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Chairs(s):

Joe Gallagher, UMBC

; ,

Description:

The growth machine has proven a durable concept for thinking about the capture of urban governance/policymaking by a class of urban elites who promote land use intensification for profit (Logan and Molotch 2005). Building on Walker (2018), Rosen & Alvarez-León & (forthcoming) argue that the rise of urban digital platforms, competition among cities to attract tech firms, the ubiquity of smart/sensing technologies, and the mediation of everyday life through various digital products marks an emergence of a new force shaping the urban: the digital growth machine. Rosen & Alvarez-León argue that the resulting embeddedness of digital capital companies' in both urban life and urban governance structures effectively masks the underlying, intersecting urban and digital accumulation forces that coordinate to promote tech-related contemporary urban growth. Congruent phenomena provide key insights to the inner workings of the digital growth machine. The racialized expropriation of platform capitalism (McMillan Cottom 2020), new forms of digital spatial fixes (Greene and Joseph 2015), bifurcation of platform labor (Mahmoudi, Levenda, and Stehlin 2020), cognitive cultural capitalism (Scott 2007; Wyly 2013), technologies of real estate (Shaw 2018; Fields 2019), digital caring labor (Burns and Andrucki 2020), platform automation and data production (Attoh, Wells, and Cullen 2019), industries of digital deprivation (Perry 2018), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), and data colonialism (Thatcher, O'Sullivan, and Mahmoudi 2016; Couldry and Mejias 2019) all suggest particular perspectives on the digital growth machine, connecting it to new form(s) of land-, labor-, and capital-derived profits predicated on the urban experience.

These forms of digital exploitation and expropriation don't necessarily leave tangible or obvious traces in the built environment. Nevertheless, the digital growth machine still transforms spatial relationships in the city and novel contradictions arise from the tension between the fixity of urban spaces and the flow(s) of data and capital. Scholars are beginning to answer the question posed by Leszczynski (2019) and built upon by Attoh et. al: what kind of city is built by big data in tandem with the digital growth machine? While technology firms and other digital growth machine actors profit, their quest for data-driven growth leads to a city that is "defined by alienation and isolation" (Attoh et. al 2019). This concept follows recent work which helps us see platforms and their ilk for what they really are: they are at their core digital rentiers and landlords (Rigi and Prey 2015; Sadowski 2020) whose digital form is fairly novel but whose reproduction involves enclosure and extraction. Faced with novel digital form, Walker (2018) argues for the need of collective action against tech capital while Datta & Odendall (2019) argue, with others, for the need to combat the consolidation of power that is made possible through digital technologies in cities.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda