Session 47: Grassroots Digital Urbanism, Refusal, Sovereignty, and the Glitch

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.

Suggested Reading: 

• Barns, S. (2019): Platform urbanism: Negotiating platform ecosystems in connected cities. Springer Singapore.

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

• Elwood, S. (2021): Digital geographies, feminist relationality, Black and queer code studies: Thriving otherwise. Progress in Human Geography, 45(2), 209-228.

• Karvonen, A., Cugurullo, F., & Caprotti, F. (2019): Inside smart cities. London: Taylor & Francis. 

• Kitchin, R. (2015): Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 131–136. 

• Kitchin, R., & Perng, S.-Y. (Eds.). (2016): Code and the city (1st ed.). London: Routledge.

• - Leszczynski, A. (2020): Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(2), 189–208.

• Lozano Paredes, L. H. (2021). Platform Urbanism ‘Glitches’–Minor Theory for Researching Platforms in Latin American Cities. Available at SSRN 3931133.

• Lynch, C. R. (2020). Contesting digital futures: Urban politics, alternative economies, and the movement for technological sovereignty in Barcelona. 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Speaker’s Biography: 

Niloufar Vadiati is an urbanist working on the relationship between technologies and the cities. 

She is now a DFG Walter Benjamin fellow at Digital City Science (DCS) chair at the HafenCity University Hamburg, working on Grassroots Digital. ‌She is also teaching Digital Urbanism at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, editor of Digital Geography and Society Journal and research associate of Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). Before joining DCS, she worked at department of Economic Geography at HafenCity university Hamburg for her PhD on Urban Legacy of London Olympic Games among Local East Londoners. 

Conceptual framework article:

Alternatives to smart cities: A call for consideration of grassroots digital urbanism

Podcast:

https://soundcloud.com/grassrootsdigitalurbanism

Videos:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLthUKnAxPlK3b0GaLkfL6tZv1JZHIwnTI&si=X__EJfAF0k_FDubq

Blogs:

https://www.niloufarvadiati.com/blog