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The term 'smart cities' describes a bundle of informational technologies that are profoundly reconfiguring how cities are managed and experienced. This piece is an introduction to a special issue of the journal on cycling, cities, and smart technology. For all the attention on smart cities within the social sciences, surprisingly little scholarship has focused on the ways that specific technologies and practices are enrolled or incorporated into ideas and visions for the smart city or smart urbanism. The articles in the special issue "Cities and Smart Technology: The Case of Cycling" seek to address this lacuna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cycling has the potential to play a key role in developing environmentally and socially sustainable cities and neighbourhoods in New Zealand. Realising this potential requires understanding how different groups within New Zealand society relate to existing patterns of cycling, and how they might respond to the introduction of a range of new cycling oriented infrastructures. Commenting on articles from the special issue "New research on cycling in New Zealand," this article argues that human geographers and other social scientists have much to offer policy makers and planners in understanding how a transition to more people oriented, sustainable, urban mobility systems might be fostered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition of this fact a great deal of recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transformations in the governance and ownership of infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited by urban dwellers. Yet in all sorts of ways infrastructures are realised through their use and inhabitation. This paper argues for the importance of attending to the ways that infrastructures are reinterpreted through use. Focusing on a case study of commuter cyclists in London, it explores the ways in which cyclists accommodate themselves to (and are in turn accommodated by) the infrastructural orderings of London's streets. Confronted by the obduracy of a road infrastructure designed primarily for motorised traffic, cyclists show a diverse range of approaches to negotiating movement through the city on bikes. The paper describes how this negotiation can be understood in terms of the more or less skilful processes of navigation, rule following, rule making, and rule bending. This involves a polymorphous mix of practices, some common to driving, others to walking, and yet others unique to cycling. In conclusion, the paper suggests that transformations of infrastructures found within cities need to be understood as much through emergent changes between their elements, and that close attention to how infrastructures come to be inhabited offers productive avenues for thinking about ways to improve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue on transnational urbanism, we are interested in accounts of transnational mobility that are attentive to everyday practices and geographical emplacement. Eschewing narratives of trouble-free movement by disembedded actors, consideration is thus given to the mundane and situated efforts by which people make their lives across international borders. We also wish to amplify the social scientific register of transnational migrants by considering groups whose mobility has thus far been little examined. In this introductory paper we elaborate these arguments, while also summarising the content of the substantive papers which follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of 'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more 'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the 'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]