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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
How is life in digital cities changing what it means to be human?
In this perceptive book, Myria Georgiou sets out to investigate the new configuration of social order that is taking shape in today’s cities. Although routed through extractive datafication, compulsive connectivity, and regulatory AI technologies, this digital order nonetheless displaces technocentrism and instead promotes new visions of humanism, all in the name of freedom, diversity, and sustainability. But the digital order emerges in the midst of neoliberal instability and crises, resulting in a plurality of contrasting responses to securing digitally mediated human progress. While corporate, media, and state actors mobilize such positive sociotechnical imaginaries to promise digitally mediated human progress, urban citizens and social movements propose alternative pathways to autonomy and dignity through and sometimes against digital technologies.
Investigating the dynamic workings of technology and power from a transnational and comparative perspective, this book reveals the contradictory claims and struggles for the future of digital cities and their humanity. In doing so, it will enrich understandings of digital urbanism, critical data studies, and critical humanist studies.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
1 The Digital Order of Cities: For People, by the People?
Recentring the human
Why now? Technological and humanistic convergences
Defining the digital city
Writing digital cities through the intertwined geographies of humanity
Ordering the digital city
From mediations of order to the digital order
The digital order and its contradictions
Aims and structure of this book
2 The Competing Humanisms of the Digital City
The ideology of the digital order: Popular humanism
The contradictions of the digital order: Demotic humanism
Against the digital order: Critical humanism
A critical humanist epistemology
A critical humanist theory
A critical humanist methodology
3 Popular Humanism: The Sociotechnical Imaginaries of the Digital Order
The rising force of popular humanist imaginaries
Mediating imaginaries of humancentric digital urbanism: Media and corporate discourses
From growth to rights and diversity: Policy imaginaries for the digital city
Imagining the human: The order of discourse of the digital city
Conclusion: A progressive discourse, a humanism without responsibilities
4 Demotic Humanism: The Liminal Subject of the Digital Order
The critical epistemology of demotic humanism
Liminality: The transitionality of the digital order
Becoming human in the digital city
Experience
Affect
Agency
Conclusions: The struggle of becoming urban human
Notes
5 Critical Humanism: Against the Digital Order
Critical humanism as praxis
Epistemological blind spots: Why we need a humanist reading of the digital city
For a critical humanism
Against presentism and technodeterminism
The values of critical humanism
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Being Human in Digital Cities
Myria Georgiou
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Myria Georgiou 2024
The right of Myria Georgiou to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3079-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3080-9(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936994
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
The journey towards the completion of this book was long, exciting, sometimes difficult. But, more than anything, it was a journey with amazing companions – colleagues, participants, friends, family. This project has truly benefited from intellectual insights generously offeredby a number of colleagues. I am grateful to Lilie Choularaki for inspiring conversations and thorough feedback throughout the project; to Nick Couldry and to Wendy Willems for their close read of chapters in the making and their challenging but encouraging feedback; to Giorgia Aiello, Christoph Lindner, John Downey, Scott McQuire, Alison Powell, and Scott Rodgers for sharing thought-provoking feedback at different stages of my writing. I am indebted to colleagues who invited me to discuss the ideas and research behind the book at the University of Melbourne, the University of Stockholm, the University of Southern California, the University of Oregon, and, of course, at my home institution, the LSE. The Urban Communication Foundation and its co-directors, especially Susan Drucker and Gary Gumpert, have been wonderful co-travellers in the long journey of researching and debating urban communication. The colleagues who shared their expertise and showed patience and generosity of spirit while we were working on the project Digital Makings of the City of Refuge have brought great inspiration and support to the development of some of the ideas and material discussed in this book. I am particularly indebted to Deena Dajani, Suzanne Hall, Giles Lane, and Marcia Chandra, as well as to Kristina Kolbe, Afroditi Koulaxi, and Vivi Theodoropoulou for sharing research experiences in Athens, Berlin, and London. My ySKILLS colleagues Alia Zaki in London and Leen d’Haenens, Veronica Donoso, and Emilie Bossen in Belgium, and also the Athens journalist and good friend Ioanna Niaoti, through her support of my fieldwork in Greece, were wonderful partners in respectfully engaging with young refugees at Europe’s urban margins.
