Sophia Maalsen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 89314 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Sophia Maalsen |
| PRENOMES | Sophia |
| SOBRENOME | Maalsen |
| ASSINATURA | MAALSEN S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6384-0785 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 56 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 477 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2013 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Algorithmically mediated encounters in the public realm through young adults’ use of Strava
This paper reveals how Strava, a social fitness platform, operates infrastructurally to mediate how encounters unfold in urban public spaces. Using encounters as an analytical frame, we examine how Strava’s algorithmically mediated encounters shape users’ experiences of public life and feelings of connection, and at times, loneliness. Drawing on ten in-depth interviews with young adult Strava users in Sydney, we show that Strava algorithmic syste…
Implications of tenant data collection in housing
It's “really companiony”
This paper critically reflects on the process and possibilities of a specially developed digital qualitative research tool – the “Ethnography Journal” app. Although a variety of digital research tools are readily available, this research was specifically interested in understanding the process of app development, the way that technological constraints influenced the design and the data collected, and the opportunities for thinking beyond the app …
Digital activism in housing struggles
This review focuses on the role of digital technologies in housing activism. Housing is chosen as a site in which to highlight the activist applications of the digital for three reasons: the global housing crisis and housing's role as a key driver of inequality, housing's increasing digital mediation and the reinvigoration of tenant activism in response to the conditions created by the two preceding reasons. Focusing primarily on the area of tena…
Digital geographies II
The last 2 years have seen a marked rise of geographical work engaging with generative artificial intelligence (AI) across the discipline. Despite this recent surge of interest, there is a much longer history of geographers contributing to debates on AI and actively asking what automated technologies mean for the discipline and what geography can add to our knowledge on the implications of AI. In this report I provide a brief historical overview …
Bloomberg's Global Mayoralty
Bloomberg Philanthropies—the philanthropic organization of multibillionaire, CEO and former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg—has become a palpably influential node in global networks of urban policy knowledge generation and mobility. This article examines the formative conditions, scope and operations of Bloomberg's philanthropically funded complex of urban policy influence. It begins by outlining Bloomberg Philanthropies' ecosystem of u…
Imperfect infrastructures of care
AI Authoritarianism
This intervention offers a call for investigating the deepening alignment of artificial intelligence and authoritarian politics. The paper highlights three key features of AI that inflect the workings and logics of authoritarianism: (selective) inhumanisation, the cult of intelligence and scaling. We argue that AI, through these features, is not simply extending, but actively modulating, key dynamics of authoritarianism. To account for this, we p…
Enacting urban governance innovation
Prototyping as a Means to Innovate Affordable Housing Policies and Provision
In the face of rising housing affordability challenges, a diverse range of stakeholders are increasingly looking to alternative forms of housing provision and policy, and in particular, a turn to more explicitly experimental and design-inflected approaches. The process of prototyping is one of these. In this paper, we look at how prototyping is being used to address housing affordability in two ways. The first draws upon prototyping’s innovation …
Domestic technonatures
Home in cybersymbiosis
Acknowledging the history of more-than-human approaches in human geography, and the entrenchment of computational devices in the home, this paper advances the concept of cybersymbiosis as framework to think about the way we make home with computational devices. Doing so provides a speculative tool for thinking through our relationships with devices and the way we make home with them in critical ways. Three insights are identified: first, that the…
Housing disruptions
Digital geographies 1
This report is intended to provide a foundation to debates which illustrate how geographers have approached the challenge of understanding something variously invisible and immaterial as the digital and its impacts on the production of space. Thus, this first report will focus on how geographers conceptualise digitally produced and mediated spaces. It will trace the way we have understood digital spaces from grappling with the dichotomies of onli…
Proptech and the private rental sector
Private renting increasingly comprises a complex ecosystem of actors who assemble housing within the market, and collect rental income and data from tenants, and data on the material assets themselves. Our analysis – at the intersection of rentier and platform capitalism – focuses on landed (material real estate) and technological (digital infrastructure and data) property in Australia’s private rental system. Drawing out relationships between th…
The social lives of rental proptech
Housing's value is contested, with discussions including the economic value of housing through literature on assetisation and financialisation, social value in debates about housing as a human right, value capture in infrastructure development, and the value of housing for social reproduction. With this in mind, we engage with the various ways housing, tenants and Proptech are valued by tenant advocates, real estate professionals, and proptech de…
