[Air-L] Media at Sydney talk 6 Sept: Colonising the Public?

[Justine Humphry]

MEDIA at SYDNEY SEMINAR: COLONISING THE PUBLIC? SMART STREET FURNITURE AND THE
TECHNO-POLITICS OF URBAN MEDIA

Friday, 6 SEPTEMBER, 3PM - 4:30PM
S226 Seminar Room, Department of Media and Communications, University of
Sydney
John Woolley Building (A20) level 2, entry off Manning Road, Sydney

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Colonising the public? Smart street furniture and the techno-politics of
urban media
Justine Humphry, Jathan Sadowski, Sophia Maalsen & Chris Chesher
(University of Sydney)

This seminar introduces the Smart Publics research collaboration between
the University of Sydney and the University of Glasgow on the social,
design, and governance implications of smart street furniture, drawing on
fieldwork in Glasgow, London and New York. We situate this research in a
critical account of the privatisation of public space in cities and the
role of smart urbanism as a trend accelerator. We explore these issues in
the context of smart upgrades to street furniture like kiosks and benches,
which are hybrid urban media objects purportedly installed to address
barriers of access to information-communication networks. Yet we argue that
these emerging forms of street furniture raise serious risks related to
surveillance, data harvesting, and targeted advertising—which are unevenly
distributed among users. We also outline how their installation changes
city flows and social interactions, and how their ownership challenges the
role of local government in overseeing public objects and spaces. We
conclude by considering the historical development of (smart) street
furniture as translations from earlier objects in public space such as
phone booths and benches which mediate urban life, craft urban publics, and
are adapted and resisted by users.

About the speakers: Justine Humphry is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures in
the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney and
co-lead of theSmart publics University of Sydney-University of Glasgow
research partnership. Her research is on the cultures and politics of
mobile media and smart technology in everyday life with a focus on digital
inequalities, mediated publics and marginalised media use. Justine has
studied mobile communication and homelessness extensively and has conducted
collaborative research on mobile antiracism apps in Australia, France and
the United Kingdom. Her current projects involve researching smart street
furniture in New York, Glasgow and London.

Jathan Sadowski is a postdoctoral research fellow in smart cities in the
School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.
His work critically analyses the political economy of digital technologies
that are data-driven, networked, and automated. His current projects
include an ethnography with a city government on the process and politics
of planning smart initiatives. Jathan’s book – Too Smart: How Digital
Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the
World – will be published in 2020 by The MIT Press.

Chris Chesher is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of
Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His current research
focuses on the interplay between smart home and smart city technologies:
the role of voice in smart speakers and voice assistants; the digitisation
of real estate advertising; the global introduction of smart street
furniture; and smart technologies at the interface of private and public
spaces. He is also working on a collaboration with the Sydney Institute for
Robotics and Intelligent Systems, and on a book called Invocational Media.

Sophia Maalsen is a lecturer in urbanism and former IB Fell postdoctoral
research fellow at the University of Sydney. Her research addresses the
increasing digital mediation of housing and alternative forms of housing,
including the increase in tenure forms such as share housing across all age
groups. Maalsen also researches practices of smart urbanism and is
currently on two grants that look at how smart urban practices and
governance materialises in different contexts. Prior to joining the
University of Sydney, Sophia was a postdoctoral researcher on the EU funded
Programmable City Project where she investigated the digital transformation
of cities and urban governance. Her particular expertise is in
understanding the intersection of the material, digital and the human and
how this effects lived experience. She is the author of The Social Life of
Sound (2019, Palgrave MacMillan).