Digital Politics, Urban Geographies: Emergence as an Orientation to Life with Platforms

My chapter makes a case for “emergence” as an epistemological reorientation in scholarship on digital urbanism that offers generative openings in our theoretical and analytic imaginaries, beyond deficit- and damage-centered frames. I explore the epistemological and political possibilities of emergence through a close reading of insurgent improvisational digital tactics forged by diverse actors confronting racial violence, surveillant policing, tenant abuse, and more. Opening up the theoretical imaginaries through which we try to understand urban life with platforms is urgent and stands to reveal creatively grounded, deeply relational digital praxes of everyday life that recalibrate urban sociospatialities around emplacement, solidarities, and thriving.