March, 6th to 8th, 2024
Organised by Jan Üblacker (EBZ Bochum), Hadas Zur (Harvard), Tim Lukas (University of Wuppertal)
Funded by Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS)
Digitalization is changing practices of social control and policing in cities and neighborhoods. New technologies such as smartphones, apps, social media, sensors or algorithms reshapes police practices in the urban arena and reconfigures the interface between physical and digital spaces in police work. Moreover, digitalization facilitates and decentralizes law enforcement actions and order maintenance policing in a manner that involves new actors.
One example is the emergence of digitally-mediated vigilantism, when residents use neighborhood apps to share evidence of perceived disorder and offences (Lub, 2018; Trottier, 2017) or to maintain racial borders in residential spaces (Kurwa, 2019; Lambright, 2019). In addition, open-source, intelligence-led policing may alter the spatial perception and knowledge of police officers. Finally, digitalization promotes new modes of representation, communication and interaction which challenge police (Bock, 2016), and introduce new spaces for negotiation that transform police-community relations as we know them (Zur, 2022). Therefore, urban policing in the digital age produces a multitude of new dilemmas and topics concerning social issues, questions of justice and inequality, geography, media, and politics. The aim of the workshop is to gather researchers from various disciplines to discuss the broad question of how processes of digitalization reshape policing and social order in cities and neighborhoods. The workshop is an opportunity to develop a new field of research on an emerging phenomenon, which shape many cities in the world and the daily life and security of the urban inhabitants.
Stadt als Motiv 