Eurograd message

                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/), 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@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 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/
[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 Studies58(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-paten
ts-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.
_______________________________________________
EASST's Eurograd mailing list
Eurograd (at) lists.easst.net
Unsubscribe or edit subscription options: http://lists.easst.net/listinfo.cgi/eurograd-easst.net

Meet us via https://twitter.com/STSeasst

Report abuses of this list to Eurograd-owner@lists.easst.net