Convenor: Dr. Syeda Jenifa Zahan, USF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, DIST, PoliTo
Funded by: Urban Studies Foundation
Supported by: Beyond Inhabitation Lab and DIST, PoliTO
Keynote: “Imaginaries of/and the digitally mediated city: a feminist critique.”
by Prof. Gillian Rose, School of Environment and Geography, University of Oxford
17 October 16:30 CET
Smart urbanism as a logic, practices of institutional 17-18 October 2024overhauling and governance is deployed by various stakeholders using a range of techniques, technologies and socio-spatialities. These are fixed, predefined, top-down interventions that aim to achieve ‘better’ and ‘inclusive’ cities, we are often told. Yet, the ways in which smart cities are deployed and structured is a question and expression of power and violence. Smart interventions, as they take hold across the world, are productive of structural violence in the form of overt violence and “banal power” (Datta andOdendaal 2019). From evictions to make space for smart developments to algorithmic violence (Safransky 2020), surveillance and digital data erasures, smart cities reproduce old and engender new forms of violence against those marginalised in and by the smart city.
Utilising Johan Galtung’s concept of “structural violence” as violence that is “built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently unequal life chances”(Galtung, 1969: 170–71) as an entry point, this workshop aims to interrogate the following questions:
- How does smart urbanism engender forms of structural violence (socio-political, economic, dwelling, ecologies, institutions, and ideologies)? What are the mechanics, sites, and conditions produced by such violence?
- How do urban dwellers respond to such violences saythrough overt resistances and/or “quiet encroachments”(Bayat 1997)?
- How can we learn from these responses? Are alternativeand radical futures beyond (or along with) the smart citypossible, given its structural hold? If yes, what modes,mechanics and blueprints do these futures take?
The workshop is imagined as a space of collective criticalthinking and network building among those who arecommitted to interrogating these questions.