Technology & power
Who programs the city, and with whose data. Surveillance, algorithms, platforms and the geopolitics that decides where a border gets drawn.
Every city is programmed. It used to be programmed by rules and plans; now also by software, sensors and platforms that decide in real time who passes, who parks, who looks suspicious and which neighbourhood gets investment. The question is no longer whether the city is smart, but for whom.
Here we gather the analyses on urban technology and power: surveillance and its cameras, the algorithms that sort the city, the platforms that take over the street, the smart city and its rankings, artificial intelligence in planning. And urban geopolitics: borders, global cities, colonial legacies and the decisions taken very far from where they are suffered.
A smart city is not the one with the most sensors, but the one that knows who installs them, what they measure and whom the data serve.
- Urban geopolitics
Janet Abu-Lughod: cities, the world system and comparison
Janet Abu-Lughod showed a world system existed before European dominance, and studied Cairo, Rabat and New York…
Janet Abu-Lughod 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Ash Amin and the relational city: what holds a city together
Ash Amin describes the city as a fabric of relations between people, infrastructure and flows. What it means for…
Ash Amin 2 min read - Urban AI
Michael Batty: How Models Reveal the Hidden Essence of Cities
Michael Batty explains the city as a complex system emerging from millions of decisions: fractals, scaling laws,…
Michael Batty 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Neil Brenner: Global Urbanization Goes Beyond City Borders
Neil Brenner argues that urbanization does not fit administrative boundaries: scale, state restructuring, extended…
Neil Brenner 3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urbanized Fear: Security, Segregation and Resistance in the City
Teresa Caldeira explains how fear designs the city: the talk of crime, fortified enclaves in São Paulo, the paradox…
3 min read - Urban AI
Proximity Transforms: Edward Glaeser on Productive Cities
Edward Glaeser explains why concentrating people and firms makes cities more productive: agglomeration, human…
Edward Glaeser 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Rem Koolhaas: Manhattanism, Bigness and the Generic City
Rem Koolhaas explains what happens when the city grows faster than the planner's control: Manhattanism, Bigness,…
Rem Koolhaas 3 min read - Urban AI
William J. Mitchell: The Future City, Information and Connection
William J. Mitchell anticipated in City of Bits, e-topia and Me++ the hybrid city of matter and information: the…
William J. Mitchell 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Why Cities Are the Key Nodes of Globalization: Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen explains why a dispersed economy needs global cities to coordinate it: command functions, social…
Saskia Sassen 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Fulong Wu: The Chinese State Still Leads Urban Transformation
Fulong Wu explains how China's shift to a market economy changed urban production without removing the state: land,…
Fulong Wu 3 min read - Urban AI
Algorithms That Decide Your Rent in Spain and the United States
Revenue management programs pool landlords' data and recommend rents that rise all at once: how they work, the…
3 min read - Urban AI
Who Controls the City When Software Is Privately Owned?
When a company operates a city's sensors and algorithms, the vendor governs: lock-in, algorithmic opacity, the…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Who Experiments in Our Cities? Pilots and Risk in the Global South
Experimental urbanism tests the cities of the future in the Global South, from Eko Atlantic to India's smart cities…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The City Written by Speculative Funds: Why Planning Lost the Pen
How investment funds, not planners, order the city: Madrid's price surge, public housing sold to funds and Harvey's…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Michael Peter Smith: Transnational Urbanism and Global Cities
Michael Peter Smith argues in Transnational Urbanism that globalisation is made by migrants and networks in…
Michael Peter Smith 2 min read - Surveillance / data
Stephen Graham: Militarisation and Surveillance in the City
Stephen Graham describes in Cities Under Siege the new military urbanism: how techniques of war, surveillance and…
Stephen Graham 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Bob Jessop: The State and Neoliberal Urban Restructuring
Bob Jessop explains how the state moved from Keynesian welfare to competitive workfare and what it means for…
Bob Jessop 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
David Theo Goldberg: Race, Space and Power in Cities
David Theo Goldberg shows that racism organises urban space: ghettos, peripheries and zoning manufacture race.
