[News] CfP: Refusal and the Computational City - From (de)coding the machine to (en)coding care

[Maja-Lee Voigt]

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*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/

/[Reading time: 8:56 minutes]/

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.

*Formalities:*

Our goal is to accept a portfolio of articles that provide theoretical 
as well as empirical contributions. If you are basing your paper on 
fieldwork and/ or with the help and support of others (which all of us 
do), please consider making visible your process of knowledge production 
and add your (non-academic) collaborators as co-authors. For inspiration 
on how to consciously think about an author’s order, see this 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrLOGokqL7w>resource by CLEAR (Drmaxlib 
2021). Authors are defined as those who have made a significant 
contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of 
the reported study. Transparency about the contributions of authors is 
encouraged, for example in the form of a CRediT author statement 
<https://www.elsevier.com/authors/policies-and-guidelines/credit-author-statement>. 
We warmly welcome the work of collectives!

Should you wish to submit your contribution, please send *a 
350-words-abstract* to
*Niloufar Vadiati (niloufar.vadiati at hcu-hamburg.de)* and *Maja-Lee Voigt
(maja-lee.voigt at leuphana.de)* by *October 30, 2023*. Notification of 
acceptance:
November 20, 2023. Please specify your methods, theoretical framing and 
central argument.
In order to curate the submission and publication process as caring, 
mindful, and inclusive as possible, we invite you to fill out this form 
<https://cloud.logistical.city/apps/forms/s/by3aNnbtCDtqMWrgp8q8qb2s>as 
well.

/Disclaimer:/We very much encourage the collaboration between all kinds 
of job practices (academic, practitioner), disciplines, backgrounds, 
institutional hierarchies, and levels of experiences. We will prioritize 
the perspectives we feel do not get represented enough and/or are often 
affected by any kind(s) of discrimination(s).

If you are invited to submit an article:

·the word limit is 9,000 words, including notes and references

·all articles will be subject to peer review and editorial decisions as 
usual

·we expect submissions of accepted papers by April 30, 2024. Please 
select the article type “VSI: Refusal and the Computational City” when 
submitting your manuscript 
<https://www2.cloud.editorialmanager.com/diggeo/default2.aspx>.

We thank you for your time and interest, and are very much looking 
forward to learning from your work.

*References:*

Berlin VS Amazon (2023): Berlin VS Amazon. 
https://berlinvsamazon.noblogs.org/ [last accessed 07/20/2023].

Carraro, Valentina (2023): Of fixes and glitches: Mixing metaphors for 
platform urbanism. In: Digital Geography and Society 4, 100056.

D’Ignazio, Catherine / Klein, Lauren F. (2020): Data feminism. Strong 
ideas seriesCambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Drmaxlib (2021): Laboratory Life: Author Order (Episode 1). 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrLOGokqL7w [last accessed 07/20/2023].

Kouki, Hara/ Makrygianni, Vasiliki (2022): Call for papers - Digital 
Geography and Society. 
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/digital-geography-and-society/about/call-for-papers 
[last accessed 07/28/2023].

Lynch, Casey R. (2020): Contesting digital futures: Urban politics, 
alternative economies, and the movement for technological sovereignty in 
Barcelona. In: Antipode 52/3, 660–680.

Maalsen, Sophia (2022): The hack: What it is and why it matters to urban 
studies. In: Urban Studies 59/2, 453–465.

Mattern, Shannon (2018): Maintenance and Care. In: Places Journal. 
https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/ [last accessed 
02/24/2020].

Mattern, Shannon (2021): A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban 
Intelligences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pierri, Paola/ Lüning, Elizabeth Calderón (2023): Civic Participation in 
the Datafied Society| A Democratic Approach to Digital Rights: Comparing 
Perspectives on Digital Sovereignty on the City Level. In: International 
Journal of Communication 17, 3600–3618.

Russell, Legacy (2020): Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London/ New York: 
Verso Books.

Sadowski, Jathan (2021): Who owns the future city? Phases of 
technological urbanism and shifts in sovereignty. In: Urban Studies 
58/8, 1732–1744.

Shaw, Joe/ Graham, Mark (2017): An ‘Informational Right to the City’? 
In: Shaw, Joe, Graham, Mark (Hg.), Our Digital Rights to the City. 
Meatspace Press.

Simpson, Audra (2007): On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and 
Colonial Citizenship. In: Junctures 9, 67–80.

Sollfrank, Cornelia (2018): The Beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist 
Praxis in the Twenty-First Century. transversal texts. 
https://transversal.at/blog/the-beautiful-warriors [last accessed 
03/19/2023].

Solnit, Rebecca/ Schwartzenberg, Susan (2018): Hollow City: The Siege of 
San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. London/ New York: 
Verso Books.

Steele, Catherine Knight (2021): Digital Black Feminism. Digital Black 
Feminism. New York: New York University Press.

The Care Collective (2020): The Care Manifesto. The Politics of 
Interdependence. London; New York: Verso Books.

Tonkiss, Fran (2013): Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city. In: 
City 17/3, 312–324.

transmediale (2021): Transmediale for refusal - Theme. 
https://transmediale.de/theme [last accessed 06/18/2021].

Tuck, Eve / Wayne, Yang K. (2014): R-Words: Refusing Research. In: 
Paris, Django, Winn, Maisha T. (Hg.), Humanizing research: decolonizing 
qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. Thousand Oakes, 
California: Sage Publications.

Vadiati, Niloufar (2022): Alternatives to smart cities: A call for 
consideration of grassroots digital urbanism. In: Digital Geography and 
Society 3, 100030.

Voigt, Maja-Lee (2023): We build this city on rocks and (feminist) code: 
hacking corporate computational designs of cities to come. In: Digital 
Creativity 34/2, 162-177.

-- 
Maja-Lee Voigt, M. Sc. (she/ her, hear name 
<https://namedrop.io/majalevoigt>)

Research Associate and PhD Student, "Automating the Logistical City 
<https://logistical.city/>" | Leuphana University Lüneburg
Universitätsallee 1, C40.411, 21335 Lüneburg

*Akteurinnen für urbanen Ungehorsam* <https://akteurinnen.de/>
Interdisciplinary City Research Collective

**OUT NOW: We build this city on rocks and (feminist) code: hacking 
corporate computational designs of cities to come <We build this city on 
rocks and (feminist) code: hacking corporate computational designs of 
cities to come>**
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