Spatial Production, Digitalities and “The Digital”
Topics: Digital Geographies
, Geographic Thought
, Cultural Geography
Keywords: digital space, digital geographies, space, spatial production, geographic theory
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 20
Authors:
Emma Fraser, University of California, Berkeley
Clancy Wilmott, University of California, Berkeley
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
The relationship between pre-digital capitalism, urban development, and progress has often been framed around Marxist conceptions of spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991). While digital geographies as a field has grappled with geographies “through, produced by, and of the digital” (Ash, Kitchin and Leszczynski, 2016) there is still much to be said about philosophical consequences of “the digital” for theories of spatial production and spatiality. In this paper we propose that digitalities – as plural and heterogenous drivers of cultural, as well as economic, development – are interwoven with myths of progress and digital exceptionalism.
Advancing a position first developed during an RGS session convened by the authors in 2018, this paper argues that digitalities and attendant digital spatialities are characterised by multiplicities which intersect, connect and co-form: for instance, hybridities, geometries, image-spaces, affects, politics, narratives, interfaces, fluidities, automations, codes, technologies, practices, exchanges, lives and bodies. Across these analyses, theories of space and spatiality have been complicated, extended and refigured as digital technologies have opened up new critiques. Through contemporary as well as pre-digital approaches to development, technology and space, we consider the extent to which digital growth follows established forms of spatial production, and the ways in which pre-digital theories of space and spatiality can shed light on the relations between platforms, lived space and different digitalities. We also consider possibilities for resistance and reconfiguration in digital space via an acknowledgement of the multiplicitous nature of digitalities over monolithic claims of a digital age.
Spatial Production, Digitalities and “The Digital”
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides