Reading the City in a Global Digital Age: The Limits of Topographic Representation

Understanding a city or a metropolitan region in terms of built topography is increasingly inadequate when global and digital forces are part of the urban condition. What we might call the topographic moment is a critical and a large component of the representation of cities. But it cannot incorporate the fact of globalization and digitization as part of the representation of the urban. Nor can it critically engage today’s dominant accounts about globalization and digitization, accounts which evict place and materiality even though the former are deeply imbricated with the material and the local and hence with that topographic moment. A key analytic move that bridges between these very diverse dimensions is to capture the possibility that particular components of a city’s topography can be spatializations of global and digital dynamics and formations; such particular topographic components would then be one site in a multisited circuit or network. Such spatializations destabilize the meaning of the local or the sited, and thereby of the topographic understanding of cities. This holds probably especially for global cities. My concern in this essay is to distinguish between the topographic representation of key aspects of the city and an interpretation of these same aspects in terms of spatialized global economic, political, and cultural dynamics. This is one analytic path into questions about cities in a global digital age. It brings a particular type of twist to the discussion on urban topography and cities since globalization and digitisation are both associated with dispersal and mobility. The effort is then to understand what analytic elements need to be developed in order to compensate for or remedy the limits of topographic representations for making legible the possibility that at least some global and digital components get spatialized in cities. Among such components are both the power projects of major global economic actors but also the political projects of contestatory actors, e.g. electronic activists. A topographic representation of rich and poor areas of a city would simply capture the physical conditions of each—advantage and disadvantage. It would fail to capture the electronic connectivity possibly marking even poor areas as locations on global circuits. Once this spatialization of various global and digital components is made legible, the richness of topographic analysis can add to our understanding of this process. The challenge is to locate and specify the fact of such spatializations and its variability. This brings up a second set of issues: topographic representations of the built environment of cities tend to emphasize the distinctiveness of the various socio-economic sectors: the differences between poor and rich neighborhoods, between commercial and manufacturing districts, and so on. While valid, this type of representation of a city becomes particularly partial when, as is happening today, a growing share of advanced economic sectors also employ significant numbers of very low-wage workers and subcontract to firms that do not look like they belong in the advanced corporate sector; similarly, the growth of high income professional households has generated a whole new demand for low-wage household workers, connecting expensive residential areas with poorer ones, and placing these professional households on global care-chains that bring-in many of the cleaners, nannies and nurses from poorer countries. In brief, economic restructuring is producing multiple interconnections among parts of the city that topographically look like they may have little to do with each other. Given some of the socio-economic, technical, and cultural dynamics of the current era, topographic representations may well be more partial today than in past phases.