Actually existing digital geographies in the antipodes (and elsewhere)

Presenting author: Marco Amati (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Since the mid-1990s the urban forest has become a totemic aspiration of green urbanism around the world. Widely touted as providing a critical buffer against the urban/anthropocenic climactic extremes of heat and stormwater flow, trees in the urban environment have been extensively re-valorised as 'green infrastructure' that provide a range of ecosystem services. Apparent and emerging in this unfolding global process across multiple urban biomes and jurisdictions, has been a reconceptualisation of the wider role of urban trees to human flourishing beyond the mere economic. These have included efforts to design urban silvicultural experiences as more-than-human ones, acknowledging that for many urban dwellers in post-colonial and cities of the global south, the trees have always meant far more than that presupposed by a framework of human services.

This presentation will review some of the non-ecosystem service rationales for urban forest preservation that include forest bathing, tree cremation burial, tree repurposing and tree communication. Critically engaging with Block's (2018) concept of the 'innovation labour force' the purpose with each of these will be to examine the role of the digital in (co)creating a digital urban forest presence.

Presenting author: Kalervo Gulson (University of Sydney)

This paper will provide an empirical account of an education system's attempt to use machine learning. The education system has used external consultants to look at identifying causal factors and what could be changed to make a difference to enduring inequities in educational outcomes. This paper is interested in whether this policy experiment in causality creates new, dispersed, spaces of policy making through the use of machine learning. The paper looks at how the use of Artificial Intelligence may be transforming the sites of policy making in education as both human and posthuman.

The paper will outline how data scientists use a combination of techniques that make explicit the assumptions that make up calculation, from the field of causal inference, with techniques from ML that depend on machine, but not human, interpretable calculations that can be framed as posthuman decision-making spaces. To connect AI, policy spaces and agency the paper uses Roden's (2015) ideas of self-augmenting systems, that are neither controllable nor in control. In a lack of decisive control lies the possibility of exploring whether an experiment in policy certainty, that is neither controlled or deterministic, will create new policy spaces and new kinds of machine/ (post)human policy learning.

Presenting author: Bhavna Middha (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Other author: Ian McShane (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

This article analyses expectations and experiences of digital public spaces that facilitate community engagement with urban development plans. While viewing digital spaces as part of an expanding repertoire of public spaces and events - physical and digital - that signify the participatory turn in municipal governance, we argue that local officials and residents are over-optimistic about the democratic and administrative capacities of the digital sphere.

Through a case study from Melbourne, Australia - a city with significant growth pressures - we argue that the experience of new participatory digital platforms falls short of expectations, for both residents and officials. Data show that well-documented problems with established modes of community engagement such as agenda control and 'black boxing' of responses are replicated in online settings. The wariness residents have of administrators and elected officials are overlaid by new concerns of digital distrust and digital exclusion. For officials, the challenges of these digital spaces require time to develop and apply new skills. Our study suggests that digital spaces are not homogenous but are made up of diverse and complex practices and interrelationships. Thus, rather than digital spaces replacing face to face spaces of participation, we need contextual and strategic combinations of online and offline engagement.

Presenting author: Jessica McLean (Macquarie University)

Other authors: Sophia Maalsen (University of Sydney), Lisa Heinze (University of Sydney)

Digital technologies often come with promises of more sustainable practices but the environmental impacts of such technology in and of itself is frequently overlooked. This paper examines how the University of Sydney is attempting to address sustainability issues and to what extent digital technologies are included within that setting. The University's main campus is an ideal place to consider processes that aim at making the digital sustainable as it has control over buildings, and a community of students, scholars and affiliated people who co-produce the institution, including many who may be invested in reducing environmental impacts of their work and study.

Drawing on empirical research at the university, this research offers a case study of how digital technologies sit within a current sustainability planning process. Key themes that emerge from this research include frustration with digital technologies, visibility of digital technologies as a part of the infrastructure that universities need, as well as assumptions that digital technologies are included in sustainability strategies by default and that it is difficult to achieve leverage in planning for digital sustainability. We find that digital technologies, and their supporting infrastructure, are not frequently core concerns when evaluating sustainability of institutions

Presenting author: Sophia German (University of New South Wales)

Other author: Graciela Metternicht (University of New South Wales)

Recent trends in capturing women's perceptions of 'safe' and 'unsafe' places using crowdsourcing techniques have revealed the extent of gender-based violence (GBV) in public areas.

