Special Sessions

Important Dates

All abstracts should be submitted here, whether you are submitting to a special session or to the open sessions.

1 - Digital Platforms and Regional Development

Organisers: Robert Hassink, Han Chu, Martin Kenney (Kiel University, Germany)

In recent years, digital platforms have caused great changes in people's daily life, in consumption and in production, and hence in regional development, which has led to the emergence of new phenomena and concepts such as "platform urbanism", "platform economy", and "platform ecology". With the power of the Internet, digital platforms are both a new space for certain new industries activities in regional economies, as well as an important infrastructure and actor bridging a variety of economic activities in virtual space and physical regions. This special session focuses both on the role that digital platforms play at influencing regional economies and on challenging theoretical concepts in economic geography, from three perspectives. First, it focuses on how the platform economy enters and interferes with existing regional industries and regional industrial chains. Does that affect the regional economy in a positive or negative way? What do regional governments and agencies need to do to leverage the platform? Secondly, it focuses on how innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities are regionally discovered through the platform. Numerous innovative startups in regional economies integrate and connect different resources through digital platforms. Thirdly, it challenges existing theoretical concepts in economic geography explaining regional economic development, such as clusters, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and path creation, which emerged in the pre-digital time. Several features that are in contrast to assumptions made in these concepts characterize the digital platform economy. What theoretical implications does that have? We have submitted a special issue proposal to Regional Studies.

2 - E-empowerment in marginal rural and mountain

Organisers: Paolo Giaccaria, Nicolò Fenu, Samantha Cenere (University of Turin)

Contact: paolo.giaccaria@unito.it

Following Macintosh (2004: 3) tripartition of e-participation (e-enabling, e-engaging and eempowerment), we agree that much attention has been paid to mere e-enabling, making digital government procedures accessible and understandable in order to deliver services. The focus on the e-enabling aspect is particularly worrisome in marginal rural and mountain areas, where depopulation is a most serious issue, and the digital gap is higher. In such contexts, the digitalisation of everyday services is seen as a shortcut to secure civil rights for the (elderly) population and to attract new residents thanks to remote working, digital infrastructures, and distance learning.
As a consequence, the higher level of e-participation (e-engaging and e-empowerment) is often seen as secondary given the centrality of service provision as a means to contrast the depopulation trend. On the contrary, we stress the importance of active citizenship in setting the goals and means of marginal rural and mountain areas regeneration and the role of digitalization in securing effective citizens’ empowerment. Because of marginality and depopulation, marginal areas can be a locus to experiment with participation and citizenship in planning and policy-making fruitfully.

The session welcomes original conceptual and empirical research contributions about eempowerment
in marginal rural and mountain territories. For example:
- civic digital platforms (e.g. digital living lab, civic social networks) and their impact on policies co-design and co-production;
- blockchain-based technologies (local currencies, digital wallet, digital twinning) and the emergence of decentralised legitimation in marginal areas;
- digitally enabled rural and mountain new inhabitants (e.g. digital nomads, makers, temporary residents) and their impact on e-empowerment.

3 - Platformization of everyday urban life in Southern European cities

Organisers: Jorge Sequera; Jordi Nofre (Nova University Lisbon)

Contact: jorgesequera@poli.uned.es

How do we imagine the city? How do we represent the urban? How do we eat, move or shop? What are the lifestyle models we have chosen? How are digital platforms being introduced in all of them? All these questions will focus our understanding of our everyday urban life and the possible scenarios in tomorrow’s on-demand city. We invite conceptual and empirical papers that explore the main changes in everyday urban life by mapping cultural tastes and social practices in the digital era, focusing mainly on how digital platforms are used for certain daily activities that are a feature of urban life, how they are expressed and the novelties they feature. The overall goal this session proposal is to share theoretical and empirical approaches that focus on how ‘online platforms’ have affected, transformed and impacted urban consumption, lifestyles, leisure and work culture in Southern European cities.

4 - Prefiguring Politics in Computationalised Cities

Organisers: Niloufar Vadiati, Martin Bangratz (HafenCity University Hamburg, RWTH Aachen)

Contact: Niloufar.vadiati@hcu-hamburg.de, bangratz@pt.rwth-aachen.de

Mediating local governance with data, algorithms, and platforms is invoking new political possibilities and reconfiguring the status quo of urban actors through the entry of new players, from giant tech corporations, digital experts and hackers to increasingly digitally involved citizens. In this context, the politics of urban everyday life are now constituted not just by humans and natural forces, but also by digital posthuman bodies through exercising their technological forms of agency. Nonetheless, top-down techno-political settings, with entrepreneurial and solutionist hegemony, remain dominant, particularly in smart cities. This deterministic approach to technological development and monopolised ownership of data and internet infrastructure has gained critics, followed by active resistance. The ideas of reimagining techno-political epistemologies, reshaping power relationships, and alternative spatial practices are being materialised and experimented with different communities in different geographies. The panel will examine the tools, formats, and practices that seek to prefigure urban politics to represent and remake collective agency in the digitalisation process. The question at stake is how these experimental practices conceptualize and envisage cities' future in relation to space technologies, and power. Bringing together discussions on the "right to the city" and "technological sovereignty", contributions to this session may address theoretical considerations as well as empirical observations from the lens of different disciplines and fields: Urban commons and data commons, The intersection of spatial justice & data justice, Technological sovereignty and spatial urbanism, Tech-feminism, Urban hack, Queer(ing) the tech-politics, Glitch urbanism

5 - XR methods and digital geographies

Organizers: Michal Rzeszewski, Leighton Evans, Phil Jones, Tess Osborne (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Swansea University, University of Birmingham, University of Leicester)

Contact: mrz@amu.edu.pl

Technologies from the XR spectrum, which include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), are increasingly present in scientific discourses among various disciplines, both as something that should be researched and something that could be used as a method and a tool. Geography is no different in this regard, as there is a growing interest in using technologies such as VR, exemplified by a recent book by Phil Jones and Tess Osborne (2022) and many examples of pioneering research. For geographers, XR presents itself as an ontological and epistemological opportunity. However, the technological landscape is ever-changing, and digital platforms and communities emerge and disappear constantly. This situation makes it hard to keep pace with fluent research fields, disciplinary boundaries, and available software and hardware. Therefore, it is even more crucial to organize discussions about the current and future use of XR in geographical research, mainly since XR is still used by a small number of geographers (Bos 2021). In this session, we aim to explore those possibilities through the following questions: What are XR-specific research dilemmas in geography? What new research opportunities can be explored through XR? Is XR mature enough for a research tool? How can XR be used to explore both material and digital spaces? What ethical challenges are involved with XR use in research?