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Over the past decade, environmental science and governance have undergone a ‘big data’ and ‘smart technology’ turn. Environmental sensing and monitoring technologies now gather an unprecedented amount of data about the Earth, including its biodiverse species. While these technologies are deployed for the purpose of preservation and conservation, they have been criticised for their tendency to reduce more-than-human life to data and to exert forms of algorithmic control over that data in a way that diminishes multispecies justice. In this paper, we argue for the importance of bringing digital environmental humanities (DEH) perspectives to bear on environmental governance—particularly in thinking through and planning for multispecies future(s) in an increasingly urbanised world. We focus on smart urban governance models and explore the role of biodiversity databases in environmental governance. Taking the Australian White Ibis as the protagonist of this chapter, we reveal how representation of the White Ibis in two biodiversity databases—namely the Atlas of Living Australia and Big City Birds—reinforces human-centred environmental governance. By engaging with the data-driven portrayal of ibises, the paper mobilises the more-than-human turn to propose a future direction for biodiversity databases that acknowledges nonhuman agency.

Cities worldwide are at a critical juncture as digital technology, ubiquitous computing and IoT devices have been entering all aspects of urban life resulting in so-called smart cities, which use urban informatics and urban science to collect, process and analyse spatial big data using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). The aim of this chapter is to offer a critical look at spatial data applications in urban informatics and urban science. We draw on an empirical investigation into location awareness and the politics of spatial data, which explored both end-user and industry/government perceptions of location-based services and the digital platforms providing them. After introducing relevant literature, we briefly outline the methodology that produced the empirical data we rely on here. In keeping with our focus on contentions of the software-sorted city, we discuss three broad themes: (1) big data versus thick data; (2) data privacy, and; (3) data sovereignty. We conclude with an outlook on future work.

This chapter examines the rise of locative apps and services and the emergence of geolocation as enabling platform within the digital data economy. In outlining the geographies of locative apps, we consider their spatial infrastructures, affordances, and emerging cultural economies, and focus on three key themes. First, we trace the historical emergence of mobile geolocation along with theorisations about the new ‘hybrid’ forms of spatiality being generated in its wake. Second, we discuss the spatial affordances and infrastructures of location-based apps and services, outlining the various ways in which location is operationalised within and through smartphones. Our final theme addresses how mobile geolocation has contributed to an expanding location economy. We particularly focus on the very real and significant implications for privacy and surveillance that the location industry poses, and in conclusion we offer potential pathways to a more equitable (locative) data future.

We welcome the opportunity to contribute to this review of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). Prof Peta Mitchell and Dr Jessica Megarry are part of the research team for the ARC- funded Digital Media, Location Awareness and the Politics of Geodata project, which critically examines the increasingly pervasive role of location metadata (or geodata) in Australian smartphone practices and cultures. Our research indicates that: • Location data is widely collected from Australians for a range of purposes. • The collection, use and disclosure of location data can have serious potential impacts on individuals, including risks to their personal safety. • Location data can reveal other sensitive information about individuals. • Australians are concerned about the privacy risks associated with sharing their location data. • Australians may provide ‘consent’ in relation to their location data, despite privacy concerns, because they cannot otherwise use particular services. • Australians may provide ‘consent’ in relation to their location data without fully understanding how their location data is collected, used and disclosed. • Companies have sought to rely on ‘consent’ that is neither fully voluntary nor fully informed in legal proceedings brought against them. Based on this research, we recommend: • Amending the definition of sensitive information to include location data. • Explicitly including ‘voluntary’ and ‘informed’ in the definition of consent (proposal 9.1).

Big data analytics in smart cities has given rise to the new interdisciplinary field of urban science, which uses data mining, visual analytics, modeling, and simulation to create novel planning support systems. One such system is RAISE (the Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer) which assists urban planners and local government authorities with rapid analysis and visualization of land value uplift from proposed transport infrastructure. This paper’s contribution is twofold. We first introduce co-design as a method for developing a planning support tool such as RAISE and present findings from a series of co-design workshops that informed its development. Findings included the need for further transparency of the land valuation process and recommendation of a community feature that explains valuation outcomes to landowners. The resulting insights from the co-design process led to a series of emerging questions that the design of this type of planning support system raises: (a) the collaboration with local government partners and the need for what Huybrechts calls “institutioning;” (b) some of the ethical implications of use, and (c) the impact of moving from conventional to AI/machine learning-assisted modeling. We discuss these questions as part of our second contribution. The paper concludes by reflecting on the process of using the development of RAISE not just as a solution but as an opportunity to problematize new questions and identify future research opportunities that tackle these questions.

