Sensing the City: tracing complex urban patterns and their implications for urban governance

A diversity of widely available digital applications makes our life easier, for instance with regard to travelling, communication, networking and shopping. In addition to these dissipated smart phone applications, many of the digital tools purposefully aim at steering us for safety, efficiency and sustainability. Planned smart urban solutions allegedly have capacity for mitigating climate change via “green” tech and optimization. Moreover, digitalization is suggested to help in adapting sudden changes in society, e.g. Pandemic, climate change adaptation.

Despite, or maybe because of, their potential, smartification and digitalization of cities needs critical reflection. With moving bigger parts of our lives to the online world, the spatial principles of traditional retail shift, fake news and mis-information challenge democratic decision making, surveillance increases and dependency of the public sector on globally operating technology firms grows. There are also methodological concerns as some digital city models are presented tools to predict and control urban systems and thus ignoring the complexity and evolutionary resilience of cities. Moreover, using new technologies sometimes seems to become a goal in itself, reducing opportunities for other, equally valuable, methods of sensing the city. 

To advance urban governance for better future cities, it is necessary to explore these tools, methods and emerging human behavior patterns in smart cities, along with individual preferences, trends and ethical connotations. Crucial is to recognize and embrace the intrinsic uncertainty and complexity of technology mediated cities and societies.

We invite all complexity scholars across disciplines to contribute with high quality submissions on the following conference themes:

• Practical and methodological approaches of sensing the city: analyses, planning, data management for grasping the dynamics of complex urban patterns at various scales

• Understanding the ‘smartification’ of cities: ontological/meta-level viewpoints and challenges and opportunities resulting from the complexity of urban life

• Societal and policy implications – ethical principles for using urban data, co-evolution of technology and urban governance, and the digital empowerment of civil society 

More information: HERE