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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Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space
Wow this looks like a super cool European Art Program combining my research interests in migration, technology, and mobility! Is anyone going to be Warsaw this summer, or Amsterdam or Berlin next summer? I wish I could see this! (*note the website is confusing)
Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space
Tracing Mobility is a pan-European arts programme produced by Radiator launching in Nottingham mid May 2010 and travelling to Warsaw (June/July 2010), Amsterdam (2011) and Berlin (2011). Radiator will present a series of residencies, workshops, events and symposia, examining the shifting terrain of global mobility and how developments in networked infrastructure are transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance.
Mobility has become one of the most important keywords in dominant discourses on globalisation, techno-economic change and the Information Society. The idea of nomadic, ‘mobile’ persons supported by spatial mobilisation of capital, goods and knowledge pervades politics, economics, technology, media, commerce and culture.
The discourse surrounding mobility, characterized by the dream of always on accessibility, the lure of the de-territorialistion of space and the breakdown of public, economic or geographic boundaries offered by the Internet; associations concerning mobility shifts between cultural pessimism and cyber utopianism. Mobility has been facilitated by the ‘boom in wireless technology’*, a development generally perceived as progress in an economic and technological sense. What is often neglected is the progress offered by the cultural potential of the new spaces opened up by these technologies.
Thanks you Tomas Skovgaard (@endlesscities) for twittering about this!
