Pauline McGuirk

AI is emerging as a transformative force likely to rework multiple aspects of work, social life, cities, and, by implication, the housing system. Indeed, numerous institutions such as the World Ban...

Debates on the relationship between urban spaces and creative industries have traversed multiple dimensions and spatialities. Yet, with some notable exceptions, analytical focus rarely lands on domestic space. This article engages with the domestic geographies of creative work in the city to explore the growing centrality of home both as a locus for this work and as material–affective infrastructure sustaining creative production. Drawing on longitudinal research with musicians in Sydney, Australia, we use the lens of creative practitioners’ experience through COVID-19 – wherein home and neighbourhood were necessarily centred – to unpack the intensification of home’s importance to creative work. The article explores how home, understood relationally as encompassing home–neighbourhood, plays a pivotal role as an informal, low-risk and supportive creative production space. Relational spaces of home – enrolling kitchens, bedrooms, home studios and gardens, as well as nearby local venues and scenes in the self-reinforcing affects of creative collaboration and performance – provide vital material–affective infrastructure for the process of collaborative creativity. Participants revealed the geographies of ‘creative homes in creative neighbourhoods’ fashioned via the self-intensifying affects of levity, appreciation and sociality, enabling and supporting ongoing creation. Home–neighbourhoods were central to worlds of creative work, intensified by COVID-19’s tempering effect alongside digitalisation, assetification and financialisation. Foregrounding the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism, housing (in)security and creative work, we conceptualise home–neighbourhood in relation to the emerging geographies of hybrid and home-supported work, with key implications for urban cultural and housing policy.

A key pathway for realising energy transitions in the built environment is through the development of a robust, skilled workforce that is equipped to identify and deliver potential energy savings. This chapter draws on insights gained from a two-year interdisciplinary qualitative project on built environment energy transitions, delivered in partnership with the Australian government and industry. We look to the experiences of the vocational teachers tasked with training and professional development of the “fridgie” workforce – the skilled technicians who are responsible for the maintenance, repair and upgrade of Heating, Ventilation, Air-Conditioning & Refrigeration (otherwise known as HVAC&R) systems in the built environment. Teachers working in the Australian vocation sector play an important navigational role between current training and educational programmes, and the expectations of industry and government responses to energy futures. Yet HVAC&R teachers, and the centrality of their roles within the formal sites where training happens, are a largely invisible and unheralded resource. We find HVAC&R teachers to be important “middle actors” for delivering the energy transitions required to meet global climate change commitments. We suggest that HVAC&R teachers offer a unique opportunity for enhancing existing skills and training outcomes, and to meet the changing workforce and skills demands associated with future energy transitions.

Fuentenebro et al.'s (2025) intervention on geographies of philanthropy provides a welcome prompt for geographers to engage more extensively with philanthropy's undeniable socio-political significance. My commentary focuses on the authors’ proposition and disaggregation of ‘the philanthropic complex’. Useful as the proposition is, I argue we will be well advised to resist the urge to allow ‘the complex’ to sediment as a macro-concept. Geographical engagements with philanthropy will benefit from engaging with more fully relational thinking and an insistent focus on practice to understand how philanthropy's powers and capacities are assembled and, more generatively, to identify the potential to disassemble and even to redirect philanthropy's impacts.

In this paper, we extend current debates around urban Artificial Intelligence (hereafter “urban AI”) by outlining new modes of framing or conceptualizing urban AI, understanding its trajectory, and...

The era of urban artificial intelligences has begun. It is already difficult to imagine urban futures without artificial intelligence (AI). In this final chapter, we draw on the volume’s empirical findings to explore the repercussions of urban AI and give evidence of how the emergence of AI in cities is reshaping urban society, urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban planning and urban sustainability. Subsequently, we demonstrate how the city is influencing the evolution of AI, by moulding its physical manifestations in actually existing spaces and determining its very intelligence. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to unpacking similarities between this collection’s case studies of AI urbanism and well-known practices of smart urbanism. Here, we highlight connections with past and present smart-city initiatives, as well as points of departure that suggest the formation of a novel AI urbanism. We conclude the volume by discussing the implications of the emergence of urban AI for urban theory and the future of cities.