ABRN | Boderland Futures: Technologies, Zones, Co-existences, 25-27 June, 2020, Seoul

Neha Gupta Announcement
Subject Fields
Urban Design and Planning, Urban History / Studies, Humanities, Digital Humanities

I am looking for prospective participants to convene a panel for the 7th Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network | Boderland Futures: Technologies, Zones, Co-existences, 25-27 June, 2020, Seoul |

Please contact via email: neha.ckgupta@gmail.com

Panel Abstract

"The city is a temporal construction -- an unfinished project of industrial-modernity -- it expands in time. Therefore, there can be no longitudinal, sustained perception of the city -- the city is mobile -- a space in time. The representation(s) of the city-space, produced by this temporal construction of the city, and the practices of mobility therein, service the dualistic enframing of the metropolis. This furnishes two divergent imaginations -- the concept city of urbanists and planners, and the experiential city of practices. This panel segues from these images of the city, and tries to establish the algorithm as the perceptual tool that now (re)produces the image of the city.

We primarily interact with our cities through our mobilities, which bears the overtone of pursuit, purpose, and other conditions of the money economy. Continuities of displacements and dislocations produce the urban experience. The city multiplies mobilities and in so doing diminishes the definite. To be mobile is to lack a definite place. It is an in-between moment between nowhere(s). The commute is the sole anchorage in a space that is characterised by the permanence of transience; one must always “pass by” in the city. The city then has to be imagined not as an entity in itself, but as perceived and consumed through the machineries of perception, by its inhabitants and tourists alike.  New practices of mobilities that are organised through network(s) produce an alternate imagination of the urban space. As geographic information is mediated by digital monopolies, the city manifests as an algorithmic construction, the architecture of which is organised using the data available about its spaces. When digital conglomerates monopolise urban information they create divides that (re)orient the city -- the ‘right to the city’, both informational and political, and its mobilities. Now, as we move into an era when climatic changes are causing shifts in the habitable spaces of the planet, do we need cities themselves to be mobile? Do data-furnished representations that depend on the circulation of data on imbricated mobilities, question the permanence of the brick-and- mortar imagination of the city and reconfigure it as ephemera? Does this favour the imagination of mobile cities? This panel will deliberate on the city-space as a (re)production of algorithmic mobilities, and the movement to the modular-mobile-city."

The dealine for Panel Propasals is 30.09.2019.

Financial Support: There is limited financial support to some scholars who reside in Asia.  Please note that the conference operates on a limited budget, and will not normally be able to provide more than a partial coverage of the costs of travel.

Contact Information

National Institute of Technology Silchar

District Cachar

Assam - 788010

 

Contact Email
neha.ckgupta@gmail.com