Many of the intellectual conversations behind the book took place during my travels and were conducted with the colleagues who showed me incredible generosity and hospitality, while helping me to recognize the connections of the urban world, and also the many layers of their particular cities. The Annenberg School at the University of Southern California has been a welcoming host during my Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship, and I am particularly thankful to Sandra Ball-Rokeach’s encouraging spirit and her always big heart in sharing her ideas, her office, and her home. Sarah Banet-Weiser offered warm encouragement and intellectual stimulation, and so did dear colleagues François Bar, Matt Bui, and Hernan Galperin, while Tanita Enderes provided great research support during my fieldwork. Saskia Witterborn hosted me in Hong Kong and helped me to understand the city as a distinct and global site of communication, while Yong-Chan Kim facilitated my discovery of the many complex and contradictory sides of Seoul and Songdo. I cannot thank them enough for sharing ideas and for offering invaluable guidance and mediating fieldwork support that helped me to conduct research in those locations. I am also indebted to Alejandro Medina for his support in Havana, which was instrumental to my getting to know the city beyond the surface. And Laura Guimarães Corrêa was both an insightful co-traveller to Havana and a generous host during my visiting professorship at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. I am grateful for your hospitality and inspirational conversations. And, of course, my biggest appreciation goes to the many participants in the research behind the book; it is their agency, their intellect, and their experiences of injustice and resistance that kept reminding me who it is that we do research for.
The intellectual and ethico-political challenges I encountered across cities drove this project, but I would not have managed this journey without the love and friendship of those close to me. Many of them are the colleagues already mentioned – good and trusted friends. I am also deeply thankful to Rosslyn Bender, Gareth Dale, Wendy Dembo, Amira Lopez, Lucy Nabijou, Andreas Onoufriou, Nancy Thumim, and Natasa Vourna for their amazing friendship in Athens, London, and Los Angeles. My warmest thanks go to my wonderful family, Kevin, Leon, and Elektra, who never stopped encouraging me and holding my hand, and to my parents, Clara and Aris, whose love and commitment to justice taught me how to engage with the world and how to never lose hope.
1The Digital Order of CitiesFor People, by the People?
Today, like almost every day now, I leave my car at home and go for a local walk. What has become a daily routine is the most ordinary response to some of the acute crises of our times: environmental, economic, epidemiological.
While walking, I listen to a podcast debating humanism, and at the same time I keep tapping ‘deny’, ‘deny’ on my phone screen, as apps keep asking to locate my movement in the city. Soon after, the haptic technologies I carry on my body start vibrating with reminders of my next Zoom meeting.
As I walk down the street, I come across billboards that advertise stuff, different stuff, but most of them share a common imagery: happy smiley people on their phones or on screens. When I turn into a side street, I am faced with graffiti that take over the commercial billboards and that signpost with hashtags their expansive intended audience: a fading #MeToo and a colourful #BLM are only two of the powerful reminders that the city is an agonistic space of material and symbolic struggles.
I then return home, which is not only where I live but also where I now work for the most part. As I browse through online resources on digital cities, I read ‘Of the people, for the people, by the people’ on a headline praising smart cities in the Telegraph (2019) – a British newspaper. I then notice how Google (2021) advertises its jobs: ‘Googlers’ … insight, imagination, and a healthy disregard for the impossible’. And alongside those I come across the promise of Centre for London (2021), a major thinktank, to digitally advance ‘a shared vision for London with Londoners’.
This is all very interesting, I am thinking, as I observe how the media, corporations, and the state promote digital change by talking about people, not about technology. The thought is interrupted by the human in the next room: my daughter, who keeps pinging me with selfies of herself and the cat.
