Infrastructures of Extraction in the Smart City Zones, Finance, and Platforms in New Town Kolkata

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

This article explores the infrastructures of value extraction that emerge as the township of New Town Kolkata is being transformed into a “smart” city. As the processes of digitalization take shape amid uncertainties and contradictions, the city becomes a site for intensive data mining. Commercial platforms, such as Uber, use computing infrastructures to predict and orientate consumer behavior, monetize attention and emotion, discipline labor, and maximize profit. Yet if data extractivism is a prominent process of urban digitalization, it is also inextricably linked to broader dynamics of resource extraction, dispossession, and financializaton that precede and march along with the making of smart cities. The complementary concepts of urban extractivism and extractive urbanism are apt to capture, I suggest, the entanglement between digital and nondigital forms of value extraction that take place in the smart city. At the same time, the analysis of economic operations in the making of the smart city also prompts reflections on the relations between speculation and extraction.

Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational Journal of Communication
Volume15
Pages (from-to)2652-2668
Number of pages17
ISSN1932-8036
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Mutual Trust as a Key to Internationalization of SMEs
  2. Spontaneity and the spaces between
  3. Marie Hoppe: Subjektwerdung unter Bedingungen von outsiderness
  4. Unfair wage perceptions and sleep: Evidence from German survey data
  5. Farewell to the White Space?
  6. Professional Service Firms, Knowledge-based Competition and the Heterarchical Organization Form
  7. Collaborative governance towards cities sustainability transition
  8. Evaluation der Implementation konzeptuell unterschiedlicher Maßnahmen zur Leseförderung in der Sekundarstufe I
  9. Der europäische Weg
  10. Historii nelze rolišit od jejího zobrazení
  11. §60 Nutzung von Seewasserstraßen
  12. Openness in Cross-Cultural Work Settings
  13. Visions of Philhellenism in the Poetry of Wilhelm von Humboldt: Between Historical Analysis and Idealized Modernity
  14. Gerd Hurm: Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain
  15. Frömmigkeit der Theologie, zur Logik der offenen Theodizeefrage
  16. Improvising Digital Transformation
  17. Das Projekt „Fach-an-Sprache-an-Fach“
  18. Auf den Schultern von Riesinnen
  19. Treppauf, Treppab
  20. The pitfall-trap of species conservation priority setting
  21. Künstliche Tiere
  22. Board Ancestral Diversity and Voluntary Greenhouse Gas Emission Disclosure
  23. Recovery from work stress
  24. IT-Governance in der internationalen Hochschulkooperation (IT-GOV)
  25. David im November
  26. Sustainable Management compensation and ESG performance
  27. Storms Schimmelreiter. Das Töten als Initiation ins Soziale
  28. Recycling of organic residues to produce insulation composites
  29. Führt der Einsatz externer Berater zur Überimplementierung innovativer Steuerungsinstrumente?