Digital Territories: Location Awareness and the Re-making of Political Space in Rio's Favelas

Wednesday, February 8, 2017 - 15:00 to 17:00
Room 2.31, Iontas Building, North Campus, Maynooth University

This talk examines the digital production of territory through (digitally enabled) location awareness, and the various visibilities and invisibilities at play in the mobilization of ICT technologies towards bridging urban exclusion. Drawing on Stuart Eleden’s notion of territory as “a rendering of a ‘space’ as political category” (2013), the talk examines the politics of spatial calculation involved in recent attempts to incorporate Rio’s favelas within the city. As Rio de Janeiro rebrands itself as a ‘smart city’, both non-profits and ICT corporates such as Google re-imagine the city and its favelas, mobilizing the digital mapping of ‘previously unmapped’ territories as a technique of socio-economic inclusion. In the context of Rio’s favelas—the frontier of formally governed territories—digital mapping represents an emerging form of making territory through computational logics. Yet, in contrast with the disciplinary techniques of Rio’s Pacifying Police Units, location awareness via digital mapping operates as a governmental technique that incorporates population into a broader economic territory, reinforcing a way of governing favelas through opening up them to further (digital and material) circulations. In the interface between smart, digital and urban worlds, political territory is re-made through economic incorporation.

Smart Cities