Ola Söderström
Biographic Data
| ID | 105383 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ola Söderström |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ola |
| FAMILY NAME | Söderström |
| SIGNATURE | SÖDERSTRÖM O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Neuchâtel |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7111-8765 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 496 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Planting for healthy air
Societal Impact Statement Cities urgently need nature to improve public health, support biodiversity, and increase resilience to climate change. Yet not all green spaces offer the same benefits. In this study, we show that more diverse urban plantings create richer “chemical environments”; subtle, naturally scented atmospheres formed by plant emissions that can influence how people feel and recover from stress. By revealing this hidden dimension …
Designing landscapes of affordances for ageing in place
This paper aims to contribute theoretically, methodologically, and empirically to research and interventions regarding ageing in place. Theoretically, the paper contributes by drawing on the literature on landscapes of care and landscapes of affordances to suggest a multiscalar and more-than-human approach to ageing in place. Methodologically, we argue that studying ageing in place requires a participatory and translational methodology. Participa…
Comparative platform urbanism
The rapid integration of digital platforms into urban life has given rise to the concept of platform urbanism, highlighting the co-constitutive relationship between cities and platforms. While platform urbanism has emerged as an important approach for understanding contemporary cities, the field lacks a robust comparative perspective. To address this gap, we synthesize comparative approaches from platform studies and urban studies to outline a ty…
Digital platforms as contact zones
This article contributes to literature on digital platforms as place-makers by developing the concept of the “platform as contact zone”. Envisaging platforms as variously layered “contact zones”, we show how platforms today play a pivotal role in the organization of exchanges and transactions between local actors and visitors, both on-line and on site. Drawing on a case study in Palermo, Sicily, we show that reviews on digital platforms have beco…
Artificial intelligence and the state
The emergence of the modern state was closely intertwined with the advent of statistics and demographic data. Today, we are witnessing the ascent of artificial intelligence as a new technology of governance. This article seeks to lay the groundwork for a research agenda at the intersection of the state and artificial intelligence, unpacking the notion of "AI" and examining the consequences of the state transitioning from statistics to artificial …
Walking through the city soundscape
This article discusses how an aspect of urban environments - sound and noise - is experienced by people walking in the city; it particularly focuses on atypical populations such as people diagnosed with psychosis, who are reported to be particularly sensitive to noisy environments. Through an analysis of video-recordings of naturalistic activities in an urban context and of video-elicitations based on these recordings, the study details the way p…
Stress and emotional arousal in urban environments
This article examines the entanglement between feelings of stress and discomfort, physiological arousal and urban experiences of persons living with early psychosis. It adopts a biosocial approach, using mixed methods combining ambulatory skin conductance monitoring, mobile interviews and contextual data, collected through GPS and video recordings. The study draws on and strives to cross-fertilize two recent strands of research. The first relates…
How environments get to the skin
Epidemiological research in psychiatry has established robust evidence of the link between urban living and psychosis, but the situated experience of the city, as well as the precise ecology of psychosis remain largely unexplored. In this context, the aim of this paper is to discuss the productive potential of a ‘re-vitalized’ biosocial geographical thinking and researching on urban mental health. We do so through a methodological proposition. Fi…
More-than-local, more-than-mobile
This paper explores how the smart city phenomenon becomes nearly ubiquitous in countries and cities around the world. Drawing on policy mobility studies and cosmopolitisation – defined as globalization from within – it focuses on the roll-out and take-up of smart city narratives and interventions in South Africa since 2005. Based on a media analysis on national and local scales, the paper shows that the smart city effect is an entangled phenomeno…
The three modes of existence of the pandemic smart city
Working on the provincialisation of the smart city in South Africa and India, the members of our research team recently witnessed, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the five countries in which we live and work, the emergence of a ‘pandemic smart city’. Technologies, institutions, organisations and people we were observing and working with were repurposed, reshaped or reoriented in efforts to manage and mitigate the public health crisis. Draw…
City Avoidance in the Early Phase of Psychosis
Background: A considerable amount of research has explored the link between living in an urban environment during childhood and the increased risk to develop psychosis. However, the urban milieu is more than a risk factor as it is also a place for socialization and enrichment. The aims of the current study were to explore, in a large sample of early psychosis (EP) patients, their pattern of use of the city, their perception when exposed to variou…
Precarious encounters with urban life
On edge?’
