Guest editor: Raphaël Languillon-Aussel

Digitalisation of urban spaces, especially public spaces, is a long run process that became tangible in the 2000s, but its roots are in the 1970s and even before—at the beginning of the cybernetics age (Mitra and Schwartz, 2001). The telecommunication revolution at the end of the 1990s and the digital revolution in the mid-2000s have externalised computational and digital technologies from private indoor spaces (mainly homes and professional environments) to public external spaces (Eveno, 2014 ; Picon, 2015), leading to the rise of the digital city and its avatars—the smart city, the smart community, the wise city, the safe city, the U-city, the intelligent city, and so forth.

As a result of industrial initiatives, mainly from US companies, the smart city model has quickly and virally spread across the world in the 2010s. Commonly defined as a city structured by the genesis, collection, management, processing, and almost instantaneous analysis o...

Guest editor:

• Thomas Buhler, UMR 6049 ThéMA, Université de Franche-Comté

• Samuel Carpentier-Postel, UMR 6049 ThéMA, Université de Franche-Comté

• Laurent Matthey, Université de Genève

Recently, there has been a wealth of textual data which are becoming increasingly available. Whether it is online media, websites, social networks, or planning documents (Buhler and Lethier, 2019), a vast quantity of data is being uploaded to servers which potentially contains valuable information for the analysis of the discourses of various actors in territorial production (from planners to inhabitants).

At the same time, computer-assisted textual-analysis methods and tools (Lebart and Salem, 1994) have constantly been developed and become more accessible to the academic community. Free open-source tools such as IRAMUTEQ (Ratinaud, 2009) and TXM (Heiden et al 2010) have, for example, greatly facilitated access to software for processing these semantic corpora. Against this background, this issue wishes to ta...

In the context of urban transformation, children's mobility is a field of study in the social sciences that has been growing rapidly over the last twenty years. In this research, we aim to understand how children’s autonomy evolves during a “normative transition” from elementary (T1) to middle school (T2). Children’s autonomy is studied through daily independent travel, types of places visited as well as by observing children’s ability to deal with unexpected and unfamiliar situations.

Based on a longitudinal Mobi’kids survey using mixed methods (GPS travel/stop data; data from prompted recall interviews with children), children’s autonomy (based on independent travel, types of places visited and the ability to deal with unexpected situations) was analyzed over two periods (T1, n=86 and T2, n=56). The results show differences in mobility habits between the suburban and city children (in both T1 and T2), but also the same evolution trend in terms of independent travel while attending...