People, Place, and Media in the Contemporary City

The digitization and privatization of human experience from the global to the intimate has become so pronounced in capitalist societies that it is now difficult and perhaps unnecessary to disentangle the production of media from that of place. Indeed, the reciprocal production of geography and technology entailed in globalization has led to a re-theorization of the urban form over the past two decades. Hybrid constructions of the “Informational City” (see Castells, 1992), “Cybercity” (see Boyer, 1992 and Graham, 2004), “Networked City” (see Mitchell, 2003), and more recently the “Real-Time City” (see Hollands, 2008 and Kitchin, 2014) and “Data-driven City” (see Flowers, 2013) suggest a growing interest and inquiry into the political ecology of a supposedly “smart” urbanism. …

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