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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the administrative problematisations of conflict-prone urban tourism (e.g. noise) as political processes predetermining the future of city tourism. It is shaped by today’s administrative ways of knowing increasing visitor pressure as an issue for urban (tourism) development.

The problematisation of conflictive urban tourism in Berlin is used as case study and lens to analyse how administrative bodies see conflictive tourism like a tourist city. Drawing on Mariana Valverde’s idea of Seeing Like a City (2011), the paper demonstrates how disparate governmental bodies see and reduce the complexity of conflicts resulting from tourism in order to handle it. The authors use policy documents as the basis for the analysis.

The paper provides empirical insights about how political knowledge on urban tourism conflicts is produced in Berlin. The marginalisation of these conflicts on the federal state level seemingly aces out the calls for action on the borough level (Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg). According to these disparate modes of problematisation, older and younger governmental gazes on conflictive tourism and its future relevance interrelate in contingent combination.

This paper fills a gap in the existing urban tourism literature, by focussing on the definition of policy problems by governmental bodies as powerfully linked to the availability of solutions.

This chapter elucidates how digital citizenship regimes may be rescaling nation-states. In order to shed light on this phenomenon, the chapter introduces and answers three main research questions to unfold the content of this book as follows: (1) How will nation-states in Europe evolve in the aftermath of the emerging digital citizenship regimes? (2) Against the backdrop of the COVID-19, will the urban age reconfigure the technopolitics of European nation-states through new digital citizenship regimes (Moisio, 2018)? (3) And ultimately, will Europe evolve towards a post-national technopolity from a platform of established nation-states headed for a city-regionalised federal network of nations determined voluntarily and democratically through blockchain (Bauböck & Orgad, 2019; Calzada, 2018a, 2022; Calzada & Bustard, 2022; De Filippi & Lavayssiére, 2020; De Filippi, Mann, & Reijers, 2020; Keating, 2017; Keating, Jordana, Marx, & Wouters, 2019; Orgad & Bauböck, 2018)?

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: in the first part, we will provide comprehensive, state-of-the-art urban and visual studies across the domains of visibility, urban aesthetics and the legitimate use of the urban. We will show that what we see is foremost what is accessible and legitimate as a vision, while the urban provides multiple realms of invisibility that are often neglected or rendered invisible. Art, architecture, urbanism and place-making will be used as examples of these dynamics.

In the second part of the chapter, we will present a research study on the decolonial practices of re-signification of colonial urban traces. Despite the dominant representation of Italians as ‘good people’ (a local version of ‘white innocence’), in recent years, Italy has witnessed a new interest stemming from bottom-up local movements dealing with colonial legacy in the urban space. We will show a research example (‘Decolonising the City. Visual Dialogues in Padova’) based on participatory video, arts-based methods and walking methods.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a growing interest in the potential of movement-based artistic practices for exploring aspects of the urban experience. As a visual artist and a geographer, I have become increasingly interested in how the movement-based practice of performative walking might be used as an ‘inventive method’ for examining and understanding aspects of how we live in cities.

In this chapter, I draw upon the insights gained from four recent projects to explore performative walking's potential as a mode of enquiry. These projects were conducted in and around Edinburgh, Scotland, between 2016 and 2019. Each project was designed to create an affective ‘friction’ and enhance participants' sensitivity to space and place through practices such as hyper-slow walking, repetitive walks, walking in the dark and creating spaces for imaginary games. The projects demonstrated to me that performative walking can help uncover emotional and hidden geographies by combining, and bringing to bear upon these spaces, the visual, sensory, historical, mythical, remembered, personal, projected and, importantly, the imagined.

I conclude that performative walking is a valuable form of research which should be given parity with other forms of urban inquiry, such as public consultations, in dialogues about our future cities. Furthermore, I propose that attempts should be made by those interested in developing ‘inventive’ methods in urban inquiry, including those interested in developing creative geographies, to evaluate more systematically the contribution that performative walking might make to ways in which we understand, and develop, our cities.

