Gentrification and the Right to the Geomedia City

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue “Gentrification and the right to the geomedia city.” The aim of the special issue is to make up for the lack of research on how gentrification is shaped and underpinned by the normalization of various media platforms that currently define urban life—and what these media mean to the resistance to gentrification. Building on the seven contributions that make up the special issue, this article introduces the concept of the geomedia city as a discriminatory regime of dwelling. The geomedia city refers not only to the digital infrastructures built into urban environments—circulating and embedding data—but more crucially to the social and cultural dynamics whereby certain norms, skills, and forms of capital (and thus people) are legitimized (or marginalized) in the city. As such, geomedia constitutes a territorializing force that lubricates urban displacement processes by defining who has the right to belong where.

Gentrification research has for a long time failed to analyze the role of media in urban displacement processes. Although there have been studies on how media coverage plays into the social upgrading of neighborhoods, and, more recently, the role of social media in classifying urban places (e.g., Boy & Uijtermark, 2017; Jansson, 2019; Zukin et al., 2015) and the platform-reliant connections between gentrification and the so-called sharing economy (e.g., Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019; Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018), there are very few systematic analyses of the interplay between gentrification and the socially classified and classifying needs for, and uses of, different media infrastructures, technologies, and contents (see Leszczynski & Kong, 2022, for a recent example). This lack is somewhat paradoxical given the rapidly growing interest in the so-called “media city” (e.g., McQuire, 2008), “networked city” (e.g., Iveson & Malsen, 2019), “data-driven city” (e.g., Kitchin et al., 2017), “smart city” (e.g., Cardullo et al., 2019; Rose et al., 2021; Rose & Willis, 2018), and “digital city” (Halegoua, 2019), and associated notions like “platform urbanism” (e.g., Graham, 2020; Leszczynski, 2020; Sadowski, 2020; van Doorn, 2020) and “smart urbanism” (e.g., Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019; Kitchin, 2014). Research into these areas has focused especially on the transformations of “smart”/urban governance and citizenship in the face of datafication and automated surveillance (e.g., Cardullo et al., 2019; Leszczynski, 2016; Shelton & Lodato, 2019), and on the flexible and exploitative arrangements of the urban platform economy in relation to, for example, accommodation services, food delivery, and digital workspaces (e.g., Richardson, 2020b, 2021; Stabrowski, 2017; van Doorn, 2020), rather than on the socioeconomic and cultural logics whereby new media technology conditions the territorialization of urban space.

Cardullo and Kitchin (2019) are right in noting that the current stronghold of “smart urbanism” as a global blueprint for democratic city development rests on a neoliberal ideology promoting certain forms of civic participation at the expense of others. On a general level, to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre (1968/1996), this means that “smartness” merely reproduces the basic democratic dilemma that not everyone has the same “right to the city” (cf. Cardullo et al., 2019). On a more local level, in concrete neighborhoods, it also means that the normalization of data-driven businesses and organizations and associated urban services and practices nurtures the stigmatization and displacement of less privileged inhabitants and their ways of life. This, we argue, is where the connections to gentrification processes should be addressed (for a similar approach, see Leszczynski & Kong, 2022). We must delve beyond issues of participation and citizenship; we should also try to get at the most mundane underpinnings of our “digital existence” (Lagerkvist, 2017), things like labor, dwelling, and belonging.

Our aim with this special issue is primarily to make up (at least to some degree) for the long-standing lack of research into the interplay between gentrification and (new) media (see also Jansson, 2019). We hope that the contributions presented here will illuminate not just the role of media in gentrification processes but also how gentrification contributes to the legitimization and material anchoring of technological imperatives subsumed under ideologically coded labels like the “smart city.” That said, we also see it as our duty as social scientists to actively counter such commercially biased descriptors of deeply complex developments—which is not to suggest that one should refrain from addressing the ideological work of those labels per se (Sadowski & Bendor, 2019). Instead, we intimate the more analytically precise yet sufficiently open-ended notion of geomedia to frame our discussions of the interplay between spatial transformations and new media/communications. Following McQuire (2016), geomedia is here understood as an expanding socio-technological regime marked by technological convergence, ubiquity, location awareness, and real-time feedback (see also Fast et al., 2018). The geomedia city, in turn, refers to a geomediatized city, that is, a city whose life forms and modes of (re)production are in various ways reliant on and embedded with geomedia. By extension, to establish our analytical link to gentrification, in the following section we develop a concept of the geomedia city as a discriminatory regime of dwelling.

