FlowCity

Abstract

This paper argues that contemporary cities can be understood as socio-technical constructions supporting mobilities and flow to more or less distant elsewheres: flows of people, goods, services, information, capital, waste, water, meaning. As such infrastructurally mediated flows are enrolled into the reconfiguration of urban spaces, a logic of intense geographical differentiation is underway. Within this people, institutions and places are enrolled in very different ways into the broadening circuits of economic and technological exchange that support processes of globalization. Networked infrastructures, far from somehow equalizing geography, as so often portrayed in the business press, are actually being organized to exploit differences between places, within ever-more sophisticated spatial divisions of labour. Following an introduction which explores the links between technological mobilities and flows and the restructuring of contemporary urban space, the paper analyzes in detail the emerging networked configurations of four of the most salient types of networked mobility space emerging in the contemporary metropolis. These are: e-commerce spaces, passenger airports and fast rail stations, export processing zones, and multi-modal logistics enclaves dedicated to freight.