Within smart cities debates, the dominant discourse suggests that smart technologies will improve sustainability, efficiency, and environmental control, yet much of these claims have been taken for granted, furthering post-political urban environmentalism. We see this as an opportunity for critical geographers and political ecologists to investigate the politics of urban environmentalism at the nexus of big data, smart technologies, and data-driven governance.

Recent work has brought attention to these issues. For example, Gabrys (2014) identifies the ways in which smart cities enroll environments - surroundings, natural processes, and technological milieu - to shape the range of possible ways of being in the city. Likewise, Luque-Ayala and Marvin’s (2016) work on urban atmospheric control and “nowcasting” shows how computational power extends a logic of control onto natural processes, such as storm surges and flooding in the city. Recent work on “environmental big data” has also pushed forward concerns about the practices, devices, and subjects involved with environmental monitoring, raising new questions about epistemologies and ontologies of nature in the city as well as the politics of socio-environmental control (Gabrys 2016; Lippert 2016; Garnett 2016; Fortun et al 2016).

Critical questions are still to be answered, however, as smart cities and IoT agendas proliferate. They include questions of the decision-making practices around the geographic-ecological placements of data centers, the implications of sensors for real-time monitoring of air and water pollution, and the nature of the performativity and social construction of open data categories such as "environmental" data.

To this end, we are soliciting abstracts for a series of organized sessions to be held at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, to be held April 10-14 in New Orleans, LA. We would be particularly interested in work addressing the following topics, although we are in no way limiting our solicitation to this list:

• How do smart cities and/or urban data mobilize particular conceptions of “the environment”, and what are the implications of this process?
  
• What are the politics and environmental considerations/limitations around the locations of data centers or other data infrastructures?
  
• What sorts of more-than-human assemblages are enrolled to understand, manage, and respond to smart cities’ environmental implications?
  
• What roles do smart infrastructures play in the production, management, representation, extraction of value, and economies of “natures”?
  
• How does “environmental stewardship” and “corporate responsibility” play into discourses of smart cities’ environmental implications?
  
• How are particular publics “called into being” by smart infrastructures in response to socio-environmental concerns?
  
• How are environmental justice movements mobilizing smart technologies or environmental data to fight injustices?
  

Fortun, K., Poirier, L., Morgan, A., Costelloe-Kuehn, B., & Fortun, M. (2016). Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716668903.

Gabrys, J. (2014). Programming environments: environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), 30-48.

Gabrys, J., Pritchard, H., & Barratt, B. (2016). Just good enough data: Figuring data citizenships through air pollution sensing and data stories. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716679677.

Garnett, E. (2016). Developing a feeling for error: Practices of monitoring and modelling air pollution data. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716658061.

Lippert, I. (2016). Failing the market, failing deliberative democracy: How scaling up corporate carbon reporting proliferates information asymmetries. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716673390.

Luque-Ayala, A. & Marvin S. (2016). Urban Atmospheric Control: Nowcasting and the Modulation of Infrastructure. Presentation at 2016 AAG.