@ranjodh

About the call:

Cities brim over with #speculation. Urban futures are conceived, dreamt of and calculated through a wide variety of speculative practices. Where finance has long speculated on cities, and the #city has served as a playground for sociological thought and more recently #datascience, the city has also become a test bed in the register of #smartcities and #platformurbanism. At the same time, the actors involved in urban speculation have expanded, from urban planners to data scientists and smart city consultants to #BigTech. Through tests and experiments, #technology is deployed to speculate on cultural, social and economic life in the city, and thus puts a claim on cities’ technoscientific futures. How has Big Tech normalized and monopolized speculations on #urbanfutures? What do these futures (potentially) look like? How do urbanites interfere in these mostly black-boxed prophecies and business models? And how are anti-speculations / speculative otherwises performed?