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.
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.
Home, digital technologies and data are intersecting in new ways as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. We consider the data practices associated with COVID-19 responses and their implications ...for housing and home through two overarching themes: the notion of home as a private space, and digital technology and surveillance in the home. We show that although home has never been private, the rapid adoption and acceptance of technologies in the home for quarantine, work and study, enabled by the pandemic, is rescripting privacy. The acceleration of technology adoption and surveillance in the home has implications for privacy and potential discrimination, and should be approached with a critical lens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...renters. I argue that there is a further significant housing shift that deserves our attention - share housing. Share housing in the twenty-first century is different as evidence shows that people are sharing for longer and across widening age demographics; and that access to and experience of share housing is increasingly mediated by the digital. However, scant attention has been paid to share housing beyond its stereotype as transitional housing for young people between the family home and individual home ownership. Here I provoke geographers to take seriously, 'Generation Share' and the digitalised geographies of shared housing.
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 ...popular music heritage. They recognize the role of material culture and museums in fostering social memory while also noting the absence of second-wave feminism in museum representation. Research on the archival turn in feminism suggests some intersections between material culture literature and some feminist thought and practices, but such overlap requires further examination. The authors suggest that masculine dominance of record collecting has implications for representing whose music heritage and tastes are being preserved. The literature on collecting has traditionally defined masculine actors as collectors while positioning feminine actors as consumers. This article looks at record collecting in detail and argues that a feminist critique of archiving in record collecting provides valuable insights into gender and power relations. Ethnographic research of record collectors conducted in 2006 and 2010–2013 shows that women do collect, but their collecting practices are overlooked due to the type of objects or genres being collected, and where they do exhibit the same qualities of masculine collectors, they are seen as anomalies and often downplay the value of their collections. Furthermore, gender bias is perpetuated when personal collections become the basis of musical canons and are institutionalized through reissue labels or museum collections. This maintains the masculine hegemony seen in music cultures more generally and has implications for creating and building an inclusive musical heritage.
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