David Theo Goldberg 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Global Cities According to Saskia Sassen: Power and Inequality
Cities in a World Economy (1994) by Saskia Sassen explains why the global economy is run from a few cities and what…
Saskia Sassen 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Mike Davis: Planet of Slums, Inequality and Megacities
Mike Davis explains in Planet of Slums how the megacities of the Global South grow without jobs or infrastructure,…
Mike Davis 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Edgar Pieterse: Spatial Justice and Sustainable Cities in Africa
Edgar Pieterse of the African Centre for Cities proposes radical incrementalism for African cities: improving the…
Edgar Pieterse 3 min read - Urban AI
Manuel Castells: from neighbourhood struggle to network city
Castells read urban movements as structural responses to power, then showed how information networks reconfigured…
Manuel Castells 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Cities: Reimagining the Urban by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift proposes thinking the city as flows, rhythms and…
Ash Amin 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
James Scott: Why the State's Grand Plans Fail
James C. Scott explains in Seeing Like a State why high modernist plans fail: legibility, Le Corbusier, Brasília…
James Scott 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Çağlar Keyder: Istanbul Between the Global and the Local
Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (1999), edited by Çağlar Keyder, explains how Istanbul turned its…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Hong Kong as a Global City: Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui
Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui explain how Hong Kong went from colony to global financial centre and what that means…
Stephen Chiu 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
City Politics by Judd and Swanstrom: Power and Urban Governance
City Politics by Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom explains how US cities are governed: private power, growth…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Urban Geography in the 21st Century: Challenges and New Frontiers
How urban geography has changed: theory beyond the Global North, cities and climate change, technologies of…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Henri Lefebvre: The Urban Revolution as a Global Process
In The Urban Revolution (1970) Henri Lefebvre argues that urbanisation overflows the city and becomes a global…
Henri Lefebvre 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
African Cities by Garth Myers: Reassessing African Cities
African Cities (2011) by Garth Myers proposes reading African cities on their own terms: postcolonial, informal,…
Garth Myers 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira and São Paulo: Growth, Inequality and Equity
Teresa Caldeira explains how São Paulo grew through self-built peripheries and split into fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis by Mbembe and Nuttall
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall read Johannesburg as a modern African metropolis rather than an exception. The…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Manuel Castells: the space of flows
What Manuel Castells means by the space of flows: how networks of information and capital reorganise global cities,…
Manuel Castells 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Shanghai as a Global City: From the Concessions to Pudong
Shanghai went from an open port in 1843 to a cosmopolitan metropolis and, after 1990, to a state-directed global…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Urban Condition: The Fragmented Metropolis of Globalisation
The Urban Condition (1999) by the Ghent Urban Studies Team describes the dispersed metropolis of globalisation and…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: what makes a global city global
New York, London and Tokyo concentrate capital, information and decisions. Saskia Sassen explains what links them…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Urban AI
Hybrid Urban Space: Physical and Digital (Castells and Shields)
Hybrid urban space overlays the street and the platform. What Castells's space of flows and Shields's mythology of…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Brenda Yeoh: Migration and Urbanization in Asian Cities
Brenda Yeoh explains how Singapore and other Asian cities grow with migrant workers denied belonging.
Brenda Yeoh 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: migration, inequality and the global city
How Saskia Sassen explains the global city: financial concentration, international migration, urban inequality and…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces: Globalisation and Urban Governance
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces explains how globalisation reorganised states in space: from spatial Keynesianism…
Neil Brenner 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Urban Governance: Models, Challenges and Citizen Participation
Urban governance shares power over the city among governments, businesses and residents. Jon Pierre's four models,…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Endless City by Burdett and Sudjic: The Global City Compared
The Endless City (2007) by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic compares with maps and data New York, Shanghai, London,…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Racial inequality and spatial segregation in the city
How race structures the city: Wacquant (Urban Outcasts), Elijah Anderson and Ruth Glass on segregation,…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Peripheral Global Cities: Subordinate Integration and Exclusion
How the cities of the Global South are inserted into the world economy in a subordinate way: Grant and Nijman's…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Planetary Urbanization: Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's Thesis
Planetary urbanization holds that the urban has no outside: mines, plantations and networks are part of the city.
Neil Brenner 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Indigenous Peoples in the City: Rights and Recognition
Indigenous peoples' rights in the city clash with urban expansion and planning. What Clara Irazábal and Raquel…
3 min read - Urban AI
Platform Urbanism: How Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo Change the City
Platform urbanism explains how Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo reorganise transport, housing, retail and work.
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Production of Space in the Global South: Robinson and Pieterse
The production of space in the Global South needs its own categories. What Jennifer Robinson (Ordinary Cities). The…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Forced Displacement in the Global South: A Growing Urban Crisis
Forced displacement in Global South cities grows through development, violence and climate. What Mike Davis and…
3 min read - Urban AI
Technopolitics and Urban Governance per Kitchin and Jasanoff
Urban technopolitics decides who owns a city's data and which algorithms govern. What Rob Kitchin and Sheila…
3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urban Security and Technology: Surveillance (Lyon and Graham)
Cameras, drones and facial recognition are transforming urban security. What David Lyon and Stephen Graham explain,…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Socio-Spatial Segregation: Wacquant, Massey and Sassen
Socio-spatial segregation sorts rich and poor into separate neighborhoods. How Loïc Wacquant, Douglas Massey and…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Urbanization in the Global South: Simone, Pieterse and Roy Explained
Global South urbanization concentrates the world's urban growth without formal jobs or state capacity. What…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Postcolonial Urban Fragmentation: Inequality and Resistance
Why postcolonial cities remain divided: Fanon's city, Graham and Marvin's splintering infrastructure, Caldeira and…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira's City of Walls: Segregation and Fear in São Paulo
City of Walls (2000) by Teresa Caldeira explains how fear of crime turned São Paulo into a city of fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Urban AI
Automation and Urban Inequality: What Autor and Srnicek Explain
Automation polarises urban employment and platforms fragment work. What David Autor and Nick Srnicek show and which…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Fernando Carrión: the fragmented city in Latin America
What the fragmented city means for Fernando Carrión: spatial segregation, public policy and citizen security in…
Fernando Carrión 2 min read - Urban AI
The Right to the Smart City: Who Benefits from Digital Cities?
The Right to the Smart City, edited by Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio and Kitchin, carries Lefebvre's right to the city…
3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urban Militarisation: Surveillance and Control (Graham and Davis)
Urban militarisation brings the tactics and technologies of war into the surveillance of cities. What Stephen…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Jennifer Robinson and Ordinary Cities: Urban Theory from the South
Ordinary Cities (2006) by Jennifer Robinson holds that all cities are ordinary and sources of theory. Her critique…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: Cities in a World Economy
A summary of Saskia Sassen's Cities in a World Economy: why a handful of cities concentrate command over the global…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Urban AI
Industry 4.0 and Cities: How It Transforms Urban Mobility
Industry 4.0 brings sensors, artificial intelligence and electromobility to the city. What changes in transport,…
3 min read
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