Digital Geography and Society最新文献

While life-as-usual remains disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, cities rely increasingly on community-based and often digitally-enabled sharing of knowledge, skills and resources. These emergent forms of ‘communal sharing’ cannot be explained through instrumentally-beneficial economic discourses or structurally-disruptive political narratives alone. Rather, they call for revaluing the interdependent social relations that digital platforms enable and maintain. Drawing from a relational ontology of transformative social innovation, this paper begins to reframe communal sharing as inherently interdependent social relations between citizens and across civic, market and government domains. These interdependencies mean that sharing through digital platforms is not only responding to, or resisting, dominantly neoliberalist urban logics but is both formed by and reforming new understandings of urban agency. To explore these new understandings of being, doing and thinking of the city as shared, the paper adopts a generative epistemology of postcapitalist politics. Reading communal sharing as not merely interdependent but as fundamentally prefigurative of urban structures, norms and behaviours, the paper develops a post-structuralist approach to sharing cities. This approach illustrates practices as co-determined, communities as resourceful, and initiatives as highly adaptive socio-spatial performances taking place within and beyond digital platforms. Recognising and nurturing the enabling role of digital in sharing cities, the paper adopts the hopeful stance of reconceptualising communal sharing to open space for social and sectoral divides to be bridged and reimagined beyond the pandemic accelerations of platform capitalism.

This paper examines what I call the project for democracy, by which I mean a perpetual individual-and-collective project to manage our affairs ourselves, in all areas of our lives. The goal of the paper is to understand better what that project entails and how we can carry it out well. To do so, I examine a very prosaic empirical case, the software code that organizes the everyday environment of our personal computing devices: operating systems, window managers, wireless interfaces, system trays, and so on. What would the project of democracy look like in that context? The bulk of the paper is spent fleshing out an answer to that question. I then suggest that the project for democracy in the digital realm of the desktop is just one instance of the wider project for democracy. The desktop can be a little model that can guide and inspire the project for democracy in other arenas, such as the household, the neighborhood, the city, and beyond.

Logistics is a relatively hidden subject in tourism studies. This theoretical article advances a logistical approach to the study of tourism in the platform economy. It is argued that the platform economy rests on logistical accumulation, which means that human practices are not just predicted but ultimately steered in order to generate profitable digital data streams. At the same time, “smart”, mobile media platforms provide unprecedented logistical affordances to people to navigate and manage various flows. Tourism is thus taken as a logistical intersection, where the steering mechanisms of the platform economy entangle with the needs and capacities for orientation, coordination and orchestration among travellers. The social expansion of logistical accumulation raises questions of human agency, especially in relation to tourism, as well as a need to study how the basic tension between “steering” and “being steered” unfolds in different sociocultural settings. The article provides a critical account of the logistical frictions, conflicts and inequalities characterizing digital tourism geographies. It also actualizes the need for further exchanges between media studies, tourism studies, and critical geographical research on logistics.

Digital platforms have become an increasingly central concept for reflecting societal processes, but the historical and spatial embeddedness of platformization is often neglected as dystopian warnings and promises of efficiency take center stage. The Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified discussion and speculation regarding the future of digital platforms and changing everyday routines in (post-)pandemic cities. Drawing on the case study of Graz (Austria), this paper expands generalized speculation by a concrete exploration of what alternative platform futures in (post-)pandemic cities might hold. The underlying aims are to identify case-specific socio-spatial dynamics with respect to the platformization of on-demand food delivery in Graz and to explore in what ways these dynamics were influenced by the pandemic.

The article contextualizes the development of food delivery platforms in Europe, taking into consideration long-term enabling conditions such as neoliberal restructuring, financialization and the crisis of social reproduction, but also the boom of delivery platforms during the ‘lockdowns’ related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The case study draws on qualitative interviews with company officials, delivery workers, union representatives and restaurant owners to investigate the platforms' disruptive and unequal effects. Through this storying of the development of the platform economy for food deliveries in Graz from various perspectives in the pandemic city of the year 2020, the study challenges the narrative of a capital-driven and pervasive platformization. At the same time, the findings point out limitations of the local alternative platform model and contribute to the critical discourse on urban platforms.

Autistic children and young people who find physical interaction challenging may feel more able to communicate in familiar environments. Communication and social interaction utilising digital online platforms and spaces may provide such an environment, with a comfortable level of engagement that can be relatively controlled. As blogs, vlogs, and online uploads are often live and up to date, these constitute useful first-hand perspectives, particularly for and from neurodiverse individuals who may find physical interaction and communication difficult and confusing.

As an initial source of their perspectives, together with the views of their stakeholders, thematic analysis of autistic authors and bloggers within the community was conducted from digital publicly available blog posts and published articles in relation to a particular activity - cosplay. Analysis was performed in relation to independent sole and group cosplay (dress-up) play activities within the physical home and digital online spaces to ascertain if, and if so, to what extent dress up creative and character cosplay is used by autistic individuals as a response to socio-spatial exclusions, to create own space within which to belong and exhibit agency.

