The Digital Growth Machine: Urban Change and the Ideology of Technology
Topics: Urban Geography
, Digital Geographies
, Urban and Regional Planning
Keywords: digital growth machine, urban growth, digital technologies, growth machine, urban geography, digital geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17
Authors:
Jovanna Rosen, Rutgers University-Camden
Luis Alvarez Leon, Dartmouth College
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
We argue that technology sector-led urban growth combines digital accumulation and urban accumulation dynamics to transform urban growth processes and outcomes. This process builds on long-standing growth machine dynamics (Logan & Molotch, 1987) to create a unique and potent urban growth variation: the digital growth machine.
The digital growth machine fosters four related capital accumulation avenues that enable and support its activities: 1) extending long-standing land development and industrial attraction strategies, to promote urban growth and increase exchange values; 2) new possibilities for capturing land-related profit beyond traditional land development and intensification strategies; 3) new opportunities for intermediaries to emerge and profit from urban dynamics; and 4) new digital renderings of the city that affect land-related value and perceptions of place. The first process builds on traditional growth machine dynamics in a new industrial context, while the latter three are directly enabled by new digital tools and the digital transformation of urban landscapes, including, for instance, platform urbanism.
By viewing these four avenues together, as interrelated urban growth strategies supported by urban elites, we demonstrate how urban digitization extends—and in so doing, transforms—long-standing growth machine dynamics. Taken together, these processes simultaneously further dynamics of elite control over land that have become deeply entrenched in cities under capitalism, while qualitatively transforming urban life and the role of cities and land in this economic system.
The Digital Growth Machine: Urban Change and the Ideology of Technology
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides