Hi everyone,
Please note the extended deadline for abstract submissions to the 7th
Nordic STS Conference: 14 March 2025.
A full list of conference panels can be viewed here:
https://www.nordicsts.se/
Artistic submissions and exploratory workshops can be submitted here:
https://www.nordicsts.se/general-information/
Please consider submitting an abstract to our panel:
The City as Controlled Environment - bringing together STS perspectives on
urban transformations
Panel Organizers:
Devika Prakash (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm),
devikap@kth.se
Manuel Jung (STS Department, TU Munich)
Sophia Knopf (STS Department, TU Munich)
Cities have always been seen as a place and an entity to be controlled
(Scott, 1998). Overt technologies of control historically range from
prisons and asylums (Foucault, 1975) to urban design stymieing
protest (Jordan, 1992). More subtly, spatial technologies such as zoning,
and large urban infrastructure systems of water supply and sewerage have
shaped cities and their residents to fit modern ideals (Graham and Marvin,
2001). Control, innovation and technology are intimately intertwined in the
study of cities. Within the last few years, scholars from STS, urban
studies and related fields have created a rich body of work on urban
governance, both in terms of how urban innovation is governed (Joss, 2015)
as well as how cities are rendered governable (Karvonen, 2020). The
purpose of our panel is to bring different ambitions on urban governance
and technological transformations into conversation with each other by
mobilising the notion of “control” as an analytical lens to think about
how
technologies restructure life in the city, while often promising radical
change.
In recent decades, such discourses have gained importance in the context of
novel and emerging technologies deployed in the urban context. In the
narrative of “smart cities”, for instance, the city is conceptualised as
a
system of systems that can be integrated and controlled from one
centralised node (Goodspeed, 2015). City subsystems are expected to
function as ‘oligopticons’ that neatly separate and bundle urban
functions
and allow them to be managed scientifically (Hermant and Latour, 1998). A
similar promise comes from the emerging technology of Digital Urban Twins:
digital representations of urban spaces and their operations (Dembski et
al, 2020). However, these twins also come with a second promise:
functioning as virtual laboratories for cities, in which future scenarios
can be simulated in the safe environment of a digitally represented city.
In turn, the proliferating test bed landscape has to navigate the tension
between openness and the constitution of controlled spaces, for example
while supervising experiments with autonomous driving (Engels et al. 2019).
In broader terms, technologies like these streamline human agency, while
they are expected to innovate urban life and governance.
Combining historical studies and present day examples, we hope to
collectively gain insights into the theme of urban control. We invite a
variety of perspectives to help recognise continuities and broader
principles that are rearticulated over time in the context of different
technologies, while acknowledging the narratives around the novelty and
revolutionary character of new technologies and the performative nature of
such claims. Some questions around this theme include:
What are the political implications of more implicit forms of control, such
as nudging, real-time feedback and self-monitoring of citizens?
Who exercises control in this way, based on which knowledge practices and
which legitimacy?
How do these mechanisms shape the different parts of our lives?
Through which mechanisms is control stabilised or destabilised and what
does this mean for the actors’ ability to act?
What have historical attempts to control the city looked like? What
peculiarities of urban life today are shaped by technologies that control
people, spaces, and urban metabolisms?
We want to discuss these questions in the light of the omnipresent promise
of urban transformation.
We broaden our perspectives to think about different technological domains
that enact control. This panel invites investigations on “cutting-edge" new
technologies, but also on mundane artefacts and their political
implications as well as historical experiences exploring the intertwinement
of technologies and control.
With this collection of ideas, we hope that this panel allows us to explore
different ideas, articulations and empirical insights, and to see in which
ways the conceptualisation of the city as a “controlled environment” can
be
fruitful for thinking about urban transformations.
Best regards,
Devika
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