Theorizing the Digital City: Abstracts from 5 geographers

[I wish that i could’ve attended this session! In the meantime I need to look up each author’s work! - tricia]

AAG - 2010 Annual Meeting, Washington, DC
Session Description: From locative media to cloud computing, smartphones to embedded 2d bar codes, cities are emerging as digital platforms.  Situated within and comprised of the cyber-infrastructure that makes digital environments possible, this new form of urbanism exists as much in a Hertzian space as in the concrete and asphalt of the physical city.  Urban nature has folded around the Internet.  The Internet is creating and recreating urban spaces. Computing experiences are urban experiences and the city is a computer, with far reaching ecological, social, political, educational and health consequences. This session will address how the spread of ubiquitous computing into everyday life is reworking urban forms, changing understandings of community and social networks, raising concern about the reach of surveillance as well as opening up new spaces and techniques for protest.  How is urban space adapting to the new forms the Internet is taking?  What is required to maintain these networks?  Who is included in this new urban reality and who is left out?  How are scholars from architecture, urban planning, and sociology approaching research into this new field and what  contribution can geographers offer to the discussion?  

Key Words: Cloud computing, ubicomp, locative media, social networking, digital city, urbanism, cyberinfrastructure, networked ecologies

Alan Wiig - Temple University
Creating the Digital City: Geographies of the Internet’s Infrastructure

The digital city is here, and although this space has been theorized for at least a decade, there is little research into the infrastructural networks that support these emergent urban landscapes.  While geographers have critically examined the role of traditional infrastructures—water, sewer, streets, electricity, and telephone—in creating modern cities, little attention has been paid to the role of the Internet’s infrastructure in creating urban spaces today.  The geographers that directly study the Internet have traditionally done so either from an economic geography standpoint or from the perspective of the utility of the cyberspace itself.  This presentation aims to address how the Internet reaches our computer screens and mobile phones via the infrastructural networks that ground the technologies in the urban landscape.  This presentation will situate the social and spatial impacts of the digital city’s physical infrastructure:  the data centers and fiber optic cables as well as the hertzian spaces that merge to provide ubiquitous Internet connectivity for the contemporary city.  For example, what is the historic development of urban data centers:  where are they sited and why, and how do these businesses interact with their surroundings.  The methodological utility of different theoretical approaches, ranging from urban political ecology to postmodernism, will be critiqued and then applied using central Philadelphia as a case study.  Understanding how we conceptualize proximity and how the scale and interdependence of interactions are fundamentally changing within these networked ecologies is a needed component for studying urban spaces today and into the future.

Keywords:

Internet, Infrastructure, Digital City, Networked Ecologies, Urban, Philadelphia

Michele Masucci - Temple University
Citizen Cartography in the Digital City

Scholars concerned with critical cartography, cyberinfrastructure, and digital inclusion point out that the movement to rapid mapping and broadening map making communities can paradoxically be at odds with the challenges faced in creating maps that reflect (a) fair representation of information, (b) high quality and easy to interpret visualizations of spatial information, and (c) consideration for the impacts of their use in decision making and representation processes. This discussion will build on discourses of critical cartography and participatory mapping through focusing on the analysis of the emergent widespread use of interactive web map tools in the context of the digital city. I plan to examine the implications of this trend for the study of (a) digital inclusion and the digital divide, (b) virtual representations of place, (c) the effects and transformation of cities as spaces shaped by digital technologies and cyberinfrastructure; and (d) the importance of technology literacy as a pathway for engaging web mapping technologies and the larger cyberinfrastructure transformations.  The emergence of web enabled mapping has reshaped discussions about cartography precisely because specialized training is not required to create maps, gather and share spatial information, and tailor maps in relation to decision making, advocacy, or planning. Nonetheless, the politics of digital inclusion involve the inextricable effects of barriers to accessing information and communication technologies, the ways in which those barriers mitigate access to services and resources, and how those barriers are shaped and impacted differently by groups with different levels of societal empowerment.

Keywords:

web 2.0, citizen cartography, digital city, cyberinfrastructure, digital inclusion

Lorena Munoz - Westfield State College
‘Sense of Place’ and the Digital Urban Landscape: Students Navigate and (Re)create Everyday Lived Spaces Through Digital Technologies.

As cities become spaces of digital platforms with different forms of accessible technologies available to its residents, it is imperative to understand ‘how’ residents experience these spaces as they navigate their every day lives.  This paper is focused on the experiences of high school students who participated in the Building Information Technology Skills (bITS) program, as they engaged with different urban spaces as a platform towards learning and using digital technologies. The students created ‘sense of place’ via their practice and interactions with community maps, blogs, web mapping and digital photographs which aided in their spatial understanding of their own urban communities. The students gained complex understandings of geography as a way of life (not just a spatial concept) and their positionalities as critical towards understanding themselves in relation to the world they live in.

Keywords:

Sense of place, digital technologies, urban spaces, place, urban landscapes

Laura Porterfield - Temple University
Digital Citizenship in the Era of Surveillance

Modern subjectivities are constantly created and re-negotiated within the urban landscape, giving rise to varying and sometimes contentious understandings of citizenship. This photoessay will investigate how citizens negotiate surveillance technologies, paying particular attention to the ways in which they interpret the role of new technologies in perpetuating and maintaining subjectivities that exclude. The expanded entanglement in ‘remote’ telephone and [data] monitoring systems by police operates symbolically (as well as actually) to mark, to site.  The central goal of this project is to investigate the phenomenological implications (or entanglements) of these technologies on (or upon) community citizenship.  This presentation will consider the utility of participatory photojournalism as a means to solicit critique and analysis from (rather than upon) North Philadelphians.

Keywords:

surveillance technologies, community citizenship, photo documentation

Michael L. Dorn, PhD - Temple University
Independence starts here?! Hertzian space and quest for a ‘disability culture’

The twentieth century saw increases in life expectancy throughout much of the world that resulted in people with disabilities living longer, if still frustratingly limited, lives.  An international disability rights movement emerged through the forging of North-South partnerships and the diffusion of consciousness-raising efforts from the North America and Northern Europe during 1970s and 1980s.   The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 was a key benchmark in the diffusion of ‘disability rights,’ as activists employed an all-inclusive definition of disability, arguing that social and economic justice was long overdue for those places at the margins of society, tarred or tagged with the ‘disability.’  While attentive to this broader context, this paper will focus on the production and consumption of the idea of ‘Disability Culture’ in the succeeding two decades (90s and 00s) in the activities of Philadelphia-area cultural coalitions: Liberty Resources (Philadelphia’s Center for Independent Living); the Mayor’s Commission on Persons with Disabilities; the Independence Starts Here Festival of Disability and the Arts; and Disability Studies: the PHILLY! Meetup.  It seeks to answer the following questions: What happened to the 1980s dream of a united disability culture in the current era of welfare state retrenchment as well blogging and web 2.0?  And what do these innovations mean for the way we conceive of the connection between disabled bodies and digital cities?

Keywords:

disability studies, disability culture, urban geography, cyberinfrastructure, virtual communities