Critical Remote Sensing and the Urban

Session Title: 

Critical remote sensing and the urban

Organized by:

Focus:

The use of remote and other sensing technologies in estimating, regulating and reshaping various transition challenges has rapidly grown over the past decades. For urban contexts this has important implications for how urban processes and patterns are known and governed. The relevance of earth observation infrastructures is now often accompanied by calls for more work in the domain of critical remote sensing highlighting the politics and everyday implication of the volumetric regimes earth observation and other sensing techniques contribute to. The session will explore how a critical remote sensing matters to urban sensing. Focusing on the politics of and in urban remote sensing we call for making use of remote sensing in non-extractive ways to safeguard that people and groups are not reduced to data points and how to connect the people on the ground with the eyes in the sky. 

Topics of interest:

• How is remote sensing contributing to processes of modulating (urban) environments?
• How can we study and make sense of volumetric regimes that link technologies in earth's orbit to local practices of sense making?
• How does (remote) sensing play into ongoing crisis narratives and what can we learn from this about sustainability and digital transitions?
• What would practices of counter-remote sensing look like and how could they be made possible?