Mistra Urban Futures: a living laboratory for urban transformations

This paper examines the ‘future’ as a blueprint for social power relations in postcolonial urbanism. It addresses a crucial gap in the rich scholarship on postcolonial urbanism that has largely ignored the ‘centrality of time’ (Chakrabarty, 2000 ) in the politics and speed of urban transformations. This paper takes postcolonial urbanism as a ‘colonisation of/with time’ (Adam, 2004 ) that reaches across spaces, scales and times of the past, present and future to produce cities as spatio-temporal entities. Using the lens of ‘futuring’ (Urry, 2016 ) as a practice of imagining and governing cities through speed, this paper analyses India’s national 100 Smart Cities Mission through a set of popular myths that create a dialectic relation between past and future. It suggests that smart cities in India are marked by the deployment of two parallel mythologies of speed – nationhood and technology. While the former refers to a mythical moral state, the latter refers to transparent and accountable governance in order to produce smart cities in the image of the moral state. The paper concludes that while postcolonial future time is imagined at the scale of the smart city, there is a simultaneous recalibration of its governance at the scale of the nation.

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A Neighborhood Shopping Street and the Making of Urban Cultures and Economies in Germany

City and Community ◽

10.1111/cico.12064 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 140-157 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Petra Kuppinger

Keyword(s):

Cultural Production ◽

Cultural Complexity ◽

Current Configuration ◽

The Face ◽

Urban Transformations ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Economic Innovation ◽

Cultural Economies ◽

Ethnic Neighborhood ◽

Immigrant Neighborhoods

This paper examines the cultural, social, and economic contributions of multi–ethnic neighborhood businesses to the transformation of German cityscapes. The diversity on N–Street in Stuttgart has been at the forefront of urban transformations and cultural production. I show that neighborhood stores and shopping streets are sites of urban experiments and cultural beginnings which produce new authenticities in the face of rapid urban homogenization. Combining theoretical debates about urban “authenticities,” the creative potential of immigrant neighborhoods, and ethnic/cross–cultural economies, I analyze transformations of N–Street and the surrounding neighborhood. I argue that neighborhood shopping streets are relevant nodes and agents in urban transformations and the production of urban futures. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I introduce N–Street's history, its current configuration of genuinely local urban cultures and economies, and its cultural complexity and cultural and economic innovation.

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Urban Futures

10.3362/9781780446325 ◽

2005 ◽

Author(s):

Nabeel Hamdi ◽

Jane Handal

Keyword(s):

Urban Futures

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Urban Transformations

10.3138/9781442623996 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Parker Daly Everett

Keyword(s):

Urban Transformations

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Smart and Resilient Urban Futures for Sustainability in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Review of Policy Responses on Urban Mobility

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13116486 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (11) ◽

pp. 6486

Author(s):

Christina Kakderi ◽

Eleni Oikonomaki ◽

Ilektra Papadaki

Keyword(s):

Operations Management ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Smart Growth ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Sustainable Mobility ◽

Health Crisis ◽

Daily Routines ◽

Policy Responses ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Made In

The COVID-19 pandemic has put lifestyles in question, changed daily routines, and limited citizen freedoms that seemed inalienable before. A human activity that has been greatly affected since the beginning of the health crisis is mobility. Focusing on mobility, we aim to discuss the transformational impact that the pandemic brought to this specific urban domain, especially with regards to the promotion of sustainability, the smart growth agenda, and the acceleration towards the smart city paradigm. We collect 60 initial policy responses related to urban mobility from cities around the world and analyze them based on the challenge they aim to address, the exact principles of smart growth and sustainable mobility that they encapsulate, as well as the level of ICT penetration. Our findings suggest that emerging strategies, although mainly temporary, are transformational, in line with the principles of smart growth and sustainable development. Most policy responses adopted during the first months of the pandemic, however, fail to leverage advancements made in the field of smart cities, and to adopt off-the-shelf solutions such as monitoring, alerting, and operations management.

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Urban specters

Environment and Planning D Society and Space ◽

10.1177/02637758211030286 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 026377582110302

Author(s):

Asha Best ◽

Margaret M Ramírez

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Black Women ◽

Urban Space ◽

Women Artists ◽

Social Life ◽

The United States ◽

Spatial Method ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Black Life ◽

The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

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Out of the loop? On the radical and the routine in urban big data

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/00420980211014026 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 004209802110140

Author(s):

Sarah Barns

Keyword(s):

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Big Data ◽

Computational Models ◽

Data Driven ◽

Urban Systems ◽

Out Of The Loop ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Urban Behaviour ◽

The City

This commentary interrogates what it means for routine urban behaviours to now be replicating themselves computationally. The emergence of autonomous or artificial intelligence points to the powerful role of big data in the city, as increasingly powerful computational models are now capable of replicating and reproducing existing spatial patterns and activities. I discuss these emergent urban systems of learned or trained intelligence as being at once radical and routine. Just as the material and behavioural conditions that give rise to urban big data demand attention, so do the generative design principles of data-driven models of urban behaviour, as they are increasingly put to use in the production of replicable, autonomous urban futures.

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