Who does the city work for?
Where do people play in cities?
What new inequalities are created in cities?
What are the emergent third places in cites?
What new technologies are built for cities?
How do future scenarios of cities seduce policy makers, planners, and designers?
This blog is where I track my interests in 1.) how people use cities, 2.) how cities use people, and 3.) the spatial production of knowledge that comes out of cities.
Urbanism refers to processes that drive people to live in cities. My idea of Digital Urbanisms refers to processes that drive people to online sociality. I am interested in how Digital Urbanism presents a new geography of constraints and mobilities where the materiality of living in cities and its digital infrastructures are becoming mutually constituted. Being urban is not an outcome, it is a process, and this process now takes place online just as much as it takes place offline.
I spoke about Digital Urbanism in China at SXSW, Sleeping in Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users.
Digital Urbanism is also a term that architectural theorists use. While architects focus on the form of the city as a digital space, I employ digital urbanism to refer to the people that inhabit the city and are experiencing the shift where everyday urban life is increasingly mediated by digital tools.
I use Digital Urbanisms in the plural because I want to emphasize that there is more than one digital urban future. Also the url for singular Digital Urbanism wasn't available, so that is how I ended up with a domain name in Monstserrat (.ms), which conveniently makes Digital Urbanisms plural!
I write longer thought pieces on Cultural Bytes and Byes of China. I have like 20 other blogs where I put out more silly than thoughtful, you can find the full list on my website.
I curate a reading list on cities and technology that is continually being updated If you have any readings to add to this list that you or another person has written, please let me know!
email | twitter | website
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"Looking at Gielen’s work, it’s tempting to propose a new branch of the human sciences: geometric sociology, a study of nothing but the shapes our inhabited spaces make. Its research agenda would ask why these forms, angles and geometries emerge so consistently, from prehistoric settlements to the fringes of exurbia. Are sites like these an aesthetic pursuit, a mathematical accident, a calculated bending of property lines based on glitches in the local planning code or an emergent combination of all these factors? Or are they the expression of something buried deep in human culture and the unconscious, something only visible from high above"
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