This research investigates practices and routines of farmers in Austria and southern Germany and their interrelationships with digital media and communication technologies as well as automation and artificial intelligence. Combining practice theory and actor-network theory, we conducted 16 farm studies to examine how digital technologies are used to perform tasks, and how objects, things and ideas have the equal ontological status of actants capable of modifying human practices. Our results show how automated technologies and smart applications are perceived as objects that facilitate work while creating new tasks and responsibilities. Everyday technologies such as WhatsApp, in contrast, are being used for various purposes on the farm, with sometimes revolutionary consequences in the sense that whole areas of work are undergoing comprehensive change and are being redesigned to take account of digital possibilities. We conclude that the use of mostly 'top-down' introduced AI and automation technology brings new actors into play, resulting in a redistribution of agency, while everyday technologies also generate considerable dynamics and can thus be said to have a high transformational potential.

There is a deepening need for dialogue between (digital) urbanists and Internet Studies scholarship. In this paper we are interested in "urbanizing" Internet Studies by thinking about how digital infrastructures create and control circulations, movement, flows, and streams within urban contexts. More specifically, we think about circulations and concentrations of natural, human, and digital resources by way of Urban Political Ecology to better understand smart cities, digital urban labor, and Anthropocene literatures.

As data, infrastructures, apps, capital, and natural phenomena concentrate in cities, and are instantiated to create and constrain flows and circulations, we contend that Internet Studies can play a key role in analyzing and understanding these new socio-technical entanglements. Drawing on Nost and Goldstein's notion of "data infrastructures", we think about how the materiality of data and digital technologies shape cities, and cities shape data and technologies. We suggest several conceptual and methodological overlaps with Urban Political Ecology, to signal what an urbanized Internet Studies, concentrated on circulations and flows, might look like.

Blunt and Sheringham (2019) call for home-city geographies but do not consider the role of digital technologies in mediating these relations (Koch and Miles, 2021). Digital geographers have largely examined manifestations of the digital city (smart city, platform urbanism, etc.) and the digital home separately. This paper explores the question of the smart home/city by reading it through a series of established analytical frames for reflecting on the relationship between domestic and urban space, namely: governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling. The first two call attention to the movement of certain activities, relations, or processes across traditionally understood boundaries between domestic and urban spaces. The third lens, thresholds, considers the ways boundaries between domestic and urban space are not simply transgressed but are actively re-negotiated through the new digital mediations. The fourth lens, dwelling, moves beyond a focus on such boundaries or divisions to instead highlight the ambiguity and indeterminacy of everyday life. Each lens opens a distinct set of questions about the evolving spatialities of digital life and the ways they are enacted, negotiated, and potentially contested.

Smart city platforms–encompassing mobile apps, cameras, sensors, algorithms, and predictive analytics—function as surveillance tools. Specifically, these Internet-connected devices and services generate troves of data on residents, including real-time geolocation, energy consumption habits, travel patterns, mobile device identifiers, Internet browsing history, phone contacts, credit card numbers, and much more. The proposed project is focused on the City of Long Beach’s vision to use data in ethical ways that avoid reinforcing existing racial biases and discriminatory decision-making. When fully implemented, this digital rights platform will operationalize both privacy and racial equity as priorities for all deployments of smart city technology.

First, the platform will feature text and the open-source iconography that visually conveys how the City of Long Beach uses specific technologies, what data the devices collect and how the City utilizes that data. We plan to strategically deploy these information points across Long Beach, physically adjacent to or digitally embedded within civic technologies, e.g., sensors, cameras, small cells, mobile payment kiosks, and a 311 app. The platform will include a feedback application consisting of access (via QR code or hyperlink) to an online dashboard where users may learn additional details, update data collection preferences, and share comments/concerns with local government officials. The ultimate goal is to develop a backend solution that enables residents to opt-out of data collection.

The platform will provide residents with a clear understanding of how local government applies predictive and diagnostic analytics to personal data, and will also empower community members by granting them agency.

Data quality facilitates data interoperability for optimal decision-making in smart cities datafication. But there are few studies on how technologists (e.g., data scientists), governance people (e.g., municipal workers), and third-party collaborators (e.g., smart city services vendors) assess data quality together in smart cities datafication. This paper offers a response to this knowledge gap, using interviews (n=10) with municipal workers, data scientists and smart city services vendors, and data structure documents (n=8) in a situated case, the Stavanger (Norway) smart city. Implicit the paper’s results is that data quality is a floating signifier – comprising the different articulations of data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors in assessment. This generates friction with implications on data interoperability. This paper therefore posits that assessing data quality in smart cities datafication is ambiguous, but not empty. It fluctuates between the articulations of data scientists, municipal workers, and services vendors, with implications on data interoperability through the friction this generates.

Keywords: data quality, data interoperability, floating signifier, frictions, smart city datafication