Discovering smart
In the late 2010s, publics in the UK encountered new kinds of street furniture: Strawberry Energy Smart benches in London and InLinkUK kiosks in Glasgow, with smart features such as phone charging, free Wi-Fi, free phone calls, information screens and environmental data. This article analyses how smart street furniture is socially constructed by relevant social groups, each with different interests, forms of power and meanings. Smartness became a…
Artificial intelligence, geography and society
Intersectionalizing Housing Discrimination Under Rentier Capitalism in an Asset-Based Society
Rental discrimination is a key factor in the reproduction of socio-economic inequality under emergent rentier capitalism within the asset society. Our research into the effects of discrimination in the Australian private rental sector shows how factors including age, race, gender and socio-economic status intersect to shape experiences of discrimination. A compounding and exponential discriminatory burden – financial, psychological, and physical …
Algorithmic epistemologies and methodologies
Algorithms have been the focus of important geographical critique, particularly in relation to their harmful and discriminatory effects. However, less attention has been paid to engaging more deeply with the epistemological effects of algorithms, the result being that geographers continue to overlook more generative algorithmic potentials, practices, epistemes and methodologies. This paper progresses our engagements with algorithms by first consi…
Tracking, calculating, watching
Jakarta is widely lauded by global consultancies, technology giants and critical scholars as an increasingly important ‘smart’ city. One of the reasons for this is the attempted use by state, corporate and individual actors of smart technologies, discourses and practices to solve the urban challenges of flooding, traffic and waste management in the context of climate change and urbanisation. In this paper, we examine the efforts of the Jakarta Sm…
Innovating urban governance through ‘Challenges
In recent years, urban “Challenges”—competitions that solicit and reward novel solutions to urban policy problems—have become embedded within a wider program of governance innovations presented to city governments as effective means to solve complex urban problems. This paper offers an overview and critical evaluation of the uses of Challenges in contemporary urban governance innovation, based on an extensive analysis of existing Challenges and r…
We're the cheap smart home
The definition and materialization of smart homes has changed over time in accordance with technological advancements and changing housing trajectories. Despite this, to date little research has problematized what different household types and tenure mean for the smart home. As housing markets become more diverse and technology becomes increasingly embedded in the everyday, critical attention needs to be paid to ways in which technologies are bei…
Situated, Yet Silent
This article provides new evidence of the ways that smart cities materialize within specific sites and contexts through smart street furniture (SSF). Drawing on empirical data generated through mixed-method field research, the article examines the situated data relations that emerge in the context of the adoption of InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow and Strawberry Energy smart benches in London. The concept of “silences” is proposed to analyze ins…
Frankenstein Urbanism
Generation Share
Traditional housing careers are being re-configured. Home ownership is declining and a parallel increase in renting has lead some commentators to suggest that this is creating a generation of renters. I argue that there is a further significant housing shift that deserves our attention – share housing. Share housing in the twenty-first century is different as evidence shows that people are sharing for longer and across widening age demographics; …
Algorithmic epistemologies and methodologies
Algorithms have been the focus of important geographical critique, particularly in relation to their harmful and discriminatory effects. However, less attention has been paid to engaging more deeply with the epistemological effects of algorithms, the result being that geographers continue to overlook more generative algorithmic potentials, practices, epistemes and methodologies. This paper progresses our engagements with algorithms by first consi…
Social control in the networked city
Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have supe…
The praxis and politics of building urban dashboards
This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard – a website built by two of the authors that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information – from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence to unpack the buildin…
The Smart Home on Fire
Some of the largest tech companies in the world, not to mention a stream of smaller startups, are now our roommates. Homes have become the target for smart devices and digital platforms that aim to upgrade old appliances, like refrigerators, and provide new capabilities, like virtual assistants. While smart devices have been variously championed and demonized in both academic literature and popular media, this article moves critical analysis beyo…
A feminist perspective on digital geographies
Feminist digital geographies are an important part of the digital turn currently underway in geographic scholarship. At the same time, feminist movements are taking advantage of, and emerging from, digital spaces. This article considers how the digital intersects with gender and what opportunities the digital affords feminist movements. We do so by drawing on a case study of feminist activism within Destroy the Joint (DTJ), an online social media…
