Urban prospecting

Abstract

This dissertation applies an urban political-economy framework to look at the growing mobile and laboring population of digital nomads who are attempting to pursue their futures and access the city amidst an increasingly global and uneven geographic distribution of jobs located in inaccessible cities, a situation I refer to as the new urban crisis. I approach Digital Nomads as a new in-formation unit of production introduced by changes in the nature of work as well as by corresponding changes in the urban social structures of social reproduction brought about by the transition to post-industrialism and the flexible regime of capital accumulation. Digital Nomads are a heterogenous population, a field of class fragments brought together by their shared and plural experiences of the new urban crisis. It is in the way that these diverse actors respond to this crisis that they begin to form themselves as a coherent figure and subject, or rather a number of classes-in-formation obscured under the moniker of the Digital Nomad. Mobility is a key tool this population utilizes in response to this crisis, connecting to cities in new ways through practices such as co-living and remote work. Digital Nomads approach these practices from different positions, coming across one another in shared spaces in the cities they invest their mobility in while learning from one another the different ends these practices can be put to. These collisions shape and direct their future mobility and its underlying logics, acting as the sites where digital nomads and their successors are being made. As the outcomes of this mobility will impact cities and systems of global production for decades to come, it is vital to understand the processes by which this mobility is directed, to understand how the lifeworld of labor and the digital nomad makes mobility to certain places over others possible, posing the question: When you can live anywhere, where do you choose to live? This dissertation sets out to unpack the subjective processes by which digital nomads invest their mobility, a practice I will refer to as Urban Prospecting. Urban Prospecting is both the objective collection of these movements and the open-ended sets of subjective logics guiding these pursuits. Urban Prospecting logics are used to evaluate places as potential sites for future investments of mobility, these evaluations weighing how each place makes certain life outcomes related to the self and employment possible. In order to get at both the logics and outcomes of urban prospecting, I utilized a mixed methods approach which included network analysis and multi-sited ethnography to unpack how digital nomads interpret their position within the global urban landscape and how these interpretations guide where they invested their mobility. Building a social network model of digital nomad mobility logged on the social networking platform Nomadlist between more than 700 cities around the globe, my research demonstrated that digital nomads engage in two broad circuits of mobility: (1) mobility to the global city, and (2) mobility away from the global city to new offbeat and off-the-map locations. I then conducted multi-sited ethnography at the PodShare co-living space in the Global City of Los Angeles and the Ghoomakad co-living space in the Offbeat city of Dharamsala, India in order to look at the types of digital nomads and urban prospecting logics underlying each circuit of mobility. In each city, I elaborated a place-based typology of the type of digital nomads I met based on how they balanced the terms of urban prospecting that guided them to each location. In the former case, I looked at how and why this population is still attaching itself to global cities in crisis and their attendant labor and social reproductive markets. In the latter case, I investigated the emergence of new work destinations that have been enabled by the introduction of remote work that allows digital nomads to decouple from global cities and head to offbeat locales and remote getaways in Southeast Asia and the Global South that offer tourist infrastructures, nice weather and low costs of living. I end by considering the implications this labor mobility poses for the future of work, urbanization and capital accumulation in general.--Author's abstract