Lecture Abstract
In technophilic discussions of digital connectivity and the city, apps that help us to navigate and explore our urban environments are presented as working for us – improving our experience of the city by enhancing its enchantments and overcoming its obstacles. In this presentation, I argue that we are also being put to work by our apps. By mediating the relationship between the urban crowd and the digital cloud, these apps turn our commutes, our shopping, our leisure, our exercise, even our activism, into a form of digital labour that is exploited for profit in a process of ‘accumulation by datafication’. They therefore represent a new chapter in the commodification of everyday urban life – one that has significant consequences for our rights to the city and challenges for urban politics.
About the speaker
Kurt Iveson is Associate Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the relationship between cities and citizenship, and has covered a range of topics including: contests over the regulation and production of public space; the urban politics of difference and equality; the implications of locative technology for everyday urban life and politics. He is author of Publics and the City (2007), and co-author of Planning and Diversity in the City: Redistribution, Recognition and Encounter (2008), and Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Cities (forthcoming). He blogs at citiesandcitizenship.blogspot.com, and has a fortnightly radio show in Sydney about urban environmental issues called Down to Earth.
Panel Discussion
After the talk, there will be a panel discussion, with the following participants:
-Associate Professor Jonny Aspen (Institute of Urbanism and Landscape, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design), https://aho.no/en/aho-staff/jonnya
-PhD candidate Aron Sandell (Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo).
For more information on the seminar series, please the website: http://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/networks/cities-and-society
The seminar series is hosted by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.