Digital transformations of the urban – carbon – labor nexus: A research agenda

Abstract

Digitalization is profoundly impacting natural resource extraction. Mines and wells are monitored and managed in new ways from real-time data streams to algorithmic decision-making to implementation of automated vehicles. How mines and wells are superintended is restructuring the geographies of employment as more of the day-to-day mining operations are centralized in urban locations distant from sites of extraction. Digital infrastructures allow for greater control over distant non-urban extractive geographies, but they also are remaking urban spaces. While the tendency today is to create ever more geographically extensive extractive-labor regimes, these regimes are increasingly modulated by digital technology advances, a feature that also central in the drive for cities to become “smart.”

Here, in a review of the literature, we theorize these transformations and show that they raise pressing new research questions at the (digitalized) nexus of urban — carbon — labor. We argue that to date, research, particularly that on digitalization, has at any time tended to focus on two of the three nodes in this nexus, and better integrating all 3 of them raises unique theoretical challenges. We offer 4 inquiries as an agenda that can guide future research. First, how should urban labor be brought to bear on digital extraction scholarship? Second, how is digitalization of carbon-extractive economies shaping social divisions of labor in the smart city? Third, does the datafication of “nature” in energy-extractive industries transform political ecology relations? Fourth, how does the particular context of the extractive industries make us rethink urban economies of digital labor?