Telescoping the City: Technological Urbiquity,or Perceiving Ourselves from the Above

Background

My involvement in the discussion at the Above symposium began with written work I produced almost 10 years earlier, referring to concepts such as vertical urbanism and cinematic city (Tripodi, 2008, 2009b). Examining the shifting concepts and practice of public space facing the rise of the network society I focused my attention on how image production and digital media affect the contemporary urban experience. I suggested the concept of the cinematic city to describe a late modern incarnation of the urban form whose economy, and infrastructural and spatial organization are utterly dependent on the circulation of images and the management of attention. I employed the term vertical urbanism to refer to the semantic use of vertical urban surfaces as an increasingly relevant function in respect to the horizontal dimension of traditional zoning. Although acknowledging a wide strand of studies referring to the terms cinematic and vertical urbanism, my use of such terms has been relatively counterintuitive, outlining some peculiar aspects. Cinematic urbanism, as I argued in the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (Tripodi, 2009a), is generally understood as the field of study that analyses the city as narrated in cinema and media production. My argument is that more attention is needed for the reverse aspect of this relation between urban representations and spaces: the extent to which digital media are transforming the experience, design, and economy of the city in light of what Jonathan Beller (2006) defines as the “cinematic mode of production.” Employing the notion of vertical urbanism, I did not refer principally to the intuitive and legitimate attention paid to the increasing physical extrusion of architecture, or to the vertical stratification of infrastructure and artifacts produced and inhabited by human society. I pointed instead to the relevance of exploiting urban vertical surfaces as a main productive infrastructure supporting image production processes. The verticality considered here is that of the planar surfaces intersecting the human gaze, the frontal cognizance of the world through the eye complementing its horizontal experience through legs (and wheels). In the context of the domination of symbolic economies, the urban experience of citizens is reshaped as an essentially visual one, redefining citizenship as audience (Gordon, 2010). Instead of a passive spectatorship, the voyeuristic experience of the city is a productive labor that sets the new rules of the attention economy (Beller, 2006; Goldhaber, 1997; Terranova, 2012).

The invitation to the Edinburgh symposium in 2016 provided an opportunity to reflect upon my previous formulations and to verify the extent to which this conceptualization had survived the fast-paced socio-spatial and technological evolution of the last decade. In the following, I will propose that if the aforementioned argument of a paradigmatic shift from horizontal organization of spatial planning to the vertical dimension is increasingly recognized in recent academic discourse, a new aspect emphatically appears to shuffle and complicate the frame. To describe such a dynamic, I will introduce the concept of “technological urbiquity,” and the related metaphor of “telescoping the city” as fitting to understand the epochal shift in the way we perceive and position ourselves in planetary spatiality. I will examine three dimensions of public space in the cinematic city as conceptualized in my previous work: the horizontal, the vertical and the networked. First, I will discuss the emergence of the vertical dimension in current discourse and the related “politics of verticality,” linking it with the intensification of the image production processes. Second, I will contend that with the expansion of the networked dimension, what we are experiencing now is a further step into an apparent emancipation from the Cartesian and physically bound positioning of the individual self into spatial coordinates; a condition allowing a more ethereal, a-spatial, and ubiquitous relation with the geographical context described as urbiquity. Finally, I will argue that such a condition is the technologically mediated reflection on the individual of what in the current disciplinary discourse is identified as “planetary urbanization”. Theories of planetary urbanization shift the attention from the city—relegated as an outdated object of analysis—to the process of urbanization at large, which produces effects worldwide as a direct consequence of choices and demands concentrated in urban epicenters (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Lefebvre, 1970). My argument here is that the condition of technological urbiquity constitutes an essential factor endorsing the planetary urbanization process, increasing the capacity of individuals to transcend locality and contribute to distant transformations, and extending urban lifestyles and imaginaries beyond the urban scale while consolidating dependencies on global infrastructure.

Three Dimensions of the Cinematic City

As I proposed in my earlier work, the “cinematic city” emerges as paradigmatic urban civic form in the twenty-first century as a consequence of three techno-social processes deeply embedded in the neoliberal global order: the expanded mobility of goods, people, and capitals; the overwhelming production of images saturating the public sphere and dominating urban economies; and the intense mediation of interpersonal relationships through technological devices and digital protocols (Tripodi, 2008, 2009a). These processes engender three epistemological spaces ¹ that may be respectively described as space of flows, space of exposure, and mediated space (Tripodi, 2008). I suggested that these conceptualizations also represent three constitutive dimensions of public space intended in a wider sense as essential social connective tissue. The first is the inherently horizontal dimension of mobility, sustaining the interpretation of public space as transport infrastructure, articulated as roads, squares, open spaces, stations, and transit facilities. The second is the vertical articulation of semantic surfaces intersecting with urban space, which is the representational space where symbolic productions are displayed and exposed to the public, that is, façades, screens, showcases, and billboards (Figure 1). The last is the networked dimension of global society, namely the mediated space of information communication technologies, transforming public space into virtual interface. With no inherently spatial nature, the networked dimension is strictly dependent on the material presence of wires, antennas, micro-processors, magnetic supports, and data storage devices (Tripodi, 2009a, p. 141).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Advertising campaign for a German telecom company. Photo Manuela Conti / ogino:knauss.