In this article, we examine the rise of contact-tracing apps during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic as a new form of technological solutionism – a technological or techno-social fix that can be deployed at national scale in response to an urgent, supranational problem. A dystopian view saw the rapid development and proliferation of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps as a vanguard technology for surveillance. Expediently deployed as a technological fix to the pandemic, contact-tracing was seen to threaten to transform a state of emergency into a state of exception, under which accepted or constitutional laws and norms might be suspended. Here, we extend early critiques of the contact-tracing app as a ‘technofix’ to argue the growing intervention of global technology corporations in digital governance and affairs of national sovereignty throughout the COVID-19 pandemic represents a new frontier of state–industrial surveillance that exploits people’s pre-investment in and dependence on technology corporations. We exemplify this with the ‘technofix’ of the Google–Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework and critically examine the notion of a decentralised and privacy-preserving Bluetooth-based contact-tracing framework proposed by global technology corporations that may threaten state sovereignty when determining public health responses to current or future crises.

Real-time data from urban and rural regions is increasingly being used by policymakers to achieve environmental sustainability goals within smart cities. At the same time, smart urban governance has been criticized for its technocratic and human-centric approach that sacrifices long-term planning for the here-and-now and overlooks the more-than-human in sustainability-related city-region foresight strategies. By reviewing two city-region foresight strategies employed in Australia–namely, the Atlas of Living Australia and Greenprints–this paper argues for the merits of including foresight strategies that account for multispecies entanglements. The paper mobilizes more-than-human perspectives to propose multispecies foresight for better urban and regional sustainability outcomes.

Over the last fifty years, and across a broad spectrum of humanities and social sciences disciplines, there has been an ongoing and critical reassessment of the role played by space, place, and geography in the formation and unfolding of human knowledge, subjectivity, and social relations. Starting with the identification of a distinctive “spatial turn” within critical and social theory in the second half of the twentieth century, it has become a commonplace to recognise space as being political and as having a particular affective and effective power. A distinctive constellation of socio-technological changes at the start of the twentieth century brought the question of space to the critical foreground, and, by the end of the twentieth century, a loosely defined and interdisciplinary “spatial theory” had emerged, while a number of fields across the humanities and social sciences had avowedly undergone their own “spatial turns.” More recently, new critical approaches have emerged that foreground the geo- as both a starting point and method for critical analysis as well as new inter-disciplines—namely the geohumanities and spatial humanities—that provide a focus for the range of work being done at the interstices of geography and the humanities. With the rise to ubiquity of geospatial and geolocative technologies over the last 15 years—and their almost wholesale penetration into everyday life in the global North in the form of the GPS-enabled smartphone—the question of the geo– and its role in locating and mediating human experience, knowledge, and social relations has become ever more salient. In an era where the geo- becomes geo-location, and is increasingly defined by networked relations among humans, digital media, and their locational data traces, new approaches and schools of thought that transect geography, digital media, and critical and cultural theory have once more emerged, constituting what might be thought of as a new, digital spatial turn. Charting the

Automation through smart city technology deployments and big data analytics has the potential to create more liveable, sustainable, and equitable cities. However, internationally, there are many examples of smart city developments that have attracted criticism, concerns, and community backlash over issues such as data ethics, privacy, mass surveillance, commodification, and social control. In response, this chapter presents DataCare – a model for cities to practically implement technological sovereignty as a way to renew and maintain the social licence to operate smart city technology. Grounded in a critical review of the literature, the chapter argues that data collection and automation in smart cities must be more citizen and community-oriented. Informed by smart city developments in Toronto and Barcelona, the chapter introduces DataCare – a model for a dedicated facility hosted by the city and offered to citizens, communities, and businesses. The envisaged DataCare space can be tailored to raise awareness of data ethics, to run data literacy training seminars, to engage in participatory data analytics, and to speculate about city data futures. DataCare aims to increase data transparency and autonomy, showcase new business opportunities, and empower citizens and community.

