Contemporary sustainable urban development discourses and practices are increasingly being influenced by and conflated with a wide range of smart and digitalization agendas. The integration of ICT into urban systems promises enticing new ways of knowing and acting upon cities to enhance their economic, environmental, and social performance. The emergent smart urban operating systems are often presented as neutral analytical devices and an inevitable consequence of technological development. However, the move to digitalize cities is having profound and long-lasting impacts on the knowledge politics of sustainable urban development.
This Research Topic focuses on the techno-politics of the sustainable-smart city and how urban knowledge is being assembled and institutionalized through processes of digitalization. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions from scholars in planning, geography, political science, anthropology, sociology, science & technology studies, and aligned disciplines to contribute new insights on how practices of monitoring, sensoring, analyzing, modelling, simulating, and automating are influencing the political rationalities of sustainable urban development.
We welcome contributions on issues related but not limited to:
• The ‘new urban science’ and emergent approaches to knowing cities
• Sensored landscapes, surveillance and social control
• City information modelling, digital twins and the politics of abstraction
• Urban operating systems as new centers of calculation
• The disruptive potential of platforms to reorganize collective services
• Algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence and calculative rationalities
• Digital exclusion and the right to the city
Contemporary sustainable urban development discourses and practices are increasingly being influenced by and conflated with a wide range of smart and digitalization agendas. The integration of ICT into urban systems promises enticing new ways of knowing and acting upon cities to enhance their economic, environmental, and social performance. The emergent smart urban operating systems are often presented as neutral analytical devices and an inevitable consequence of technological development. However, the move to digitalize cities is having profound and long-lasting impacts on the knowledge politics of sustainable urban development.
This Research Topic focuses on the techno-politics of the sustainable-smart city and how urban knowledge is being assembled and institutionalized through processes of digitalization. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions from scholars in planning, geography, political science, anthropology, sociology, science & technology studies, and aligned disciplines to contribute new insights on how practices of monitoring, sensoring, analyzing, modelling, simulating, and automating are influencing the political rationalities of sustainable urban development.
We welcome contributions on issues related but not limited to:
• The ‘new urban science’ and emergent approaches to knowing cities
• Sensored landscapes, surveillance and social control
• City information modelling, digital twins and the politics of abstraction
• Urban operating systems as new centers of calculation
• The disruptive potential of platforms to reorganize collective services
• Algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence and calculative rationalities
• Digital exclusion and the right to the city
