Digital Geography and Society最新文献

Experiments in alternative forms of urban digitalisation include blockchain-based applications as enablers of civic action in local communities, inspired by different visions than blockchain-based speculative cryptocurrencies. This article investigates how blockchain technology can be oriented towards locally embedded applications. It explores the case of a blockchain-based wallet app that aims to support social collaborative economies and civic participation in urban communities by tokenising social and economic assets. Building on studies on the embeddedness of urban digital platforms with a local character, this article studies how the app under consideration is shaped by, and adapted to, the needs and resources of local socio-economic contexts. Two pilot experimentations on the app are considered, concerning systems for rewarding civic participation and urban sharing economies. The empirical analysis concerns the methodology for introducing the app into local socio-economic contexts, the way in which local actors interpret its properties, and the resulting iterative co-design of its functionalities. The article defines and discusses the extent to which the civic blockchain is rendered context-based by this methodology, and highlights similarities and differences with other urban digital platforms. The empirical evidence drawn from this research contributes to the debate on how community members, researchers and digital experts together can realise alternative forms of urban digitalization.

The Special Issue defines ‘housing disruptors’ as the emerging ideologies, practices, and logics capable of changing the housing system. In this paper, I argue digital engagement technologies were a housing disruptor for combining an ethic of care and technological scale in order to reimagine planning democracy and ultimately the delivery of equitable housing. First, I outline the care ethics of digital engagement and connect it to a lineage of planning theory that values deliberative participation and agonistic urban politics. I then interrogate the meaning of scale in digital engagement and how it contributes to urban democracy and justice issues. However, the structural limitations that practitioners faced in practice put into question how possible it was to apply a scale logic from the technological and business world, which sought to streamline and grow, to a planning system (that is complex) and solutions to the housing crisis (even more complex). My concluding remarks suggest that digital engagement was symbolic for the changing value principles in planning, as one that was committed to a fairer and more equitable planning system; but how successful it was (or has been) able to provide an alternative planning structure remains uncertain.

Digital real estate technologies (Proptech) have rapidly become ubiquitous in many nations—including Australia—their presence reshaping how tenants, landlords and agents navigate private renting. How Proptech are mediated by regulatory settings and responses shapes their presence, impacting on their potential for both subtle and overt forms of discrimination. In this paper we draw on our Australian-based research to illustrate the utility of a rental schema to develop understandings of digital reconfigurations and their discrimination effects in the private rental sector. Our research sought to identify and examine discrimination against renters across the entire experience of renting—particularly in relation to new and emerging forms of discrimination arising from, or exacerbated by, digital technologies. By focusing on the experiences of renters, the schema that we employed inverts Proptech approaches that create and target new assets for financial extraction through the rental sector, instead recognising the discriminatory potential of such approaches. We signal the utility of this renter-experience-centred approach to examine the rental sector through a discrimination lens, and the real and potential role for regulation including, but not limited to, a focus on digital technologies. Incorporating research, alliance-building and advocacy into our schema bolsters its renter-centredness and reiterates the necessity of these efforts at housing justice for urgent regulatory reform. We point to our own nascent efforts in collaboration with Australian tenant advocacy groups—inspired by others—to use digital technologies to subvert embedded power imbalances that drive discrimination in Australia's private rental sector.

In the German public debate, platform work and crowdwork have become the epitome of the dark side of the digital transformation of the working world. Although Germany is marked by a high density of labour regulations, those do not necessarily translate into/create fair conditions for platform workers in the country. At first glance, the historical legacy of strong social partnership between employers' and workers' organisations and the restrictiveness of German labour law mean Germany present powerful regulatory tools to thwart precarity and strengthen workers' rights in the platform economy. However, the spread of non-standard employment and sub-contracting, in combination with increased migration from within and beyond the EU, has given rise to a rather different picture. Assisted by public demands for far-reaching deregulations to secure Germany's international competitiveness as production site, several digital labour platforms have found an environment conducive to growth in Germany. Platform work in Germany is often lauded for its flexibility and low entry barriers, as it provides an easy opportunity to earn an income and can help labour market integration for those who face barriers to standard employment. Nevertheless, important issues are present. The paper aims to shed light on the working conditions of platform workers in Germany. The analysis is founded upon the five core principles of Fairwork. Drawing from documentary analysis, 65 semi-structured interviews with platform workers and 8 interviews with platform managers, the paper finds that the country's relatively stringent labour regulations do not always translate into fair working conditions for platform workers. Although, compared to other countries, many platforms workers in Germany are legally classified as employees, sub-contracting practices, the use of unskilled migrant labour and other platforms' practices undermine many employment rights in practice.

