Reading the City in a Global Digital Age

by Saskia Sassen

Topography: Graphic representation of the surface features of a place or region on a map, indicating their relative positions and elevations.

This reading doesn't seem to address screens particular...only as elements of urban development.

"While the topography of rich and poor areas of a city would simply capture the physical
conditions of each – advantage and disadvantage. It would not capture the electronic
connectivity."

The writer suggests that while this information is still valid, by including this electronic connectivity, it would make the information more accurate in this technological day and age. As it stands, topography screens out "hunks of urban reality".

Posits that there are interconnections that are not being seen using topography eg "the global and the urban, the physical and the digital, rich and poor areas in a city". Specifically, the social and digital connections are omitted.

In direct response to theorists such as Baudrillard the writer argues that cities continue to be key sites for the emergence of new types of political subjects, often arising out of conditions of acute disadvantage.

Globalization and digitalization signal new possibilities for political action, and power has not dispersed geographically nor gone entirely virtual. The digital is never only technological.

Even the realm of finance, which is perhaps the most highly digitized activity of our time, cannot be thought of as exclusively digital. Electronic financial markets require enormous amounts of material, not to mention people.

Moreover, what takes place in finance is deeply inflected by culture, material practices, and imaginaries that exist alongside cyberspace. According to Sassen, the promise of the city in an era of globalization is precisely what the city promised in times past: The other side of the global city, she writes, is that it is a sort of new frontier zone where an enormous mix of people converge. Those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, who are outsiders, who are members of minorities that have been subjected to discrimination can gain presence in global cities, presence vis-à-vis power and presence vis-à-vis each other.

(Edited from Abstract)