Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

How are cities shaped by smart and digital infrastructures? The widespread use of technology enables occupants of the twenty-first-century city to be simultaneously present in real place and digital space. The connective speed and mobility offered by technology, within, between, and beyond cities, can appear to collapse and compress space. This is in contrast to the effect of physical networks, which in densely populated environments can appear to expand space as a product of the time taken to travel between places. These emerging conditions challenge conventional nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of what a city is and where its boundaries lie. As the potential density of urban centres increases, the geographical boundaries of the city are distorted. Is the contemporary city becoming amorphous? Modernist discourse concerning the planning and organisation of cities has been dominated by growth and the efficiency of spatial operation and performance within urban infrastructure (Batty, 2008). In the contemporary city, technology drives the size, scale, shape, and relationship of built and urban form (see for example, Luque-Ayala, and Marvin, 2015). Consequently, cities can no longer be understood as a two-dimensional ground plane but must be explored within the dimensional complexity of digital infrastructure (Graham, 2016). Based on case studies of the Scottish Highlands and Cornwall, this paper will identify the transformative drivers of contemporary urban space through a review of the implications of digital infrastructures for spatial operation and performance. It will begin to explore the definitions of smart and intelligent cities, with a view to understanding the new operational boundaries of the city and identify where potential opportunities through new networks may arise.