13. Digital Cities

This week we are thinking about the ways cities are peculiarly imbricated in the digital. A particular focus in this discussion is the supposition that ‘the digital’ is not only concerned with the things that we say or do with and through digital/networked media and technologies but is also actively produced by code.

Our everyday lives are in a few extraordinary and many mundane ways mediated by the more-or-less autonomous actions of computer programmes. When we pay for parking via an app, request an Uber (via the app) or check-in for a flight (again, on an app) then the ways in which we negotiate space – the ways in which we traverse it – are mediated by code. These are forms of coded space, according to Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin. Occasionally, we encounter places and spaces that simply cannot function without software. There are some spaces we make use of that are entirely contingent upon digital infrastructures. According to Dodge & Kitchin, these are forms of code/space.

The platforms upon which many of our interactions with other people and with the places and things around us are sometimes founded are significantly urban in nature. Added to this, many of the media we use are vying for our attention and to capture it we are encouraged to play and compete.

In this lecture we also look into the ways in which our interactions with and in cities are often framed in terms of games and play. We investigate the kinds of location-based services we use or are surveilled by and the ways they enrol us through play.

Cities are leisure spaces as well as work places. As the platforms we use track us and our interactions they reveal things about our cities. Our uses of cities become the objects of data gathering and we are incentivised to share those data through games.

This week’s tasks are organised around three combined aims:

1. Exploring the ways digital connectivity is being integrated into (almost) everything.
2. Asking what this means for urban life.
3. Critically interrogating how ‘Smart Cities’ and an ‘Internet of Things’ can be understood politically & culturally.

In the lecture I want us to think about the importance of code and data in relation to urban space and place. In particular I want to think about:

• the ways in which code and data are used towards particular ends
• the kinds of claims made for code and data
• and, most importantly, how code and data are never ‘neutral’

1. Graham, Stephen, 2005, “Software-sorted geographies”. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5), pp. 562-580.
2. Kitchin, Rob, 2014, “The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism”. GeoJournal 79, pp. 1–14. 

Please read them with the questions below in mind:

• How are code and data understood in terms of everyday spatial experience?
• What can code and data do? What are their (geographical) limits?
• What is significant about all of this for cities?

Time on Task: 50 minutes

1. ‘Smart cities’ are being designed, and claims are being made about them – on which we need to critically reflect as geographers with an interest in ‘the digital’.
2. The ‘Internet of Things’ is both a rationale and a rhetoric for digital interconnectivity that raises important ethical/political & cultural questions – especially about privacy, surveillance and value.
3. Both  the ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘smart cities’ have been addressed by geographers as: software-sorted geographies, coded spaces and code/space.
4. We are increasingly asked to consider the abstract forms of software as having agency, but need to be critically reflective of ‘algorithm’ talk.

A 2015 blogpost I wrote: Some thoughts about how ‘algorithms’ are talked about and what it might mean to study them