[News] Conference Call "Urban Speculations - Cities, Technologies, Futures"

[Maja-Lee Voigt]

Dear all,

my research team at the Center for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg, and I are 
hosting a conference on "Urban Speculations - Cities, Technologies, 
Futures" early next year and wanted to share this Call for Conference 
Papers with you all!

We'd like to warmly invite you contribute as well as to share the call 
with those who might be interested beyond this mailing list.
For more details, please see the call below or have a look at our 
website. <https://logistical.city/conference/>

I hope to see some of you there!
Maja-Lee



> Urban Speculations: Cities, Technologies, Futures
>
> CONFERENCE CALL
>
> https://logistical.city/conference
>
> 4-6 February 2025
> Lüneburg, Germany
>
> Host: Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University of Lüneburg
>
> Organizers: Ilia Antenucci, Armin Beverungen, Maja-Lee Voigt, Randi 
> Heinrichs, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
>
> Deadline for abstracts: 1 July 2024
>
> Confirmed keynote and keynote panel speakers: Lauren Bridges, Liza 
> Cirolia, Constance Carr, Berlin vs. Amazon, Aris 
> Komporozos-Athanasiou, Andrea Pollio, Niloufar Vadiati
>
> **
>
>
>   Conference theme
>
> Cities brim over with speculation. Urban futures are conceived, dreamt 
> of and calculated through a wide variety of speculative practices and 
> in their social, cultural, political, economic and technological 
> dimensions. Finance banks on rising asset values; data brokers predict 
> future traffic flows; security consultants claim to preempt crime; 
> logistics companies prefigure demand; all the while the city’s 
> incessant sociality imagines and produces a multiplicity of urban 
> futures.
>
> Where finance has long speculated on cities (Komporozos-Athanasiou 
> 2022; Leitner and Sheppard 2023), and the city has served as a 
> playground for sociological thought (Amin 2013, Lefebvre 1996[1968]) 
> and more recently data science (Townsend 2015), the city has also 
> become a test bed in the register of smart cities and platform 
> urbanism (Halpern et al. 2013). In disparate fields, such as the 
> automated management of risk in a data-security calculus (Leszczynski 
> 2016) or in autonomous driving where the very sociality of the city is 
> put to the test (Marres 2020), speculation has become a technological 
> practice, where futurity is calculated on the basis of data, and 
> technologies are designed to remake the city.
>
> At the same time, the actors involved in urban speculation have 
> expanded, from urban planners to data scientists and smart city 
> consultants to Big Tech. Consider Amazon’s ‘logistical city’ (Rossiter 
> 2016): its prediction algorithms map consumer desires along 
> neighborhoods; its expansion of last mile delivery infrastructure 
> speculates on present and future demand; and its patents conceive of 
> an automated future populated with delivery robots, drones and flying 
> zeppelin warehouses (Stewart 2018). Through tests and experiments, 
> technology – married to financial speculations such as those of 
> venture capital invested in platform companies – is deployed to 
> speculate on cultural, social and economic life in the city, and thus 
> puts a claim on cities’ technoscientific futures.
>
> In these and other ways, speculation – the technological, financial, 
> legal and social capacity to act in the present against a set of 
> future possibilities – becomes mundane. At the same time, the social, 
> cultural and political implications of what it means that the city has 
> in many ways become the basis for speculation remain to be enumerated. 
> In particular, notions such as prediction, resilience or preemption 
> structure much of the debate around techno-urban developments and 
> operationalize the logics of platform urbanism nowadays. As 
> technological speculation stakes its claim to shaping urban futures, 
> how do cities respond and what is at play in letting companies like 
> Amazon prototype (logistical) cities’ futures?
>
> Besides an applied focus of urban informatics or smart cities, science 
> and technology studies, media studies and urban studies must grapple 
> with the everydayness of the ways speculation remakes cities. To do so 
> requires both methodological adjustments and conceptual developments 
> concerning the speculative imaginaries of prototyping, testing, 
> demoing (Halpern and Günel 2019), of patenting (Hlongwa 2020), and 
> investing. How has Big Tech normalized and monopolized speculations on 
> urban futures? What do these futures (potentially) look like? How do 
> urbanites interfere in these mostly black-boxed prophecies and 
> business models? And how are anti-speculations / speculative 
> otherwises performed?
>
> Submissions
>
> For this conference, we invite contributions that explore urban 
> speculations from transdisciplinary and diverse perspectives. We seek 
> to gather an interdisciplinary community of scholars of urban 
> informatics and smart cities, science and technology studies, media 
> studies, spatial and urban studies, critical data studies, 
> organization studies and critical geography, to weave together 
> empirical and conceptual insights on the many ways in which 
> speculation is shaping urban space and politics. Contributions from 
> feminist/queer/decolonial perspectives as well as early career 
> scholars are particularly welcome. We also encourage methodological 
> experiments and innovations for researching urban speculations ranging 
> from media histories, to ethnographies of infrastructures and digital 
> ethnography, to speculative methods and beyond.
>
> Questions that we seek to address during the conference include, but 
> are not limited to:
>
