Digital Geography and Society最新文献

Broker bureaucracies: The subsidiary offices of the digitalizing state

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2025-01-07 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100112

Fenna Imara Hoefsloot , Neha Gupta , Dennis Mbugua Muthama , José de Jesús Flores Durán

{"title":"Broker bureaucracies: The subsidiary offices of the digitalizing state","authors":"Fenna Imara Hoefsloot , Neha Gupta , Dennis Mbugua Muthama , José de Jesús Flores Durán","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100112","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100112","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Intermediaries play crucial roles in the implementation and functioning of the state in the transition towards digital governance. As a restructuring of networks, information flows, and territories – the digitalizing state implies the transition towards the digitalized interaction between the state and its residents, signaling a potential shift in the position of intermediaries in this process. Drawing on interviews with brokers and key informants in land administration and ethnographic observations in Nairobi, Guadalajara, and Mumbai, we explore the interplay between digital technologies, paper-based systems, typists, consultants, and citizens in the digitalizing state. This urges us to consider how digitalization, in many ways, goes against the novelty and excitement ascribed to the dynamics of modernizing and digitizing state governance. Paying attention to the geographies of information flows shows how digitalization unfolds in both the offices of the state as well as in subsidiary, hybrid spaces and through acts of brokerage. We argue that the paper-filled offices of the print shops and cybercafés are the sites where a potentially different range of alternative digital futures are exposed. Outside of the tropes of control, seamless connection, or the globalizing effect of digital technologies, these spaces give insight into the deeply institutionalized cultures and ways of organizing civil and political life in which digital technologies are introduced.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"8 ","pages":"Article 100112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143181499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

(Retail) platform legitimation through municipal partnerships?

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2025-01-06 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100111

Sina Hardaker , Alexandra Appel

{"title":"(Retail) platform legitimation through municipal partnerships?","authors":"Sina Hardaker , Alexandra Appel","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100111","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100111","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Collaborations between digital platforms and governments are increasingly common, and understanding these partnerships is essential for grasping how platforms navigate and influence urban governance and market boundaries. This paper examines the legitimation processes involved in such collaborations, focusing on the <em>eBay Deine Stadt</em> initiative as a case study. This initiative, led by eBay, helps municipalities launch local online marketplaces, facilitating the digital transition for struggling brick-and-mortar retailers. Drawing on qualitative expert interviews with municipal stakeholders and a quantitative survey of retailers listed on the <em>eBay Deine Stadt</em> platform, this study offers several key contributions: Overall, it reveals the mixed outcomes of the <em>eBay Deine Stadt</em> initiative, adding to the discussion on platform legitimation in response to traditional retail decline. The study demonstrates the role of municipalities and government institutions in shaping the narrative of platforms as urban problem-solvers and highlights the absence of strategic planning by municipalities in their collaborations with digital platforms, noting that some urban actors promote a positive local perception, thereby potentially legitimizing increasing platformization. The study identifies institutional work as central to this legitimation process, highlighting a clear shift towards general validation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"8 ","pages":"Article 100111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143181161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Characterizing climate change sentiments in Alaska on social media

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-12-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100110

