Digital Social Innovation: Spatial Imaginaries and Technological Resistances in Urban Governance

by Chiara Certomà

Overview

This book engages the reader in exploring the relationships between digital social innovation initiatives and the city. It delivers a fresh, accessible and case-based discussion on the emergence of digitally-enabled social innovation practices in Europe that are redesigning the urban space and challenging the consolidated urban governance processes.

By adopting a critical geography perspective, this ground-breaking analysis of digital social innovation provides the reader with an accessible overview of the way in which urban reproductive processes mobilise the physical and the virtual dimensions of the city and generate distinctive spatial configurations. Together with novel urban narratives and socio-technical imaginaries, these support the existing geometries of power or construct new ones.

The author clearly describes contemporary cities as the new battlegrounds for controlling the digital sphere, shaped by the interplay between digital capitalism and resistance movements. In light of grassroots initiatives advanced by cyber-activists, e-makers and hackers, the book unveils the socio-political and cultural underpinnings of the revolution produced by the digital social innovations in the city and the socio-technological regimes supporting them.

This author successfully sheds new critical light on traditional innovation studies exploring the debate on digital innovation through the lens of social and cultural geography providing an invaluable reference for those working in this field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030804510
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	08/21/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Chiara Certomà is Assistant Professor of Political and Economic Geography at the University of Turin (Italy), affiliate at the Centre for Sustainable Development at Ghent University (Belgium) and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Italy). She is currently visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technologies and Society at TU Graz (Austria).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introducing Digital Social Innovation in the City1.1 Digital Social Innovation: what is it and where it comes from1.2 Experimenting with Digital Social Innovation: global goals, local initiatives1.3 Expert’s box “People-friendly City platform. Reloaded” (by Mark Dyer, Waikato University)2.1 The city as innovation embedding ecosystem2.2 Assets and obstacles to digital social innovation2.3 City box “Barcelona”2.4 Expert’s box “Place-based Innovation” (by Alberto Cottica, Edgeryders)Chapter 3: In the innovators’ shoes: communities, practices and pitfalls3.1 The world of innovators’ communities3.2 Innovating in the urban agglomerate3.3 City box: “Warsaw”3.4 Expert’s box: “Technologies for Good” (by Olly Zanetti, external consultant at Nesta)Chapter 4 Informality, transactionality, fluidity: a new urban governance model for/from digital socialinnovation4.1 Urban governance in commotion4.2 New actors, new assemblages, new practices4.3 City box: “Rome”Chapter 5 Into the dark side: criticalities and contestation5.1 The digital turn and its discontents5.2 Behind the technology veil: is the public at risk?5.3 City box: “Ghent”5.4 Expert’s box: “The city is for the People” (by Karl-Filip Coenegrachts, City of People)Chapter 6 Spaces for innovation?6.1 Urban digital governance6.2 Towards the “internet of people”?6.3 Expert’s box: “On the Digital Social Innovation manifesto” (by Antonella Passani, T6-Ecosystem