Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss how we can reconsider the 'urban' as a site of ecological richness -as opposed to its usual pairing with pollution- and critically analyse the digital tools for detecting biodiversity and wildlife in the urban.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will discuss how we can reconsider the 'urban' as a site of ecological richness -as opposed to its usual pairing with pollution- and critically analyse the digital tools for detecting wildlife in the urban. First, I will discuss how pollution is presented as an essentially 'urban crisis' in smart city proposals, where data-driven solutions perpetually postpone impending environmental destruction (Halpern and Günel, 2017). I will then use Simondon's concept of transduction to demonstrate the co-generative relationship between data and infrastructure and by building on this theoretical background, I will discuss how this process leads to the urban being defined by relational problems. Following this, I'll suggest to shift the focus to the ecological richness of urban environments by drawing on Matthew Gandy's (2022) Natura Urbana project. With this, I ask how we might find different ways of drawing attention to biodiversity by using digital media in urban environments. That is, how data and infrastructure in the urban environment can be positioned to celebrate the unique forms of vegetation and biodiversity at the edges of the built environment, as opposed to the dominant approach that equates it with environmental degradation. To illustrate this, I will critically discuss apps that are designed to record biodiversity and wildlife in the urban context to study what types of epistemologies they produce and circulate and whether these contribute to environmental justice in urban spaces.