Junjun Yin , Matthew Brooks , Donghui Wang , Guangqing Chi

{"title":"Characterizing climate change sentiments in Alaska on social media","authors":"Junjun Yin , Matthew Brooks , Donghui Wang , Guangqing Chi","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100110","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100110","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The profound impacts of climate change have spurred global concerns. Yet, public perceptions of this issue exhibit significant variations rooted in local contexts. This study investigates public perceptions of climate change in Alaska on Twitter and explores their connections with local socioeconomic and environmental factors. Using geo-located tweets from 2014 to 2017, we identified a collection of climate-related tweets using a deep learning framework. Employing lexicon-based sentiment analysis, we quantified the sentiments with positive and negative scores, further enriched by extracting eight core emotions expressed in each tweet. Furthermore, we applied regression models to assess the influence of regional socioeconomic and environmental attributes on climate-related sentiments at the census tract level. Our findings reveal an overall upward trajectory of Alaska's Twitter-expressed climate change sentiments over time, particularly during the summer months. Insights into the interplay between local demographics and environmental features and climate change perceptions include: (1) Census tracts with higher Native Alaskan or American Indian populations tend to express more negative sentiments, (2) the inclusion of road density stands out as a significant factor, suggesting that climate change is seen/discussed more in areas with more dense-built infrastructure, and (3) the presence of mixed emotions exhibits a profound connection with climate change sentiments—i.e., emotions of disgust and surprise are inversely related, whereas sadness and trust demonstrate positive associations. These outcomes underscore an evolving situation awareness of climate change among individuals, emphasizing the need to consider local factors in understanding public perceptions of this global issue.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"8 ","pages":"Article 100110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143181500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Synthetic geospatial data and fake geography: A case study on the implications of AI-derived data in a data-intensive society

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-12-04 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100108

Antonello Romano

引用次数: 0

Counter-mapping platformization. Rethinking the spatial differentiation of platform control, labor relations and restaurant virtualization in proprietary markets for food-delivery

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-12-04 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100107

Yannick Ecker, Maximilian Lukowsky, Marius Wecker

{"title":"Counter-mapping platformization. Rethinking the spatial differentiation of platform control, labor relations and restaurant virtualization in proprietary markets for food-delivery","authors":"Yannick Ecker, Maximilian Lukowsky, Marius Wecker","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100107","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100107","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Living off financialization and crises of social reproduction, digital platforms play an increasing role as mediators of urban everyday life, productions of space and labor. Hence, subverting hegemonic narratives of pervasive platformization and bringing relationalities behind such care-less digital infrastructures back into focus has become a central challenge for critical analyses. In our contribution, we focus on proprietary markets for food delivery and develop a counter-strategy less explored in recent work on these forms of platform urbanism. By gathering and repurposing publicly-available platform data through <em>counter-cartographies</em>, we explore the spatial differentiation of platformized delivery logistics, labor relations and restaurant virtualization. We ground the need for such an approach in a theoretical discussion of recent work on platform urbanism and contrast it with narrower political economy perspectives that conceptualize platforms as proprietary markets. By using web-scraped data and public listings for the food aggregator platform <em>Lieferando</em> for Hamburg and Halle (Germany), we focus on restaurants as participating nodes in the digital platform's marketplace. Instead of offering a single alternative counter-narrative and counter-strategy, the contribution proposes to develop a dual perspective on the subsumption of labor relations under platformization and to complement academic interest in labor protests with a deeper concern for the food-delivery market as a site of conflict, accumulation and anti-competitive market practices.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"8 ","pages":"Article 100107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143181160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Housing disruptions: Six conceptual entry points for analysing the digital transformation of housing and home

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-12-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100109

Tim White , Dallas Rogers , Sophia Maalsen

引用次数: 0

The urban-tech feedback loop: A surveillance and development data-walk in South Lake Union 城市-技术反馈回路：南湖联盟的监控与发展数据漫步

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-11-09 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100106

Dillon Mahmoudi , Anthony Levenda , Alicia Sabatino

{"title":"The urban-tech feedback loop: A surveillance and development data-walk in South Lake Union","authors":"Dillon Mahmoudi , Anthony Levenda , Alicia Sabatino","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100106","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100106","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this research article, we employed an autoethnographic data-walk methodology to explore the complex relationship between urban spaces and digital data collection, using the South Lake Union neighborhood as a case study. We examined how major technology companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and various property developers leverage the dual forces of urbanization and data gathering to shape urban environments in ways that serve their interests. Our key contribution lies in uncovering the power dynamics at play, where tech companies exert significant influence over urban planning and governance, reshaping cities into spaces designed for surveillance and commodification. In areas like South Lake Union, the redevelopment into numerous small storefronts enables the granular tracking of consumer behavior, turning everyday activities into data that fuels targeted advertising and capital accumulation. We identify two central insights. First, data-walks offer a way to “story” the influence of tech corporations on urban spaces from the perspective of everyday experiences. While digital data collection is integral to capital accumulation, the process is uneven and must be viewed from various angles—including from the perspective of everyday life—to fully understand the emerging inequalities. Second, we argue that the transformation of urban environments under tech capitalism exacerbates existing social and spatial inequalities while generating new ones. The commodified surveillance of daily activities and consumption not only drives data accumulation but also reshapes the physical and social fabric of the city. This work serves as an initial step in challenging these unequal processes of surveillance-driven urban development.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"7 ","pages":"Article 100106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142655242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