Along these lines, the contributing articles look at three intersecting areas of concern: (1) the sociocultural role of geomedia in gentrification processes, for example, platformed modes of urban aestheticization and the emergence of socially exclusive, media-reliant places; (2) the sociocultural, potentially gentrifying imaginaries of the geomedia city in, for example, urban policy making, tourism, and digital entrepreneurship; and (3) various forms of resistance to the synergies of gentrification and geomediatization. The special issue contains seven articles that paint a diverse picture of gentrification processes in major cities around the world, mainly in Europe, Australia, and the United States. In the remainder of this introduction, we will present these articles and delineate three themes that we believe encapsulate the overall contribution of the special issue. We begin with the very notion of the geomedia city and then turn to its implications for gentrification in terms of territorialization and cultural justice.

Understanding the Geomedia City as a Regime of Dwelling

We argue with Scott McQuire (2016) that the technological regime of mass media with its stand-alone technologies and institutionalized modes of cultural mass distribution (the press, broadcasting services, cinema, etc.) has been gradually replaced by a more fluid and interactive regime that entangles people into increasingly open-ended and prescriptive circuits of data and information. To capture its spatial and material embeddedness, as well as the geographical responsiveness of new technology, this new regime is called geomedia. McQuire lists four features that set geomedia apart from mass media: (1) ubiquity, meaning that media platforms are continuously available especially due to mobile devices; (2) real-time feedback, recognizing that “many-to-many” flows of information can be circulated immediately between users, for example, in social media; (3) location-awareness, pointing to how information flows and contents are increasingly adapted to the users’ locations and movements due to the automatic gathering and processing of geo-data; and (4) convergence, referring to how different media technologies, genres, and institutions are fused together and traditional distinctions break down. The fact that we understand geomedia as a “regime” implies that we take the above features as normalized affordances that people expect from their everyday media environments—just as the resistances have also become more quotidian (see Annunziata & Rivas-Alonso, 2018). Ubiquity, real-time feedback, location-awareness, and convergence encapsulate a set of increasingly taken-for-granted opportunities to socialize, navigate, and organize one’s life through various online services. At the same time, these features prescribe certain ways of socializing and getting around in the world, and, above all, they foster a reliance on geomedia technologies through people’s continuous engagement with and generation of digital data and information. This is how geomedia gradually expands not just as a technological regime but as a social regime as well. We refer to this social expansion and consolidation of geomedia as geomediatization—a dialectical process whereby technology, space, and social life are mutually molded (cf. Fast et al., 2018, 2019; Jansson, 2019, 2022).

Following from this, the “geomedia city” should be understood as a geomediatized city. We use it here as a sensitizing concept to capture a range of media-related social changes that demarcate urban life in the early 21st century. In 2008, McQuire explored the notion of the “media city,” in a book with the same title, as a city where media are built into the very fabric of urban life through, for example, screens, sound systems, and mobile communications networks. The geomedia city points to the extension of this condition, pertaining to a largely revolutionized technological landscape where we, as McQuire (2016, p. 60) puts it, “are all ‘thrown’ into an age of digital urbanism, whether we use particular devices or services or not.” As such, geomedia constitutes a social and socializing force that cannot simply be “turned off”; it is “implicated in the wholesale restructuring of social practices including the public terrain of embodied encounters” (McQuire, 2016, p. 61). Beyond the fact that geomedia conditions social life in the city (and elsewhere), that is, how people connect and share experiences, it is also a regime that directly affects how spaces and places are represented, largely following the logics of spreadability (see, for example, Jansson & Klausen, 2018), and how various flows in the city are managed both at the level of urban governance and among citizens themselves. This latter point refers to the logistical implications of geomedia and the fact that mobile, data-driven platforms, and thus automated forms of surveillance penetrate into almost all kinds of mundane undertakings today, whether we look at transport systems, shopping centers, work places, or private homes (Jansson, 2022).

The close interaction between, even blending of, these geomediatized urban realms—social connectivity, spatial representations and logistics—is obvious, for example, in Bosma’s and van Doorn’s contribution to this special issue. In their analysis of the gentrification of Airbnb, they demonstrate how private hosts present their accommodations and associated urban sites in more or less professionalized ways in order not just to promote their services but also to drive valuable data traffic. As such, the platform and its business model do not just sustain a particular mode of representing the city, attracting certain (gentrifying) gazes; they also feed into the overall platform economy through modulating how people interact (e.g., through comments and ratings) and move in and between cities and neighborhoods. As the authors argue, rent-seeking and control over digital data streams are essential parts of platform companies’ accumulation strategies. This testifies to how the social power of geomedia is ultimately bound-up with the logics of datafication (see, for example, Sadowski, 2020) and how certain groups of people (in this case the so-called Superhost, Co-Hosts, and other semi-professional entrepreneurs of the sharing economy), in turn, invest into the mastery of such logics. What emerges is a geomediatized way of thinking about spatial assets, or capital, and what constitutes urban life forms at large (see also Centner, 2008). The very same tendencies can be discerned in Fast’s article about urban coworking spaces in this issue, where she describes how “adventurous” elite spaces and territories for mobile workers are designed around geomedia technologies such as brand-specific community apps. Indeed, those who are in the position of appropriating such environments in the city are also those invited to feel at home, to belong, in the geomedia city.