The banality of what I described here is familiar to many – though not to everyone, not everywhere. These descriptions represent a glimpse into the ordinary – especially, but not exclusively, in the metropoles of the global North. In their ordinariness, they reflect a life that cannot be acted upon or imagined outside digitization. Yet these banal descriptions also call for reflection on a much larger problematic: the uneven but deep entanglement of technology, power, and urban life that we take for granted but still do not fully understand in its implications – both for cities and for the humans (and other beings) who occupy them.
The city I’m talking about is the kind of city now ordinarily referred to as ‘the digital city’. This is far from being an unexplored area of scholarship, of course. Inspiring and influential research on what is now called ‘smartcitization’ (the process of making cities technologically ‘smart’), on infrastructural change, and, more broadly, on platform urbanism has tackled critical questions about the transformation of cities into networked, platformized spaces of constant tracking, surveillance, and commodification of life within them. While learning from this literature, broadly labelled digital urbanism, I also note how much it situates its central enquiry on data, infrastructures, and automation. Humans often appear on the receiving end of digitization and its data-driven economic and spatial order. Humans are less studied as agents involved in the making of digital cities – cities that are imagined, regulated, and experienced through technological innovation – unless they are in positions of authority. Urban humanity often remains an opaque category, often silent, often passive, often irrelevant to explorations of the relationship between urbanization, technology, and power. Relegating humans to being mere recipients rather than agents of change displaces questions of power but also of the right to the city. Seeing the human again is an urgent responsibility, if we are to understand what is at stake in studying cities and technology, especially at times of racial, gender, and transphobic violence often intensified through technologies of surveillance, control, and data extraction. How we live, live together, but also apart; how we write the stories of our lives or how our storytelling is dismissed; and how we enjoy or are being denied the right to the present and future urban world are all questions that we need to recentre in our research on digital change.
This book argues that recentring the human in digital scholarship is a necessity if we are to fully understand the workings of power, if we are to fully grasp digitization’s embeddedness in the making of urban structures and superstructures. We will see how an unstable but tenacious urban order is planned, performed, and sometimes resisted on platforms and networks in order to sustain social peace in cities that experience perpetual crises – economic, environmental, epidemiological. Paradoxically, while configured digitally, this order is constituted not by displacing, but by reclaiming the human.
The enquiry into what it means to recentre the human and why we need to decentre technology comes out of my own observations across the urban world. The question that drives the book is this: what if we start from the human rather than from technology when we study digital cities? The book delves into the exploration of the digital city, being driven by this fundamental, if paradoxical, observation: that humans, not innovation, now appear as the driving force of order. Why is this shift – imagining and planning digital cities through the human rather than through technology – happening? And why now?
Ridden by crises – economic, environmental, epidemiologic – cities are fragile. We see the urban poor pushed out by gentrification, which is at the same time celebrated on social media and their selfie testaments of ‘authentic’ city ‘discoveries’; we see urban migrants’ rights diminished, as automated surveillance filters access to health and education; and we even see how AI threatens to replace so much of what humans do in terms of work and decision-making, generating panic on cities’ material and digital streets. How will humans be and become urban, if their sense of security in neighbourhoods and cities fades away? What future can they imagine, when they are subjected to predictive policing and to automated decisions, made for them but without them? And how will they share the city, if the rules of engagement with friends, neighbours, lovers, and co-workers become algorithmically mediated?
Paradoxically, the more power seems to slip away from urban humans’ control, the more important the human becomes. The more datafication and AI threaten to displace human actions and intelligence, the more prominent the ontological and philosophical questions about the future of humanity become, and not only academically but also in conversations that expand from the media to the dinner table. Discourses of fear and hope for cities full of either parasitic humans or laidback consumers served by robots are captions not of a mere distant fantasy, but of a fast-approaching future. At least that’s what we hear on news media, see in fiction, and experience in everyday conversation.
