Overview

How is life in digital cities changing what it means to be human? In this perceptive book, Myria Georgiou sets out to investigate the new configuration of social order that is taking shape in today’s cities. Although routed through extractive datafication, compulsive connectivity, and regulatory AI technologies, this digital order nonetheless displaces technocentrism and instead promotes new visions of humanism, all in the name of freedom, diversity, and sustainability. But the digital order emerges in the midst of neoliberal instability and crises, resulting in a plurality of contrasting responses to securing digitally mediated human progress. While corporate, media, and state actors mobilize such positive sociotechnical imaginaries to promise digitally mediated human progress, urban citizens and social movements propose alternative pathways to autonomy and dignity through and sometimes against digital technologies. Investigating the dynamic workings of technology and power from a transnational and comparative perspective, this book reveals the contradictory claims and struggles for the future of digital cities and their humanity. In doing so, it will enrich understandings of digital urbanism, critical data studies, and critical humanist studies.​

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9781509530793

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Reviews

‘Myria Georgiou offers a fascinating critique of how humans and cities are co-constructed through promises of a digital future. This is a highly engaging and important book, which will be of great interest to academics and students for years to come.’ Ayona Datta, University College London ‘Discussion of what it means to be human is usually abstract. Myria Georgiou complements this with really helpful attention to urban contexts, their variety and the different shapes they give to human experience, action and, indeed, reality. An important contribution.’ Craig Calhoun, Arizona State University

Author Information

Myria Georgiou is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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