Situating the geoweb in political economy

Abstract

The geoweb represents a profound shift within regimes of the production, dissemination, and institutionalization of geographic information. Going beyond early geographic accounts of the geoweb that engage it as an extension of Web 2.0, this paper situates the emergence of the geoweb within the neoliberal political economic restructuring of the state. Drawing upon evidence of state, market, and citizen practices around Web-based spatial media and geoinformation, I argue that as the state is ‘rolling back’ from public aspects of the cartographic project, market regimes of governance are simultaneously ‘rolling out’, subsuming the mapping enterprise to the imperatives of technoscientific capitalism.

Keywords

geographic information geoweb governance neoliberalism political economy the state

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