AI and data-driven urbanism: The Singapore experience 人工智能和数据驱动的城市化：新加坡的经验

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-11-06 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100104

Diganta Das , Berwyn Kwek

{"title":"AI and data-driven urbanism: The Singapore experience","authors":"Diganta Das , Berwyn Kwek","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100104","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100104","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper presents a deep and critical analysis of Singapore's new wave of state-built digital tools and services and how it connects to its larger smart urbanism project, also known as Smart Nation. The COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly Singapore's response, served as a real-world testing ground for smart urbanist strategies. In particular, we analysed the logic that emanates from these novel digital interventions, how they operate on the complex urban built environment and the population, and their effects on urban and citizenry morphologies. Next, we examined a series of state-led technological implementations that have emerged since the Covid-19 pandemic, providing digital solutions that assist citizens with the changing rhythms of everyday living, data-capturing sensors and gantries to aid authorities in contract tracing efforts and enforce vaccination differentiation measures, geospatial digital mapping of demographic data, in withal robotics for automated policing and cleaning activities; and the use of AI and automated data-driven tools in public health to improve service delivery and care to patients. While we are unable to exhaust every piece of technology for the purpose of this paper, these developments, along with their design thinking and operations, we argue, are helpful in revealing the contemporary conjectures of Singaporean digital urban idealism and the governing strategies of the state. By examining Singapore's response, this study aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on smart urbanism, offering insights into how cities can leverage technology effectively while balancing technological innovation with privacy and public trust.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"7 ","pages":"Article 100104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142655240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

From tenants to subscribers: Digital experiments in residential rent extraction 从租户到订户：住宅租金提取的数字实验

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-11-06 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100105

Tim White

引用次数: 0

Working in the comfort zone: Understanding coworking spaces as post-digital, post-work and post-tourist territory 在舒适区工作：了解作为后数字时代、后工作时代和后旅游时代领地的协同工作空间

Digital Geography and Society Pub Date : 2024-10-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100103

Karin Fast, André Jansson

{"title":"Working in the comfort zone: Understanding coworking spaces as post-digital, post-work and post-tourist territory","authors":"Karin Fast, André Jansson","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100103","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100103","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Coworking spaces are contradictory places. Typically, they are constructed as connected, domestic-like places for hard work and as recreational, aestheticized destinations for individuals in search of work-life balance and opportunities for partial disconnection. This article contributes an immanent critique of coworking spaces through the overarching notion of “coworking space territoriality”. Our point of departure is the concept of post-digital territoriality, which captures how individuals and organizations in various ways try to counter the downsides of escalating digitalization and reclaim a sense of bounded place. To further elaborate the subversive potentials of coworking spaces, however, the “post-digital” is brought into dialogue with “post-work” and “post-tourist”; two other “post-” concepts that contain ideas and practices that characterize the contradictory nature of coworking spaces. At the intersection of all three facets of territoriality, we argue, the coworking space emerges as a spatially and socially bounded comfort zone. The suggested approach informs the ongoing conversation about the ambiguous role of coworking spaces in broader transformations of society, especially in terms of social inclusion and exclusion. The theoretical arguments are anchored in a substantial literature review as well as in first-hand empirical data from a “hot-desking ethnography” covering ten different coworking spaces in Oslo, Denver, and Palma de Mallorca.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"7 ","pages":"Article 100103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142539154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0