Pub Date : 2025-10-15DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100144
Guy Baeten , Carina Listerborn , Pablo Miranda , Maja de Neergaard , Fredrik Torisson
Based on ethnographic observations, this article seeks to empirically illustrate how one of the main functions of the Smart City Expo in Barcelona in 2024 is to perform smartcity-as-ideology and its technological-solutionist stance that considerably narrows our understanding of urban problems and the solutions for it. The article introduces the Expo and describes our arrival and visit to the Expo. It provides empirical detail of the performativity of technological solutionism and its optimism, including the role of alliances, based on ethnographic observations. The main features of the technological-solutionist ideology underpinning the smart city are summarised and we conclude how this performativity is in line with Althusser's understanding of ideology.
{"title":"‘LIVE BETTER’: Smart City Expo as performative ideology formation","authors":"Guy Baeten , Carina Listerborn , Pablo Miranda , Maja de Neergaard , Fredrik Torisson","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100144","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100144","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Based on ethnographic observations, this article seeks to empirically illustrate how one of the main functions of the Smart City Expo in Barcelona in 2024 is to perform smartcity-as-ideology and its technological-solutionist stance that considerably narrows our understanding of urban problems and the solutions for it. The article introduces the Expo and describes our arrival and visit to the Expo. It provides empirical detail of the performativity of technological solutionism and its optimism, including the role of alliances, based on ethnographic observations. The main features of the technological-solutionist ideology underpinning the smart city are summarised and we conclude how this performativity is in line with Althusser's understanding of ideology.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145332302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-25DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100142
Jessica McLean , Randa Abdel-Fattah , Milena Bojovic , Andrew McGregor , Success Shaibu , Ben Spies-Butcher , Jonathan Symons
If a chauvinistic troll billionaire takes control of a digital platform, enabling hate speech and tailoring algorithms around their whims, how should higher education institutional accounts respond? To consider this question, our paper uses a collaborative listening approach to navigate diverse positionings and political imperatives: it presents both collective analysis and individual authored reflections from seven members (faculty and PhD students) of a social science school at an Australian public university resulting from their iterative discussions. We take two moments as reference points: 1) changes in Twitter/X's culture following its takeover, and 2) the centrality of Twitter/X to public deliberation over, and resistance to, Israel's bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attacks. We conclude that individual decisions about using digital platforms depend on the goals of engagement, that these goals are contingent, and that for-profit digital platforms are inherently paradoxical affective spaces. Resolving the tensions that users experience in these spaces may not be possible unless new digital platforms with different models of ownership and governance are created.
{"title":"Should we stay or should we go? Dilemmas arising from (new) corporate ownership of a digital public space","authors":"Jessica McLean , Randa Abdel-Fattah , Milena Bojovic , Andrew McGregor , Success Shaibu , Ben Spies-Butcher , Jonathan Symons","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100142","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100142","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>If a chauvinistic troll billionaire takes control of a digital platform, enabling hate speech and tailoring algorithms around their whims, how should higher education institutional accounts respond? To consider this question, our paper uses a collaborative listening approach to navigate diverse positionings and political imperatives: it presents both collective analysis and individual authored reflections from seven members (faculty and PhD students) of a social science school at an Australian public university resulting from their iterative discussions. We take two moments as reference points: 1) changes in Twitter/X's culture following its takeover, and 2) the centrality of Twitter/X to public deliberation over, and resistance to, Israel's bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attacks. We conclude that individual decisions about using digital platforms depend on the goals of engagement, that these goals are contingent, and that for-profit digital platforms are inherently paradoxical affective spaces. Resolving the tensions that users experience in these spaces may not be possible unless new digital platforms with different models of ownership and governance are created.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145265285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-25DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100143
Jennifer Mairi Macdonald , Cathy J. Robinson , Danilo Urzedo , Cara Penton , Recain Nabarlambarl , Lorina Maralngurra , Suzanna Nabulwad , Amanda Lilleyman , Sylvia Maroney , Gloria Roberts , Anthea Lawrence , Lydia Lawrence , Lewellyn Moulin , Bernadette Calma , Bessie Coleman
