehran has been a protracted space of radical modes of resistance; in 2017, Vida Movahedi’s move of taking off and hanging her headscarf in the air while standing on a utility box was then reproduced and magnified by women and men amid the Woman-Life-Freedom movement in September 2022, turned that space into a scarf-bonfire Square.
However, the violent state oppression brings the insurgents into political inaction and a silent and/ or invisible mode of action in public spaces, turning the urban space into a space of survival. In these contexts of resistance and survival, different spatial and temporal modes of care have been produced by organized and/or everyday practices.
With the digital turn that is mediating almost every urban and human interaction(Graham, 2020), the spaces of care have been extended from the physical to the digital sphere. Throughout time, the data, algorithms, and platforms of digital technology have embodied different forms of violence (Elwood, 2021). For instance, the state-owned smart cities and digital platforms have been instrumentalized for military surveillance.
At the same time, it has opened multiple, creative, even small-scale (even temporary) spaces of care. That ranges from offering a virtual space to connect, network, and construct alternative knowledge via social media platforms to alternative urban mapping, hackerspaces, cyberfeminist spaces, and a digital solidarity economy. ‘Gershad’, has been an application that some Iranian subalterns have initiatied as collective mapping to hack the control of morality police patrols and survive the daily state-surveillance of women’s clothing based on forced Hijab regulation (Akbari, 2021).
Consequently, a complex dynamic in care production has been formed on the interface of digital and material space within different urban areas as well as across the region. The question at stake here is how to build some extent of understanding about practice of care at the interface of code and space in the cities of Middle East and North Africa that are sharing similar experiences of resistance and survival.
We gently invite practitioners, activists and/or self-identified feminists, care advocates, hackers, academics, or urbanists to think with us about the spatiality and temporality of care.
Reimagining participation at the time of digital urbanism?
DCS workshop for revisiting the classical theories of participation from the lens of digital urbanism, and critically reviewing the data-driven participation tools
20 September 2022 at HCU
Concept
The workshop begins by briefly looking at the situated and relational understandings about participation in urban planning, drawing on classical theories. The bulk of the workshop will then focus on how participation is played out on the digital ground by exploring the varieties of digital tool for visualisation and decision-making support.
Ultimately, this workshop calls attentions to some of the shortcomings, deficits, and limitations of data-driven participation tools, not in order to necessarily bypass the demand for the digital tools in participatory planning, but in order to strengthening and adopting them to the reality of planning.
STS-Hub 2025 Open Panel
The conjunctural critics on ‘Digital Platforms as Urban Infrastructures’
Abstract
Digital platforms are increasingly functioning as urban infrastructures, leaving cities with no alternative but to arrange their spatial, economic, and social processes around them. Problematising the infrastructural role of digital platforms, particularly by corporate-tech entities, are on the rise, highlighting issues such as privatized governance, algorithmic power, financial speculation of urban space, gig-labor exploitation, and unregulated platformised workspaces. Simultaneously, digital platforms have played as glitches across different socio-political contexts, leading to urban hacks, opening new spaces of grassroots mobilization, and ultimately serving as alternative social and care infrastructure. This panel looks forward to exploring the major critics around digital platforms as urban infrastructure, and beyond that to open space for otherwise critical thinking. We proactively would like to invite scholars and activists from grassroots organizations, from economic global south that are characterized with “non-state-invested infrastructure", to geographies with western-sanctioned states to join the discussion. The hope of this panel is in line with the concept of STS, which seeks to embrace different critiques and situated perspectives, and is ultimately to practice ‘diffraction’ as methodology.
Key words: Digital Platforms, Urban Infrastructure, Critics, Geography, Diffraction.
Big Tech & the City: Space, Labor and (Sub)Urban Struggles
Presentation: Greetings from Google, Mountain View – How Big Tech appropriates participatory urbanism to design cities and offices “for people”
by Katja Schwaller, Stanford University
July the 12, 2024, at Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin
Link of the workshop can be found here.
Response Summary
It is not the first time that Google has taken an ambitious step toward building cities from scratch; we can look at the Sidewalk project in Toronto as an example. Additionally, Google is not the first Big Tech that hack the existing participatory planning strategies to build local lobby (we can look at Airbnb landlord movement). However, the Google City in the Bay Area is on such a scale that it can be seen as a spatial manifestation of Silicon-Valley colonialism.
Telling observational and performative tales, I follow multiple, creative, and careful practices of resistance of bottom-up collectives in Berlin. Through the observation method, I have reviewed the different forms of resistance, the discourses underpinning their work and the alternatives they are building. The collectives range from DYI internet infrastructure with autonomous data-hub that contest the deterministic digital technological infrastructure, tech-feminist collectives (cyber feminist cities) that are loudly refusing the current hegemonic subjectivity of digital technology, and the neighbourhood-based digital currency based on the solidarity economy.
As a vignette, this presentation will discuss the communal refusal strategy of these collectives and elaborate on how they are politically, spatially and performatively reappropriating the technological glitches in the city and enabling the (re)imagining alternative modes of digital urbanism in Berlin.
Our session: Prefiguring Politics in Computationalised Cities
Niloufar Vadiati and Martin Bangratz
Mediating local governance with data, algorithms, and platforms is invoking new political possibilities and reconfiguring the status quo of urban actors through the entry of new players, from giant tech corporations, digital experts and hackers to increasingly digitally involved citizens. In this context, the politics of urban everyday life are now constituted not just by humans and natural forces, but also by digital posthuman bodies through exercising their technological forms of agency.
Nonetheless, top-down techno-political settings, with entrepreneurial and solutionist hegemony, remain dominant, particularly in smart cities. This deterministic approach to technological development and monopolised ownership of data and internet infrastructure has gained critics, followed by active resistance. The ideas of reimagining techno-political epistemologies, reshaping power relationships, and alternative spatial practices are being materialised and experimented with different communities in different geographies.
The panel will examine the tools, formats, and practices that seek to prefigure urban politics to represent and remake collective agency in the digitalisation process. The question at stake is how these experimental practices conceptualize and envisage cities' future in relation to space technologies, and power.
Bringing together discussions on the "right to the city" and "technological sovereignty", contributions to this session may address theoretical considerations as well as empirical observations from the lens of different disciplines and fields.
