Since the late 1990s the shift from ‘industrialism’ to ‘informationalism’ ushered in proclamations that a new world of ‘knowledge capitalism’ had dawned, in which knowledge and information was the resource for economic competitiveness and societal development (May and Perry 2018). Cities were seen at the vanguard of this shift, whether as active proponents or sites where alternative imaginaries for a more democratic ‘knowledge society’ could emerge. These opposing struggles – for knowledge as a tool to extract value or as a lever for spatial justice – nonetheless aligned in framing ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ as (relatively) unproblematic categories. Orthodox scholarship was oriented to how cities could enable spillovers and agglomeration economies to leverage profitable advantage, whilst critique focused on spatial inequalities (Madanipour 2011) resulting from the intensification of techno-capitalist extractions from the ‘urban field’ (Moisio and Rossi 2025).
Are we now in a disinformation age or ‘infodemic’ (Stephens et al. 2023)? Has the promise of the information age (Bell 1979; Castells 2010) turned sour in the midst of the contemporary geopolitical landscape – where what counts as ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’, as much as what we do with it, is contested and politicised?
Disinformation is not new, but the speed, scale and intensity of changes raises fresh questions, given the intersections between rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and technologies and tools to ‘control the capital’ (Goodfellow and Jackman 2023), digital and technological innovations (Balayan and Tomin 2024), their re-appropriation as mechanisms for urban control (Schlumberger et al. 2024) and the geopolitical restructuring of global relations. There is emerging but underdeveloped scholarship – often outside urban geography - on the role of different local populations and institutions in resisting ‘truth decay’ (Jackson 2025) in the context of diminishing trust in democracy.
We invite papers that engage critically with three themes: 1) how cities are impacted by disinformation, whether through state-sponsored tactics or the commercialisation of false narratives 2) whether and how urban responses absorb, intensify or resist disinformation 3) the types of existing and new inequalities produced. We are particularly interested in global urban case studies across Easts, Wests, Souths and
Norths that unsettle and set an agenda on cities in the disinformation age, with attention to geopolitical ramifications. Topics may include but are not limited to the:
- Changing geographies and infrastructures of the disinformation economy, for instance, the spatial distribution of data centres, scam factories, or bot farms
- Flows of disinformation through human and non-human networks and infrastructures and processes of mediation and transmission
- How the geo-politics of state-sponsored and corporate AI infrastructure, and DaaS (Disinformation-as-a-Service), is wired into and through urban systems
- Use of disinformation by different national regimes and resulting impacts on cities & urban areas, including the creation of ‘news deserts’ (Gulyas, A. et al 2023)
- Effects of disinformation on urban politics, everyday life and different urban groups in the city – including how disinformation is received by differentially exposed groups, and mediated by intersectional vulnerabilities (Gondwe et al. 2025)
- Everyday and street-level disinformation in historical and contemporary urban contexts, including local media and news environments
- Counter-disinformation strategies, tools and techniques by municipal governments (Trijsburg et al. 2024) and urban populations, or the reappropriation of disinformation to achieve social justice goals
- Grassroots and insurgent information and knowledge ecosystems at the local level and implications for data citizenship (Carmi et al. 2020)
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
If you would like to present a paper, please submit a title and abstract (max. 300 words) including 4-6 keywords and short biography. We require full names, institutional affiliation and email addresses for all authors. Please indicate the corresponding author.
Send to b.perry@sheffield.ac.uk and tom.goodfellow@manchester.ac.uk by Friday 27th February.
This is planned as an in-person session, and RGS has indicated limited hybrid capacity. However, we would still be interested in your work if it relates to these themes even if you are not able to attend in person so do get in touch if this is you.
SCHEDULE:
- Submit to session organisers: Friday 27 th February
- Session organisers submit to RGS: Friday 6 th March
- Notification from RGS of accepted panels: Monday 27 April
REFERENCES:
Balayan, A. and Tomin, L. (2021) Surveillance City. Digital Transformation of Urban Governance in Autocratic Regimes, Communication Strategies in Digital Society seminar 10.1109/ComSDS52473.2021.9422841.
Bell, D. (1979) The Social Framework of the Information Society. First published in M.L. Dertouzos and J. Moses (eds), The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View ( MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979).
Carmi, E., Yates, S., Lockley, E. and Pawluczuk, A. (2020) Data citizenship: rethinking data literacy in the age of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. Internet Policy Review, 9(2).
Castells, M. (2010) The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gondwe, G., Madrid-Morales, D., Tully, M. and Wasserman, H. (2025) Misinformation and digital inequalities: Comparing how different demographic groups get exposed to and engage with false information. Mass Communication and Society 29(1).
Goodfellow, T. and Jackman, D. (2023) Controlling the Capital: Political Dominance in the Urbanising World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gulyas, A., Jenkins, J. and Bergstroem, A. (2023) Places and spaces without news: The contested phenomenon of news deserts, Media and Communication, 11(3).
Jackson, V. (2025) Knowledge Institutions and Resisting ‘Truth Decay’. In: R. Krotoszynski Jr, Koltay, A. and Garden, C. Disinformation, Misinformation and Democracy. Legal Approaches in Comparative Context. Cambridge University Press.
Mandanipour, A. (2011) Knowledge Economy and the City: Spaces of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
May, T. and Perry, B. (2017) Cities and the Knowledge Economy: Promise, Politics and Possibilities. London: Routledge.
Moisio, S. and Rossi, U. (2024) The Urban Field: Capital and Governmentality in the Age of Technomonopoly, Colombia: Colombia University Press.
Schlumberger, O., Edel, M., Maati, A., & Saglam, K. (2024) How authoritarianism transforms: A framework for the study of digital dictatorship. Government and Opposition, 59(3).
Stephens, M., Poon, J. and Tan, G. (2023) Misinformation in the Digital Age: An American Infodemic. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Trijsburg, I., Sullivan, H., Park, E., Bonotti, M., Costello, P., Nwokora, Z., Pejic, D., Peucker, M. & Ridge, W. (2024) Disinformation in the City: Response Playbook. The University of Melbourne. DOI 10.26188/26866972