Digital technologies increasingly entangle with everyday Indigenous land management practices, from place-based biocultural monitoring to political decision-making. As Indigenous knowledge and governance practice intersect with big data and technological devices, questions remain around how Indigenous agency can lead situated digital engagement while navigating the systemic injustices exposed through technological glitches. Drawing on glitch feminism debates, this paper examines the mechanisms that open possibilities for Indigenous-led digital disruptions and reimagines technologies through culturally grounded practices. Here, we present the notion of ‘care praxis’ as a collective approach for mediating the glitchy disruptions and transformations that emerge when using digital technologies for land management on Indigenous Country. Through collaborative work between Indigenous women rangers, coordinators and researchers in northern Australia, we show how care praxis sustains Indigenous rangers' agency and facilitates alternative socio-technical relations that attend to the materialities of digital infrastructures, community relations, and the rangers' subjectivities. Indigenous-led and collaborative methods nurture women's leadership in local land management and strengthen community networks to foster capabilities, as guided by the appropriate Indigenous authorities. Our findings show that glitches are not merely shifts from breakdowns to possibilities, but reveal care as ongoing, collective work that assists in resisting exhaustion and precarity that otherwise falls disproportionately on Indigenous women. By extending glitch politics and epistemologies through the lens of care praxis, this work highlights how Indigenous agency reworks technological breakdowns into the co-creation of sites of expansive digital possibilities rooted in customary obligations and stewardship responsibilities.
{"title":"Weaving care praxis to mediate glitches in Indigenous digital land management in northern Australia","authors":"Jennifer Mairi Macdonald , Cathy J. Robinson , Danilo Urzedo , Cara Penton , Recain Nabarlambarl , Lorina Maralngurra , Suzanna Nabulwad , Amanda Lilleyman , Sylvia Maroney , Gloria Roberts , Anthea Lawrence , Lydia Lawrence , Lewellyn Moulin , Bernadette Calma , Bessie Coleman","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100143","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100143","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Digital technologies increasingly entangle with everyday Indigenous land management practices, from place-based biocultural monitoring to political decision-making. As Indigenous knowledge and governance practice intersect with big data and technological devices, questions remain around how Indigenous agency can lead situated digital engagement while navigating the systemic injustices exposed through technological glitches. Drawing on glitch feminism debates, this paper examines the mechanisms that open possibilities for Indigenous-led digital disruptions and reimagines technologies through culturally grounded practices. Here, we present the notion of ‘care praxis’ as a collective approach for mediating the glitchy disruptions and transformations that emerge when using digital technologies for land management on Indigenous Country. Through collaborative work between Indigenous women rangers, coordinators and researchers in northern Australia, we show how care praxis sustains Indigenous rangers' agency and facilitates alternative socio-technical relations that attend to the materialities of digital infrastructures, community relations, and the rangers' subjectivities. Indigenous-led and collaborative methods nurture women's leadership in local land management and strengthen community networks to foster capabilities, as guided by the appropriate Indigenous authorities. Our findings show that glitches are not merely shifts from breakdowns to possibilities, but reveal care as ongoing, collective work that assists in resisting exhaustion and precarity that otherwise falls disproportionately on Indigenous women. By extending glitch politics and epistemologies through the lens of care praxis, this work highlights how Indigenous agency reworks technological breakdowns into the co-creation of sites of expansive digital possibilities rooted in customary obligations and stewardship responsibilities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145265780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-10DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100140
Tooran Alizadeh, Deepti Prasad
In this paper we build on the existing literature on ‘alternative smart urbanism’ and yet, take a critical lens to inform theory. Informed by 30 interviews with a variety of civic society actors/organisations in India, complemented with policy/document analysis, this paper makes two main contributions. First, it brings empirical evidence of the burgeoning alternative smart city practices from the understudied context of the Global South, providing an opportunity to learn from the margins. In particular, five lesser-known alternative smart initiatives in India are featured. The differences and similarities within these five initiatives are discussed under five overlapping categories of broader focus areas/aims, working models and actors involved, technical tools, association with political authority, and COVID-19 responses. Second, the paper takes a critical approach, unpacking the identified practices from ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ perspective, advancing reconceptualisation/theorisation of alternative smart urbanism from an intersectional feminist lens. We reconceptualise alternative smart urbanism as a collective of intersectional phenomena bringing together a wide range of civic society actors/organisations and digital technologies, noting the highly gendered smart margins in which diverse groups of women are impacted by several axes of social inequality and oppression. This reconceptualisation expands earlier definitions of the concept, and opens the political spectrum of alternative smart urbanism to reflect the complex environment in which civil society actors/organisations operate.
