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Algorithms have been the focus of important geographical critique, particularly in relation to their harmful and discriminatory effects. However, less attention has been paid to engaging more deeply with the epistemological effects of algorithms, the result being that geographers continue to overlook more generative algorithmic potentials, practices, epistemes and methodologies. This paper progresses our engagements with algorithms by first considering practices of care as a means to reframe our relationship with algorithms. Second, the paper identifies an epistemological rupture that allows us to reconceptualise algorithms as co-researchers, enabling us to encounter new spaces and understand these spaces in new ways.

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.

Recent geographical attention to smart places has underlined the key point that smart places are made: crafted incrementally over time and woven through existing sites and contexts. Work on analysing the crafting of ‘actually existing’ smart cities has turned to describing and characterising the processes through which smart cities are made and, within this, the interplay and relative significance of accidental versus purposeful smart cities has come to the fore. Drawing on the concept of dispositif to capture the simultaneity of piecemeal and opportunistic change with deliberate strategy, this paper furthers these debates using examples of two places within the Sydney Metropolitan Region, Australia: Newcastle and Parramatta. Through their analysis we identify the evolving interplay of a priori drivers, ad hoc initiatives and post hoc strategies evident in the crafting of smart cities. Understanding the emergence of actually existing smart cities, we conclude, is sharpened and strengthened by the concept of dispositif, through its attention to processes characterised by non-linear, overlapping and recursively combined drivers that are not without purposeful, strategic intent.

Does ‘informal’ housing offer more affordable choices for low-income renters in expensive cities? This paper investigates this question with reference to Sydney, Australia, where planning reforms h...

Australia faces a chronic shortage of affordable rental housing, as do many other nations in the Global North. Unable to access the formal rental sector, lower-income earners are increasingly resorting to share housing and other informal arrangements, sometimes occupying makeshift accommodation or illegal dwellings. This article examines informality in Sydney’s housing market, an important case because of the explicit policy efforts geared towards supporting diverse and higher density housing supply. It draws on analysis of the regulatory planning framework and primary data derived from interviews and focus groups with housing advocates, support workers and building compliance officers from across the metropolitan region. It seeks to understand the drivers of supply and demand within the informal housing market and constructs a typology of informal tenures and dwelling provision. The article contributes new empirical data on the outcomes of planning policies designed to enable flexible housing responses which legitimise some informal practices, and the wider dimensions of informal housing provision within formal urban systems of the Global North.

The coronavirus pandemic is opening up a space for housing advocates and scholars to push for reforms to the private rental sector. Yet, we argue the Australian government has shown little commitment to addressing long-term, structural housing issues. Temporary reform will not lead to a new or more socially just housing system in the long-term—a new housing normal—without a significant and nation-wide tenant campaign. Like others, we are working together on campaigns such as this, but we are conscious that the government is likely to revert back to their old housing habits.

This article provides new evidence of the ways that smart cities materialize within specific sites and contexts through smart street furniture (SSF). Drawing on empirical data generated through mixed-method field research, the article examines the situated data relations that emerge in the context of the adoption of InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow and Strawberry Energy smart benches in London. The concept of “silences” is proposed to analyze insufficiently articulated data relations resulting from gaps or absences in the use, design, and governance of this new type of urban furniture. The argument made is that data silences lead to failures to account for decisions and the deferral of responsibilities regarding the data aspects of these objects. It is suggested that an approach that focuses on “listening” to and “speaking” about data relations can enable dialogical forms of accountability, and realize the potential of SSF for citizens in local contexts.

Urban governance innovation is being framed as an imperative to address complex urban and global challenges, triggering the adoption of novel institutional forms, approaches and techniques. Urban political geographers are still some way off fully apprehending the dynamics of these innovations and their potential to reconfigure the composition and politics of urban governance. This paper suggests dialogue between urban political geography and public sector innovation literatures as a productive way forward. We build from this engagement to suggest a critical research agenda to drive systematic analysis of innovatory urban governance, its heterogeneous formation, politics and possibilities.

The definition and materialization of smart homes has changed over time in accordance with technological advancements and changing housing trajectories. Despite this, to date little research has problematized what different household types and tenure mean for the smart home. As housing markets become more diverse and technology becomes increasingly embedded in the everyday, critical attention needs to be paid to ways in which technologies are being used to mediate households beyond the owner-occupied, nuclear family home. Thinking critically about this is necessary in order to better understand the benefits and pernicious effects of technology on people who have different needs for technology within the home due to different tenures and different materializations of housing and home. This article situates the rented and shared house as the ‘actually existing’ smart home. It shows that those sharing housing use smart technologies performatively, subversively and as an infrastructure of care across all stages of the share housing cycle – from finding a place to live, to managing the household and maintaining relationships. In doing so the shared smart home offers an alternative smart home reflecting a household diversity that smart home discourse has, to date, largely been blind to.