Against this background, we are inclined to think of the geomedia city not foremost as a techno-commercial machinery circulating, surveilling, and embedding data (although such processes are part of the picture), but as a regime of dwelling. As such, it also cuts across established notions like the “smart city” (linked mainly to forms of governance and supply systems) and platform urbanism (more related to commercial services and start-up culture). By dwelling, we here refer to people’s daily modes of getting by and getting around in the city, as well as the imaginaries accompanying such activity (see Ingold, 1993, 2000; Moores, 2012). As we advance this notion of the geomedia city, we not only move away from the celebratory discourses implied by terms like “smart urbanism” or “sharing economy”; we also put the accent on issues of belonging and the lived spaces that are so vital to address if we are to understand gentrification on a deeper level, beyond instrumental and infrastructural matters. As a regime of dwelling, the geomedia city highlights the ordinariness of geomedia as well as its translation into discriminatory norms and routines that may be repressive or emancipatory, depending on social context. Not just everyone can become a Superhost, or any kind of host for that matter, and not everyone is in the position of making use of the new flexible mobility services on offer in the geomedia city.

In prescribing what Lefebvre (1974/1991) calls spatial codes, the geomedia city legitimizes certain skills and certain forms of capital while marginalizing others. This condition is well captured here by Klausen in her analysis of how the Danish digitalization strategy is built into and materialized through regeneration programs in Copenhagen. As she points out, the top-down rollout of digital self-services in the Copenhagen region “resembles a sanitation, or gentrification, of the digital public infrastructure in how it implicitly prioritizes digital skills and resources more pertinent in some groups than others.” People who are economically or socially disadvantaged, or simply lack the appropriate skills, such as the elderly citizens figuring in Klausen’s case study, may easily fall behind or feel alienated under such conditions. As Klausen argues, “to know, practice and live with and through digital media in times and spaces marked by geomediatization is then to understand the codes guarding this space.” Building on this approach, we will now reflect more explicitly on gentrification and the territorializing forces of geomedia.

Digital Resignation and Territorialization in the Geomedia City

To get at the segregating aspects of the geomedia city, we need to consider not just how growing reliance on digital platforms adds to the spatial capital of particular groups, notably the (entrepreneurial) middle classes (e.g., Centner, 2008; Jansson, 2019), but also the flip side of the coin. In the following, we call for the concept of digital resignation to be applied in the context of the geomediatized city (and questions of gentrification). Similar to the “surveillance realism” that Hintz, Dencik, and Wahl-Jorgensen (2018, p. 92) propose to describe “the nature of acceptance and resignation to the increasing mass collection of data across social life despite widespread unease and concerns with these infrastructures and systems”, we frame processes of acceptance and resignation not only in relation to media use but also the wider context of the expansion of geomedia businesses and corporations as geomediatization realism. In many contributions, we recognize widespread forms of acceptance and resignation concerning geomediatization processes, even where they are experienced as problematic. In contrast to this, some of the contributed articles additionally point to instances of geomediatization resistance as a possible countermovement to this development.

Digital resignation signifies a shift in the perception of how people deal with many of the challenges that the use of digital media—and especially questions of privacy and surveillance—pose. As a move away from the privacy paradox (where people’s perceptions and actions do not match), digital resignation attests to feelings of futility, a “condition produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper & Turow, 2019, p. 1824; see also Marwick & Hargittai, 2019). Draper and Turow (2019) even go one step further: They frame digital resignation as a rational response to consumer surveillance, although they also emphasize that corporate practices tend to encourage digital resignation. These “uneven power relationships between companies and publics in the digital age” (p. 1824) are clearly an increasingly important aspect of the relationship between geomediatization and gentrification. Others, such as, Lutz et al. (2020) have also underlined the idea of rational response, but suggest to label this coping mechanism “privacy cynicism”—“an attitude of uncertainty, powerlessness, mistrust, and resignation toward data handling by online services that renders privacy protection subjectively futile” (p. 1168). This coping mechanism helps to bridge the (unbridgeable) gap between the desire to stay private and the desire to be digitally up-to-date and included. In our view, the concept of digital resignation, however, refers to more than the attitude: It puts a clearer emphasis on the practices resulting from the attitude.

