Urban Speculations: Cities, Technologies, Futures

Conference theme

Cities brim over with speculation. Urban futures are conceived, dreamt of and calculated through a wide variety of speculative practices and in their social, cultural, political, economic and technological dimensions. Finance banks on rising asset values; data brokers predict future traffic flows; security consultants claim to preempt crime; logistics companies prefigure demand; all the while the city’s incessant sociality imagines and produces a multiplicity of urban futures.

Where finance has long speculated on cities (Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022; Leitner and Sheppard 2023), and the city has served as a playground for sociological thought (Amin 2013, Lefebvre 1996[1968]) and more recently data science (Townsend 2015), the city has also become a test bed in the register of smart cities and platform urbanism (Halpern et al. 2013). In disparate fields, such as the automated management of risk in a data-security calculus (Leszczynski 2016) or in autonomous driving where the very sociality of the city is put to the test (Marres 2020), speculation has become a technological practice, where futurity is calculated on the basis of data, and technologies are designed to remake the city.

At the same time, the actors involved in urban speculation have expanded, from urban planners to data scientists and smart city consultants to Big Tech. Consider Amazon’s ‘logistical city’ (Rossiter 2016): its prediction algorithms map consumer desires along neighborhoods; its expansion of last mile delivery infrastructure speculates on present and future demand; and its patents conceive of an automated future populated with delivery robots, drones and flying zeppelin warehouses (Stewart 2018). Through tests and experiments, technology – married to financial speculations such as those of venture capital invested in platform companies – is deployed to speculate on cultural, social and economic life in the city, and thus puts a claim on cities’ technoscientific futures.

In these and other ways, speculation – the technological, financial, legal and social capacity to act in the present against a set of future possibilities – becomes mundane. At the same time, the social, cultural and political implications of what it means that the city has in many ways become the basis for speculation remain to be enumerated. In particular, notions such as prediction, resilience or preemption structure much of the debate around techno-urban developments and operationalize the logics of platform urbanism nowadays. As technological speculation stakes its claim to shaping urban futures, how do cities respond and what is at play in letting companies like Amazon prototype (logistical) cities’ futures?

Besides an applied focus of urban informatics or smart cities, science and technology studies, media studies and urban studies must grapple with the everydayness of the ways speculation remakes cities. To do so requires both methodological adjustments and conceptual developments concerning the speculative imaginaries of prototyping, testing, demoing (Halpern and Günel 2019), of patenting (Hlongwa 2020), and investing. How has Big Tech normalized and monopolized speculations on urban futures? What do these futures (potentially) look like? How do urbanites interfere in these mostly black-boxed prophecies and business models? And how are anti-speculations / speculative otherwises performed?

References

Amin A (2013) The urban condition: A challenge to social science. Public Culture 25(2): 201–208.

Berlin VS Amazon (2023) Berlin VS Amazon. https://berlinvsamazon.noblogs.org/ [accessed 20 July 2023].

Bridges L (2021) Infrastructural obfuscation: Unpacking the carceral logics of the Ring surveillant assemblage. Information, Communication & Society 24(6): 830–849.

Carr C and Hesse M (2022) Technocratic urban development: Large digital corporations as power brokers of the digital age. Planning Theory & Practice 23(3): 476–485.

Cirolia LR and Harber J (2022) Urban statecraft: The governance of transport infrastructures in African cities. Urban Studies 59(12): 2431–2450.

Graham M, Kitchin R, Mattern S, et al. (eds) (2019) How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. Oxford: Meatspace Press.

Halpern O, LeCavalier J, Calvillo N, et al. (2013) Test-bed urbanism. Public Culture 25(2): 272–306.

Halpern O and Günel G (2017) Demoing unto death: Smart cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope. The Fibreculture Journal (29): 51–72.

Hlongwa L (2020) The city as an algorithmic formation: Insights from patent data. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation 14(1): 47–66.

Komporozos-Athanasiou A (2022) Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leitner H and Sheppard E (2023) Unleashing speculative urbanism: Speculation and urban transformations. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 55(2): 359–366.

Leszczynski A (2016) Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 48(9): 1691–1708.

Lefebvre H (1996) The right to the city. In: Kofman E and Lebas E (eds) Writings on Cities. Cambridge, Mass, USA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 147–159.

Maalsen S (2022) The hack: What it is and why it matters to urban studies. Urban Studies 59(2): 453–465.

Marres N (2020) Co-existence or displacement: Do street trials of intelligent vehicles test society? The British Journal of Sociology 71(3): 537–555.

Mattern S (2021) A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rossiter N (2016) Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Sadowski J (2021) Who owns the future city? Phases of technological urbanism and shifts in sovereignty. Urban Studies 58(8): 1732–1744.

Stewart M (2018) Amazon Urbanism: Patents and The Totalizing World of Big Tech Futures. In: Failed Architecture. Available at: https://failedarchitecture.com/amazon-urbanism-patents-and-the-totalizing-world-of-big-tech-futures/ (accessed 24 May 2018).

Townsend A (2015) Cities of Data: Examining the New Urban Science. Public Culture 27(2 76): 201–212.

Vadiati N (2022) Alternatives to smart cities: A call for consideration of grassroots digital urbanism. Digital Geography and Society 3: 100030.

Travel and Accomodation

The conference will take place in the Central Building at Leuphana University of Lüneburg (address: Universitätsallee 1, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany).

Information on how to get to Lüneburg and to Leuphana’s main campus can be found here: https://www.leuphana.de/en/university/maps/travel-directions.html

A map of the campus is available here: https://www.leuphana.de/en/university/maps.html . The central building is building C40.

We have secured a few hotel rooms in Lüneburg for our conference guests. You are welcome to book any of these as below, however you may also want to check for alternative hotels and offerings.

• B&B Hotel Lüneburg is located close to the main train station and is a bus ride away from campus. There is a contingent of twin rooms available for single use at €74,40 including breakfast with code „Leuphana CDC“ – available until 15th December.
• Seminaris Hotel Lüneburg is located next the park and within walking distance from campus. A variety of rooms are reserved for single use for €112 including breakfast (with an option to book for two people which incurs additional cost). These are bookable via reservation.lbg61@seminaris.com or +49 4131 713129 with code „Leuphana“ until 31st December.
• Hotel Altes Kaufhaus, Hotel Bargenturm, Hotel Bergström, located in the city centre, are all bookable via https://www.dormero.de/ with code „CLEUPHA“ – there is no contingent but this code gives you acccess to the special Leuphana rate, which is around €90-120.