Innovating urban governance
Urban governance innovation is being framed as an imperative to address complex urban and global challenges, triggering the adoption of novel institutional forms, approaches and techniques. Urban political geographers are still some way off fully apprehending the dynamics of these innovations and their potential to reconfigure the composition and politics of urban governance. This paper suggests dialogue between urban political geography and publ…
Urban governance innovation and Covid-19
Emergencies such as COVID-19 trigger calls for innovation and invoke forced experimentation. They can shift what is thinkable and thus licence social and institutional change, opening space wherein new sociopolitical arrangements might emerge. Cities are at the heart of the COVID-19 emergency, in terms of impact, management, and solutions. This commentary considers the implications of COVID-19 for urban governance innovation. Incrementally, innov…
Hidden homes? Uncovering Sydney’s informal housing market
Australia faces a chronic shortage of affordable rental housing, as do many other nations in the Global North. Unable to access the formal rental sector, lower-income earners are increasingly resorting to share housing and other informal arrangements, sometimes occupying makeshift accommodation or illegal dwellings. This article examines informality in Sydney’s housing market, an important case because of the explicit policy efforts geared toward…
Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond
Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revi…
Intersectionalizing Housing Discrimination Under Rentier Capitalism in an Asset-Based Society
Rental discrimination is a key factor in the reproduction of socio-economic inequality under emergent rentier capitalism within the asset society. Our research into the effects of discrimination in the Australian private rental sector shows how factors including age, race, gender and socio-economic status intersect to shape experiences of discrimination. A compounding and exponential discriminatory burden – financial, psychological, and physical …
Multiscalar governance of urban energy transitions in Australia
We're the cheap smart home
The definition and materialization of smart homes has changed over time in accordance with technological advancements and changing housing trajectories. Despite this, to date little research has problematized what different household types and tenure mean for the smart home. As housing markets become more diverse and technology becomes increasingly embedded in the everyday, critical attention needs to be paid to ways in which technologies are bei…
I cannot afford to live alone in this city and I enjoy the company of others
Share housing is changing. Once considered a form of short-term housing and a lifestyle choice for young adults fresh out of the family home, share housing is increasingly playing a broader role into advanced adulthood. Recent work has claimed the emergence of Generation Rent; however, the reconfiguration of housing experiences is illustrated not only by renting but also by an increase in house sharing and the emergence of ‘Generation Share’ with…
Catalysts for transport transitions
How smart cities are made
Recent geographical attention to smart places has underlined the key point that smart places are made: crafted incrementally over time and woven through existing sites and contexts. Work on analysing the crafting of ‘actually existing’ smart cities has turned to describing and characterising the processes through which smart cities are made and, within this, the interplay and relative significance of accidental versus purposeful smart cities has …
Revising the smart home as assemblage
Although aspirations for the ‘smart home’ have existed since the 1950s, the recent understanding of smart technological interventions as ecosystems of policy, material, people, ICT and data that drive social and spatial change, suggests we need to revise the smart home. From increased leisure time to increased energy efficiency – the smart home has promised, and frequently failed to deliver its utopian promises. First, this paper argues the smart…
Sharing as sociomaterial practice
Sharing has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary urban life and scholarship, as cities and social lives are transformed by the share economy and collaborative consumption. This paper advances critical analysis of sharing economies through an investigation of the ways in which objects are mobilized in the practice of sharing. Drawing on an empirical base of 35 interviews conducted with Sydney residents using car sharing as a form of transpo…
Digital geographies 1
This report is intended to provide a foundation to debates which illustrate how geographers have approached the challenge of understanding something variously invisible and immaterial as the digital and its impacts on the production of space. Thus, this first report will focus on how geographers conceptualise digitally produced and mediated spaces. It will trace the way we have understood digital spaces from grappling with the dichotomies of onli…
Finding home online? The Digitalization of share housing and the making of home through absence
Economic pressures, demographic changes and digital technologies are reshaping housing pathways as rented, shared and digitalized. In Australia, a growing proportion of adults are renting in the private market, often in shared accommodation. We know little about shared housing because the shared rental sector remains largely “hidden”. Online shared housing platforms offer insights into how people seek homes in a market where personal attributes a…
Covid-19 and the accelerating smart home