Tim Bunnell 2016
New Punitiveness on the Move
Within the neocolonial context of 'Plan Colombia' in the early 2000s, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took up position in the heart of the Colombian penitentiary administration to lead a reform based on the United States' ultra-punitive penal regime. This paper analyses how the reform was set up on the ground, shedding light on the partially divergent expectations of the two governments. Drawing on recent literature on the mobili…
On alternative smart cities
Smart urbanism seems to be everywhere you turn. But in practice the agenda is an uncertain one, usually only partially developed, and often more about corporate-led urban development than about urban social justice. Rather than leave smart urbanism to the corporate and political elites, there are opportunities now for critical urban scholarship to not only critique how it is currently constituted, but to give shape to a globally oriented alternat…
Unpacking ‘the City’
Cities in Relations
Smart cities as corporate storytelling
On 4 November 2011, the trademark 'smarter cities' was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an 'obligatory passage point' in the implementation of urb…
Michel Foucault and the Smart City
Drawing upon Michel Foucault's approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between ap…
Loose threads
This paper analyses the recent developments in public space policy in the city of H anoi, V ietnam. It has three aims. The first is to look at a potentially progressive urban policy in contrast to most work on ‘policies in motion’ that has primarily been concerned with neoliberal policies. The second is to put the process of public space policymaking in H anoi in historical and cultural perspective. We therefore describe public space in H anoi as…
Critical Mobilities
The field of mobility studies examines social phenomena through the lens of movement. In this perspective, societies are regarded as being constantly reconfigured as they are shaped by a series of mobile entities (capital, people, information). This book engages critically with many of the claims and challenges of mobility studies by providing empirically rich reports of mobilities and their limitations. Instead of assuming a seamless world of fl…
Urban constellations yesterday and today
Worlding Cities. Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global
Dynamics of globalization
No abstract available
Smart cities as corporate storytelling
On 4 November 2011, the trademark 'smarter cities' was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an 'obligatory passage point' in the implementation of urb…
Michel Foucault and the Smart City
Drawing upon Michel Foucault's approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between ap…
On alternative smart cities
Smart urbanism seems to be everywhere you turn. But in practice the agenda is an uncertain one, usually only partially developed, and often more about corporate-led urban development than about urban social justice. Rather than leave smart urbanism to the corporate and political elites, there are opportunities now for critical urban scholarship to not only critique how it is currently constituted, but to give shape to a globally oriented alternat…
On edge?’
More-than-local, more-than-mobile
This paper explores how the smart city phenomenon becomes nearly ubiquitous in countries and cities around the world. Drawing on policy mobility studies and cosmopolitisation – defined as globalization from within – it focuses on the roll-out and take-up of smart city narratives and interventions in South Africa since 2005. Based on a media analysis on national and local scales, the paper shows that the smart city effect is an entangled phenomeno…
From urban wastelands to new‐build gentrification
Gentrification represents an important aspect of the transformation of socio‐demographic structures in many cities around the world. The definition of this concept has been extended in recent years to cover different processes of social upgrading and to incorporate a plurality of forms, protagonists, and spaces. The notion of ‘new‐build gentrification’ is part of this process of redefinition. Because of its strong connections with global socioeco…
New forms of gentrification
This special issue addresses the questions of gentrification and new‐build gentrification, two processes of urban transformation that significantly contribute to the reconfiguration of the socio‐demographic profile of populations in contemporary cities. Whereas gentrification has long referred to the physical and social transformation of central areas through rehabilitation of existing housing stock and population displacement by more affluent ho…
The three modes of existence of the pandemic smart city
Working on the provincialisation of the smart city in South Africa and India, the members of our research team recently witnessed, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the five countries in which we live and work, the emergence of a ‘pandemic smart city’. Technologies, institutions, organisations and people we were observing and working with were repurposed, reshaped or reoriented in efforts to manage and mitigate the public health crisis. Draw…