In conditions of such fast change and uncertainty, social peace and consensus also become fragile. Even as digital advancements – from tech-driven gentrification to surveilled cities – raise fears of humans losing control, another wave of change appears to emerge: protesters around the world demand humane futures, cities where dignity, safety, and respect for life supersede greed and economic and patriarchal domination over existence. Most prominently, Black Lives Matter – par excellence an urban movement that comes out of long histories of urban marginalization and violence, but also of protest – puts human life at the core of its struggle. But this is not a struggle for bare life; as so many movements show, be they feminist, LGBTQI, or environmental, the struggle for the present and the future of cities is one for dignity, autonomy, and freedom.
Given the fragility of a city where fears and hopes for the future converge, where dissensus and consensus are precariously balanced, a new order is being mobilized. This is an order that has to work with and for fragile times, that entangles the promise of diverse, sustainable, and open urban societies to technologized futures. This is what I refer to as ‘the digital order’. It is in the name of better and more inclusive urban societies, an always-to-come better city, a ‘present future’ (Kitchin 2019b), that investment in infrastructures of connection and control is now promoted; it is by centring urban humanity in digital urban futures that sociotechnical imaginaries gain their high currency; it is in the promise of progressive cities through mediated sociality, joy, and work that platforms and networks become seductive, not threatening, technologies to users.
Recentring the human
As the possibility – or impossibility – of order is now recentred on humans, ‘for people and by the people’, the city becomes a site where claims to life and values for twenty-first-century humanity are gaining centre-stage. As I will show, digital cities have emerged as exemplary sites for an urban world of revamped and competing humanisms: a popular humanism through which the digital order is articulated, a demotic humanism through which the city is lived, a critical humanism through which life and freedom for humans and other beings are and can be reimagined. We will thus see how corporate and state actors aim to maintain hegemony via a popular humanism. Popular humanism mobilizes techno-solutionist promises for and on behalf of the people: technologies are seemingly necessary for better, more sustainable, and equitable cities. This is, in Mosco’s (2005) words, the digital sublime: the myth that technology, transcending time, space, and politics-as-usual, will transform society. We will also see how urban humans’ everyday reveals the contradictory workings of human agency that operate through demotic humanism; demotic humanism is expressed through ordinary and creative digital practices in which what it means to be and become human is played out in everyday uses of the digital, from TikTok performances of urban identity to hashtag activism. And we will conclude by examining how the political risks and potentialities of the digital city’s revived humanisms demand a critical humanist resistance and response; critical humanism will be discussed as a conceptual and political alternative to the false promises of popular humanism, one that sets forward pathways and values of dignity, autonomy, and freedom for being and becoming human in the current historical, spatial, and technological conjuncture.
Drawing on research across eight cities over a period of seven years, I will show why, in the urban stories of digital change we tell, we need to pay more attention to humans, both as representations and as actors. Of course, recognizing humans as actors of technological change is not a new claim. Humans always mattered, and the tension between them and technology has shaped key debates in social sciences, especially within media and communications scholarship – since its birth. In this book I start by advocating scholarship that investigates how deeply, even if differentially, the human is entangled in the social, economic, and political struggles of digital cities. This claim is central to the urban world – a world where most of the world population lives (UN Habitat 2019), where inequalities are most intense (United Nations 2022a), and where, even if unevenly, order is now advanced through technological innovation.
Throughout the book I deliberately speak of humans, and more particularly of urban humans, as against other categories of analysis, such as users or audiences, consumers or citizens, subjects or selves (though I use all of these as secondary and explanatory concepts when I refer to particular kinds of human acts and representations). Privileging the human is intentional and situates the book within trajectories of critical social sciences and humanities that recognize human agency and embodied and reflexive action as fundamental to understanding societal, cultural, and political change. Specifically, I understand the human as an important concept, even if it is always unstable and plural, or precisely because it is so. The human, in the plurality of the concept’s significations, is a subject with whom and through whom research is conducted. As Ingold (2006: 259) reminds us, we cannot assume a natural definition of humanity, as there is ‘no human nature that has escaped the current of history’. The meanings of ‘the human’ are shaped through action and through discourse. Activity, Ingold (2006) argues, shapes humans; and it does so alongside ‘a collective social nature of being human … connected, relational, valued’, adds Plummer (2021: 5). At the same time we need to understand how the human is always discursively constituted and claimed for within social order and through ‘highly problematic assumptions at cognitive, theological and normative levels’ (Chernilo 2017: 11).