Home, digital technologies and data are intersecting in new ways as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. We consider the data practices associated with COVID-19 responses and their implications for housing and home through two overarching themes: the notion of home as a private space, and digital technology and surveillance in the home. We show that although home has never been private, the rapid adoption and acceptance of technologies in t…
The social lives of rental proptech
Housing's value is contested, with discussions including the economic value of housing through literature on assetisation and financialisation, social value in debates about housing as a human right, value capture in infrastructure development, and the value of housing for social reproduction. With this in mind, we engage with the various ways housing, tenants and Proptech are valued by tenant advocates, real estate professionals, and proptech de…
Smart housing
Digging up Unearthed down-under
Hybrid geographies are well developed in studies of human–nature relations and environmental humanities, but less so in geographies of music and gender. In this article, we use hybrid geographies to frame our critical engagement with Australia's triple j's Unearthed, a publically funded website and radio station that presents new music. Hybrid approaches enable us to understand gendered power relations in music by deconstructing the ways power di…
The hack
This commentary advances the ‘hack’ as an urban concept. While the hack transcends existing literatures on the digital and informality, it is a distinctive concept and is being used systematically in new domains. I situate the hack conceptually, outline its empirical and methodological value and propose a framework to research the urban hack. Importantly, it is not just the technologies of hacking but the translation of computational logics to th…
Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond
Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revi…
Digging up Unearthed down-under
Hybrid geographies are well developed in studies of human–nature relations and environmental humanities, but less so in geographies of music and gender. In this article, we use hybrid geographies to frame our critical engagement with Australia's triple j's Unearthed, a publically funded website and radio station that presents new music. Hybrid approaches enable us to understand gendered power relations in music by deconstructing the ways power di…
Reissuing Alternative Music Heritages
Increasing value is being placed on popular music as cultural heritage. This article addresses this interest through the overlooked practice of reissue, which acts to curate and preserve musical heritage, presenting it in a way that emphasizes music’s materiality. I will first look at the rise of popular music as heritage before looking at specific reissue labels—Sing Sing Records and Smithsonian Folkways—that demonstrate the multiplicities of mu…
The praxis and politics of building urban dashboards
This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard – a website built by two of the authors that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information – from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence to unpack the buildin…
Learning about Feminism in Digital Spaces
Collaborative online research offers opportunities and constraints for geographers. This article critically appraises a collaborative research process that we used to illuminate spatial and political dynamics of feminism contained within the online group ‘Destroy the Joint’ (DTJ). A mostly Australian initiative of over 74 000 Facebook members, DTJ aims to end sexism and misogyny in multiple ways. It operates as a meeting place, discussion forum, …
Catalysts for transport transitions
Sharing as sociomaterial practice
Sharing has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary urban life and scholarship, as cities and social lives are transformed by the share economy and collaborative consumption. This paper advances critical analysis of sharing economies through an investigation of the ways in which objects are mobilized in the practice of sharing. Drawing on an empirical base of 35 interviews conducted with Sydney residents using car sharing as a form of transpo…
Multiscalar governance of urban energy transitions in Australia
Record collections as musical archives
In this article the authors extend the concept of the museum and its collecting practices to record collections, and position record collections as musical archives that are representative of our popular music heritage. They recognize the role of material culture and museums in fostering social memory while also noting the absence of second-wave feminism in museum representation. Research on the archival turn in feminism suggests some intersectio…
Familial mobilities beyond the private car
Mobility practices are one of the central labours of family, through which the relations of kin and non-kin are negotiated. In many cities, the private car has been and is central to familial mobility through the transportation of objects and people, as well as enabling the accomplishment of familial social activities. Recent technological disruptions to transport systems and the increased popularity of non-car modes are challenging such tight in…
The Smart Home on Fire
Some of the largest tech companies in the world, not to mention a stream of smaller startups, are now our roommates. Homes have become the target for smart devices and digital platforms that aim to upgrade old appliances, like refrigerators, and provide new capabilities, like virtual assistants. While smart devices have been variously championed and demonized in both academic literature and popular media, this article moves critical analysis beyo…
A feminist perspective on digital geographies
Feminist digital geographies are an important part of the digital turn currently underway in geographic scholarship. At the same time, feminist movements are taking advantage of, and emerging from, digital spaces. This article considers how the digital intersects with gender and what opportunities the digital affords feminist movements. We do so by drawing on a case study of feminist activism within Destroy the Joint (DTJ), an online social media…
Smart housing
I cannot afford to live alone in this city and I enjoy the company of others
Share housing is changing. Once considered a form of short-term housing and a lifestyle choice for young adults fresh out of the family home, share housing is increasingly playing a broader role into advanced adulthood. Recent work has claimed the emergence of Generation Rent; however, the reconfiguration of housing experiences is illustrated not only by renting but also by an increase in house sharing and the emergence of ‘Generation Share’ with…
Social control in the networked city
Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have supe…
Modes of making smart cities
Rent and crisis
The coronavirus pandemic is opening up a space for housing advocates and scholars to push for reforms to the private rental sector. Yet, we argue the Australian government has shown little commitment to addressing long-term, structural housing issues. Temporary reform will not lead to a new or more socially just housing system in the long-term—a new housing normal—without a significant and nation-wide tenant campaign. Like others, we are working …
Revising the smart home as assemblage
Although aspirations for the ‘smart home’ have existed since the 1950s, the recent understanding of smart technological interventions as ecosystems of policy, material, people, ICT and data that drive social and spatial change, suggests we need to revise the smart home. From increased leisure time to increased energy efficiency – the smart home has promised, and frequently failed to deliver its utopian promises. First, this paper argues the smart…
Covid-19 and the accelerating smart home
Home, digital technologies and data are intersecting in new ways as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. We consider the data practices associated with COVID-19 responses and their implications for housing and home through two overarching themes: the notion of home as a private space, and digital technology and surveillance in the home. We show that although home has never been private, the rapid adoption and acceptance of technologies in t…
Generation Share
Traditional housing careers are being re-configured. Home ownership is declining and a parallel increase in renting has lead some commentators to suggest that this is creating a generation of renters. I argue that there is a further significant housing shift that deserves our attention – share housing. Share housing in the twenty-first century is different as evidence shows that people are sharing for longer and across widening age demographics; …
Civic Infrastructure and the Appropriation of the Corporate Smart City
Concerns have been raised regarding smart city innovations leading to, or consolidating, technocratic urban governance and the tokenization of citizens. Less research, however, has explored how we make sense of ongoing appropriation of the resources, skills, and expertise of corporate smart cities and what this means for future cities. In this article, we examine the summoning of political subjectivity through the practices of retrofitting, repur…
Finding home online? The Digitalization of share housing and the making of home through absence
Economic pressures, demographic changes and digital technologies are reshaping housing pathways as rented, shared and digitalized. In Australia, a growing proportion of adults are renting in the private market, often in shared accommodation. We know little about shared housing because the shared rental sector remains largely “hidden”. Online shared housing platforms offer insights into how people seek homes in a market where personal attributes a…
How smart cities are made
Recent geographical attention to smart places has underlined the key point that smart places are made: crafted incrementally over time and woven through existing sites and contexts. Work on analysing the crafting of ‘actually existing’ smart cities has turned to describing and characterising the processes through which smart cities are made and, within this, the interplay and relative significance of accidental versus purposeful smart cities has …
Hidden homes? Uncovering Sydney’s informal housing market
Australia faces a chronic shortage of affordable rental housing, as do many other nations in the Global North. Unable to access the formal rental sector, lower-income earners are increasingly resorting to share housing and other informal arrangements, sometimes occupying makeshift accommodation or illegal dwellings. This article examines informality in Sydney’s housing market, an important case because of the explicit policy efforts geared toward…
Urban governance innovation and Covid-19
Emergencies such as COVID-19 trigger calls for innovation and invoke forced experimentation. They can shift what is thinkable and thus licence social and institutional change, opening space wherein new sociopolitical arrangements might emerge. Cities are at the heart of the COVID-19 emergency, in terms of impact, management, and solutions. This commentary considers the implications of COVID-19 for urban governance innovation. Incrementally, innov…
Political science (36 obras) · Sociology (33 obras) · Business (25 obras) · Computer Science (22 obras) · Smart Cities and Technologies (22 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Economics (19 obras) · Geography (15 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Engineering (14 obras)