This phenomenon exists at a global scale; women and gender diverse individuals are making choices informed by these perceptions, ultimately impacting on their mobility through urban space. This paper presents research that we are conducting to enhance understanding on how future urban spaces could be reimagined to include perceived safety as a measure of accessibility. What can geospatial technologies offer to analyse these issues at local and national scales, and how could such analyses and modelling tools contribute to improve liveability of urban spaces worldwide?

Our initial research shows increasing trends in the use of phone or web-based platforms to crowdsource data. SafetiPin, for example, is a phone-based platform that incorporates environmental parameters into its safety audits, used to calculate a safety score per area. Such initiatives call for the direct improvement of infrastructure such as lighting. On the other hand, She's a Crowd aims to build a database of incidents to combat the underreporting of GBV by collecting the stories of women and gender diverse individuals. Prior research and initiatives show the potential of geospatial technologies for working towards gender-inclusive cities.

Presenting author: Adam Moore (University of Melbourne)

Other authors: School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (University of Melbourne)

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an online-based community that builds, cares for and runs an open-source digital platform, this paper examines the work performed behind platforms: the oft-hidden or obscured practices of maintenance, repair and iterative development. Such collaborative, commons-based approaches to digital platforms have been called "platform cooperativism" and positioned as means to counter the apparent dominance of proprietary, data-hungry, and hyper-capitalist platforms. However, although useful as an imaginary for articulating needed changes in relationships between such platforms and labour, theorisations of "platform cooperativism" require empirical grounding in actually existing digital platforms built, maintained, and governed in cooperative fashion. Furthermore, while research on platform-mediated labour (i.e. gig work) remains better developed, understanding of the work behind platforms is less so.

In response, I share analysis of participants' reflections on working in a "platform cooperative" and theorisations of how maintenance and repair work comes to matter for digital platforms - across networked sites, at surprising distances from points of breakdown, and incorporating various intensities of embodied skill and habit. Tracing these practices enriches understandings of how this digital work contributes to shaping digital infrastructures, built by and for those who depend on them, and thereby, possibilities for different work futures.

Presenting author: Jennifer Macdonald (Charles Darwin University and CSIRO)

Other authors: Cathy Robinson (CSIRO), Maria Lee (Kakadu National Park), Ryan Barrowei (Kakadu National Park) Bessie Coleman, (Kakadu National Park)

The scholarship and practice of responsibly navigating the disruptive possibilities of new technologies has yet to fully consider Indigenous worldviews. We draw on Indigenous-led research in northern Australia's Kakadu National Park to reflect on research practices for navigating the introduction of aerial drones as a tool for local Indigenous co-managers to monitor and manage this World Heritage Area. We present protocols to guide Indigenous-led innovation - empowering Indigenous governance, developing Indigenous-led collaborative science and society relationships, and enabling ongoing Indigenous and technological innovation - and show how these protocols were applied to negotiate and navigate drone technology at Jarrangbarnmi, an important biocultural landscape owned by Jawoyn people in northern Australia. These protocols provide a way for Indigenous people to guide and authorise the introduction of new technologies that could be used to produce new knowledge to adaptively co-manage their lands.

Presenting author: David Bissell (University of Melbourne)

Evaluating how the on-demand mobilities of platform urbanism are transforming urban life is a central political question for digital geographers. Developing recent work in cultural geography that explores the politics of negation and critique, I argue that there are two significant modes of evaluation at play in these digital geographies: the negations of platform urbanism itself, and the negations of critical theory that work to cleave open counter-hegemonic spaces of resistance.

Reflecting on a project exploring the gig economy in Melbourne from production, consumption and governance perspectives, I suggest that there is a third form of negation that is often overlooked in these debates. Through the concepts of unknowing, neutrality and ambivalence, I argue that the negative can also be understood in terms of irresolvable limits. I explain how this way of approaching the negative offers both a means of questioning the operation of power in platform urbanism, as well as a way of interrogating 'actually existing' digital geographies.

