Glitch epistemologies for computational cities

Abstract

This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as generative fissures within them, we mobilize a queer orientation that stays with the generative tensions of urban spatialities that present as idiosyncratic and as interrupting. We mobilize this epistemological approach through illustrative U.S. based examples of seemingly abandoned shared e-bikes, performatively ‘ugly’ homes, and wilful property dilapidation wrought through the registers of desire and aesthetics. In so doing, we show how glitch empistemologies render visible how the technocapitalist manufacturing of normative spatial desires for particular kinds of urban sociospatialities and aesthetic visual signatures are both secured and interrupted on digitally-mediated and -mediatized terrains. Glitch epistemologies establish the significance of small-scale disorientations in digital urban mediations, engaging these nonperformativities and non-computes as unexceptional openings onto everyday possibilities for politics in computational cities.