Chiara Certomà – författare

This book critically examines the interplay between digitalization and sustainability. Amid escalating environmental crises, some of which are now irreversible, there is a noticeable commitment within both international and domestic policy agendas to employ digital technologies in pursuit of sustainability goals.

This collection gathers a multitude of voices interrogating the premise that increased digitalization automatically contributes to greater sustainability. By exploring the planetary links underpinning the global digital economy, the book exposes the extractive logics ingrained within digital capitalism and introduces alternatives like digital degrowth and the circular economy as viable, sustainable paths for the digital era. Through a combination of theoretical reflections and detailed contextual analyses from Italy, New Zealand, and the UK—including initiatives in participatory planning and technology co-design—it articulates the dual role of digital technology: its potential to support socio-economic and environmental sustainability, while also generating conflicts and impasses that undermine these very objectives. Offering fresh insights into power disparities, exclusionary tactics, and systemic injustices that digital solutionism fails to address, this volume also serves as a reminder that sustainability extends beyond climate-related issues, underscoring the inseparability of environmental discourse from wider social justice considerations.

Aimed at a diverse readership, this volume will prove valuable for students, researchers, and practitioners across various fields, including Geography, Urban Studies, Sustainability Studies, Environmental Media Studies, Critical AI Studies, Innovation Studies, and the Digital Humanities.

This book critically examines the interplay between digitalization and sustainability. Amid escalating environmental crises, some of which are now irreversible, there is a noticeable commitment within both international and domestic policy agendas to employ digital technologies in pursuit of sustainability goals.

This collection gathers a multitude of voices interrogating the premise that increased digitalization automatically contributes to greater sustainability. By exploring the planetary links underpinning the global digital economy, the book exposes the extractive logics ingrained within digital capitalism and introduces alternatives like digital degrowth and the circular economy as viable, sustainable paths for the digital era. Through a combination of theoretical reflections and detailed contextual analyses from Italy, New Zealand, and the UK—including initiatives in participatory planning and technology co-design—it articulates the dual role of digital technology: its potential to support socio-economic and environmental sustainability, while also generating conflicts and impasses that undermine these very objectives. Offering fresh insights into power disparities, exclusionary tactics, and systemic injustices that digital solutionism fails to address, this volume also serves as a reminder that sustainability extends beyond climate-related issues, underscoring the inseparability of environmental discourse from wider social justice considerations.

Aimed at a diverse readership, this volume will prove valuable for students, researchers, and practitioners across various fields, including Geography, Urban Studies, Sustainability Studies, Environmental Media Studies, Critical AI Studies, Innovation Studies, and the Digital Humanities.

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’.

Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption.

The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’.

Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption.

The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.

This book engages the reader in exploring the relationships between digital social innovation initiatives and the city. It delivers a fresh, accessible and case-based discussion on the emergence of digitally-enabled social innovation practices in Europe that are redesigning the urban space and challenging the consolidated urban governance processes.

By adopting a critical geography perspective, this ground-breaking analysis of digital social innovation provides the reader with an accessible overview of the way in which urban reproductive processes mobilise the physical and the virtual dimensions of the city and generate distinctive spatial configurations. Together with novel urban narratives and socio-technical imaginaries, these support the existing geometries of power or construct new ones.

The author clearly describes contemporary cities as the new battlegrounds for controlling the digital sphere, shaped by the interplay between digital capitalism and resistance movements. In light of grassroots initiatives advanced by cyber-activists, e-makers and hackers, the book unveils the socio-political and cultural underpinnings of the revolution produced by the digital social innovations in the city and the socio-technological regimes supporting them.

This author successfully sheds new critical light on traditional innovation studies exploring the debate on digital innovation through the lens of social and cultural geography providing an invaluable reference for those working in this field.

This book analyzes the ongoing transformation in the “smart city” paradigm and explores the possibilities that technological innovations offer for the effective involvement of ordinary citizens in collective knowledge production and decision-making processes within the context of urban planning and management. To so, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from a range of experts including city managers, public policy makers, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) specialists, and researchers. The first two parts of the book focus on the generation and use of data by citizens, with or without institutional support, and the professional management of data in city governance, highlighting the social connectivity and livability aspects essential to vibrant and healthy urban environments. In turn, the third part presents inspiring case studies that illustrate how data-driven solutions can empower people and improve urban environments, including enhanced sustainability. The book will appeal to all those who are interested in the required transformation in the planning, management, and operations of data-rich cities and the ways in which such cities can employ the latest technologies to use data efficiently, promoting data access, data sharing, and interoperability.