Locating the alternative digital. Care, code, and community for alternative urban economies

Abstract

The relationship between urban socio-spatial practices and digital technologies has been extensively scrutinised. Recently, research has driven attention to grassroots, non-corporate socio-technical experiments that contribute to the enactment of economic diversity while prefiguring alternative digital urban futures.

The article discusses two initiatives in the city of Turin, Italy. The first one, CeloCelo, is an online platform allowing people to donate objects and local third sector associations to collect them and assign to people in need. The second one, COSO, is a project employing a Blockchain-based wallet app to provide the neighbourhood community with instruments to support grassroots alternative sharing economies.

The article conceptualises the two investigated initiatives as digitally enabled alternative economies that variously co-constitute geographies of caring in the city. Employing qualitative methods, the research sheds light on how the enactment of caring is enabled by alternative forms of economic relations, which support the circulation of care in the city through the more-than-human collectives that sustain alternative economies. Specific attention is paid to the generative capacities of the digital technologies employed in order to understand their role in the unfolding of the socio-spatial relations that sustain alternative economies. In doing so, the present research aims at contributing to overcoming digital geographies that are still too prone to reading for hegemonies, while keeping an eye open to the need of reading the economy for difference (Gibson-Graham, 2006).