Dear all,

We are pleased to share our co-edited special issue on the theme of ‘Knowing Urban Environments in a Digitally Mediated Age’, for Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice. The issue is home to seven papers that offer theoretical and creative interventions to the question of ‘what constitutes knowledge of urban environments in the digital age?’

The papers draw from creative and theoretical projects to collectively propose alternative ways of knowing the city through participatory, sensory, and more-than-human approaches. By unsettling dominant methods of measurement, mapping, and representation, we argue that they foreground reflexivity, relationality, and epistemic humility. Despite being increasingly mediated by digital and data-driven technologies, which purport ideas of objectivity, we call for a critical examination of how we might maintain a healthy scepticism of objectivity in digital systems while simultaneously implementing technologies into our modes of enquiry about the city. Ultimately, the issue opens up possibilities for more plural and critical forms of urban knowledge in a digitally mediated age. But this is about more than cities; the issue contributes to wider fields of study that question dominant knowledge systems and pose the question of how we might think and act otherwise for a better future with technology.

 

Link to full issue here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/EPF/current and you can find our editorial here.

 

Güneş & Mike (Duggan)

 

Dr Güneş Tavmen

Lecturer in Digital Infrastructures

Department of Digital Humanities

King’s College London