City governments increasingly use environmental sensing technologies and resulting data to respond to urgent planetary challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Although these initiatives are positively focused towards conservation, as a number of researchers have noted, biodiversity conservation projects are largely embedded in positivist scientific discourse and often do not question the neoliberal capitalist framework cities are operating within (Brockington & Duffy, 2010; Büscher et al., 2012). The environmental sensing technologies used to track nonhuman species for conservation purposes are designed by humans to understand the environment and its inhabitants, therefore, they are geared towards human perception (Gabrys, 2016). Moreover, as Adams (2019) has argued, these approaches often exercise a form of spatial control over nonhuman life and their movements (Adams, 2019) that also reinforce human exceptionalism (Clarke et al., 2019). Similarly, the biodiversity databases confine nonhuman beings into matrices of knowledge that commodify them (Youatt, 2008) as sources of ‘natural capital’ (Costanza et al., 1998). Building on this discourse, we argue that techno-scientific approaches alone are not sufficient to address urban biodiversity loss. Our research also finds previous studies and current urban governance approaches have not successfully addressed the increasing biodiversity concerns. The failure to address biodiversity concerns has political and ethical implications for the future of urban life – both human and nonhuman. This paper argues for a different methodological approach to biodiversity conservation in city governance – speculating desirable future(s). The paper is divided into three sections. First, it identifies issues embedded in urban science and smart city data-driven approaches to biodiversity conservation. Second, under the rubric of more-than-human studies (Houston et al., 2018; Loh et al., 2020; Todd, 2015; Van Dooren e

The Internet of Things (IoT), a similarly broad and contested concept, is an umbrella term referring to digital devices, sensors, and related hardware that are connected to the internet – these days usually through LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) networks. The deployment of IoT underpins optimised and efficient urban management through automation in smart cities. This submission is a contribution invited by the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) to their 2020 Internet of Things Report. It specifically focusses on: (1) Smart Cities, Sustainability and Rebound Effects; (2) Adopting a Holistic Ecology Perspective: More-than-Human Smart Cities; (3) Assessing the Environmental Impact of IoT-enabled Smart Cities from the perspectives of - (a) Demand for Minerals; - (b) Vendor Lock-In, Planned Obsolescence and Virtual Wear-Out; - (c) Product Disposal, Recycling and E-Waste, and; - (d) Electricity Consumption.In summary, the deployment of IoT devices in smart cities for the purpose of driving sustainability outcomes is ironic. While the data captured from IoT devices in smart cities is said to drive sustainability strategies through efficiency gains – which on their own are insufficient to tackle the climate emergency – the deployment of IoT per se in turn aggravates the planetary ecocide by worsening sustainability outcomes outside the smart city in other parts of the world.

The Cooperative Research Centre for Developing Northern Australia (CRCNA) has invested in this Northern Australia Communications Analysis to investigate the impacts and relevance of digital inclusion for developing northern Australia. A consortium of university and industry partners led by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has identified impediments and solutions to economic and social development through digital inclusion in Northern Australia (NA). While our focus is pan-NA digital infrastructure and services, and social infrastructure and digital capability, we offer some insights into the CRCNA’s focus areas (First Nations, health, agriculture sectors), which appear in the Addendum to this Directions Paper.

As social media platforms have become ubiquitous in everyday life, calls for mixed-methods approaches to studying social media platforms have also increased. Especially following the so-called “computational turn” (Berry, 2011) in media and communication research, we have witnessed the development of novel quantitative approaches, tools, techniques, and methods to study social media platforms. Qualitative studies, in contrast, often continue to draw from traditional methods that are sometimes not well equipped to deal with the particularities of studying these spaces, including their affordances, dataset sizes, systematic sampling and downsizing of data, or simply put, finding the right datasets. This becomes particularly important for studies employing a discourse-analytical perspective. Traditionally, selecting texts for discourse analysis has been straightforward, with researchers using contextual knowledge to select newspapers, articles, television programs, political speeches, and similar texts for qualitative analysis. However, when it comes to social media, especially if the researcher is interested in the broader discursive environment or the everyday communicative practices of social media users, data selection and downsizing becomes more complex...