This workshop examines the ways in which knowledge on various aspects of urbanism is produced, gathered, shared, or used by various actors, and how its circulation at once mediates, mitigates and creates urban uncertainty. It also aims to examine how advances in technologies of gathering data, communicating, and networking have influenced and shaped the sphere of urban governance and urban political life in cities and with what effects.  In the discussion, we will explore how information relates with uncertainty in the urban sphere.  

The Urban Uncertainty workshop series is an integral part of LSE Cities’ collaborative investigation into emerging ways of envisioning and governing the future of cities. Each session focuses on a different dimension of urban uncertainty, from health and housing to crime and climate, and brings together scholars from a handful of disciplines whose work converges on common themes.

The event is open to the public but will be kept deliberately small in order to encourage focused conversation. 

This workshop will take place at 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, room LG.03 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Here is a campus map. The reception desk on the ground floor will have your name on a list and will be able to direct you to the room.

Rob Kitchin (NUI)

Rob Kitchin is a Professor and ERC Advanced Investigator in the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, for which he was director between 2002 and 2013. Rob is a prolific scholar and has has published widely across the social sciences on issues ranging accross  critical data studies, human geography, cartography, and software studies. He is editor of the international journals, Progress in Human Geography and Dialogues in Human Geography, and for eleven years was the editor of Social and Cultural Geography. Rob is also a renown novelist and story-writer.

Adam Greenfield (LSE)

Adam Greenfield is Senior Urban Fellow at LSE Cities, concentrating his research on the interaction of networked information technology with urban experience, and particularly on the implications of emergent technologies for the construction of public space and the right to the city.

Jennifer Gabrys (Goldsmiths)

Jennifer Gabrys is Reader in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, "Citizen Sensing and Environmental Practice: Assessing Participatory Engagements with Environments through Sensor Technologies." She is currently completing a book on environmental sensing, Program Earth: Environment as Experiment in Sensing Technology. Her work can be found at citizensense.net and jennifergabrys.net.

Huma Yusuf (Woodrow Wilson Centre and Control Risks)

Huma Yusuf is a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. and the lead Pakistan analyst at Control Risks. She is also an award-winning journalist and columnist and her work has appeared in Pakistan's Dawn Newspaper, the International New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and Foreign Policy. She has written several policy papers on Pakistan's security challenges, including "Conflict Dynamics of Karachi", which was published by the United States Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. She has also published extensively on Pakistan's broadcast media landscape, including recent policy publications for Open Society Foundations and BBC Media Action. 

Myria Georgiou (LSE)

Myria Georgiou, Associate Professor, teaches at the Dept of Media and Communications, LSE. Her most recent book Media and the City (2013, Polity Press) explores the role of media and communications in the ways in which the global city becomes a space of identity, community, consumption and political action. She is currently leading a project titled: Community through digital connectivity? Communication infrastructure in multicultural London.