Evolving spatialities of digital life: Troubling the smart city/home divide

Abstract

While feminist geographers have long aimed to trouble conceptions of the city/home (and, by extension, public/private) divides, the digital city and the digital home are still often theorized as separate phenomena within much digital geography literature. Drawing on previous work on feminist home-city geographies, this paper proposes four analytical frames for reflecting on the relationship between urban and domestic space in digital geographies: governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling. The paper explores each lens through a critical review of recent literature in digital geographies and related fields. It weaves this review through a speculative reading of the Eco Delta Smart City, an experimental development building the smart city from the home up in Busan, South Korea. We show how each lens calls attention to distinct sets of questions, actors, agendas, and relations–thus refusing any single reading of the project or of the broader trends around digitalization of which it is a part. In the process, we trace how digitalization does not simply trouble existing spatial categories, but rather makes them manifest in new ways for differently situated subjects.