Sharing a call for abstracts for a session I'm hosting with Antoine Courmont at the next @rc21.bsky.social conference in Vienna! We're looking for research that investigates the way platform capitalism is remaking inequality between cities.
Here's the link to apply: rc21-vienna2026.org
๐ฃ Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.
Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.
Our special issue is finally out! ๐
With Antoine Courmont, I had the privilege of working with a stellar group of scholars to examine Google as an urban actor and highlight its uneven, shape-shifting power across cities.
Please read, share, and let us know what you think!
Very excited to be hosting this upcoming talk for @citiesabit.bsky.social. Registration is open to all :)
Flyer with USF logo for the Webinar on 2 October 2025 โ 5-6:30 pm (online) Ana Beraldo de Carvalho, Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow, Sciences Po Managing ordinary life: (Im)predictability, Violence and Solidarity in Latin American Urban Margins. Discussant: Patrick Le Galรจs, CNRS Research Professor, CEE, Sciences Po
Flyer with USF logo for the Webinar on 2 October 2025 โ 5-6:30 pm (online) Ana Beraldo de Carvalho, Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow, Sciences Po Managing ordinary life: (Im)predictability, Violence and Solidarity in Latin American Urban Margins. Discussant: Patrick Le Galรจs, CNRS Research Professor, CEE, Sciences Po
๐ Upcoming online talk (Cities Agenda โ Sciences Po)
๐
2 Oct 2025 | 17:00โ18:30 (GMT+2)
๐๏ธ Join #USFInternationalFellow Ana Beraldo โ Managing ordinary life: (Im)predictability, Violence & Solidarity in Latin American Urban Margins
๐ฌ Discussant: Patrick Le Galรจs
๐ Register: ow.ly/F5vo50X10H9
AI cannot do your job unless you do your job with AI!
Q. Who aligns the aligners?
A. alignmentalignment.ai
Today Iโm humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐น๐ถ๐ด๐ป๐บ๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ ๐๐น๐ถ๐ด๐ป๐บ๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐.
Out with โabundanceโ, time for:
So good!
Horrible news. I owe an enormous debt to Michelโs work. A truly transformative thinker and an unbelievable loss. My thoughts are with his loved ones.
www.csi.minesparis.psl.eu/articles-ved...
There is a new Chotiner interview that really underscores what is unique about Israel's genocide in Gaza: it would be very easy for the world to stop it if only a few countries wanted to.
On the 80th anniversary of Hiroshimaโฆ
The British media outlet ITV also went on a Jordanian airdrop and simply ignored the Israeli governmentโs illiberal demands:
www.itv.com/news/2025-08...
Calibri Bold looking ass logo
Extremely stoked to share a recent publication of mine in the journal Cities! Based on research I conducted last year, I look at what happens when 'innovation' takes root as a policy priority for city governments, through the prism of 'digital twin' projects.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reddit's relationship with Al is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into Al-generated search "Answers," and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit's vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person - or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They're getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real - and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere - are drifting into mutual suspicion. Huffman suggests that, just as Reddit was rewarded for offering an alternative to more baldly growth-and-ad-driven social media, it could serve a similar role in the post-ChatGPT world as a refuge for actual human interaction in a sea of generated text. "Social media made Reddit make more sense, and I think now that the web is kind of dying, sadly, that evolution helps Reddit make more sense," he says. "Reddit in that era is, Reddit is not social media. And now, we're entering this new era where Reddit is not AI."
It's a powerful pitch, to the extent it remains true. But it doesn't quite capture just how strange and risky Reddit's position is in 2025. Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing. Reddit is an alternative to a web that's harvested, polluted, and depleted by tech firms in a race to dominate Al. It's also an increasingly valuable data source for tech firms in a race to dominate AI. How long can it be both?
on reddit, the website at the end of the internet nymag.com/intelligence...
Iโm going to say itโฆ thatโs what a machine learning political order does. It intensifies a politics by trialling and experimentation. The hackathon has been policy space for a long time. www.cambridge.org/core/service...
Here is the longest blog post I've ever written (4k words).
"The Curious Question of AI-written Lists: Or, LLMs are Genre Machines"
I end with a teaching approach for writing, AI-related & non-AI related. I hope you'll read the whole thing! Thank you.
meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-curiou...
In sum, I find that a sandbox approach to urban governance produces social entropy. It accelerates the perpetual recomposition of social and technological networksโmuch happens but nothing is done. This weakens governance capacity and makes collective action more difficult.
The aggregate dynamic is one of constant yet non-transformative activity. Perpetual movement from one project to the next, none of which can sucessfully install durable change. I call this dynamic 'sandbox urbanism'โplay for play's sake, without the ability to stabilize and export new technologies.
Entrepreneurial actors adjust the definition of their objectives to suit the existing interests and practices of local actors. Local actors, conversely, get to participate in 'innovation' without the need to reorganize or change. Innovation can proceed apace without creating much novelty at all.
In short, I argue that these experiments in public-private innovation put competing institutional logics of flexibility & stability, change & continuity in tension with one another. In the negotiation between these logics, projects like the digital twin proceed along the path of least resistance.
Extremely stoked to share a recent publication of mine in the journal Cities! Based on research I conducted last year, I look at what happens when 'innovation' takes root as a policy priority for city governments, through the prism of 'digital twin' projects.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
In a parallel life, I designed political posters. Some of them were pretty damn good. Hereโs one of my favourites, for @suebigoil.bsky.social and @avilewis.bsky.social
It doesnโt work!! Its unreliable and I spend more time checking its output or finessing prompts than I would just doing the work myself :)
#VendrediLecture ๐
A quoi servent les "jumeaux numรฉriques" de villes ?
Oskar Steiner, doctorant, a รฉtudiรฉ l'exemple de ceux fournis par Dassault Systรจmes.
A lire dans @metropolitiques.bsky.social โคต๏ธ
#SmartCity
cc @edr-sciencespo.bsky.social @scpo-research.bsky.social
Extremely excited to share my first academic publication in @metropolitiques.bsky.social! In it, I trace the way firms' offers are reshaped by local politics, raising questions about how we characterize the role of digital platforms in the city today.
metropolitiques.eu/La-fabrique-...
Excited to present with my colleague Luca at this workshop tomorrow with the @ccds-aup.bsky.social!
Looking at medieval city-states, company towns and contemporary smart cities, we argue that city "autonomy" is incapable without symmetrical processes of automation and othering.
Abstract below :)
Although some have argued quite differently re. the steam engine! That an inefficient and faulty tech only took off when framed as a way to discipline labour (no dependence on hydraulic energy means factories can be urbanized, weaker bargaining position for workers surrounded by a large labour pool)
Boston is an amazing place.