The dyadic constitution of the human through action and through discourse (as well as their inevitable entanglement, of course) drives the conceptual and methodological orientation of this project. First, the book understands humans through their critical and creative capabilities to act, even in contexts of momentous technological and corporate power. Methodologically, this means seeing but also understanding how humans are being but also becoming under conditions of always limited possibilities, through embodied but also narrative acts that generate stories and feelings about the self and about human and non-human others. Humans are subjects with whom this urban story is written. Second, the book conceives of the human as a discursive category, mobilized to impose, but also to resist, the digital order. Methodologically, this means studying the manifestations and consequences of how the human becomes a discursive category used by different actors, from advertisers to protesters, to make specific claims and to justify specific ideologies at particular times and spaces. The human, as actor and as a discursive category, is of course differentially constituted within and across the colonial, postcolonial, and capitalist geographies of non-isomorphic distribution of power and of claims and access to rights and resources. As many city governments, for example, set digital skills at the heart of their social inclusion policies, they reframe the causes and effects of social inequalities by promising that the lives of those at the margins will become better through ‘digital integration’. As corporations invite consumers to put their faith in smartphone affordances to support their healthier and safer lifestyle, they advance imaginaries of cities made by and for digitally capable individuals. And when local activists call neighbours to sign online petitions to save their local park, they enhance imaginaries of urban humans who now think and act as digital citizens. As these examples show, the humans of the digital city are anything but a singular, natural category. Rather, urban humans are subjects of competing humanist claims made for them and on their behalf.
Humanism (or rather humanisms, in the plural) becomes an important category in this book, alongside the human. Unlike the human, who is experienced and imagined, humanism is a stance – a set of beliefs and practices, ‘a human search for meaning’ (Plummer 2021: 5). I did not anticipate, or even imagine, the importance of humanism(s) when I started this project. However, in my research I have repeatedly observed the persistent return of the human in the many ways in which cities are imagined, regulated, and claimed – from centres of governance all the way to the urban street. While antihumanism and posthumanism have hugely influenced digital urbanism scholarship (which I will discuss later), I here call for renewed attention to the human, both as an empirical category of significance – asserted in the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourse and practice of technologized cities – and as an analytical category of importance – captured in the contradictory mobilizations of humanist values of diversity, equality, dignity, and freedom to affirm or challenge order, and consequently power.
Humanism, as we will see in detail in the next chapter and across the book, becomes a site of ideas, representations, and performances that capture fundamental struggles for the future of urban societies. These are struggles between a revamped liberal or, more accurately, post-neoliberal, western-centric, and inevitably exclusionary promise of human liberation through technological progress on the one hand and, on the other, a renewed ethical imperative for equality, freedom, and respect for all life – what Fassin (2019: 37) describes as a humanism after posthumanism and antihumanism: a ‘post-posthumanism’. I thus recognize the need to reflect rather than ignore the return of the human in digital societies, especially in cities. With Fassin, I recognize that this requires a ‘critical approach to human worlds in a time when they are faced with multiple menaces that affect both humans and non-humans, capitalism’s victims and destroyed environments, war casualties and ruined cities, displaced populations and threatened species, refugees and the planet’, all of which ‘is the result of human actions and therefore involves human responsibility – notwithstanding the ambiguity of the word human’ (ibid.).
