Tag: digital geography
Uneven development and the anti-politics machine
The Market Value Analysis (MVA), and similar algorithms, perpetuate racial and class-based inequalities by embedding systemic biases into urban planning and the geography of cities under the guise of objectivity. Presented as neutral tools, these algorithms depoliticize decisions, reinforcing the legacies of redlining while prioritizing capital accumulation over equitable development and justifying the abandonment of marginalized communities. [continue reading]
The urban-tech feedback loop
Tech companies are reshaping cities through a feedback loop where consumer behaviors, tracked via smartphones, inform the design of urban spaces tailored to affluent users, reinforcing consumption and deepening inequalities. Using a "data-walk" methodology in Seattle's South Lake Union, we uncovered how surveillance and data collection commodify everyday actions, embedding tech-driven priorities into urban development. To disrupt this cycle, we advocate for inclusive methodologies... [continue reading]
From FOSS to profit
Through tracing the historical evolution of these formats, we uncover how digital labor—whether voluntary, outsourced, or co-opted—plays a role in shaping the operations of for-profit technology firms. Open standards, often associated with transparency and accessibility, paradoxically contribute to proprietary goals as well, serving as gateways through which corporations can attract free labor and build out profitable infrastructures. Companies often adopt open standards and Free... [continue reading]
The Amazon Warehouse
Amazon’s warehouses are vast, windowless spaces, each the size of multiple football fields, where thousands of employees and over half a million robots work in tandem to process immense volumes of packages daily. Coordinated by Amazon's AI-powered AWS platform, robots such as Pegasus and Proteus move products efficiently through these facilities, while delivery drivers are monitored closely by AI systems that regulate their behavior... [continue reading]
Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism
Infrastructure of the built environment affords the collection of data through situated platform services, its circulation through physical ICT infrastructure, and the materials and energy on which this process depends. [continue reading]
Urban Real Estate Technologies
Through this special issue we argue that developing a richer engagement with the role of technology, broadly construed, in reshaping urban property relations is both intellectually significant and politically timely for an engaged urban geography. [continue reading]
Silicon Forest and Server Farms
What inequities are arising in the uneven development of data infrastructures within and beyond cities? How might we extend analyses of data centers and data infrastructures to understand the relationship between computing and socio-natural change? And how might these mappings elucidate new areas for contestation and resistance? What are the possibilities for more sustainable and equitable alternatives in digital economies? This essay perhaps raises... [continue reading]
Data Colonialism Through Accumulation by Dispossession
In this article, we parse a variety of big data definitions to argue that it is only when individual datums by the million, billion, or more are linked together algorithmically that ‘big data’ emerges as a commodity. Such decisions do not occur in a vacuum but as part of an asymmetric power relationship in which individuals are dispossessed of the data they generate in... [continue reading]
Beyond the Screen
We introduce the literature on cognitive-cultural capitalism and third-wave urbanization as markers of contemporary capitalism, producing uneven socio-spatial arrangements across the global-urban system. Synthesis of media and communication studies and political economies of urbanization suggests that both capital accumulation and the social lives of (planetary) urban residents are increasingly mediated and structured by online, digital ICT platforms. We show that digital ICTs are sophisticated... [continue reading]
The Neoliberal Politics of “Smart”
This article investigates how digital technologies in the energy sector are enabling increased value extraction in the cycle of capital accumulation through surveillant processes of everyday energy consumption. We offer critical theory (Gramsci, Foucault) and critical political economy (Marx) as a guide for critical understanding of value creation in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept of... [continue reading]