The paper aims at exploring the role played by visual content in the processes of place touristification and commodification that are initiated and accelerated by online platforms. The analysis addresses the photographs through which Airbnb hosts illustrate and promote their accommodations, focusing on food images as the most fertile terrain for the inquiry, by virtue of the density of its aesthetic, social, geographical, and cultural meanings, constantly evoked by the photos. The analysis is based on a corpus of 250 listings located in the Municipality of Siena (Tuscany, Italy) present on Airbnb between November 2020 and February 2022, and 3960 photographs of the interiors uploaded by hosts. To this end, the authors develop an interdisciplinary method of investigation that synergistically integrates the geographical approach with interpretative models applied in the fields of semiotics and visual studies. The city of Siena is itself an excellent case study. Thanks to its small size, it was possible to map the entire set of accommodations present in the territory during the indicated period, which makes the corpus homogeneous and exhaustive; as a major tourist attraction in Tuscany and nationwide, the link between food, tourism and local identity is particularly strong and therefore worthy of study. Based on the outcomes, the conclusions show the effects and dynamics of a process of image normalization that differs profoundly from the promise of authentic and unique tourist experiences summed up in the platform's slogan “living like a local”.

At the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic, many American universities and colleges abruptly shifted online to reduce the spread of infection. The shift, while framed as a way to accommodate and care for the broader campus community, created new inequalities and exacerbated existing inequities among students, faculty, and staff. Faculty were introduced to forms of technology and digital media used to surveil students, such as anti-plagiarism software, invasive online exam proctoring, and recorded Zoom class sessions. Universities framed the use of technology students during a time of crisis as an act of care, but also engendered spaces of surveillance, distrust, and harm in the digital landscape. Rooted in neoliberal ideologies, care within university digital spaces is framed as an objective or function wherein the university cares about or cares for its students, faculty, and staff, rather than pursuing more equitable, democratic, and socially just models of care ethics. Based on qualitative research conducted on university responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that universities frame surveillance within digital spaces as an act of care, specifically through the antiquated model in loco parentis. We provide recommendations for universities to move towards more equitable care and discuss the ethics of care concerning surveillance in digital spaces.

This paper explores the landscape of labour in the platform economy and, more specifically, the ways local economic activities and actors are exposed to pressures of platformisation, building on the case of the Airbnb platform and the digitally-mediated short-term rental (STR) market in Athens. Conceptualising STR networks as infrastructural assemblages and through a qualitative study building on 27 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors, I focus on: tracing the wide range of workers who undertake essential tasks, the employment statuses, compensations and modes of engagement of workers, restrictions and gender-dimensions, as well as the content and attributes of STR-related work. My main argument is built around the notion of ‘platform worker’ and the need to expand it beyond workers that are directly related to the platforms, in order to include the on-site labour force upon which the creation and everyday operation of broader platform ecosystems and related infrastructure are depended.

Rarely do academics reveal the ‘backend’ of their research; the hours of labour invested into question generation, ethics compliance, transcription, translation, and data analysis, and in our case, coding. Further, when working collaboratively, the conversations that occur between collaborators seldom appear in final publications either. The development of the mobile application QualNotes, provided a productive digital space for collaboration across disciplines. In this paper, we use three vignettes to explicate the ‘backend’ of the development of that mobile application. We chart howour collaborative cross-disciplinary ethnography revealed the generative potential of thinking-with the digital and across disciplinary divides. This paper's contribution is in revealing ‘how’ we work using our disciplinary expertise, but at the same time at the edges of those disciplines too, where we contest, argue, adapt, understand, and, where we learn.

While feminist geographers have long aimed to trouble conceptions of the city/home (and, by extension, public/private) divides, the digital city and the digital home are still often theorized as separate phenomena within much digital geography literature. Drawing on previous work on feminist home-city geographies, this paper proposes four analytical frames for reflecting on the relationship between urban and domestic space in digital geographies: governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling. The paper explores each lens through a critical review of recent literature in digital geographies and related fields. It weaves this review through a speculative reading of the Eco Delta Smart City, an experimental development building the smart city from the home up in Busan, South Korea. We show how each lens calls attention to distinct sets of questions, actors, agendas, and relations–thus refusing any single reading of the project or of the broader trends around digitalization of which it is a part. In the process, we trace how digitalization does not simply trouble existing spatial categories, but rather makes them manifest in new ways for differently situated subjects.

Echoing the ‘follow the thing’ approach, this article provides a methodological thought on doing everyday geographies of the digital, based on my research experiences of undertaking the fieldwork of the project Curating Digital Lives over the past few years. This research considers the digital as a followable thing embedded in everyday spaces and practices. It develops a ‘follow the digital’ methodology that attunes us to the contingent, unpredictable, and uncertain routines and processes in which geographical networks are framed by human and non-human actors. This methodology can help geographers to nuance our understanding of the roles of the digital in producing geographical knowledge from the below. Inspired by the recent digital turn, this article also wants to open a dialogue on collaborating with new research technologies.