[Commlist] CFP: Caring Cities - a dossier for Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture

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MEDIAPOLIS Dossier: Caring Cities
Edited by Linda Kopitz and Pei-Sze Chow (Amsterdam School for Cultural 
Analysis, University of Amsterdam)
https://www.mediapolisjournal.com

CFP deadline: 15 January 2023

“The world will look different if we move care from its current 
peripheral location to a place near the center of human life” (Tronto 1993)

This dossier takes as its starting point the notion of care as “our 
individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material 
and emotional conditions” (Care Collective 2020) for a more sustainable, 
connected and caring world. We are interested in exploring care as 
something that can be ‘designed’ – and situated in design. ‘Smart’ 
cities, ‘connected’ cities, ‘sustainable’ cities, ‘cognitive’ cities  – 
these approaches to urban imaginations are deeply entangled with ideas 
and promises of technology that will serve to care for human and 
non-human inhabitants and the world at large, to improve our individual 
and collective well-being and to offer answers to the challenges of 
climate change. Such ideologies seek to position the human at the center 
of the design process, while simultaneously emphasizing technological 
innovation as essential means to achieve ‘care’. Big data, artificial 
intelligence, software solutions, digital twins, and other such digital 
tools are drawn on in both utopian and dystopian imaginations of urban 
futures. From current architectural projects like Saudi Arabia’s The 
Line in NEOM and South Korea’s Eco Delta Smart Village to contemporary 
science fiction films like Tiong Bahru Social Club (2020), questions of 
sustainability, technology and care become almost indistinguishable from 
each other. If we understand “architecture as a condition for care” 
(Krasny 2019), exploring how caring cities are represented, designed and 
(ultimately) built points us to the complex connections between 
imagination and practice.

Some of the questions we are interested in:

# How does care become material in the imagination and construction of 
cities?
# How can (audio)visual representations not just construct, but also 
critique urban imaginaries?
# How do contemporary urban imaginaries connect to historical ideas of 
care and caring spaces?
# Can cities be ‘smart’ without technology?
# In what ways does caring for infrastructures lead to more (or less) 
caring spaces?
# How can we critique the neoliberal capitalist undercurrents that drive 
these design processes and imaginations?
# What are the ethics and impacts of designing happiness and well-being 
into urban communities via digital approaches? Is ‘care’ always ‘connected’?
# How can we approach care as both a concept and a method?

We invite contributions from diverse fields, including, but not limited 
to, urban studies, film/television studies, sociology, geography, gender 
studies, political studies, philosophy, new media theory, disconnection 
studies, history, and so on. We are especially interested in 
contributions exploring ‘Caring Cities’ from a global and 
interdisciplinary perspective including artistic research and 
architectural practice.

- Please submit an abstract of your proposed article (300 words) and a 
short bio (100 words) to Linda Kopitz ((l.kopitz /at/ uva.nl)) and Pei-Sze Chow 
((p.s.chow /at/ uva.nl)) by 15 January 2023. - Authors will be informed of the 
selection within two weeks after the deadline. - Full articles 
(3000-4000 words) will be due in April 2023 and will subsequently go 
through an anonymous peer review process. - The dossier is scheduled for 
the May/June 2023 issue.
Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture is an interdisciplinary 
online journal of media and urban culture. We publish research across 
multiple academic fields — including, but not limited to, media studies, 
urban studies, geography, film, architecture, art history, visual 
culture, digital humanities, sound, and music.

No payment from the authors is required to publish with this journal.

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