Insofar as the digital layer cannot be detached from the current democratic challenges of the 21st century including neoliberalism, scales, civic engagement and action research-driven co-production methodologies; this chapter advances trends, aftermaths and emancipatory strategies for the post-pandemic technopolitical democracies. Consequently, it suggests a democratic toolbox encompassing four intertwined trends, aftermaths and emancipations including (1) the context characterised by the algorithmic nations, (2) challenges stemming from data sovereignty, (3) mobilisation seen from the digital rights perspective and (4) grassroots innovation embodied through data co-operatives. This chapter elucidates that in the absence of coordinated and interdependent strategies to claim digital rights and data sovereignty by algorithmic nations, on the one hand, Big Tech data-opolies, and on the other hand, the GDPR led by the European Commission might bound (negatively) and expand (positively), respectively, algorithmic nations' capacity to mitigate the negative side effects of the algorithmic disruption in Western democracies.

Extreme events are the occasion for many people’s encounters with climate change. Though causation is complex and no one event is directly attributable to climate change, when we consider Cassandra, we can consider what people encounter in assistance after an extreme event. This chapter takes the case of assistance to displaced people after Katrina to explore how care and surveillance were intertwined. Methods include analysis of government documents as well as interviews. When we consider assistance people receive, we often focus on the intended assistance and how it worked or did not. Evaluation is difficult, not least because criteria for determining what it means to work are uncertain. However, if we include the process of gaining assistance as part of the experience, we broaden concerns from the instrumental outcomes to the mixed messages people get in assistance. Assistance appears in a context, where the most vulnerable people have reasons to mistrust government and nonprofits, and where in the United States assistance has come intertwined with supervisory rules, a focus on getting people to work, and a need to manage criminal histories. Trust in government may be limited, emergency care can operate outside ordinary legal frameworks when providers are new, and legal accountability for assistance may be experienced as confining, despite caregivers’ intent.

Northern Ireland (NI) has pervasively been a fragile and often disputed city-regional nation. Despite NI's slim majority in favour of remaining in the European Union, de facto Brexit, post-pandemic challenges and the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) have revealed a dilemma: people of all political hues have started to question aspects of their own citizenship. Consequently, this chapter suggests an innovative approach called ‘Algorithmic Nations’ to better articulate its emerging/complex citizenship regimes for this divided and post-conflict society in which identity borders and devolution may be facilitated through blockchain technology. This chapter assesses implications of this dilemma for a city-regionalised nation enmeshed within the UK, Ireland and Europe: NI through Belfast, its main metropolitan hub. The chapter explores digital citizenship in NI by applying ‘Algorithmic Nations’ framework particularly relating to intertwined (1) cross-bordering, (2) critical awareness, (3) digital activism and (4) post-pandemic realities and concludes with three dilemmas and how ‘Algorithmic Nations’ framing could better integrate NI's digital citizenship.

This chapter develops a conceptual taxonomy of five emerging digital citizenship regimes: (1) the globalised and generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four intertwined, non-mutually exclusive and non-generalisable new technopoliticalised and city-regionalised digital citizenship regimes in certain European nation-states’ urban areas; (2) algorithmic citizenship, which is driven by blockchain and has allowed the implementation of an e-Residency programme in Tallinn; (3) liquid citizenship, driven by dataism – the deterministic ideology of big data – and contested through claims for digital rights in Barcelona and Amsterdam; (4) metropolitan citizenship, as revindicated in reaction to Brexit and reshuffled through data co-operatives in Cardiff; and (5) stateless citizenship, driven by devolution and reinvigorated through data sovereignty in Barcelona, Glasgow and Bilbao. This chapter challenges the existing interpretation of how these emerging digital citizenship regimes together are ubiquitously rescaling the associated spaces/practices of European nation-states.