(Im)material streams in the city: ecologies, economies, electrons

I’m delighted to announce that my Open Panel has been accepted to the 2021 4S conference being held in Toronto and digitally. The panel, co-organized with the brilliant Morgan Mouton, takes a sort of processual ontological look at the city, thinking about urbanism as emergent through flows (of water, electricity, capital, labor, vehicles, etc.). From my side, I think this set of philosophical orientations has a lot to contribute to how we think about the smart city. From Morgan’s side, this panel combines his interest in urban infrastructures as “tamers” of chaotic phenomena like electricity and economies. See below for the CFP, and please feel free to submit! To submit to this session by the 4S deadline of March 8, please submit your abstract in the 4S submission site here. Reach out to me or Morgan if you have any questions.

3. (Im)material streams in the city: ecologies, economies, electrons

The deepening datafication of urban life has had profound impacts on the organization, exploitation, and circulation of natural, social, economic, and political resources. These impacts are often material—for example in the extraction of minerals required to build digital devices or in the siting of data centers—and often discursive—as digitization becomes a rationale and logic guiding urbanization and new forms of data colonialism. What underlies them all is a unique set of circulations, movement, flows, and streams.

In particular, streams of data make the circulations visible and governable. The datafication of urban services (e.g., energy, transportation, water, and waste) allows for real-time, fine-grained identification, quantification, and spatialization of all sorts of flows running across urban space. This key idea behind “smart city” discourses promises more control over urban space, urban metabolism, and streams of privately-held revenue.

This panel explores how data capture, channel, and tame streams, circulation, and flows across urban space. We are especially (but not exclusively) interested in empirical and theoretical contributions from the Global South, and studies attuned to human and non-human relations.

Questions

1. How has datafication, and the processes necessitating, facilitating, and emanating from it, transformed the ecologies and resources subtending urban space and urbanization?
2. How are flows initiated, maintained, and terminated for particular political and economic interests?
3. How do digital and analog urban infrastructures slow, accelerate, or direct these flows?
4. What sorts of knowledges and epistemologies are possible within this milieu, and how can we politicize them?

Contact: ryan.burns1@ucalgary.ca, morgan.mouton@u-pem.fr

Keywords: Datafication, circulation, urban studies, capitalism, political ecology