Precarious encounters with urban life
Paper Cities
We find instead that direct observation, far from being a mere ragpicker, is an explo ration by the form-seeking and form-imposing mind, which needs to understand but cannot unless it casts what it sees into manageable models. 1
Unpacking ‘the City’
Studying cosmopolitan landscapes
In Beijing, a few months ago, I was intrigued by the meaning of a (by now) banal street scene. Cycling on the sidewalk close to the 4th Ring Road in the northeastern part of the city, I bumped into a street-sign for a furniture and design shop just nearby: Cosmopolite, Boutique Living in China (Figure 1). A few blocks away and a few minutes later I could not miss a huge and comfortable housing complex – Lido Courts – presenting itself as ‘the oas…
Redefining the field
The geographers’ field has in the past two decades been redefined both through a series of theoretical innovations and the encounter of a series of new situations in the field. The latter can still be today the bounded place of traditional ethnography but also a more complex multi-sited, virtual space of investigation peopled by non-human and human entities, and approached through polysensorial, mobile or emotional forms of analysis. How do new t…
Stress and emotional arousal in urban environments
This article examines the entanglement between feelings of stress and discomfort, physiological arousal and urban experiences of persons living with early psychosis. It adopts a biosocial approach, using mixed methods combining ambulatory skin conductance monitoring, mobile interviews and contextual data, collected through GPS and video recordings. The study draws on and strives to cross-fertilize two recent strands of research. The first relates…
From mosaic to network
It is already a tradition: most country reports in this journal start with questions and doubts concerning the relevance of thinking about the production of geographical knowledge in national terms
Artificial intelligence and the state
The emergence of the modern state was closely intertwined with the advent of statistics and demographic data. Today, we are witnessing the ascent of artificial intelligence as a new technology of governance. This article seeks to lay the groundwork for a research agenda at the intersection of the state and artificial intelligence, unpacking the notion of "AI" and examining the consequences of the state transitioning from statistics to artificial …
New Punitiveness on the Move
Within the neocolonial context of 'Plan Colombia' in the early 2000s, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took up position in the heart of the Colombian penitentiary administration to lead a reform based on the United States' ultra-punitive penal regime. This paper analyses how the reform was set up on the ground, shedding light on the partially divergent expectations of the two governments. Drawing on recent literature on the mobili…
Cultural Geographies in Practice
Walking through the city soundscape
This article discusses how an aspect of urban environments - sound and noise - is experienced by people walking in the city; it particularly focuses on atypical populations such as people diagnosed with psychosis, who are reported to be particularly sensitive to noisy environments. Through an analysis of video-recordings of naturalistic activities in an urban context and of video-elicitations based on these recordings, the study details the way p…
Urban constellations yesterday and today
Worlding Cities. Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global
Paper Cities
We find instead that direct observation, far from being a mere ragpicker, is an explo ration by the form-seeking and form-imposing mind, which needs to understand but cannot unless it casts what it sees into manageable models. 1
Expo.02
De la mégalopole au split screen. Trois esthétiques urbaines contemporaines
Cet article part du principe que la cognition ne peut pas être confinée dans des univers mentaux individuels, mais qu'il s'agit d'un processus qui prend place dans toute une série de lieux, d'institutions et de médias. Je choisis ici d'explorer trois mondes d'images où s'élaborent des connaissances sur la ville contemporaine : celui du peintre argentin Guillermo Kuitca, celui de la série télévisée américaine «24 heures chrono », celui des réalisa…
Cultural Geographies in Practice
Studying cosmopolitan landscapes
In Beijing, a few months ago, I was intrigued by the meaning of a (by now) banal street scene. Cycling on the sidewalk close to the 4th Ring Road in the northeastern part of the city, I bumped into a street-sign for a furniture and design shop just nearby: Cosmopolite, Boutique Living in China (Figure 1). A few blocks away and a few minutes later I could not miss a huge and comfortable housing complex – Lido Courts – presenting itself as ‘the oas…
