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In this introduction to the first of two special issues on ‘Informal housing practices’ we set out the foundations for a research agenda on ‘informality’ within housing scholarship, and propose ini...

This commentary advances the ‘hack’ as an urban concept. While the hack transcends existing literatures on the digital and informality, it is a distinctive concept and is being used systematically in new domains. I situate the hack conceptually, outline its empirical and methodological value and propose a framework to research the urban hack. Importantly, it is not just the technologies of hacking but the translation of computational logics to the urban that underpins the importance of the hack, as well as the critical need to set out a research agenda surrounding the hack within urban studies.

Feminist digital geographies are an important part of the digital turn currently underway in geographic scholarship. At the same time, feminist movements are taking advantage of, and emerging from,...

Around the world, digital geographies have been renegotiated in the COVID-19 pandemic, from increased surveillance with digital devices to facilitation of new spatial boundaries for work and recreation. Digital storytelling has emerged as a ubiquitous way to communicate care, and sometimes enact harm, at multiple scales during COVID-19. Digital technologies are allowing people to share narratives and experiences that capture how they adapt, recover, and resist the damaging aspects of health and economic crises via digital technologies. We focus on care to appreciate the diverse ways that humans and more-than-humans are coproducing digital geographies while facilitating narratives that maintain and repair our worlds so we can live as well as possible. But harm is also facilitated by digital storytelling and considering how the same technologies facilitate opposite processes makes for challenging digital spaces and analysis. A digital geographic approach helps to read the effects of these changes as it uses an integrated lens on spatial and justice issues. As the boundaries between public and private places have blurred with spatial and physical distancing, digital devices are mediating, enabling, and constraining forms of care and harm with a new intensity.

© 2017 The Authors Sharing has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary urban life and scholarship, as cities and social lives are transformed by the share economy and collaborative consumption. This paper advances critical analysis of sharing economies through an investigation of the ways in which objects are mobilized in the practice of sharing. Drawing on an empirical base of 35 interviews conducted with Sydney residents using car sharing as a form of transport, we explicate the material entanglements that constitute car sharing in order to highlight the complex intersections of the object being shared, the constellations of objects brought into the orbit of the practice, and the code that flows through each. Bringing together a material-focused analysis into conversation with the concepts of share economies as both performed and hybrid, we advance the concepts of sharing as a set of socio-material entanglements. We argue that the divergent spatialities and temporalities of objects and humans both hold together and tear apart the experiences of sharing, which in turn underpins car sharing's implications for the reconstitution of automobility.

Learning from women leaders in Australia has gained attention as a national political issue since the election of Julia Gillard as our first female Prime Minister in 2010. In parallel with her period in office, a growth in feminist action and practice has been evident, in institutions and interventions such as ‘Destroy the Joint’, a group that agitates for an end to sexism and misogyny in multiple spaces. This article examines shifts in gendered leadership and activism, in online and offline spaces, especially with respect to learning from women’s experiences in leadership, and we consider the implications of gendered politicking on planning issues. Drawing on empirical quantitative and qualitative data from an online survey of nearly 900 Destroy the Joint participants, this article looks at some impacts of national female leadership on Australian governance and what people believe should happen to achieve gender equality, in planning and political representation contexts. We argue that discourses...

In this paper we look at the integration of the digital and the resurgent interest in crafting artefacts. We do this by focusing on the work, relationships and spaces occupied by Pyladies Dublin - a coding group intended for women to learn and 'craft' code in the programming language of Python. Pyladies offers an interesting and fruitful case study as it intersects gender, relations of making and places of making, nested firmly within the digital world. The relations of making within the Pyladies group provides salient insight into the production of code, gender and space. Pyladies is predominantly attended by women with the focus to encourage women to become more active members and leaders of the Python community. By producing code in a friendly space, the group also actively works towards producing coding subjectivities and hybrid, mobile spatiality, seeking to produce coding and technology culture that is diverse and gender equitable. We base our ethnographic study to suggest ways in which Pyladies Dublin is consistently engaging in crafting code and crafting coding subjectivity and spatiality.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide the theoretical and methodological background required for constructing a framework that accommodates the multibiographical sensibilities of sounds and their social lives. Part 1 outlines practices of materialising sound and the making of both property and personhood through this. Part 2 introduces the reader to the mixed-methodological toolbox that helps us to understand the social life of things.

This chapter discusses a case study which focuses on musician Rob Thomsett’s Australian progressive psych recording Yaraandoo. Yaraandoo is a rare album worth considerable cultural and monetary capital. This chapter will illustrate the key concepts, which will be further developed throughout the following chapters. Importantly Yaraandoo will act as an introduction to material culture studies, earlier discussed in the book, and I apply its core theories to understand how the human and the nonhuman interact to both define and place value on the other “thing” and oneself. Yaraandoo exhibits an agency through its ability to help define those people who value it, and in its influence on their evaluation of both other people and sound objects dependent on the relational context.