The proposed analysis might seem out of sync with antihumanist and posthumanist critiques centred on the infrastructural ordering of the city through platforms and their aggressive profiteering, or with the rising concerns about AI replacing human work and agency. Yet, I claim, this is a necessary reshuffle of our conceptualization of both the digital and the human. This is even more so in times of crises, when, as I observed in my research, the struggles between securing order in crisis and finding hope for a life beyond crisis become recentred on humanistic values, as these are revived, revamped, and reimagined through competing claims to democratic and free societies. In developing my argument, I highlight the symbolic and material constitution of digital cities as more than merely infrastructural or corporate projects led by platform- and machine-driven rationalities. Cities, I argue, are uneven and complex spaces of life, meaning-making, and also hope; they are not just spaces for technological applications and experimentations. As Natale and Guzman (2022: 627) argue, we need to ‘move toward a conceptualization of culture in which machines are intertwined within human systems of meaning-making’, a research field that has become marginal to scholarship, since the latter is often fixated on the machine and its own ‘distinct’ power and agency. Yet, while scholarship often spotlights the machine, powerful actors make claims to life and agency through the promise of technologically induced human progress, reminding us that digital change is a complex project with intertwined economic, social, and cultural stakes.
Why now? Technological and humanistic convergences
The digital city’s currency and appeal have grown at times of urban and global crises of the status quo – economic, political, ethical. As one of the major contemporary undertakings promising urban transformation, the digital city is par excellence a post-neoliberal project, as will be discussed later in more detail. Characteristic of many post-neoliberal projects is their ability to bring together otherwise contradictory ideals (Davies and Gane 2021). For the digital city, this is the paradoxical convergence of market economics and platformization’s extractive datafication on the one hand, and the promise of diverse, sustainable, and inclusive urban societies on the other. The paradox explains why mistrust – public, political, academic – towards platforms and their digital economy is on the rise while at the same time citizens as well as elites invest in infrastructures that secure their domination across public and private urban life. What sustains this contradiction, I argue, is not infrastructural capabilities alone but also the symbolic power of digitization, persistently represented as a force for good. This symbolic power contradicts the realities of technologically enhanced inequalities through gentrification, predictive policing, and automated rationing of public services and elevates technology still further, to the role of a believable generator of positive change. Such power becomes apparent, we will see, as so many urban actors – corporations, the state, the media, but also civil society – promise a technologically enabled rehumanization of the unequal city. What digital cities bring, we are now told, is not profit, economic growth, and controlled societies, but instead progress, openness, and sustainability. These promises turn into a diffused popular humanism that redefines the project of digital change away from neoliberalism’s technocratic and technodeterministic discourse and instead moves towards a reimagined humancentric technologization in which technology is narrated as working for humans and not the other way around.
It is important to understand these new promises of progress and freedom, both within the history of capitalist modernity, including in its critique (an example is Marx’s confidence that industrial machinery advances human liberation), and within and against the ideological bankruptcy of neoliberalism, expressed most intensively in financial, environmental, and epidemiological crises. Across the world, the rise of the populist right, with its post-truth and nationalist doctrines, has challenged the ideological domination of neoliberalism, reflecting the most visible and threatening forms of post-neoliberalism (Davies and Gane 2021). The appeal of the populist right may reveal the ideological and economic crisis of neoliberalism at the level of the nation. Yet, at the level of the city, we most vividly see the contradictions of this crisis in the urban manifestations of post-neoliberalism. Advancing an order that seamlessly produces consumers and only selectively citizens, platforms, data, and AI encroach on all elements of political, cultural, and social life in the city, promising freedom and autonomy through digital artefacts and infrastructures. Cities have become agonistic sites where the ideological and economic dominance of neoliberalism is both powerful and under attack (Parnell and Robinson 2012). In fact, cities reveal post-neoliberalism as a contradictory, rather than as an altogether new, phase of neoliberalism. Progressive and radical movements contest urban inequalities, as we see in the case of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) revolt across American cities, the feminist acts of disobedience across Latin American and European cities, and city governments’ own defence of the rights of migrants and minorities from Barcelona to Los Angeles. At the same time, it is in cities that commodified expressions of hashtag activism and corporate sponsorship of justice causes mostly emerge, with fashion brands and digital companies incorporating the language and symbols of anti-racism, feminism, and LGBTQI rights in their strategic communication. As cities become hubs for challenging the authority of the racial and neoliberal market and state, the language and means of power and resistance are claimed and reclaimed by different actors. Technology becomes intrinsic in this process, not least as digitization makes the vision of greener, more inclusive, and democratic cities believable. Or this is what the dominant discourse of progressive urban futures claims.