> ●How do practices of patenting, prototyping, demoing and testing 
> reconfigure urban futures? What ‘other urban intelligences’ (Mattern 
> 2021) are sidestepped in the process?
> ●What is the impact of computational urbanism (by corporations/Big 
> Tech) on urban infrastructures, spatial form, or network topologies 
> (Bridges 2021; Carr/Hesse 2022)?
> ●What kind of governmental techniques and politics, of ‘urban 
> statecraft’ (Cirolia and Harber 2022), are emerging from urban 
> speculations?
> ●How can technological speculations in cities be made subject to the 
> hack (Maalsen 2021) and to questions of ownership (Sadowski 2021)?
>
> ●What possibilities of city-making do counter-speculations or 
> anti-predictions, in everyday practice or in terms of fabulation 
> (Graham et al. 2019; Vadiati 2022; Berlin VS Amazon 2023), offer?
>
> This conferences is organized by the research team of the “Automating 
> the Logistical City: Space, Algorithms, Speculation” research project 
> (https://logistical.city/ <https://logistical.city/>), based a the 
> Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, and 
> emerges out of a network on “Speculative Ordinaries” which also 
> includes further collaborators.
>
> Submission guidelines
>
> We welcome proposals for closed panels and individual presentations. 
> For /individual presentations/, please submit a 350-word abstract 
> including title, keywords, name and affiliation of authors, 
> references. For /panel submissions/, please submit a 500-word panel 
> description (including title, keywords, name and affiliation of 
> convenors, references) plus 500-word abstracts for individual 
> contributions (as above).
>
> The submission opens on 1 May 2024 and closes on 1 July 2024. Please 
> submit your contributions to logisticalcity at leuphana.de 
> <mailto:logisticalcity at leuphana.de>. Notifications of acceptance will 
> be provided by 2 September 2024.
>
> Registration
>
> Registration will open in autumn 2024. There will be no conference 
> fee. All further information regarding travel and accommodation will 
> be provided at https://logistical.city/conference 
> <https://logistical.city/conference> in due course.
>
> References
>
> Amin A (2013) The urban condition: A challenge to social science. 
> /Public Culture/ 25(2): 201–208.
> Berlin VS Amazon (2023) Berlin VS 
> Amazon.<https://berlinvsamazon.noblogs.org/>https://berlinvsamazon.noblogs.org/ 
> <https://berlinvsamazon.noblogs.org/> [accessed 20 July 2023].
> Bridges L (2021) Infrastructural obfuscation: Unpacking the carceral 
> logics of the Ring surveillant assemblage. /Information, Communication 
> & Society/ 24(6): 830–849.
> Carr C and Hesse M (2022) Technocratic urban development: Large 
> digital corporations as power brokers of the digital age./ Planning 
> Theory & Practice/ 23(3): 476–485.
> Cirolia LR and Harber J (2022) Urban statecraft: The governance of 
> transport infrastructures in African cities. /Urban Studies/ 59(12): 
> 2431–2450.
> Graham M, Kitchin R, Mattern S, et al. (eds) (2019) /How to Run a City 
> Like Amazon, and Other Fables/. Oxford: Meatspace Press.
> Halpern O, LeCavalier J, Calvillo N, et al. (2013) Test-bed urbanism. 
> /Public Culture/ 25(2): 272–306.
> Halpern O and Günel G (2017) Demoing unto death: Smart cities, 
> Environment, and Preemptive Hope. /The Fibreculture Journal/ (29): 51–72.
> Hlongwa L (2020) The city as an algorithmic formation: Insights from 
> patent data. /Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation/ 14(1): 47–66.
> Komporozos-Athanasiou A (2022) /Speculative Communities: Living with 
> Uncertainty in a Financialized World./ Chicago: University of Chicago 
> Press.
> Leitner H and Sheppard E (2023) Unleashing speculative urbanism: 
> Speculation and urban transformations. /Environment and Planning A: 
> Economy and Space/ 55(2): 359–366.
> Leszczynski A (2016) Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance 
> beyond smart urbanism. /Environment and Planning A: Economy and 
> Space/ 48(9): 1691–1708.
> Lefebvre H (1996) The right to the city. In: Kofman E and Lebas E 
> (eds) /Writings on Cities/. Cambridge, Mass, USA: Blackwell 
> Publishers, pp. 147–159.
> Maalsen S (2022) The hack: What it is and why it matters to urban 
> studies. /Urban Studies/ 59(2): 453–465.
> Marres N (2020) Co-existence or displacement: Do street trials of 
> intelligent vehicles test society? /The British Journal of 
> Sociology/ 71(3): 537–555.
> Mattern S (2021) /A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban 
> Intelligences/. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
> Rossiter N (2016) /Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of 
> Logistical Nightmares/. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
> Sadowski J (2021) Who owns the future city? Phases of technological 
> urbanism and shifts in sovereignty. /Urban Studies/58(8): 1732–1744.
> Stewart M (2018) Amazon Urbanism: Patents and The Totalizing World of 
> Big Tech Futures. In: /Failed Architecture/. Available 
> at:<https://failedarchitecture.com/amazon-urbanism-patents-and-the-totalizing-world-of-big-tech-futures/>https://failedarchitecture.com/amazon-urbanism-patents-and-the-totalizing-world-of-big-tech-futures/ 
> <https://failedarchitecture.com/amazon-urbanism-patents-and-the-totalizing-world-of-big-tech-futures/>(accessed 
> 24 May 2018).
> Townsend A (2015) Cities of Data: Examining the New Urban Science. 
> /Public Culture/ 27(2 76): 201–212.
> Vadiati N (2022) Alternatives to smart cities: A call for 
> consideration of grassroots digital urbanism. /Digital Geography and 
> Society /3: 100030.

-- 
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
Office days: Monday - Wendesday

*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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