Call for Chapters: Technology and the City

Technology and the City: Towards a Philosophy of Urban Technologies

Editors: Michael Nagenborg, Margoth González Woge, Taylor Stone, and Pieter Vermaas

The book will be published in the series “Philosophy of Engineering and Technology” (Springer).

Outline

All over the world massive investments are being made to realize visions of the ‘Smart City.’ Technology plays a central role in making future cities more sustainable, to make urban governance more transparent and just, and increase the efficiency in various sectors ranging from transport to education. What is often overlooked in the process of making cities ‘smart’ is the fundamental role of technologies in the urban lifeworld. Philosophy of Technology can help understanding this role and by this contribute to a more sophisticated thinking for developing smart cities. The contributions in this volume map out how technologies are used and designed to plan, maintain, govern, demolish, and destroy the city and its part. They demonstrate how urban technologies shape and are shaped by fundamental concepts and principles, like citizenship, publicness, democracy, and nature. And, they explore how to think of technological mediated urban space as part of the human condition. The volume will thus contribute to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of Philosophy of Technology.

The studies and insights offered in this volume will also open the discussion on the particular methodological challenges for Philosophy of Technology to do justice to the city.

Potential topics

• Technologies in the urban lifeworld (e.g., public and individual transport, infrastructures, information and communication technologies, surveillance and security technologies)
• Urban co-existence and urban justice
• Diversity, Technology, and the city
• Technologies for urban planning and urban governance
• Technology and sustainability (including urban wilderness, urban wildlife, and parks)
• Cities as centers of technological innovation
• Risk, disaster, and resilience
• War: Destruction and reconstruction of the urban landscape
• Cities and technologies in Non-Western traditions
• Networked Cities
• Theoretical perspectives and frameworks

Time line

We invite abstracts with a length of maximum 1.000 words. Each chapter in the volume should have a length of between 8.000 and 12.000 words (including reference).

All abstracts will be reviewed by the editors. Chapters will be reviewed by the editors and peer reviewed by the contributors.

Due dates for abstracts: November 1, 2017
Notification of acceptance: December 1, 2017
Submission of the chapters: March 15, 2018
Due dates for reviews: April 30, 2018
Notification of final acceptance and feedback to authors: June 15, 2018
Submission of revised chapter: September 15, 2018
Publication of edited volume: Spring 2019

Please, submit your abstract by email to: m.h.nagenborg@utwente.nl

The abstracts need to be prepared for blind peer review. Please, include a short CV in a separate document. Authors should also indicate if they consider including images in the final publication.

Contact

Michael Nagenborg, University of Twente (NL)

m.h.nagenborg@utwente.nl

Call for Chapters as PDF

You can download the Call as PDF from my German web site.