{"title":"Alternative smart urbanism: An intersectional feminist take on learning from the margins","authors":"Tooran Alizadeh, Deepti Prasad","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100140","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100140","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper we build on the existing literature on ‘alternative smart urbanism’ and yet, take a critical lens to inform theory. Informed by 30 interviews with a variety of civic society actors/organisations in India, complemented with policy/document analysis, this paper makes two main contributions. First, it brings empirical evidence of the burgeoning alternative smart city practices from the understudied context of the Global South, providing an opportunity to learn from the margins. In particular, five lesser-known alternative smart initiatives in India are featured. The differences and similarities within these five initiatives are discussed under five overlapping categories of broader focus areas/aims, working models and actors involved, technical tools, association with political authority, and COVID-19 responses. Second, the paper takes a critical approach, unpacking the identified practices from ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ perspective, advancing reconceptualisation/theorisation of alternative smart urbanism from an intersectional feminist lens. We reconceptualise alternative smart urbanism as a collective of intersectional phenomena bringing together a wide range of civic society actors/organisations and digital technologies, noting the highly gendered smart margins in which diverse groups of women are impacted by several axes of social inequality and oppression. This reconceptualisation expands earlier definitions of the concept, and opens the political spectrum of alternative smart urbanism to reflect the complex environment in which civil society actors/organisations operate.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145046097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-10DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100141
Ash Alam , Bahamin Badihi , Etienne Nel
Considerable research has focused on the important role of social media in migrant life. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how remote regional areas shape migrants’ use of social media, and whether social media can serve as a viable migrant support infrastructure in such places. We seek to help address this knowledge gap by investigating how social media platforms have enabled algorithmic care for migrants to Oamaru, a small service town on the south-east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. We develop an analytic of technology-mediated care as infrastructure in a tripartite relationship between people, place and platform to guide our examination of the small town migrant support ecosystem. A questionnaire survey of migrants and a community Facebook page have been the source of our data. We observe the important role played by social media platforms through the availability of emotional, informational and material support, and also how, over time, the community Facebook page has evolved into a self-organising and generative care infrastructure. The findings confirm that this form of platformised care is not placeless, but rather contingent on place-specific relations and responsibilities by bringing together migrants, host communities and small town institutions. Social media facilitates the practice of both self-care and caring-with others, enabling migrant and host community interactions and cultural competency building, as well as addressing pre-existing migrant support deficiencies in small towns.