Presenting author: Valentina Carraro (Pontificia Universidad Católica)

The growing influence of digital platforms on cities has captured the attention of urban scholars, engendering a 'platform pivot' in digital geography. This essay contributes to this emerging area of inquiry by discussing competing conceptualisations of the relation between platforms, politics and urban space in platform research. I identify two (at times overlapping) strands of scholarship: one, rooted in the political economy, views platforms as postpolitical technologies that facilitate capital accumulation through spatial fixes, extending the smart city's technocratic, profit-oriented mode of urban governance; the other, influenced by feminist, Black and queer media studies, performatively underscores the openings and glitches in the working of platforms, in order to call into being a more hopeful digital politics.

Drawing on my research on urban platforms in Jerusalem, I reflect on how to combine these two approaches, paying attention to the contingency of platforms without abandoning political economy analysis. I argue that, by engaging with both tropes (the spatial fix and the glitch), researchers can better explain how platform-mediated local practices and global politico-economic forces constitute each other, tracing what I call 'countertopographies' of platform urbanism. 

Presenting author: Paul Maginn (University of Western Australia)

The spatiality of pornography has evolved rapidly since the emergence of the 'golden age' of porn in the late 1960s (Williams, 1994; Tarrant, 2016). Porn spaces during this were physical and largely confined to adult bookstores and XXX cinemas. By the 1980s, the suburbanisation of porn began with the VCR and local video stores that stocked 'soft-core' pornography. The porn industry quickly capitalised on and, subsequently, 'colonized' a corner of the internet in the early 1990s thereby potentially bringing porn into every home with a modem at the click of a mouse. The arrival of tubesites in the mid-2000s and rapid development in smartphone technology marked the beginning of the hyper-spatiality of porn.

In socio-cultural terms, the production and viewing of porn has evolved from being labelled obscene, deviant and immoral to a product and practice that also serves as entertainment, education and a leisure activity. Drawing on Urry's (1990) notion of the 'tourist gaze', a leisure studies lens (Berdychevsky and Carr, 2020; Meaney and Rye, 2007), and, the 'digital turn' in geography (Ash, et al., 2018), this paper contends online porn viewing can be viewed, amongst other things, as a mode of digital sex tourism and "(p)leisure pursuit". The touristic and p(l)eisure practices and preferences of online porn - straight and queer - viewing in urban and regional Australia and New Zealand are outlined.

Presenting author: Paulina Nordström (University of Agder, Norway)

Other authors: Riina Lundman (University of Turku, Finland),  Johanna Hautala (University of Vaasa, Finland)

This article studies the co-creative process between artists and artificial intelligence (AI) from a posthuman perspective. Following the paths of digital turn in geography and recent theories about technologically mediated agencies, the article argues that co-creativity emerges through the reciprocal constitution of artists and AI in the art-making processes. The empirical material comprises the video-recordings of artists explaining their work with AI. Drawing from the posthumanist feminist philosophers Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, we argue that the artist and AI are to start with entwined and their specific agencies emerge in the creative process. Moreover, the meaning making of the artists narrating the co-creative process is material.

The co-creative process is divided into three phases that are the entry points 1) entering the creative process (data and code) 2) the teaching and learning processes during the co-creation; 3) and the final selection of creative outcomes. This co-creative process is not linear, but it is always related to previous encounters at different material and technical sites. Consequently, the entry points are understood as evental doings where artist and AI agencies are constructed, and they contribute to the creative process.

Presenting speaker: Shanti Sumartojo (Monash University)

Other speaker: Robert Lundberg (Monash University), Leimin Tian (Monash University), Pamela Carreno-Medrano (Monash University), Dana Kulic (Monash University), Michael Mintrom (Monash University)

In this paper we argue that imagination forms an important part of 'actually existing digital geographies' of robots. This is because imagination is central in how people relate to, understand and feel about robotic bodies, behaviours and intent.

Building on rapidly emerging robot geographies, we discuss insights from a study that asked research participants to discuss whether robots ‘feel right’ in different public space settings. We show how imaginative responses to robots are located in dynamic relational configurations that draw together the contexts, appearance, behaviours and perceived intentions of robots, and people’s existing understandings of other technologies to understand what robots might or could do. Such an imaginative account of robot geographies offers interdisciplinary value by positing new frameworks that can contribute to studies of social robotics in engineering and computing.