The Spaces of Digital
'The Spaces of Digital’ continues from the work done on the CIS-RAW monograph on the Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar at Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad. The premise of this monograph was the debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of internet technologies.
The Spaces of Digital begins from here to further explore the city as a unit of global development. The rise of digital technologies and the ways in which they produce new metaphors for the domains of life, labour and language, result in the city being reconfigured, reimagined and remapped through the techno-spatial narratives produced by information and network webs. The project will explore this in four stages, namely:
Stage 1: Knowledge Maps
The first phase of the project seeks to build a knowledge network that maps the different actors interested in questions of techno-social cities, generating a dialogue between them and building a knowledge repository that brings in different modes, formats and forms of knowledge to intersect with each other.
Stage 2: Spatial Patterns - Digital Project
The monograph “Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities” refers to the spatial reconfiguration of many Indian cities that has occurred in the past two decades. An exercise to extract the key spatial patterns will be carried out in form of graphical representation using existing information from the monograph.
Stage 3: Knowledge Networking Building
The mapping and demonstration project will be followed by a curated workshop that invites a dialogue between the identified knowledge partners.
Stage 4: Knowledge Exhibition / Publication
The Knowledge Exhibition will be a hybrid space of online and offline curation and knowledge consolidation, and will be the final product of the project.
Some of the updates on this project may be accessed here.
Author
Puthiya Purayil Sneha
Sneha is a Programme Manager at CIS, and co-leads the researchers@work programme. She is engaged in a mapping of the emergent field of Digital Humanities in India, and is also interested in questions on the nature of textuality, reading, and writing practices in the digital sphere. She can be reached at sneha[at]cis-india[dot]org.