Findings, using Grounded Theory for thematic analysis, revealed a connection between autistic children and young people's feeling of exclusion in socio-material space and their pursuit of activites that sought friendship and like-minded others online. Within these digital spaces autistic individual are finding means and the ability to communicate together. Digital spaces for cosplay practice are encouraging feelings of acceptance whilst also providing a platform to be themselves and feel confident to reach out to, and engage with others.

This paper focusses on the impact that the development and spreading of digital platforms have at urban level. In particular, lean platforms are transforming cities more and more in sites of production and circulation, so to change also actors and roles engaged with urban planning and public policies. Despite we will propose an investigation on a particular service, neither the analysis of a general process shared by all platforms, in the article we will investigate the socio-historical background for platform economy development more in general, in order to propose a methodological approach we call a trans-urban approach.

In the first part of the article, we rest on the historical background of our digital era. Analysing the relation between technological innovation and productive organization, we will highlight how platform economy emerges as particular articulation of a more general long-time transition deeply entangled with the so-called “Logistics Revolution”. In the second part, we will consider more in depth the specificities of platform business model in relation with its urban dimension focusing on the platforms territorialization and on platforms conflicts. In the third and final part, we propose a trans-urban approach as an innovative perspective to study the globalized and variegated features of contemporary capitalism, in particular the urban impact of platform economy.

The aim is to sketch few features of a new methodological approach towards the urban space as field of tension between several and different perspectives generated by the development of platform economy.

This article summarizes some first outputs from Horizon2020 project PLUS (Platform.

Labour in Urban Spaces) coordinated by University of Bologna.

This article contributes to the emerging body of urban digitalisation scholarship concerned with alternative practices at the grassroots level by reviewing and structuring the literature in relation to the production of urban space and governance. By drawing a conceptual framework for grassroots digital urbanism, the paper first brings the ongoing discussions around the smart city and platform urbanism into critical conversation through the lenses of right to city and platform capitalism discourses. Then it reviews the literature on the unfolding alternative ideas and practices mobilised at the grassroots level to discursively and practically contest these techno-capitalist models. The outputs of this literature review are conceptualising a version of grassroots digital urbanism that is at the intersection of grassroots urban movement and digital sovereignty and highlighting the lack of empirical work and critical accounts on the resulting implications of relevant initiatives in reshaping the production of urban space and reconfiguring urban governance.

This paper explores the variety of alternative, local platforms that flourished in Hong Kong during 2019–2020, a tumultuous time which was shaped by the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests and the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the app and platform landscape by tracing the differences between local platforms, platforms made in Hong Kong, and mega platforms, platforms owned by international technology giants such as Google and Facebook. It examines this along two axes: the differences on (1) “platform logics”: what alternative organising logics are possible within this landscape? And on (2) “platform mobilities”: how do local platforms compete and co-exist with global conglomerates?

In particular, the paper excavates the disparate logics and mobilities in the array of (a) social media platforms, (b) shopping aggregator/city guide platforms, and (c) ride-hail/delivery platforms that grew in tandem with local socio-political rhythms of life in the city. This includes the differences between a “growth-at-all-cost” logic versus the incentives that encourage tailored services to a very specific user-base. Likewise, the disparities that emerge when extraction of data is not the priority – and instead, when the aim is to retain as little data as possible. Similarly, it gives examples of what platforms could look like when they are not centrally characterised by capital accumulation, value-extraction, and race-to-the-bottom logics.

This paper thus highlights the vast range of alternative platform possibilities and argues for the importance to think more critically about what platforms we are platforming, where we look to when we think of innovation, and what we forgo in a landscape starved of options. In putting the range of creative local platforms in dialogue with mega-platforms, this paper joins the larger movement urging for a better space for alternatives to flourish.

Studies show that, in times of need, Indigenous people across the continent now referred to as ‘Australia’ tend to rely more on the ‘informal’ connections of support, care and trust made with family, friends and community—connections which are increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Australian researchers have recently begun attending to the possibilities social media offers in sustaining networks of support ‘outside’ settler geographies of institutionalised health. This burgeoning digital health research, however, has tended to frame Indigenous people only as recipients of care; and it has mostly focused on the narrow remit of connecting Indigenous social media users with formal sources of health information and support. In this paper, we instead explore the already-existing ‘informal’ care practices of and between Indigenous social media users. We draw on recent developments in cultural and health geography, which have sought to understand care, health and wellbeing through Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) notion of ‘assemblage’, to chart the geographies of care that digital media makes possible. We show that Indigenous social media users are engaged in the production of distinct territorial arrangements of care. In identifying people in their networks who appear in need of help, they actively and creatively work to establish a suitable working arrangement to meet that need, which participants variously described through expressions of intimacy, networks, formality and atmosphere. These Indigenous articulations of digital media, we argue, are reterritorialising new spaces of care, safety and strength, against and outside the settler geographies that lead to widespread health disparities, and they challenge dominant narratives about Indigenous digital life.