This chapter discusses the concepts raised in the previous chapters, particularly the notion of the alternative forms of personhood that are encouraged by and distributed through music. In this way it inverts the question of ownership from who owns what to what owns who, for the human, bodily bound, possessive individual has been usurped by a multibiographical music, like cyborg, which denies the sound object status as mere object and the human agent its position as the sole possessor of agency. This presents an obvious tension between the individual defined in terms of copyright and the subject/object that is emerging from the marriage of the human agent/sound object/technology. Alternative options for property law and its application to the regulation of music-making are discussed. Consequently, the chapter argues that copyright legislation needs to acknowledge the connections and alternative ways of being in and through music, before it can begin to sufficiently accommodate contemporary music-making practices.

Digital spaces are providing new opportunities for exploring gender and sexual identities in disruptive, playful ways. Digital spaces are also supporting social movements to achieve anti-sexism and pro-diversity goals. In this chapter, we analyse recent digital activism that has supported substantial changes in social, political and cultural contexts, by examining Destroy the Joint, an online feminist group that targets sexism and misogyny in its activism. A case study analysis of how it approached the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey in 2017 allows us to trace how emotions and affect circulate to propel digital feminism, and reflect on their geographies of disruption with respect to social norms. The discussions that play out, and are at play, in digital feminism enable participants to occupy and remake spaces.

This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard – a website built by two of the authors that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information – from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence to unpack the building of the dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.

Collaborative online research offers opportunities and constraints for geographers. This article critically appraises a collaborative research process that we used to illuminate spatial and political dynamics of feminism contained within the online group ‘Destroy the Joint’ (DTJ). A mostly Australian initiative of over 74 000 Facebook members, DTJ aims to end sexism and misogyny in multiple ways. It operates as a meeting place, discussion forum, and umbrella organisation for numerous micro-campaigns that change in response to broader social, cultural and political contexts, and occur in online and offline spaces. We formed a collaborative research agreement with the moderators of DTJ to reflect on its work, asking participants to put themselves on a map and complete a survey. Participatory GIS and survey-based research operated in the real and the more-than-real spaces that contain paradoxical possibilities. We use the term more-than-real to highlight the excesses of digital spaces: the affect tha...

The ‘actually existing’ smart city is not a monolith. It is not directed by a universal logic, nor does it develop in a standardised way. As recent research has argued, the spatial, material, and political contexts of cities have major influence over what smart urbanism looks like in practice. This paper adds analytical depth to, and broadens the geographical scope of, research on the variegated modes of making smart cities. Based on empirical research in multiple Australian cities we use three case studies to explore three different modes of smart urbanism, each one centred on the interests of a different key actor: corporate-centric, citizen-centric, and planner-centric. These different modes can, and do, co-exist in the same city. At times, they are competing logics that fight to pull the city in different directions. Yet, they can also work together to shape smart city initiatives. In describing these different modes, we pay particular attention to the ways that these projects and strategies must contend with the already existing spatial, cultural, and political contexts of each place.

Hybrid geographies are well developed in studies of human–nature relations and environmental humanities, but less so in geographies of music and gender. In this article, we use hybrid geographies to frame our critical engagement with Australia's triple j's Unearthed, a publically funded website and radio station that presents new music. Hybrid approaches enable us to understand gendered power relations in music by deconstructing the ways power differences are built on cultural, social, spatial and technological relations. Engaging netnographic and mixed-method approaches we critique Unearthed as a democratic music cyberspace. We identify the limited constructions of gender and geographic location, some of which are unique to this online presence, while others are shared with broader musical spaces. We argue that the interactions between technology, artists, fans and the online spaces, as mediated by Unearthed, situate emerging artists in relation to gender, geography and genre, and thus constrain possibil...

Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revitalisation: first, the creation of Destroy the Joint, a campaign launched and maintained in Facebook and Twitter spaces; and second, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny in Parliament in October 2012. Both these moments, coming from political and public spaces, received worldwide interest, and we critically examine the context and ramifications of these instances while situating the institutional processes surrounding them within the growing feminist revitalisation. In so doing, we argue that these Australian-based cases indicate a growing feminist movement that is open and multiply focused, connecting personal politics to public campaigning, and achieving material impacts. We conclude that developing a feminist geography of new media is a challenging task, as these spaces circumvent and renegotiate traditional spatial dimensions – including scale and place – through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.