Being Human in Digital Cities
![Cover](https://www.wiley-vch.de/media/com_eshop/products/resized/no-image-150x150.png)
1. Auflage Dezember 2023
196 Seiten, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
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.
Chapter 2. The Competing Humanisms of the Digital City
Chapter 3. Popular Humanism: The Sociotechnical Imaginaries of the Digital Order
Chapter 4. Demotic Humanism: The Liminal Subject of the Digital Order
Chapter 5. Critical Humanism: Against the Digital Order
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
"Myria Georgiou's excellent new book [is] a must-read for anyone interested in digital technologies, cities and humans."
Gillian Rose, Visual / Method / Culture
"Examining the digital order's influence, including datafication, surveillance and mapping, Georgiou's essential book advocates for centring humans through the paradigm of the "right to the city" based on social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability."
Samira Allioui, LSE Review of Books