This paper grounds the critique of the ‘smart city' in its historical and geographical context. Adapting Brenner and Theodore's notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism', we suggest a greater attention be paid to the ‘actually existing smart city', rather than the exceptional or...

Big data is increasingly seen as a way of providing a more 'scientific' approach to the understanding and management of cities. But most geographic analyses of geotagged social media data have failed to mobilize a sufficiently complex understanding of socio-spatial relations. By combining the...

As more and more aspects of contemporary urban society are tracked and quantified, the emerging cloud of so-called ‘big data' is widely considered to represent a fundamental change in the way we interact with and understand cities. For some proponents of big data, like Anderson (2008), big...

This paper outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used in the Haiti relief effort, especially with respect to web-based mapping services. Although there were numerous ways in which this took place, this paper focuses on four in particular: CrisisCamp Haiti, OpenStreetMap,...

This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to reconceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes...

Information-technologies are essential for global capitalism to function at speed across scale, space and complexity. The importance of software and algorithms in the governance of these systems is reflected in the attention of scholars to the ways digital code and materiality (re)combine to...

For more than 30 years, the world's main indices for oil prices – WTI in the US and Brent in Europe – have moved in sync. This changed dramatically in 2011, when WTI started trading at a considerable discount to Brent for almost five years. This disparity violated the “law of one price”...

Automated high frequency trading (HFT) has grown tremendously in the past twenty years and is responsible for about half of all trading activities at stock exchanges worldwide. Geography has been absolutely central to the rise of HFT due to a market design of ‘continuous trading' that allows...

In less than a decade Bitcoin and the technology of blockchain – a cryptographically-secured, algorithmically-regulated, distributed-ledger – emerged as the enfant terrible of the global economy. Ironically, as cryptocurrencies reached collective valuations of hundreds of billions of dollars...

Environmental, social, and governance or ESG investing has experienced a massive inflow of funds in recent years. Given the emphasis on ESG in the media and among the finance community one could easily believe that capital markets are a major contributor to the goal of limiting global warming....