Digital technologies have changed the world, transforming how, where, and when we communicate, love, learn, create, produce, distribute, and consume. Digital Lives in the Global City examines the entanglements of urban life, investigating how urban land, governance, and the economy are being remade by advancing communication technologies. Digital infrastructures connect people and places across vast distances, yet they also extend the working day into personal time and space, increase the power of financial institutions, and enhance state and corporate surveillance capacities.

Digital Lives in the Global City intersperses critical scholarship with provocative short works from artists, activists, and citizens to engage with a wide range of issues wrought by digital infrastructure: struggles over unsafe and illegal buildings in Mumbai, the conditions of migrant work in Singapore, the question of digital debt in Toronto, and targeted policing in New York. This nuanced exploration reveals the profound connections between digital technologies and the social life of global cities.

Digital Lives in the Global City asks how digital technologies are remaking urban life around the world, from migrant work in Singapore to digital debt in Toronto, illegal buildings in Mumbai, and targeted policing in New York.

About the Author

Deborah Cowen is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade and Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, and coeditor of War, Citizenship, Territory and the Errantries book series at Duke Univeresity Press. Alexis Mitchell is an artist and SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Disability Studies at New York University. She has had recent exhibitions at Mercer Union (Toronto), the Berlinale (Berlin), and the BFI London Film Festival, and was an artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, in 2015-17 and at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire in 2018. She often works collaboratively with artist Sharlene Bamboat under the name Bambitchell. Emily Paradis is an instructor with the Urban Studies Program of Innis College at the University of Toronto, a Maytree fellow, a collaborator with the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, a member of the Right to Housing Coalition, and an independent research consultant. Her scholarship and practice aim to support marginalized communities in claiming spaces and rights in the city. She has authored more than thirty publications on housing policy, homelessness, human rights, and lived expert leadership. Brett Story is an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University, has a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Sundance Documentary Institute. She is the author of Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America and the director of the award winning documentaries, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, and The Hottest August.

Contributors: Grace Baey, Simone Browne, Charmaine Chua, Katarina Cizek, Judy Duncan, Neha El-Hadi, Heather Frise, Stephen Graham, Ju Hui Judy Han, Hussain Indorewala, Symon James-Wilson, Anja Kanngieser, Sameera Khan, James Kilgore, Krystle Maki, Shaka McGlotten, Lize Mogel, Paramita Nath, Natalie Oswin, Shilpa Phadke, R. Josh Scannell, Kashaf Siddique, Nicole Starosielski, Indu Vashist, Visualizing Impact, Alan Walks, Shweta Wagh

Reviews

[Digital Lives in the Global City] is a highly engaging and thought provoking read and an important contribution to both academic and activist discussions.

-- Casey R. Lynch, University of Nevada * Antipode *



Book Information
ISBN 9780774862387
Author Deborah Cowen
Format Paperback
Page Count 308
Imprint University of British Columbia Press
Publisher University of British Columbia Press