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As the majority of the world population has come to live in cities, urban space is ever more central as resource, commodity and medium. During the twentieth century Henri Lefebvre paved the way for the understanding of the social production of urban space as a complex and manifold process in which spatial representations, spatial practices and spatial physicality continuously interact. These interactions can also be influenced, mediated, negotiated or otherwise impacted by communication technologies, which thus become integral parts in processes of sociospatial production.
Possible examples include: how technologies of geo-localization and related practices are re-shaping spaces for nightlife in contemporary cities; how metropolitan areas negotiate their social image among multiple processes of bottom-up (emerging, “grassroots”) and top-down (“branding”) representation; how mobile communication technologies entail new practices of walking and driving which contribute to re-shape transportation spaces; how new forms of Internet-based urban gaming are “gamifying” practices of cure of urban spaces (e.g. cleaning or planting flowers) rewarded through virtual “points”; the complex interplay between media representations, policies and social actors in the shaping and reshaping of contested urban spaces; the use of ICT in the planning and management of urban space. The list could go on indefinitely.
WAVES, BITS AND BRICKS intends to focus precisely on these forms of interplay, with the objective of charting how media concretely impact on urban spaces in different geographical and historical contexts. As such, approaches disjointed from their concrete impact on spatial production (e.g. taxonomies of city representations in cinema or analyses of mobile communications focused on users alone) are discouraged. As the relationships between media and sociospatial production can be approached through a variety of paradigms, contributions are encouraged from fields such as planning and architecture, semiotics, science & technology studies, urban sociology and anthropology, communication studies.
Empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome, as are critical reviews of existing approaches to the media/sociospatial production nexus.
SUBMISSIONS Contributors are invited to first submit abstracts to Matteo Tarantino (matteo {dot} tarantino {AT} unicatt.it) and Simone Tosoni (simone {dot} tosoni {AT} unicatt.it), who will be happy to provide editorial assistance. Deadline for abstracts submission is Friday, 16 May 2012.
Authors of accepted papers will be notified via email by May 31th 2012. Abstracts will have to be in English, about 500 words of length and containing clear theoretical and methodological outlines.
Deadline for full text submission is Friday 28 September 2012. Papers’ length will be around 5,000 words.
Papers will then undergo double-blind peer-review, and authors will be notified with the reviewers’ comments by December 15th 2012. Deadline for the submission of final, revised papers is Friday 15 February 2013. Guidelines for authors can be found on the First Monday Web site at http://www.firstmonday.org/guidelines.html.
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