Front page of the article, 'Friction-free cities and the rise of contactless and robotised delivery infrastructure' by Noel Chung, published in City, 2025.
Following Anna Tsing, it proposes rethinking friction not as an impediment to flows and progress, but rather as a condition that enables motion, which can help create alternative infrastructures that foster productive frictions, i.e. diverse encounters and intersections through which cities thrive.
10.06.2025 16:41 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Two figures from the paper ‘Friction-free cities and the rise of contactless and robotised delivery infrastructure’ published in City. One figure shows an Operator pulling back branches of a plant for the robot to pass smoothly. The other shows a thermal bag dedicated to food deliveries placed at a doorstep with a note on the lid reading ‘Put the food delivery inside this, please’. Photographs with permission, altered for anonymisation. Noel Chung, 2022.
What does a city become when it strives to be frictionless?
This new paper on friction-free cities in @city-journal.bsky.social documents how delivery platforms’ ongoing pursuit of smooth urban flows gives rise to contactless, robotised infrastructure and spaces of avoidance: doi.org/10.1080/1360...
10.06.2025 14:42 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
Korean protesters waving colourful light sticks in front of the National Assembly in Seoul, 7 Dec 2024. Illustration by 5dock (@5dockk on X). Source: https://x.com/5dockk/status/1865727796347351467
🕯 Illustration by 오독 5dock (@5dockk on X) #촛불집회
09.12.2024 14:12 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
PhD candidate at Oxford Geography interested in snakebites and the politics of global health
https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/graduate/research/gkirkham.html
Professor of Political Geography & Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life @leverhulmecal.bsky.social
Algorithms, politics, technology, biometrics, AI, ethics
Author Cloud Ethics http://dukeupress.edu/cloud-ethics
Geography PhD student at University of Oxford researching digital mediations of rivers
Digital Ecologies is an interdisciplinary, international research group broadly examining the digitisation of more-than-human worlds.
🇧🇪🇫🇷🇩🇪🇱🇺🇳🇴🇸🇪🇺🇦🇬🇧
Website: http://www.digicologies.com/
Research Fellow in Future Flight @SchoolofEng_UoB @unibirmingham.bsky.social | DPhil @ox.ac.uk | interested in technology, innovation & society | 🏳️🌈 he/him
The official bsky feed of the RGS-IBG Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG)
https://digitalgeographiesrg.org/
@rgsibg.bsky.social
digital things, visual culture, cities, visual research methods. And sometimes academic life. Prof of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. I still blog, occasionally, here:
https://visualmethodculture.wordpress.com/
'Building an Inclusive European Community in Communication'
ECREA Media, Cities and Space Section, focused on the intersections of media and communications with cities and spatiality.
https://mediacitytwg.wordpress.com
underbelly of the digital. Prof @Concordia University
books: In/Convenience / Technopharmacology / Underglobalization / Asian Video Cultures
#STS @ York University, Canada: (1) Dept. of Science, Technology & Society; (2) Graduate Program in Science & Technology Studies; and (3) Institute for Technoscience & Society
https://www.yorku.ca/research/its/
Picture credit: Zoran Svilar
Reader in Media and Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. Into cities, publics, politics, social media, podcasts & journalism. https://linktr.ee/rodgers_scott
Anthropologist. Works at the University of Manchester. Studies people's lives with and alongside infrastructure, climate, energy, technology and data.
Urbanist of the majority world; Collaborator in experiments on black urbanism and popular economy. Candomble sufi. The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield
Artist, recomposing social platforms, AI futures, and interface cultures. Known for works like Demetricator, Computers Watching Movies, and minus.social. Faculty Associate @ Berkman Klein Harvard, Prof @ UIUC. bengrosser.com
Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy
Obsessed with assets & assetization + into science & technology studies, political economy, economic sociology: https://keanbirch.net/
Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society @UniUtrecht. Co-director @UU_GDS. Research: Platformization, platform studies,
@appstudies, @digitalmethods, web history.
I teach media communications and social theory at London School of Economics. Main interests: data colonialism, AI, rebuilding social media. Links to my two new books: https://linktr.ee/SpaceOfTheWorldBook https://lnk.to/DataGrabBook
ARC Future Fellow – Monash University /// co-host – This Machine Kills /// critical insurance tech + climate risk governance /// political economy of technology and capitalism: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite
