Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Yu, Yi

doi: 10.1177/02637758241256525pmid: N/A

The Chinese government has recently promoted community-based eldercare supported by digitally programmed “smart” health and safety devices placed in homes to address the perceived pressure of a rapidly aging population. This is envisioned as a solution to the growing need for eldercare that simultaneously enables aging in place, facilitates digitally mediated population governance, and provides a safety net for older adults residing in the community. However, the top-down practices of smartening older adults’ homes have encountered a series of frictions in their implementation. By examining the frictions in smart eldercare programs, this paper highlights older adults’ varied capacities to modify, resist, or misuse smart eldercare devices. In so doing, they collectively co-produce the smart environmentality that shapes the aging population. This study re-conceptualizes smart eldercare within a ‘smart environmentality’ framework, highlighting its co-production by the elderly and stakeholders through collaboration. It contributes to the literature on biopolitics and critical aging studies by revealing the interactions of digital governance, glitch politics, and co-production.

Bissell, David

doi: 10.1177/02637758231205105pmid: N/A

Being affected in on-demand platform urbanism is a primary site of politics, not an aftereffect that happens once capitalism has had its way. To make this argument, this article begins by expanding automation from its conventional technical purview to better appreciate its overlooked embodied dimensions. Accordingly, through the examples of on-demand mobility and delivery platforms, I explain how automation can be understood as a specific structure of feeling immanent to on-demand platform urbanism that is transforming city life and creating distinctive subjectivities. This article takes as its empirical focus the unravelling of these embodied dimensions of automation, which has been exacerbated by the gradual rollback of COVID-19 restrictions in Melbourne. My argument is that a felt sense of disaffection by both workers and consumers is effectively deautomating this form of on-demand platform capitalism. The article concludes that disaffection in this context has a potentially recuperative dimension, opening up alternative urban futures that were previously unthinkable.

Richardson, Lizzie

doi: 10.1177/02637758231218799pmid: N/A

Popular and academic analyses of automation in work predominantly focus on paid labour, sometimes forecasting how many jobs may be lost or investigating how new types of jobs are being created through such technological change. This article takes a different approach by considering what automation implies for the valuation of work. The starting point is that contemporary office automation is not exclusively aimed at working activities themselves but rather is increasingly directed at the infrastructure that allows work. Two infrastructural elements are identified where office automation is occurring: “tenant experience applications” that aid in the flexible occupation of office buildings, and “productivity tools” that support the organisation of office tasks regardless of location. This shift from automation targeting what work is done to how that work is done raises the question of work valuation. Plural regimes of valuation are at play in contemporary office automation, through which a myriad of interested actors emerge, extending beyond the employer and the worker. The value of flexibility thus occurs not singularly nor even primarily in the production process, but rather is achieved in the financial valuation of various aspects of office performance as well as in the social (re)definition of work.

Lin, Weiqiang; Frétigny, Jean-Baptiste

doi: 10.1177/02637758241290945pmid: N/A

For nearly three years, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had wrought disruptive border closures and network dissolutions in mobility systems of all kinds. Forwarding the concept of the Quick Response (QR) border, this article examines two technological interventions by which mobilities were ultimately revived. First, the removal of quarantine measures often assumed the rapid and mass vaccination of all. Second, the sorting of populations involved the pervasive and seductive use of QR-enabled digital ‘health passes’ to automatically confer and confirm biosecurity. Drawing on Singapore as a case study, the article argues that the remedial logics sparked by COVID-19 both mirror previous iterations of biopolitics, and breathe new intensities in them. In the context of our study, two characteristics of the QR border stand out: one, the heavy reliance of (this) biopolitics on affective consent and public cooperation; and two, the proliferation of trans-scalar and multi-purpose applications due to QR’s flexible automation. The article discusses the implications of these developments for the future of biopolitics and our complicities.

Sumartojo, Shanti; Tian, Leimin; Carreno-Medrano, Pamela; Lundberg, Robert; Kulić, Dana; Mintrom, Michael

doi: 10.1177/02637758241263206pmid: N/A

In this article, we develop a framework for robotic autonomy as contingent. We do so with an account of a series of online research workshops that asked people to design and test robot behaviours for a public space scenario of their choice, as a means to surface and discuss their understandings of robots. We show how, as people manipulated robots in a simulator, they came to understand the capacities and limits of robots in distinctive ways. Thinking with these virtual encounters with robots, we argue that robotic contingency can be understood as dependent on spatial context; as unfolding in encounters between people, robots, and other things, creatures and substances; and as subject to forms of accountability and responsibility that are ongoingly made in an uncertain world. Our analysis reinforces work on automated infrastructures, which understands them as made sense of and operating relationally. This is important because those infrastructures are a part of how people understand robotic technologies in an uncertain and processual world, and they shape their expectations about and imagination of automated technologies, such as robots, into the future. We conclude by speculating on implications for an open-ended robotics design that works with contingency rather than seeking to control it, and ask how a more expansive understanding of accountability might be assembled as part of this more emergent approach.

doi: 10.1177/02637758261425065pmid: N/A

Charania, Moon

doi: 10.1177/02637758251398697pmid: N/A

Femme interiorities is a series of provocations and essays – methodological, creative, and theoretical – devoted to thinking about femininity and its multiple interior forms, iterations, and archives. How do we tell the story of femininities, take it back, tell it anew, from feminist, queer, raced, diasporic, decolonial modes of being? Femme, as we define it, assembles and fissures an irreverent and fugitive femininity, and in so doing, gestures to femininity’s oblique relation to the libidinous, to immodesty, to eroticism, to sensation, and to flesh just as it too signals to other knowledges, memories, stories, hapticities, hauntings, and socialities. We find interiorities to be a compelling spatial metaphor because, on the one hand, it gestures to that which is inside, enclosed, private, hidden, inaccessible, and introspective, while on the other hand, it signals to the very act(s) of penetrating/entering the femme. At its core, then, this special forum considers the question: What does it mean to be inside the femme?

Cowan, TL

doi: 10.1177/02637758251408322pmid: 41743861

In this performance-essay, T.L. Cowan introduces a geyser method for ‘situation knowledges’: text-based drawings for the description and study of explosive, complex, and traumatic expression. Rejecting linearity and mono-genricity, Cowan writes tangentially and propulsively on grief, necro-political white exceptionalism and grievability, shock, shame, rage, and extreme emotional un- and re-shaping. Embracing the stigma of cognitive disorderliness/being disordered, this essay experiments with crip-femme autopoetics for immoderate ways of being out-of-order as a technique-tactic both for automatic writing and self/life-writing, which pushes past feminist mess and claims the chaotic as an aesthetic and political superpower.