In the context of geomediatization, the seemingly inevitable new way of life produced by (the acceptance of) surveillance, often points to the desire to belong, to participate in whatever might be important—at all costs (cf. Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2015). As can be seen in Klausen’s piece, for example, the feeling of digital exclusion is clearly articulated. Reactions are twofold: resignation and anger at feeling left behind or small steps to reduce the feeling of exclusion. Neither of these translate into collective actions or other forms of resistance though. As geomediatization realism settles in, geomediatization seems inevitable. Dwelling becomes an increasingly uneven matter in the geomedia city, as the regime’s aforementioned normalized affordances that many people expect from their everyday media environments are not available to everyone in the same way—often linked to equally problematic relationships to the city environment.

Geomediatization realism thus implies a doubling of resignation: It is digital resignation in relation to geomedia coupled with resignation in the context of gentrification: “gentrification is just a part of life. It’s something we just have to accept is going to happen” (Fracassa, quoted in Mendoza, 2011, n.p.). This can be seen in several of the contributions to this special issue. Polson, for example, argues that “street art and Instagram have been complicit media in hastening a major neighbourhood transformation”—hence the nitty-gritty of the neighborhood that initially attracted people there tends to disappear because others move in (sometimes only as tourists). Here, geomediatization realism occurs less on the individual level than on a collective, geographically bound, level.

The territorializing force of geomediatization is also encountered in how the city is represented; as discussed, for example, in Polson’s and Bolderman’s articles on murals and street art as conventionalized ways of spreading a mythology of sanitized vibrant urbanism via social media. In these popular channels, notably Instagram, the complexity of the city is often annihilated as are the life forms of less profitable groups of inhabitants, those whose lives do not contribute to data-driven accumulation. The tendency of social media to accelerate the aestheticization of urban space—echoing Ley’s (2003) classical argument concerning early gentrifiers (artists and cultural intermediaries) and their search for “authenticity”—may not be a problem per se. However, these processes feed into geomediatization realism. They are a source of alienation among those whose lives are systematically left out of the picture, notably rooted inhabitants starting to feel out-of-place even in places where they dwell on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes, this Instagramification also meets resistance, as Walters and Smith show in their study of how the aspirational place of West Village in West End Brisbane is publicly envisioned and reshaped to fit the blueprints of gentrification. In critically examining Instagram and Facebook posts pertaining to this neighborhood, the authors point to the hegemonic influence of social media in the construction of immaterial, representational spaces. Placemaking via social media, they argue, helps to eradicate the complex array of communities that actually comprise this neighborhood in material space. Hence, again, we see how geomedia pushes gentrification forward in an indirect way and how the “geomedia city” is promoted as a territorializing, privileged and contested, regime of dwelling.

A similar transition from “realism” to “resistance” can be seen in Hartmann’s piece on the (successful) protests against a planned Google Campus in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Although this case study concerns struggles around sociomaterial transformations rather than how urban territories are represented, it equally points to the need to consider the entanglement of economic structures and Google’s overall legitimation strategy, in particular their management of data and information, to understand their role in urban change—and thus the deeper nature of the struggle over space and place. If we examine Google’s different applications—from Google’s search engine to Google Maps, and everything in between—each shows a different way of inscribing itself into the city and into gentrification processes. For example, as McQuire (2016, p. 84) argues, “in producing the Street View database” Google has appropriated “the public appearances of urban space—that previously belonged to no one, and it has converted this common resource to private value.” These conditions certainly played into the Berlin protests. But the story of the Google Campus is also more complex—especially as it was abandoned before it began and does not involve any Google product directly. The protests turned against a potential future, based on the manifold experiences in both Berlin and other cities in recent years (Holm, 2013). The attraction of Google’s Campus feeds off this with Kreuzberg featuring high on the list of tourist attractions in Berlin. A quick view into Airbnb offers in the district underline the overprized nature of such endeavors. This is where we may also return to Bosma and van Doorn’s piece: Airbnb and its increasing professionalization play a key role in tourist gentrification, which has become a major issue in Berlin in general and Kreuzberg in particular (e.g., Füller & Michel, 2014), perpetuating the spiral of attraction that underlies many gentrification processes. This attraction also spills over into other fields, such as start-up cultures and similar ventures, which underlines Google’s desire to locate itself where innovation is supposedly taking place.

