Digital Geography and Society最新文献

Cities are a conducive context for the emergence of digital platforms and at the same time cities are reshaped by the digital spaces that are created by these platforms. The key features that set Urban Digital Platforms (UDPs) apart from other digital platforms are the allocation of public goods and services at an urban scale (via P2P transaction), and their orientation towards civic and grassroots initiatives in area’s which the local state agencies have a significant role in steering urban development patterns. This article explores the spaces and realms of interactions and engagements which ‘urban digital platform(s) (UDPs) have created in two prominent European cities, Milan and Amsterdam. By focusing on civic crowdfunding initiatives, it shows that digital platforms not only unleash societal initiatives but also have the potential to fundamentally change (urban) political processes, as their gatekeeping principles provide a powerful frame by which projects are selected. This paper sheds light on how platform urbanism and the new lens of digital geography are critical in investigating ‘alternative platforms’ as civic crowdfunding and their mutual co-constitution between technology, sociality, and spatiality.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic literature review of the research published on the economic geography and spatial implications of the fourth industrial revolution (“Industry 4.0”) using key terms and inclusion/exclusion criteria. Based on this methodological approach, this review includes 177 papers in the final analysis. I discuss the literature based on primary research strands and their analytical contributions to understanding spatial developments in the context of Industry 4.0. The review highlights five main topics that current research focuses on: (1) Value Chains and supply networks (2) Clusters and industrial districts (3) Readiness and adaptation of regional industries (4) Innovation developments and ecosystems (5) Labor market. In the analysis, it becomes particularly clear that the embedding in the theoretical fields of economic geography is so far very thin. The paper calls for a multi-scalar understanding of Industry 4.0 and outlines future research avenues with a focus on the emerging topic of digital geographies. Scholars need to put an emphasis on the role of the geography of digital innovations within socio-technical systems to better understand the spatial dimensions of the fourth industrial revolution and its impact on the economy, society, and environment.

In this section, we reflect, both empirically and speculatively, on the perspectives for STRs and related digital platforms in the (post-)pandemic city, on the grounds of early signals of change in relation to spatial justice and institutional arrangements. The discussion is opened by Tulumello and Cocola-Gant, who, by investigating the case of Lisbon, Portugal, reflect on the flexible nature of platforms vis-à-vis the (neoliberal) cloud of de- and re-regulation in housing and rental markets, discussing how this intersection allows STRs to adapt and succeed, also during the pandemic. Similarly, Iacovone explores the professionalisation of platform-mediated STRs and their adaptability to increasingly more flexible and malleable requests from the market – dimensions that allow them to successfully outcompete smaller actors. Finally, Pettas and Dagkouli–Kyriakoglou, by focusing on the case of Athens, Greece, discuss the ways STRs could be transformed into housing infrastructure for remote workers in connection to the restructuring of the post-pandemic labour market.

Digital exclusion and poverty are understood to be closely linked, and existing literature on the topic makes clear that the contexts of people's lives shape their experiences of digital exclusion in important ways. Indeed, the online and offline aspects of life are in many regards inextricable. As such, this paper focuses on the complex relationship between digital exclusion and poverty, and examines how a range of spatial, material, and temporal factors related to experiences of poverty shape opportunities to use the internet. Drawing upon qualitative data from interviews with coaches and participants in a programme which seeks to help low-income people find work, manage their money, and get online, the paper traces several key ways in which different aspects of poverty – including housing inequality – coalesce to shape experiences of digital exclusion. In doing so, the paper argues that examining the ways in which these seemingly offline aspects of poverty affect opportunities to use the internet provides an opportunity to enhance understandings of exactly how digital exclusion is manifested for those experiencing poverty.

This paper identifies opportunities and pathways through which feminist digital geographies can expand into the realm of online gaming. Whilst research at the nexus of gender and online gaming has come a long way in the past two decades, geographical perspectives are noticeably lacking. They can contribute to the discourse by emphasising the contingent nature of online gamespaces, and how a gendered subject position might be redefined through, and help to redefine, the (in)distinctions between “online” and “offline”, “gaming” and “non-gaming” spaces. I identify four directions in which feminist geographies of online gaming can unfold: aesthetic-affective spaces of the “virtually real”, relationality through and beyond the avatar, labours of play and the purpose of leisure, and non-gaming spaces and the gaming of space. These directions foreground an exploration of gender within/and online gaming that is ontologically open, spatially fluid and replete with epistemological potential.