The first aim of the present book is to show how, at times of perpetual economic, environmental, health, and political crises, order is fostered, not through the projected force of technological control or thriving markets, but through a post-neoliberal promise of rehumanized cities. This promise, the argument goes, depends on humancentric conceptions of technology – conceptions that push aside public suspicion of Big Tech and instead promote notions of technology as necessary to a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable urban world. The second aim is to show what is at stake in the rise of competing humanisms that turn the city into a revamped site of social and political struggle for and against order. On one side of this struggle we can see the incorporation of humanist values into digital strategies for the regulation of the city and for the establishment of order against (or within) the fragility of neoliberalism. On the other side we see public, activist, and scholarly discourses and practices that unsettle and sometimes challenge this order, not by dismissing humanist values altogether but by rethinking what it actually means to be and to become human in cities of intense inequalities, forceful datafication, and growing threats to all forms of life. Thus this book examines how the promise of digitally enabled humane urban futures and its contestations are embedded in claiming the right to the city and the right to be and become human in it.
Defining the digital city
I here focus on the digital city, as I understand it to be a symbolic and material construct, constituted differentially and hierarchically across regions of the world, through the convergence of three distinctive forces: an adaptable strategic model for the governance of the city and the development of infrastructures such as fibre-optic and wireless networks and bureaucratic data and connected services; a sociotechnical imaginary that ties human betterment to technological innovation and does so differentially, by linking digital progress to each city’s specific aspirations and problems; and lived experience, in cities where lifeworld and the economy are increasingly but unevenly mediated through digital infrastructures, data, and networked communications. This means that the actors that make the digital city are many: powerful authorities such as governments and corporations, which regulate the city through policies, investment, and profit-generating activities; media, which narrate the city through images and texts that define what is digital and optimal; and urban humans, who experience the city through everyday uses of technologies to manage their needs, desires, and fears.
In developing this discussion, I learned from the literature on digital cities, which brings together observations and debates on infrastructural planning, datafied governance, and sociotechnical imaginaries (Barns 2020; Halegoua 2019; Kitchin 2019a, 2019b; Powell 2021; Rose et al. 2021). This literature moves away from earlier conceptions of the ‘smart city’ as a technocentric project determined by bureaucratic governance and profit-driven infrastructural transformations alone. Instead, it examines how ‘the actually existing smart city’ (Sadowski 2021) brings together rationalities and techniques associated with data, ubiquitous computing, and AI to produce ‘a shift in how societies are managed and controlled’ (Kitchin et al. 2019: 7). Specifically, governmentality in the city moves away from disciplinary top-down governance towards social control, where human behaviour is ‘explicitly or implicitly steered or nudged’ (ibid.) – in other words, where humans’ mobilities, affect, and embeddedness in the city are ordinarily mediated through digital media affordances (Halegoua 2019).
