Mediating Uncertainty: Information and the Urban

Workshop hosted by LSE Cities

This workshop examined the ways in which knowledge on various aspects of urbanism is produced, gathered, shared, or used by various actors, and how its circulation at once mediates, mitigates and creates urban uncertainty. It also aimed to examine how advances in technologies of gathering data, communicating, and networking have influenced and shaped the sphere of urban governance and urban political life in cities and with what effects.  In the discussion, we explored how information relates with uncertainty in the urban sphere.

The Urban Uncertainty workshop series is an integral part of LSE Cities’ collaborative investigation into emerging ways of envisioning and governing the future of cities. Each session focuses on a different dimension of urban uncertainty, from health and housing to crime and climate, and brings together scholars from a handful of disciplines whose work converges on common themes.

You can access the full write up about the workshop here.

Profiles

    Jennifer Gabrys

    Jennifer Gabrys is Reader in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, "Citizen Sensing and Environmental Practice: Assessing Participatory Engagements with Environments through Sensor Technologies." She is currently completing a book on environmental sensing, Program Earth: Environment as Experiment in Sensing Technology. Her work can be found at citizensense.net and jennifergabrys.net.

    Myria Georgiou

    Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her research focuses on media and the city; urban technologies and politics of connection; and the ways in which migration and diaspora are politically, culturally and morally constituted in the context of mediation. Prof Georgiou was Chair of the Ethnicity and Race in Communication (ERIC) Division of ICA (2009-11); is founder and former chair of the Diaspora, Migration and Media section of ECREA; and a Board Member of the Urban Communication Foundation (UCF).

    Adam Greenfield

    Previously a rock critic, bike messenger and psychological operations specialist in the US Army, Adam Greenfield spent over a decade working in the design and development of networked digital information technologies, as lead information architect for the Tokyo office of internet services consultancy Razorfish, independent user-experience designer and head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia headquarters in Helsinki. Selected in 2013 as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics, Adam has also taught in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Urban Design course at the Bartlett, University College London. His books include Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006), Urban Computing and its Discontents (2007), and the #1 bestselling Against the Smart City (2013). He lives in London with his partner, the filmmaker Nurri Kim.

    Rob Kitchin

    Rob Kitchin is a professor and ERC Advanced Investigator in the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, for which he was director between 2002 and 2013. Rob is a prolific scholar and has has published widely across the social sciences on issues ranging across critical data studies, human geography, cartography, and software studies. He is editor of the international journals, Progress in Human Geography and Dialogues in Human Geography, and is principal investigator on the Programmable City project, the All-Island Research Observatory, and the Digital Repository of Ireland.

    Huma Yusuf

    Huma Yusuf is a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. and the lead Pakistan analyst at Control Risks. She is also an award-winning journalist and columnist and her work has appeared in Pakistan's Dawn Newspaper, the International New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and Foreign Policy. She has written several policy papers on Pakistan's security challenges, including "Conflict Dynamics of Karachi", which was published by the United States Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. She has also published extensively on Pakistan's broadcast media landscape, including recent policy publications for Open Society Foundations and BBC Media Action.

    Sobia Ahmad Kaker

    Dr Sobia Ahmad Kaker is an urban studies scholar who studies issues relating to urbanisation, security and governance in global south cities. She holds a PhD degree in Architecture, Planning and Landscape from Newcastle University. Her PhD thesis titled ‘Enclaves as Process: Space, Security and Violence in Karachi’ investigates processes of enclavisation across low income and middle class neighbourhoods in Karachi. Her thesis unravels how processes of securitising ordinary residential spaces shape urban socio-political relations in ways that exacerbate conflict and violence in the already divided Pakistani megacity. Sobia has extensive research experience in leading Pakistani and British research institutions. She has worked at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, the Collective for Social Sciences Research in Karachi, and LSE Cities in London. She is currently affiliated with the Centre for Civil Society and Human Security at the London School of Economics.