{"title":"Technology mediated care as infrastructure: the role of social media in supporting international migrants settling in New Zealand small towns","authors":"Ash Alam , Bahamin Badihi , Etienne Nel","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100141","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100141","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Considerable research has focused on the important role of social media in migrant life. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how remote regional areas shape migrants’ use of social media, and whether social media can serve as a viable migrant support infrastructure in such places. We seek to help address this knowledge gap by investigating how social media platforms have enabled algorithmic care for migrants to Oamaru, a small service town on the south-east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. We develop an analytic of technology-mediated care as infrastructure in a tripartite relationship between people, place and platform to guide our examination of the small town migrant support ecosystem. A questionnaire survey of migrants and a community Facebook page have been the source of our data. We observe the important role played by social media platforms through the availability of emotional, informational and material support, and also how, over time, the community Facebook page has evolved into a self-organising and generative care infrastructure. The findings confirm that this form of platformised care is not placeless, but rather contingent on place-specific relations and responsibilities by bringing together migrants, host communities and small town institutions. Social media facilitates the practice of both self-care and caring-with others, enabling migrant and host community interactions and cultural competency building, as well as addressing pre-existing migrant support deficiencies in small towns.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145103995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The widespread, uneven, and often contradictory use of digital technologies is transforming agri-food systems. Agriculture 4.0 is prompting producers to reimagine their farming futures, particularly in terms of environmental concerns, rural exodus and labor dynamics. Yet, emerging scholarship has largely overlooked how these imagined futures intersect with the persistent digital divide in rural areas. How do agribusiness actors and family farmers envision digital agri-food futures differently? To explore this question, we examined the case of the South of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a region recognized as one of the largest coffee producers in the world and home to other agricultural commodities such as sugarcane and soy. We conducted an online survey with 45 participants, followed by fieldwork visits and in-depth interviews with 11 representatives from large companies and start-ups and 5 agribusinesses providing the agribusiness perspective, which we compared to interviews with 16 family farmers. Our findings reveal that significant agribusinesses and family farmers anticipate the impact of digital technologies on their lives and productive practices. Notably, most participants believe that digital agriculture will further concentrate power in the hands of agribusiness. If Agriculture 4.0 is implemented without addressing the digital divide, agribusiness is poised to reap many of its benefits while family farmers risk becoming further marginalized. Bridging this divide is essential to ensure that the digital transformation of agriculture does not exacerbate longstanding rural inequalities in the Global South.
{"title":"Imagining agri-food futures across digital divides: Agribusiness and family farmers in Minas Gerais, Brazil","authors":"Estevan Coca , Adriano Pereira Santos , Rodrigo Giacopini","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100139","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100139","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The widespread, uneven, and often contradictory use of digital technologies is transforming agri-food systems. Agriculture 4.0 is prompting producers to reimagine their farming futures, particularly in terms of environmental concerns, rural exodus and labor dynamics. Yet, emerging scholarship has largely overlooked how these imagined futures intersect with the persistent digital divide in rural areas. How do agribusiness actors and family farmers envision digital agri-food futures differently? To explore this question, we examined the case of the South of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a region recognized as one of the largest coffee producers in the world and home to other agricultural commodities such as sugarcane and soy. We conducted an online survey with 45 participants, followed by fieldwork visits and in-depth interviews with 11 representatives from large companies and start-ups and 5 agribusinesses providing the agribusiness perspective, which we compared to interviews with 16 family farmers. Our findings reveal that significant agribusinesses and family farmers anticipate the impact of digital technologies on their lives and productive practices. Notably, most participants believe that digital agriculture will further concentrate power in the hands of agribusiness. If Agriculture 4.0 is implemented without addressing the digital divide, agribusiness is poised to reap many of its benefits while family farmers risk becoming further marginalized. Bridging this divide is essential to ensure that the digital transformation of agriculture does not exacerbate longstanding rural inequalities in the Global South.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144904066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-22DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100136
Iván Ojeda-Pereira
This article examines the intersection of digital delivery platforms, urban construction, and worker agency in Antofagasta, northern Chile. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research, it explores how delivery platform workers navigate, appropriate, and symbolically transform urban space within the constraints of the gig economy. The study foregrounds the spatial and affective practice of socio-urban securitization through the creation of informal “safe spaces,” exemplified by a kiosk that functions simultaneously as a resting point, a site of socialization, and a node of symbolic territorialization. Far from being merely functional, these spaces carry emotional and collective significance, enabling survival and community-building amidst structural precarity. By centring the lived experiences of migrant workers, the article contributes to emerging debates on the socio-technical and territorial dimensions of platform labour. It argues for expanding research agendas to include spatial justice and territorial politics in gig economies, emphasizing how digital platforms and worker agency co-produce the urban. The findings reveal how delivery workers negotiate layered risks—personal, work-related, and institutional—while constructing forms of resilience in the face of economic insecurity and spatial exclusion. This research advances a critical lens on the evolving entanglements between platforms, cities, and labour, proposing new directions for studying socio-technical territorialities.