The Covid19-pandemic has accelerated processes in which digital platforms, privileged by their critical size, become central instances of urban life. While most scholars associate platform urbanism with transnational platform corporations, such as Amazon or Facebook, local non-corporate platforms unexpectedly persist despite lacking critical size. This article analyzes processes through which non-corporate platforms are created, maintained, disseminated, and locally implemented; given this type of platform's absence of critical size. We explain the persistence of local non-corporate platforms by drawing on the concept of embeddedness. Embeddedness accounts for non-market-based, i.e. socially and culturally influenced behavior, that shapes economic interactions. We distinguish between network embeddedness, in which organizations maintain permanent and exclusive relationships with one another, and local embeddedness, which combines Hess' (2004) notions of societal embeddedness and territorial embeddedness. This article is empirically grounded on an analysis of two most different ways of creating and maintaining, disseminating, and locally implementing non-corporate platforms: Platform cooperativism and free/libre open-source software-based platforms (FLOSS-based platforms). Two empirical case studies of collaboratively governed Western-European non-corporate platforms, Gebiedonline and Decidim, respectively inform the analysis of platform cooperativism and FLOSS-based platforms. Gebiedonline is a platform cooperative through which neighborhood and theme-specific platforms are created. Decidim is a FLOSS-based platform that is mainly used for civic and political participation processes. We find that governments and civil society stakeholders create non-corporate platform technology by disentangling processes related to the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of platform technology from platform implementation processes. Following platform creation, platform maintenance is embedded in a network. Non-corporate platforms pool cost-intensive technology maintenance, while platform implementation necessarily takes place in a locally embedded manner.

In the early 21st century, blogs exploded onto the digital media scene and soon became a popular means of travel writing. However, rather than considering blogs as a straightforward tool to simply share stories and experiences, in this article, we set out to explore the role of blogs as a mediating technology (Verbeek, 2005a), especially during difficult times abroad. By analysing the blogs of expatriate Australians who were volunteers in Bangladesh in 2014/2015 as well as interviews with the bloggers, we are able to show how the blogs' affordances inform the coping process, highlighted, in particular, in an active and highly reflective engagement with the blog's unique situatedness at the cusp of the public/private. In this way we wish to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which “trusting oneself” to this specific communication technology (Kiran and Verbeek, 2010) is being experienced and facilitates sense-making in complex, and often stressful, human-world-technology relations. Foregrounding the ways in which blogs actively mediate and thus contribute to representations of the world, this article resonates with recent work on “earth writing” as a geographical practice (Springer, 2017; Wylie, 2018), and hopes to open up further debates on digital earth writing.

Understandings of digital technologies as tools to manage deficit, or conversely as mediators of harm, are prominent for young people in migrant communities negotiating the impacts of geographic isolation. Young people in these contexts emerge at the nexus of several categories of so called ‘disadvantage’ occupying spaces in the geographic and ethnic margins with curtailed independence. This paper provides an opportunity to progress discussions about young migrants beyond the city by putting dualistic, determinist approaches aside and answering calls from digital geographers to clarify the production of place through locational digital media. The production of rural place among culturally diverse young people highlights everyday uses of digital media to mediate locally embedded socialites while pointing to the place-making capabilities routinely practiced by the young participants.

The article explores algorithmic governance through the lenses of Foucault's work on governmentality. Algorithms are understood as “technologies of power” that literally “subjectify” the individuals upon which they act. Our main focus is on Syrian refugees in two national contexts - Estonia and Turkey - and we consider four types of algorithms to which refugees are subjected: relocation, police risk scoring, recommendation algorithms and online advertisements. The goal is to explore the “algorithmic imaginaries” of both refugees and Estonian experts who work with migration data about these technologies, via a series of interviews with 19 refugees and 24 data experts. Our findings show that, while relocation and police risk scoring algorithms are perceived as technologies of power responsible for producing macro-differences without paying sufficient attention to individual needs, recommendation and ad algorithms are seen as less threatening, i.e. as “technologies of the self”. From here, we suggest reconsidering algorithmic governance as an iterative practice to eventually transform the datafied “knowledge of the self”, suitable for algorithms, into a true “care of the self”.

These are uncertain times in the Anthropocene, where the health and resilience of all urban inhabitants should be key themes for cities striving for sustainability. To this end, local councils in Australia are applying digital technologies with increasing complexity as components of their urban forest management. This paper applies a more-than-human lens to analyse Australian local council urban forest policies, documents and project information for their inclusion and application of digital technologies. In this scoping review, digital geographies informed data collection to answer questions about the type, use and ownerships of tree data, and more-than-real and ‘lively data’ concepts were employed to extend their discussion.

Our analysis found that local government policies focused on general urban tree data and canopy percentages and utilised this data to justify and create policy and program parameters. There was a general lack of more-than-human considerations beyond the focus on trees in creating and designing smart urban forests, but it is unclear whether this was due to technical limitations, council desires or other factors. Challenges identified for successful outcomes included balancing priorities, access to resources and information, technological constraints, and community factors such as capacity to engage and cultural values. Digital technologies that facilitate smart urban forests tended to reinforce and re-solidify Western values. However, strengths of current applications are also evident, and we explore how they provide more-than-real possibilities for human-nature relationships to deepen and foster collaborations between disparate groups and entities in urban environments. Greater consideration and acknowledgment of the more-than-human and understanding of the more-than-real in co-creation and co-design of digital technologies and their applications may facilitate more positive outcomes for human and non-human urban inhabitants.