Book Reviews: Germaine Halegoua, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place

Abstract

In The Digital City, Germaine Halegoua offers a broad and refreshing examination of the state of the smart city and its (potential) inhabitants. The book draws on information emerging from some key smart city sites across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the U.S., including “smart-from-the-start” cities such as Masdar City and the Songdo IBD, and extensive fieldwork, especially near ground zero of the Google Fiber installation in Kansas City. Halegoua makes a strong case for reconsidering the notion of the smart city as being more than the many capacities of ubiquitous computing in the urban context. Central to her argument is the observation that place is an always shifting social construct, and that the way we use the most intimate of our devices—the smartphone—is grounded in our social desires. Taking stock of mobile media theorists and space and place scholars, at the heart of this book, Halegoua aims to illustrate and analyze the ways “many different actors are actually using digital technologies and practices to re-embed themselves within urban space to create a sense of place” (p. 3)—much of which is done by, with and through mobile technologies. The book begins with a detailed overview of the state-of-the-art in smart cities, and how the Internet of Things has been implicated in new visions of urban space. It is here that some prominent smart cities, such as Masdar City, are exposed for the ghost towns they are, built upon the asocial logic of business rather than the actual needs of potential inhabitants. The second chapter is the book at its most powerful, centering around Halegoua’s engagement on the ground with the Google Fiber rollout in Kansas City. Here Halegoua points out that the designers of the project conceived of broadband as a good in and of itself, rather than being oriented, or at least sensitive to, the needs of people, leading to predictable class-based gaps in adoption. In this chapter, further compelling research is presented on the integration of spatial and social dimensions into the grassroots smart city framework that Halegoua shapes with her ethnographic experience. The main chapters of the book are rounded out by a final chapter that makes connections between creativity and place, and how digital media and urban computing are creating new opportunities in this space. Halegoua’s critical step, and the key contribution of the book, is the building the idea of “re-placeing”: the “subjective, habitual practice of assessing and combining physical, 1024893 MMC0010.1177/20501579211024893Mobile Media & CommunicationBook Reviews book-review2021