[Commlist] Call for Papers: The Infrastructures of Socio-Ecological Knowing in the City

2nd Call for Papers: The Infrastructures of Socio-Ecological Knowing in 
the City

Abstract Deadline: 14th December 2023

We invite you to our workshop on ‘the infrastructures of 
socio-ecological knowing in the city’ that will take place on the 11th 
January 2024, at King’s College London. The output of this workshop will 
be proposed as a special issue, which will be submitted in late Spring 
of 2024. Contributors to the workshop will be encouraged to submit to 
the issue, understanding the workshop to be a space for developing works 
in progress, rather than necessarily presenting complete papers.

Please submit your 200 word proposals by the end of 14th December to 
(gunes.tavmen /at/ kcl.ac.uk) <mailto:(gunes.tavmen /at/ kcl.ac.uk)>

We have funds to cover (at least partially) the travel expenses for 
Early Career Researchers who otherwise don’t have funding. If you need 
to obtain visa to travel, let us know and we’ll expedite the decision 
making process in your case.

Overview

When the concept of the smart city emerged, one of its primary promises 
was to make cities more sustainable. With ubiquitous sensing and real 
time data flows, city administrators, we were told, would be able to 
monitor levels of urban pollution, energy use and air quality, which 
would lead to more efficient and sustainable management of resources. 
Whilst it is true that technologies, including cameras. sensors, and 
more recently AI, have been effective at recognizing and tracking 
environmental impacts, there is also much evidence that highlights the 
environmental cost of these same technologies, which rely on energy 
intensive infrastructures (Monserrate, 2022). Moreover, several scholars 
have observed that the quantifiable logics of data collection on this 
scale (the datafication of pollution, tree coverage, air quality etc.) 
does not necessarily lead to meaningful policy changes or straight 
forward action (see, for example, Gabrys, 2020).

With the recent progress (and hype) in data and AI technologies, some 
have argued that other ways of knowing the city have been eclipsed by 
the episteme of data and algorithmic imaginaries, which offer seemingly 
objective views on urban processes due to their impressive technical 
capabilities (Mattern, 2017). Following Louise Amoore’s (2020) work, 
however, we know that AI and Machine Learning techniques can be 
understood as an aperture – or a perceived opening to new ways of 
knowing, but also a foreclosing of possible futures into computational 
and statistical ways of knowing. So, taking the urbanists Brenner and 
Schmid (2015)’s question: ‘through what categories, methods and 
cartographies should urban life be understood’?, we instead ask, 
‘through what other categories, methods, and technologies could urban 
ecology be understood?’

We invite papers that are grounded in the reality of how data and AI 
technologies, and the situated socio-political ways they have become 
embedded in city governance, have come to shape our understanding of 
ecological processes in the city, thus moving us away from the 
imaginaries of smart city techno-utopias. We aim to bring together an 
understanding of the current state of play, but also to develop future 
directions for urban-ecological relations that are guided not by today’s 
focus on datafication and algorithmic processing, but by other ways of 
knowing the city.

Some questions to guide submissions:

• How do sensing and algorithmic technologies shape understandings and 
perceptions of socio-ecological systems in cities, and how might they 
foreclosure other ways of knowing?
•    Which ways of knowing the city are obscured by our society’s focus 
on the logics of datafication?

•    How are socio-ecological relations made visible through the lens of 
digital media? And who are they made visible for?

•    What role do digital media platforms play in our understanding of 
socio-ecological ways of knowing the city?

• What are the ways of socio-ecological knowing that may be localised, 
digital or non-digital that might help in working towards environmental 
justice in the urban environment?

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