The goal of this journal issue is to explore notions and practices of ‘public space’, which emerge due to the proliferation of digital data about spaces and spatial relations – from ‘accessible’ and ‘transparent’ to ‘deliberated’ and ‘identity giving’. All materials collected for this special journal issue have at least three traits in common.
Firstly, they respond to the historical situation, in which proliferation of digital data is not anymore considered as solely an instrument of democratization, but equally as a tool for manipulations, domestication of social activism, and tighter control.
Secondly, each of the issue’s materials presents its own kind of argument against technological determinism as a mode of thinking, in which invention and application of digital tools (to conduct research on spatial relations, to create new public arenas for deliberation, or to plan and program already existing spaces) are seen as a solution without examination of how exactly those tools are institutionalized and put into practice by already existing social forces.
Thirdly, they all provoke de-familiarization with and rethinking of spatial forms and practices, with which public space has been associated before the Internet. Digitalization and various modes of landscapes’ formation with the public purpose thus emerging (from voting or polling regarding urban planning cases to finding spatial evidence for a disputed military or political case) indeed provide rich material for rethinking the public space in terms of how it is practiced and infrastructurally organized.
This journal issue was initiated at the workshop Critical theory in cartography: Developing methodological approaches to public space making in digital urban studies, which took place at EHU Laboratory of Critical Urbanism, in October 2017. It was made possible by the generous support by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency grant. This issue also stems from the results of DAAD Summer Schools on the tools of critical mapping, organized by EHU Laboratory of Critical Urbanism in Visaginas, Lithuania from 2015 to 2019.
Full issue available online.