Concerns have been raised regarding smart city innovations leading to, or consolidating, technocratic urban governance and the tokenization of citizens. Less research, however, has explored how we ...

Although aspirations for the ‘smart home’ have existed since the 1950s, the recent understanding of smart technological interventions as ecosystems of policy, material, people, ICT and data that dr...

Share housing is changing. Once considered a form of short-term housing and a lifestyle choice for young adults fresh out of the family home, share housing is increasingly playing a broader role in...

Mobility practices are one of the central labours of family, through which the relations of kin and non-kin are negotiated. In many cities, the private car has been and is central to familial mobil...

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,...

This study examined relationships between urban productivity and affordable rental housing, focusing particularly on the location and availability of affordable rental housing relative to employment and labour markets in Australia’s capital cities and satellite cities.

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.

Emergencies such as COVID-19 trigger calls for innovation and invoke forced experimentation They can shift what is thinkable and thus licence social and institutional change, opening space wherein new sociopolitical arrangements might emerge Cities are at the heart of the COVID-19 emergency, in terms of impact, management, and solutions This commentary considers the implications of COVID-19 for urban governance innovation Incrementally, innovation has become a ?new normal? across multiple fields of social, economic, technological, and environmental endeavour as disruptive enhancements are sought to address complex problems: urban governance is no exception In cities, diverse new ecosystems of innovative urban governance have been emerging with the potential to reshape the politics and parameters of urban decision making, produce new institutional settings, reconstitute cities' multiscalar relations, and invoke new forms of power This commentary considers urban governance innovation in COVID times Drawing from Australian and international examples, we reflect on the actors taking centre stage as cities' responses to the pandemic take shape and consider the governing mechanisms being evoked As these innovations embed more deeply the distributed nature of urban governance, we close with thoughts on the risks and opportunities that COVID-19 presents for seeking inclusive innovation in the field of urban governance

Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have superseded disciplinary modes of control. This is said to involve the fragmentation of individuals into discrete units of dividual data. We argue that the shift from disciplinary to modulatory control should not be overstated. Rather, disciplinary and modulatory modes of control work together across a spectrum of personhood, from individual to dividual. Understanding the co-existence of, and the relationships between, these two forms of social control is essential for thinking through the urban politics of data and control. Our article illustrates this contention with three vignettes of how the dividualised data associated with discrete digital infrastructures and systems are also being ‘re-assembled’ by various authorities seeking to discipline the behaviour of individuals. It concludes with a discussion of such powers of re-assembly and their critical importance to the politics of control in digitally networked cities.

Sustainable energy transitions – broadly described as moving away from fossil fuels toward renewable resources and reducing energy demand– are emerging across the world, albeit in uneven ways. Scholarship on energy transitions has highlighted the importance of how these transitions may be facilitated or impeded by both governance and politics, and the influence of urban dynamics and histories on these transitions. Using an emphasis on multiscalar governance, this paper analyses emergent energy reconfigurations in Australia, with two purposes. The first is to understand more richly the dynamics that are differentially reworking possibilities for more sustainable energy infrastructure and energy demand in a fossil-fuel dependent nation. Second, we focus on the role of cities, considering the workings of urban energy transitions, most especially through governing the materiality of urban commercial space. Drawing on empirical examples from Australia’s two largest cities we suggest that the urban is a crucial nexus through which energy transitions are instigated, manifest and contested. We conclude by confirming that the strategic pursuit of political-economic interests of the urban, in partnership with other state and non-state actors, creates opportunities for energy transitions rendered difficult by institutional and material obduracies.

Traditional housing careers are being re-configured. Home ownership is declining and a parallel increase in renting has lead some commentators to suggest that this is creating a generation of rente...

© 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.

In this article the authors extend the concept of the museum and its collecting practices to record collections, and position record collections as musical archives that are representative of our p...

The ability of disruptions - big and small - to induce modal shift away from the private car is one of the more pressing concerns of transport geography and policy. Car sharing, a more sustainable mode of mobility to private car ownership, has quietly emerged as a viable and popular alternative to private vehicle travel in numerous cities of the world. This paper brings these two phenomena into conversation. We present a novel exploration of the precise moment in which the decision to start car sharing is made - an event which remains under-researched and little understood. Using a qualitative analysis of interview data to explore the period during which the individual adopts car sharing, we ask: how are transport transitions, particularly the uptake of car sharing, catalysed? We find that disruptions can either be single shocks, or a bundling and re-ordering of existing practices. We propose that willingness and ability as two preconditions that are key to enable transition to new ways of being mobile. Willingness is an embrace of new practices through inevitable teething problems. Ability is an aptitude for alternative practices, as well as access to infrastructure.

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 introduces the reader to sample-based music. It begins with an overview of the development of sample-based music and positions this within the context of traditions of musical borrowing more generally. The development of copyright in music is also discussed, starting from its beginnings in the Enlightenment and continuing to its more recent extension beyond music in notated form to music as recorded artefact.