{"title":"Securitizing the technoplatformized City: How delivery workers construct urban safe spaces in Chile's gig economy","authors":"Iván Ojeda-Pereira","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100136","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100136","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the intersection of digital delivery platforms, urban construction, and worker agency in Antofagasta, northern Chile. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research, it explores how delivery platform workers navigate, appropriate, and symbolically transform urban space within the constraints of the gig economy. The study foregrounds the spatial and affective practice of socio-urban securitization through the creation of informal “safe spaces,” exemplified by a kiosk that functions simultaneously as a resting point, a site of socialization, and a node of symbolic territorialization. Far from being merely functional, these spaces carry emotional and collective significance, enabling survival and community-building amidst structural precarity. By centring the lived experiences of migrant workers, the article contributes to emerging debates on the socio-technical and territorial dimensions of platform labour. It argues for expanding research agendas to include spatial justice and territorial politics in gig economies, emphasizing how digital platforms and worker agency co-produce the urban. The findings reveal how delivery workers negotiate layered risks—personal, work-related, and institutional—while constructing forms of resilience in the face of economic insecurity and spatial exclusion. This research advances a critical lens on the evolving entanglements between platforms, cities, and labour, proposing new directions for studying socio-technical territorialities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144725091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-19DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100133
Niklas Toresson
An increasing number of people select their travel destination according to its ‘Instagrammability’. As a result, certain places emerge as ‘Instagram hotspots’, where tourists replicate the same photos, leading to a plethora of nearly identical images on Instagram. Despite Instagram's profound influence on travel behavior and landscape representations, existing research has largely focused on single case studies, with limited attention to the dominant aesthetic strategies shaping landscape representations on the platform. This article addresses this gap by examining how landscapes are constructed on Instagram and how these stereotypical portrayals reflect broader societal and ecological narratives. Employing a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative iconographic-iconological techniques and quantitative content analysis, the study analyzes 625 landscape photographs posted by 25 German-speaking Instagram influencers, supplemented by 18 structured interviews with tourists influenced by Instagram imagery. The findings reveal that landscape pictures on Instagram echo Romantic era paintings, using similar motifs and aesthetic strategies. Instagrammers, like 19th-century Romantic painters, emphasize themes of solitude, mystification, sublimity, and nostalgia, contrasting sharply with contemporary issues like ecological crises. By staging and aesthetically transforming nature, Instagrammers medially reverse the destruction of nature and create idealized landscapes that evoke a bygone, pre-industrial era and an intact human-nature relationship. Accordingly, landscape images on Instagram can be interpreted as a new idealized, romantic reality or as a postmodern reinvention of Romanticism. Instagrammers seek out photo locations based on their ability to synthesize as many physical elements as possible into an ‘instagrammable’ scenery, creating a stereotypical romantic landscape image.