Gentrification as a Matter of Cultural (In)justice

A critical concern that should be addressed if we are to understand the entanglements of gentrification and geomediatization is what Couldry and Mejias (2019) call “data colonialism.” Their point is that the extraction and circulation of data penetrate deeper and deeper into people’s lifeworlds and ultimately threaten the autonomy of the self. Although it can be debated what precisely constitutes this “autonomy,” one thing is clear: In a society of automated surveillance and algorithmic profiling (Andrejevic, 2019), where prediction turns into prescription, age-old questions of human agency are once again brought to the fore. As Richardson (2020a) argues, urban platforms can be understood as flexible “spatial arrangements” that not just coordinate various actors and flows in the city but also (re)territorialize these relations in meaningful ways as “the delivered meal, the hailed ride, the space to sleep,” (p. 460) and so forth. Although urban platforms appear as more or less stable, emplaced entities, their modes of operation and extraction are all about distributed agency. So, to what extent are people in command of their lives and to what extent are they guided, steered, even forced to buy into certain services, take up certain habits, or move to (or away from) particular places in the city (or elsewhere)? To what extent does capital generated through data colonialism go into the corporate dominance of urban space, materially and socially, as we saw in the example of the Berlin Google Campus (Hartmann), and in relation to coworking spaces tailored to fit the material and cultural desires of mobile elites (Fast)?

Such complex matters again point to dwelling, that is, people’s ordinary undertakings as inhabitants of a city, as the economic and cultural nucleus of the platform economy, and thus a crucial link between gentrification and geomediatization. Previous research has already shown that problems arising from datafication and similar processes apply doubly to already vulnerable populations. These groups are already at a much greater risk of surveillance, although they are less likely to have either the necessary resources or digital skills to counter any form of exploitation. At the same time, they are increasingly becoming more dependent on digital means to uphold their access to basic services. This may hold for retired citizens, as we saw in Klausen’s contribution, as well as for precarious gig-workers whose livelihood is entirely reliant on connectivity (e.g., Andersson, 2021; Fast & Jansson, 2019; Jimenez, 2021; Richardson, 2020b). Even if we, as Richardson and Bissell (2019) suggest, think of digital skills as dynamically constituted through the interplay of human bodies and technological environments, and thus not as an inherent capacity of certain individuals or groups, the preconditions and motivations to engage successfully in such adaptation processes vary. Furthermore, while certain types of digital skills are enforced by economic and social conditions, and confined within strict infrastructural protocols, others are more open-ended and presupposing extended human agency, as seen for instance in startup cultures and urban DIY communities. Although this special issue certainly sheds some light on the correlation between gentrification and the “geographies of digital skill” (Richardson & Bissell, 2019), there is still more work to be done.

Maybe we also need refined concepts to address this type of (in)justices. In our special issue, these are only beginning to emerge. Hence, Bolderman talks about the cultural justice principle (Cantillon et al., 2021) in her contribution. Building on Fraser’s (1995) earlier work on cultural justice, in which injustices are seen to be rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication, ¹ Bolderman argues for a view of urban murals and their online circulation as resistance to but also reinforcement of existing power relations. This fits into our perception of geomediatization realism, where resistance feeds through the same platforms that are responsible for data colonialism and part of the aforementioned processes of spatial coding and exploitation. The regime of geomedia is to some extent a foundation of civic participation and recognition, but—to get back to the original point—who are the ones capable of making use of these resources in an efficient way—politically, economically, and culturally? Who are the ones who do not resign in the face of these developments? We would like to suggest, quoting Hill (2012), that “resistance cannot merely be about opting out, but about participating in unpredictable ways” (p. 121) Participation, even in the mild form, does presume a basic engagement. Digital resignation, by contrast, might hinder this kind of engagement. Hence, the multiple calls for more justice in the context of urban developments nowadays need to be extended to a call for data justice as well (see Hintz et al., 2018; Dencik et al., 2019).

Likewise, as scholars of these matters, we need to move beyond a concern with infrastructural and representational geographies (or divides) and start paying closer attention to the deeper (and more mundane) questions of dwelling, including the complex geographies of digital skill and (in)habitation. As we have suggested in this introductory article, the geomedia city is currently a regime that via new forms of digital circulation and value extraction recognizes and misrecognizes, prescribes and prevents, in one word discriminates between different forms of urban dwelling and as such drives gentrification processes. We believe that things could be different and that further interdisciplinary research can make an important contribution to our urban/digital futures.