Urban Automation is an ongoing process, a field defined by multiple tensions, an umbrella term for different and complex trends: the processes of urban digitalization (smart cities, platform urbanization, AI urbanism, etc.), the urban implications of the industrial revolution 4.0, the changing shape of everyday urban onlife, the cyborgization of labour, and so forth. These …
From Cities to Europe: Innovating Labour, Welfare and Policies in the Platform Economy
We would like to point out this series of three online seminars organised by the European project PLUS. Each seminar will address a central issue in the current debate around the platform economy: the transformations of work, the social protections to be recognised, the policies to govern the phenomenon at different geographical scales.More info below. …
On Platforming. Notes for Navigating Contemporary Hyper-Urbanscapes
Terraforming (literally, ‘Earth-shaping’) is a process of modifying a planetary surface to reconfigure its topography or ecology, affecting the entire biosphere. Forming is not (only) about shaping and configuring, but also producing and creating, or making something begin to exist. We are currently confronted with the hypothesis that Mars is the most likely candidate for terraforming. …
Platform Austria
Into the Black Box collaborated togheter with other several expert on platform urbanism to the exhibition of Austrian Pavillion at 17th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. The curators Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer focused on platform urbanism, its consequences on our lives and the resistances this phenomenon produced. All the materials are accessible on the …
Tangling a bi-oceanic corridor
In this short essay I want to accept this invitation and initiate a reflection from an excentric site, ‘following things’ across multiple sites (Cook, 2004) along the Chilean-Argentinian section of a bi-oceanic corridor hosting the first stretch of a li-ion supply chain. Li-ion batteries are an indicative, globally diffused product sustaining the world’s transition away …
Logistical Clouds – Models of the Logistics of Urbanization
Introduction The more one studies logistics, the more a new way to conceive the world erupts. In fact, in my mind, researching on logistics is a really productive exercise to elaborate new analytical lenses for the comprehension of the ongoing transformations of contemporary world. Seeing through logistics is an attempt to understand the rhythm of …