City and Technology: IIHS Annual Research Conference

The second edition of Urban ARC, the annual research conference at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) will be held from 11 – 13 January 2018, at the IIHS Bangalore City Campus. The theme for 2018 edition is ‘City and Technology’.

The call for sessions emphasises the wide-ranging nature of both “city” and “technology”. The conference aims to use diverse disciplinary and methodological lenses to re-examine, re-imagine, and re-situate our understandings of these terms.

Technology has always played a significant role in the ways societies have evolved. This is true in the context of cities as well. Cities, especially in the Global South, are spaces where the promise of technology is tested against the backdrop of the rapid urbanisation. A recent UNCTAD report emphasized the role of science, technology and innovation in the process of urbanisation, particularly if we are to ensure it is sustainable and equitable. Recent cases have highlighted ways in which technology can help reimagine cities themselves (such as in Songdo International City, South Korea and Masdar City, UAE) or sector specific process in existing cities (Sustainable Transportation in Ahmedabad). Our understandings of these processes have ranged from the celebratory to the critical

The narratives of celebration and critique emerging at the intersections of ‘Technology’ and ‘City’ present a unique moment for urban scholars. The conference aims to unpack the promises and pitfalls of technological interventions in urban spaces by examining a wide-range of intersections – sectoral, disciplinary, methodological and geographic, and offers a space for conversations on theoretical and methodological research interventions across disciplinary silos. Scholars developing new knowledge about cities will have to critically examine the role of technology in influencing urban transformations, which are often entwined with ideas and narratives of modernisation.

We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners who work on these themes to submit panel proposals that engage with the role of technology in urban transformation, and in doing so, De/Re-center technology in the evolution of the City.

Some possible threads of inquiry are:

• Social and cultural transformations in the city driven by technology
• History and historiographies of the ‘technological city’
• Media/communication and representations in/of the city
• Data and the city
• Methods and methodologies of understanding technology and the city
• Architecture/Design/Planning and the city
• Technology policy and the city
• Lived experiences at the intersections of the city and technology
• Alternate technological spaces created outside of plan and policy

These threads of investigation are not exhaustive. Rather, they are an illustration of the various ways in which the larger thematic of the ‘City and Technology’ can be approached.

For example, panels can consist of presentations which deal with:

• The suitability of engineering design in city planning
• Cultural representations of technology in the narratives of modern human settlements.
• The promise of networked societies
• Questions of equity in digital urban spaces
• The role of technology in community mobilization
• The role of media in policy making

While the constituent papers will address the intersection of City and Technology from various disciplinary spaces, the emphasis of the conference will be on cross-disciplinary and inter-sectoral approaches. The length of each panel/session will be 90 minutes with 4-5 papers and will have a designated scholar who will frame the panel and serve as chair.

Panel Proposal Submission: Deadline 20 October 2017. All panel proposals will have to be submitted online here.

Researchers whose abstracts have been selected for presentation at Urban ARC 2018 will be informed of the same by 10 November 2017 via email.

Panel organisers must ensure that copies of all papers for their respective panels must be submitted to the conference organisers before 12:00 am, 5 January 2018.

Urban ARC 2018 will take place from 11 to 13 January 2018.