La città incompleta
International audience
From mosaic to network
It is already a tradition: most country reports in this journal start with questions and doubts concerning the relevance of thinking about the production of geographical knowledge in national terms
Une gentrification émergente et diversifiée
Apparu dans les années 1960, le terme de gentrification désigne au sens strict la réhabilitation physique de certains quartiers urbains et le remplacement de leur population par des catégories plus aisées. Ces dernières années, cette définition a été élargie à d’autres processus d’élitisation et intègre désormais une pluralité de formes, d’acteurs et d’espaces. Cette extension est discutée sur la base des spécificités de l’urbanisation en Suisse,…
Les âges de la ville
La question de l’attractivité résidentielle des villescentres se pose aujourd’hui avec une acuité renforcée par le succès du modèle de la ville compacte comme alternative à l’étalement urbain. Le rôle que pourraient jouer les personnes âgées dans un éventuel «retour en ville» a souvent été évoqué sans faire jusqu’ici l’objet d’analyses spécifiques. S’insérant dans le prolongement de ces réflexions, cette contribution étudie la mobilité résidentie…
Denis E. Cosgrove (1948—2008)
New forms of gentrification
This special issue addresses the questions of gentrification and new‐build gentrification, two processes of urban transformation that significantly contribute to the reconfiguration of the socio‐demographic profile of populations in contemporary cities. Whereas gentrification has long referred to the physical and social transformation of central areas through rehabilitation of existing housing stock and population displacement by more affluent ho…
Denis Cosgrove in Europe
From urban wastelands to new‐build gentrification
Gentrification represents an important aspect of the transformation of socio‐demographic structures in many cities around the world. The definition of this concept has been extended in recent years to cover different processes of social upgrading and to incorporate a plurality of forms, protagonists, and spaces. The notion of ‘new‐build gentrification’ is part of this process of redefinition. Because of its strong connections with global socioeco…
Redefining the field
The geographers’ field has in the past two decades been redefined both through a series of theoretical innovations and the encounter of a series of new situations in the field. The latter can still be today the bounded place of traditional ethnography but also a more complex multi-sited, virtual space of investigation peopled by non-human and human entities, and approached through polysensorial, mobile or emotional forms of analysis. How do new t…
Dynamics of globalization
No abstract available
Loose threads
This paper analyses the recent developments in public space policy in the city of H anoi, V ietnam. It has three aims. The first is to look at a potentially progressive urban policy in contrast to most work on ‘policies in motion’ that has primarily been concerned with neoliberal policies. The second is to put the process of public space policymaking in H anoi in historical and cultural perspective. We therefore describe public space in H anoi as…
Critical Mobilities
The field of mobility studies examines social phenomena through the lens of movement. In this perspective, societies are regarded as being constantly reconfigured as they are shaped by a series of mobile entities (capital, people, information). This book engages critically with many of the claims and challenges of mobility studies by providing empirically rich reports of mobilities and their limitations. Instead of assuming a seamless world of fl…
Urban constellations yesterday and today
Worlding Cities. Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global
Cities in Relations
Smart cities as corporate storytelling
On 4 November 2011, the trademark 'smarter cities' was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an 'obligatory passage point' in the implementation of urb…
Michel Foucault and the Smart City
Drawing upon Michel Foucault's approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between ap…
Unpacking ‘the City’
On alternative smart cities
Smart urbanism seems to be everywhere you turn. But in practice the agenda is an uncertain one, usually only partially developed, and often more about corporate-led urban development than about urban social justice. Rather than leave smart urbanism to the corporate and political elites, there are opportunities now for critical urban scholarship to not only critique how it is currently constituted, but to give shape to a globally oriented alternat…
Tim Bunnell 2016
Geography (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Art (11 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Economic geography (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · History (8 works) · History (8 works) · Smart Cities and Technologies (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)