{"title":"Landscape constructions on Instagram. A postmodern reinvention of romanticism","authors":"Niklas Toresson","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100133","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100133","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>An increasing number of people select their travel destination according to its ‘Instagrammability’. As a result, certain places emerge as ‘Instagram hotspots’, where tourists replicate the same photos, leading to a plethora of nearly identical images on Instagram. Despite Instagram's profound influence on travel behavior and landscape representations, existing research has largely focused on single case studies, with limited attention to the dominant aesthetic strategies shaping landscape representations on the platform. This article addresses this gap by examining how landscapes are constructed on Instagram and how these stereotypical portrayals reflect broader societal and ecological narratives. Employing a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative iconographic-iconological techniques and quantitative content analysis, the study analyzes 625 landscape photographs posted by 25 German-speaking Instagram influencers, supplemented by 18 structured interviews with tourists influenced by Instagram imagery. The findings reveal that landscape pictures on Instagram echo Romantic era paintings, using similar motifs and aesthetic strategies. Instagrammers, like 19th-century Romantic painters, emphasize themes of solitude, mystification, sublimity, and nostalgia, contrasting sharply with contemporary issues like ecological crises. By staging and aesthetically transforming nature, Instagrammers medially reverse the destruction of nature and create idealized landscapes that evoke a bygone, pre-industrial era and an intact human-nature relationship. Accordingly, landscape images on Instagram can be interpreted as a new idealized, romantic reality or as a postmodern reinvention of Romanticism. Instagrammers seek out photo locations based on their ability to synthesize as many physical elements as possible into an ‘instagrammable’ scenery, creating a stereotypical romantic landscape image.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144714264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-18DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100134
Hillary Quarles , Gregory L. Simon PhD
This research illustrates how third-party food delivery platforms overcome barriers and expand markets by uniting physical, digital and virtual spaces into an interoperable platforming space. This profound reconfiguration of space enables platforms to manipulate how restaurants, drivers and customers encounter and experience delivery by simultaneously optimizing user location, behavior and interaction in each dimension. The paper begins with a review of key literature on platforms, platform urbanism and food delivery platforms, as well as spatial frameworks of physical, digital and virtual space. It then examines how platforming space is manipulated to produce efficiency through driver positioning and control, food standardization, and delivery kitchens. The paper highlights some consequences of this platform optimization, illustrating how platforms intensify and instrumentalize the entanglement of technology and space.
{"title":"Platforming space: How food delivery platforms optimize users through physical, digital, and virtual space","authors":"Hillary Quarles , Gregory L. Simon PhD","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100134","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100134","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This research illustrates how third-party food delivery platforms overcome barriers and expand markets by uniting physical, digital and virtual spaces into an interoperable <em>platforming space.</em> This profound reconfiguration of space enables platforms to manipulate how restaurants, drivers and customers encounter and experience delivery by simultaneously optimizing user location, behavior and interaction in each dimension. The paper begins with a review of key literature on platforms, platform urbanism and food delivery platforms, as well as spatial frameworks of physical, digital and virtual space. It then examines how platforming space is manipulated to produce efficiency through driver positioning and control, food standardization, and delivery kitchens. The paper highlights some consequences of this platform optimization, illustrating how platforms intensify and instrumentalize the entanglement of technology and space.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144694592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-18DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100135
Sophia Leipert
At/in the foundation of the computational city lies its often-overlooked material infrastructures – socio-technical systems such as fibre optic cables and ducts that enable digital connectivity while remaining largely invisible within dominant technocratic visions of the smart city. This paper examines how fibre optic infrastructure shapes contemporary urban spatialities through the lens of maintenance labour and care relations in Hamburg, Germany. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observations and expert interviews, it reveals how telecommunications infrastructure is materially embedded in urban spaces and (re)produced through embodied practices, exposing its entanglement with wider political-economic dynamics and spatial inequalities. By foregrounding care practices and maintenance labour, the paper highlights the expertise central to sustaining digital networks while underscoring the inequities in infrastructure development and access. Blending feminist theories of care with critical urban and infrastructure studies, it argues that maintenance labour disrupts dominant imaginaries of seamless urban digitalisation, offering critical insights into more equitable approaches to urban infrastructure (re)production. In doing so, the paper contributes to (literally) grounding infrastructure debates in the embodied realities of spatial production and advocates a shift towards infrastructural futures grounded in care.
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