Dear Colleagues,

 

We are very pleased to announce the dates of our conference ‘(Re)thinking Smart, (Re)building Scale’ on 12-13 November 2021 at the Building Centre, London. This is funded by the ESRC as part of our ‘Learning from Small Cities’ project. The conference is being organised as a hybrid event with presenters and participants having the choice to attend in person or virtually. Over the two days we have planned a series of keynotes, plenary panels, paper presentations and a sandpit workshop, alongside the launch of a month-long public exhibition and final project report at the Building Centre in London.

 

Tickets to attend the conference in person/virtually are going live today at 9am GMT. Please register on the Eventbrite link below if you are interested since we have a limited number of in-person spaces available. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rethinking-smart-rebuilding-scale-in-a-digital-urban-age-tickets-166534153135  

 

The final conference concept note and itinerary are available on our project website https://www.smartsmallcity.com/projectconference which also includes blogs, storymaps, reports and several other outputs we have produced from the project so far. Please feel free to browse and feedback to us.

 

(Re)thinking Smart, (Re)building Scale

Dates: 12-13 November 2021

In-person and virtual at: Building Centre, 26 Store St, London WC1E 7BT, UK

Recent scholarship on smart cities and digital urbanism suggests a shift from a focus on grand visions of Internet of Things, Big Data and widespread ‘technological solutionism’ (Kitchin 2015) to more prosaic and everyday uses of technology. From detailed examinations of digital surveillance and privacy breaches, more recent examinations of smart cities have expanded the meanings and significance of technology in reinforcing multiple marginalisations (Datta 2018) as well as providing opportunities for empowerment (Datta and Thomas 2021). This shift signals a rethinking of ‘smart’ urbanism as a collective of multiple, fragmented and dispersed initiatives of making do by assisting, challenging or disrupting smart urban futures. This also implies a rethinking of smart through a scalar shift – from large city-based infrastructure projects to smaller individual community level endeavours, from Big Data initiatives to deep and open data practices, from an Internet of Things (IoT) to a ‘politics of things’ (Willems 2019). These shifts, we suggest can potentially equalise power through parsimonious digital devices and infrastructures.

This conference thus seeks to explore how we may rethink ‘smart’ by rebuilding its scalar logics from the global to the local, from the regional to the relational, from the urban to the domestic. For human geographers, debates on scale have largely been framed to challenge its construction as an ontological and epistemological given. In rethinking smart through scalar shifts we take seriously Smith’s (1984) claim that different levels of scale (e.g. urban, global, national) were characterised and described by different types of relationships to capital. So that, for instance, the urban scale was determined by relations between labour and commuting, spaces of production and reproduction. Building on this work, human geographers conceptualised scale as a kind of spatial imaginary in which certain geographic relationships could be observed and delineated (Marston 2000).

The Conference will explore this relationship between scale and smart futures. For instance, how do we rebuild our conception of scale for the smart city? We argue that this means a focus on the smart city from everyday prosaic relations of power from below, which has the potential to disrupt utopian imaginaries of technological driven urban life from above. We ask how we might go about rethinking smart through smaller spaces and scales, from the small and medium sized cities to rebuilding data democracy and internet freedom from within communities and homes. For instance, how does ‘smartness’ as we understand it at the urban scale, translate to the domestic in the Smart Home? How has the global, urban, and workplace been folded into the domestic scale (Lindner 2021)? Given the tendency of new surveillant, efficiency saving technologies to disproportionately make the already marginalised vulnerable, what does this mean in terms of renegotiating power at the most intimate, domestic and bodily scales? How could this scalar shift enable us to capture the embodiment of data injustices and take into account urban relations of labour, capital, assets, markets, and the prosaic conditions of everyday life? How will rethinking smart through frugal technologies rupture and recalibrate the wider urban and regional inequalities? How will rethinking smart rebuild new and novel assemblages of ‘small data’ that can be both empowering and emancipatory?

Organisers: Ayona Datta, Philip Nicholson, Sophie Hadfield-Hill, Melissa Butcher and the ‘Learning from small cities’ team

Keynotes: Prof. Sarah Elwood (University of Washington); Prof. Susan Parnell (University of Bristol); Prof. Ursula Rao (Max Planck Institute); Prof. René Véron (University of Lausanne)

 

 

***************************************

Ayona Datta

Professor in Human Geography

Department of Geography,

26 Bedford Way,

University College London

London WC1H 0AP

 

Email: [log in to unmask]

Website: www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~adatta

Personal Blog The City Inside Out

Twitter @ayonadatta

Editor Urban Geography

 

RESEARCH PROJECTS

**NEW ERC ADVANCED GRANT** ‘Regional Futures: territorial politics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south’

British Academy Digitising the Periphery

ESRC Learning from small cities

AHRC Gendering the Smart City

British Academy (Dis)connected Infrastructures and Violence Against Women

SNSF Smart Cities: Provincialising the Global Urban Age

AHRC Learning from Utopian Cities