Ordinary Democracy and Digital Cities
Special Issue Call for Papers
Urban Studies (subject to acceptance of full proposal)
Guest Editors:
Outline:
We are in an era where democracy is perceived to be in constant crisis, marked by feelings of political powerlessness, mistrust, apathy, and negativity (Harrison, 2009; Clarke et al., 2017; Bissell et al., 2020). Recent mainstream urban research has tended to focus on democratic failure, often under the banner of the post-political, where urban democracy is characterised as a largely managerial task of establishing consensus between private companies and governments. In such accounts, urban citizens or residents become disempowered, left seeing their participation in areas such as urban planning or policymaking as inconsequential to their daily life or the things that matter to them.
It may not be surprising that scholars researching digital cities - under labels such as smart cities, platform urbanism, urban AI and more - tend to treat democratic politics with pessimism and scepticism. Digital cities are often presumed to be sites where democracy does not work; where negative, polarised, or reactionary political affects become amplified; potential democratic subjects are nudged and targeted via algorithmic mediation; or public opinions, sentiments and actions are manipulated and managed rather than activated.
Such approaches to the politics of digital cities tend to privilege concepts over practices, implicitly or explicitly predefining democracy in line with universal normative values, seen as subordinate to powerful interests or technocratic solutions. The risk is that these kinds of analysis present an image of digital cities overburdened by narratives of injustice that do little more than reaffirm implied concepts about democracy, typically described as something undermined or suppressed, or emerging only in exceptional political protests and demonstrations. This leaves little room for accounts of urban democracy emerging from more ordinary practices, cultures and histories.
This call for papers seeks Special Issue contributions that reclaim what ‘democracy’ means in digital cities more affirmatively and pragmatically. This implies two starting points. First, following Barnett (2003; 2017), we invoke the idea of ordinary democracy. This notion starts not with a reading of an anti-democratic or post-political condition, but rather seeks to find spaces, situations and sentiments where various meanings of democracy get claimed and practised. The ‘ordinary’ works as a heuristic device that emphasises democracy as something articulated, performed and practised in daily urban life. This ordinary framing asks scholars to learn from what digital cities might offer for democratic participation, negotiation and decision-making.
The second starting point is to conceptualise digital cities as an environmental condition for such ordinary democratic practices. This means perhaps paradoxically decentring the digital, refusing a tendency to isolate digital technologies as either a means of top-down control, an opaque form of algorithmically mediated and data-driven political action, or networked forms of bottom-up or tactical urban political resistance. Instead, it focuses on how digital infrastructures, affordances and techniques create ordinary conditions and spaces for articulating and performing democratic practices in and in relation to cities. These practices may extend from everyday practices, such as apparently uneventful contributions to localised social media, to more organised practices such as storytelling, care, civic hacking, journalism experiments, or political campaigning.
We aim for this Special Issue to open up interdisciplinary perspectives which take seriously ordinary accounts of digitalised places and spaces for reclaiming democracy from anti-democratic tendencies and universals. We especially welcome papers addressing lesser-known geographies and/or underrepresented populations.
Papers might make ordinary claims on democracy through the following (non-exhaustive) topics on digital cities:
Please send your 250 words proposed paper abstract to both Y-S.Tseng@soton.ac.uk and s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk by 31 July 2025 (we are more than happy to discuss your paper idea with you in advance). Following this deadline, we will notify submittors of acceptance by mid-August, and then work to submit a full special issue proposal to Urban Studies by the end of August 2025.