Against the narrow lens of the smart city, I understand the digital city as both disrupting and building upon pre-existing infrastructures of governmental, economic, and social relations. That means two things. First, digital infrastructures alter certain modes of working, socializing, and imagining cities and people through distinctive systems and their affordances – such as platforms, data, AI, and wireless networks. Second, like all infrastructures, they are situated within wider economic, social, and governmental systems through which cities are ordered – for example the market economy, the family, local governance (Halegoua 2019; Larkin 2013). My conception of the digital city also locates its sociotechnical constitution within longer histories of mediation, order, and disorder, as analysed in media and communications and in urban studies literature. Critical urban theory reminds us of the long histories of colonial capitalist economies, which have served the interests of elites through infrastructures of exploitative material conditions, including underpaid and unpaid migrant labour and dispossession of minoritized and indigenous populations (Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer 2012; Cowen 2020). Reminded as we are, in this literature, of the complex and long sociotechnical trajectories of capitalist urban economies, we can understand digitization as an unexceptional, even if distinctly important, form of technologization within longer histories of innovation, and as a form embedded in capitalist structures and superstructures for the accumulation of profit (Mason 2020). I am thus inspired by non-media-centric media studies (Couldry 2004; Krajina, Moores, and Morley 2014) and by research that highlights the situatedness of digitization within histories of mediated and technological urbanism (McQuire 2008, 2016), as well as by research on the many ways of knowing and living the city – which, as Mattern reminds us, ‘is not a computer’ (Mattern 2021).
These interdisciplinary intellectual trajectories allow me to understand digital urbanism as a non-isomorphic, non-teleological process that involves technologies, actors, and differential local, national, and transnational spatialities. The digital city is not singular and homogeneous, but a distinct formation situated within temporal and technological trajectories of digital change. For Sadowski (2021), these transformations involve an initial phase of establishing smart cities as governmental applications of new technologies; a second phase in which platforms attempt ‘to snatch sovereignty’ from government; and a third phase, ‘the most straightforward and most uncertain’, in which corporate and state actors both converge and compete for sovereignty over the city’s territory. This is the city that critical scholarship on smart cities and digital urbanism debates (see Barns 2020; Kitchin 2019a, 2019b; Sadowski 2021; Safransky 2019; Rose et al. 2021). From this interdisciplinary perspective, I also contest conceptions of digitization (and its variations through the language of datafication and platformization) as a unique force that radically changes what was there before, since a ‘pure’, unmediated city has never existed in modernity and a fully programmable city does not exist now either.
From CCTV cameras to news media cameras and, more recently, to smartphone cameras and tracking apps, technologies have become entangled in networks of control and witnessing that have long shaped order and disorder in the city. For Merrifield (2014), what we now observe is the renewal of ordered cities through ‘neo-Haussmannization’: the advance of infrastructures of control and the policing of space and people, especially those at urban margins. Effective infrastructures acting as systems of control are expanded through digital connectivity, which represents more than the mere optimization of surveillance. What we witness, with digitization, is the emergence of an odd pair: control and openness. On the one hand, the infrastructures of surveillance advance and refine urban control as a new form of ‘neo-Haussmannization’. On the other, the infrastructures of content creation, sharing, and decentralized communication promote urban imaginaries of post-Haussmannization, that is, allow us glimpses into the possibility of open or disordered cities. While the contradictory forces of infrastructural connectivity diverge in their distribution and consequences, what brings them together along the converging global trajectory of the digital city is the resolution of state, corporate, and media sectors to promote technological optimization (Horan 2000; Mitchell 1996; Powell 2021). From India to the United Kingdom and from Egypt to Greece, governments now prioritize urban connectivity above many other urban infrastructures, for example those of safe, inclusive, and accessible public space (Datta 2020). We are thus reminded that infrastructures reorder cities and, in their situated formulations, shape the meaning of order itself.
The digital city is built upon present imaginaries, investment, and planning for digital futures, but of course is also situated within the longer trajectories of modernity and conceptions of technological change as a force of good. As wireless networks enable smooth smartphone communication, secure banking exchanges, and fast access to services, different urban actors, from governments to corporations and, of course, to urban humans, commit themselves to enhancing an exciting, functional, and also controlled urban space. But cities are more than infrastructurally controlled spaces. As the subsequent discussion will show, especially in Chapter 4, global trajectories of technological urban transformation are more than corporate and governmental projects. Across boundaries, digital cities are realized through meaning-making processes that call for recentring the human. Urban humans, not technology, have become – or, to some extent, remain – the primary representations; they are agents, ethical subjects who desire, fear, or are expected to enact order though digital work, consumption, and play.
