Seminar: "From (De)coding the Machine to (En)coding Care Practices of Refusal in Berlin"

From refusing looming tech-solutionist, ‘black-boxed’ algorithmic governance and commodified, exclusionary urban spaces to reclaiming the right to unfixed, playful urban spaces and sovereignty over digital tools and infrastructures, an emergent register of grassroots urban speculation is being actively experimented by urban denizens. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in feminist hacklabs, co-operative delivery platforms, counter-infrastructural experiments, and anti-platform activist coalitions in Berlin, my study—rather than relying on major theories—conceptualizes grassroots orientation rooted in care, interdependence, and minor agency. By tracing the contested urban imaginaries of digitalized Berlin, the paper reframes grassroots digital urbanism as practices of hope, collective experimental act of refusal and care. It further argues that while these initiatives enact alternative forms of digital urbanism, they remain constrained by structural inequalities, spatial exclusivities, and infrastructural precarity.

 

Niloufar Vadiati is an urbanist and digital geographer. She is currently working as a senior research fellow at the Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Hamburg. Previously, as a DFG Walter Benjamin fellow, she was the principal investigator of the research project Grassroots Digital Urbanism in Berlin. She holds a PhD in urban geography from HafenCity University Hamburg, an MSc in spatial planning from the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, and a BA in urban studies from the University of Tehran. Niloufar serves as associate editor of Digital Geography and Society and currently lectures on digital urbanism at Leuphana University as well as on digitalisation and metropolitan culture at HafenCity University Hamburg. Beyond her academic work, she is the producer and host of Digital Urbanism, from the Grassroots, a podcast exploring critical perspectives on technology and urban life.