Relational geographies of the urban digital growth machine: Mapping the socio-spatial pathways (DiGiMap)

As traditional urban growth and spatial commodification patterns continually interweave with that of digitally mediated accumulation dynamics, multi-layered spatial logics spawn, rendering asymmetric shifts in urban processes to the dominion of digital conglomerates. DiGiMap seeks to comprehend, articulate, and illustrate polymorphic superimpositions of “the digital growth machine” (DGM), how it emerges at various spatial scales, shapes information flows/spaces, and changes contemporary urban realities of planetary urbanisation. Seated at the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Luxembourg, DiGiMap is a PhD project that will expose emerging socioinfrastructural components of DGMs, and how they shape contemporary urbanity, how cities intertwined with DGM characteristics can be relationally understood, and how advancing geographies of uneven digital development induce social inequalities. As maps are powerful tools of imagination that can reach a plurality of audiences, DiGiMap draws methodologically on Henri Lefebvre’s mille-feuille of social space, recontextualized through contemporary means of relational data iteration to multidimensionally narrate geographies of uneven spatial development ignited by the expansion of components that constitute our mutual exposure to the digital growth machine. Empirically, DiGiMap will focus on the surfaces and pathways of Luxembourg City and Zurich. Comparable in terms of socioeconomic urban growth agendas, the high degree of immediate internationalisation, patterns of urbanisation, and corresponding targets of development/maintenance of innovation economies, the study charts overlaps and variance of said digitally mediated spatial accumulation dynamics in both contexts. DiGiMap thus contributes to the state-of-the-art by producing diverse narrated cartographic representations of modern social space, advancing how digital space is perceived, and illuminating possibilities for practitioners and planners to strategically recalibrate to rapidly progressing digital geographies.