'Informational Peripheries' CfP at the RGS-IBG, London 2023

Informational peripheries: Rethinking the urban in a digital age

RGS-IBG Annual Meeting, London 2023

Sponsored by the Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG)

Session Organisers:

Prof Ayona Datta, UCL Department of Geography, a.datta@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Fenna Hoefsloot, UCL Department of Geography, f.hoefsloot@ucl.ac.uk

The increasing reliance upon data and digital technologies in cities has led to an ‘urbanization of information’ (Shaw and Graham 2017). Here information is understood to build upon the vast network of urban data to acquire meaning and significance in specific contexts. Despite the attention paid to smart cities in recent years, the role of the digital in rethinking urban peripheries have been somewhat side-lined. Peripheries are at once noted as zones of ‘insufficiency and incompletion’ (Simone, 2010), and as potentially generative spaces of confrontation, adaptation and occupation. Yet given that much of our knowledge about cities today is mediated through the digital, what then constitutes the urban periphery in a digital age?

In this session we call for researching ‘informational peripheries’ (Datta 2023) as a key analytical lens for understanding the spaces of exclusion and fragmentation created in the margins of digital, material, and social geographies of cities. The informational periphery, where exclusions are marked by both geographic and informational distance, includes uncountable subjects and unmappable territories. We propose that empirical and theoretical development of the informational peripheries can provide an important vantage point for understanding the socio-technological relations that are at the heart of conceptualising the ‘urban’ in a digital age. 

We welcome contributions from scholars, practitioners, and activists that include (but are not limited to) the following themes:  

·       The links between digital technologies and urban infrastructures in informational peripheries.

·       The role of mis/dis/mal-information in the production of informational peripheries.

·       Networks of power across state, non-state and civil society actors in the informational periphery. 

·       The linkages between paper and ‘born digital’ data in producing the information periphery. 

·       The informational periphery as nodes of confrontation and transformation across citizens, cities, regions and nations.

·       The grafting of digital information over shared colonial and postcolonial legacies in the urban peripheries.

Please submit 300 words abstracts to Fenna Hoefsloot by 12th March 2023.