While these three dimensions of global public space coexist and overlap, they emerge diachronically. Each appears at a historical moment as a dominant process of colonizing the globe and lays the ground for the next stage. First, modernity dominated the planetary surface via transport infrastructure, zoning, and bi-dimensional mapping. Until the second half of the twentieth century, modern geography had predominantly investigated the horizontal dimension, examining spatial production, geo-political relations, and economic development from a flat perspective, as projections on a map (Graham, 2016, p. 6). Second, late modernity has seen the expansion of the vertical dimension as a consequence of technologies allowing a wider penetration into the above and below strata of the planetary surface. The “thickening” of the geographical discourse cut through the landscape, and, together with the physical expansion of the human habitat, identifies a “politics of verticality,” where sovereign space and relations space/territory acquire a three-dimensional volumetry (Weizman, 2002, p. 2). The observation and critique of spatial production towards the vertical extension mirrors the parallel production of disparity that is clearly visible in the occupation of the superior sphere, “the above,” as a condition of privilege and dominance (Elden, 2013; Graham, 2004). Before delving into the third stage, when the sudden explosion of the networked condition fosters a condition of technologically driven urbiquity, let us examine the broad lines of passage into vertical extension.

Thinking vertical

During the last decade, attention to the vertical dimension in geography, geopolitics, urbanism, and art has grown significantly. In his recent book Vertical. The City from Satellites to Bunkers (2016), Stephen Graham produces an exhaustive effort to trace such discourse, or, in his words “to bring critical geographic debates more fully into line with the proliferating verticalities of our world, a highly mobile and uneven world of often disorientating vertical views, mobilities and structures which can only be understood in volumetric rather than two-dimensional, planar ways” (Graham, 2016, p. 14). ² The book investigates a stratification of sites, structures, or cultural worlds (Graham, 2016, p. 14) in 15 steps, going from the above with its orbital satellites infrastructure to the subterranean articulation of sewers, bunkers, and mines, and exploring the contested political and social relations that surround them. At the core of this text, two central chapters are dedicated to elevators and skyscrapers. The invention of the mechanical elevator opened up the vertical frontier in the modern era (Goetz, 2003). This technology rendered possible the multiplication of habitable floors and the sudden diffusion of tall buildings in urban development. It inverted the value of higher floors, traditionally reserved for the underprivileged as long as they were only accessible by stairs. Suddenly, at the end of nineteenth century, the elevator transformed the social geography of stacked housing and opened up higher levels to the privileged classes (Simmen, 2009). The elevator, in short, maximised the value extraction of urban land. What is worth noting in this trope is that the skyscraper not only represents a revolution in modern urbanism in logistical terms but also highlights a further value production in spatial development: visual substance, which magnifies the semantic and symbolic features of architecture (Koolhaas, 1978). Skyscrapers and their concentration in downtown and business districts epitomize the relevance of iconicity and spatial branding in the global economy. Such architectures work as logos, magnifying the powers that created them and forming positive associations to a place (Murray, 2012).

Tall buildings not only acquire consistent value according to their visual presence in the urban landscape, working as landmarks in a hierarchy of morphological elements (Lynch, 1960) and declaring a status of power (D’Eramo, 2003). But they also constitute vantage points that dominate the visual perspective on cities. Symbol of advanced modernity, the skyscraper with its mirroring façades embodies the substance of the capitalist system through visual and power asymmetries alike. The reflective surface that adorns most of these structures embodies the potential to be seen and a capacity to hide simultaneously. In filmic depictions and literary narratives, the modern plutocrat is often emblematically represented scoping the metropolis through the glass wall from the executive floor of the high-rise corporate building.

While the original interest in the logistical exploitation of valuable urban locations is apparently declining, or at least challenged by new suburban and distributed spatial models (Keil, 2018), the development of super-tall buildings is still fostered by their visual exploitation as symbols. The iconic capacity of the skyscraper is today in the service of national propaganda, often for authoritarian or plutocratic states (Ong, 2011, p. 206). This is evident in the increase in locations where extreme vertical exploitation is not justified by urban density or land value, such as the Arab countries competing for the tallest buildings in the world. In these places, the run to championing verticality has been pushed to a ludicrous limit, as demonstrated by the so-called vanity height, that is, the increasing proportion of super-tall skyscrapers so narrow to be almost unusable and unsellable (Taylor-Foster, 2013). Similarly, the vertical push has inspired massive investment in high-rise residential complexes, destined for financial investment by global players and driven by elaborated image production schemes. In contrast, the vertical urban development as an answer for urgent housing issues of disadvantaged social classes is declining. Inheriting the stigma of modernist housing of the twentieth century, tenements and social housing towers are not considered a worthwhile investment in the current neoliberal status quo (Hanley, 2017; Holmes, 2006).

Space of Exposure

If the verticality of skyscrapers represented financial capital as the driving force of global economy, a corresponding transformation affected public space and the cityscape as a whole, redefining its meaning and form in relation to the imperatives of cognitive capitalism (Boutang, 2012). It is a shift from the early character of the modern city, where strategic domination was based on controlling movement and transport, where public space was essentially for physical circulation or rest, to one dominated by advertising and exhibiting. Programmed flows of images constitute the core of the urban experience in the symbolic economy production/consumption chain (Lash & Urry, 2002). Public space is reinterpreted as a space of exposure (Tripodi, 2008), designed to optimize the exposition of city users to the spectacle of goods and to capture attention, fully accomplishing Guy Debord’s intuition expressed in The Society of the Spectacle (1995). If famously Debord declared in his fourth thesis that “the Spectacle (. . .) is a social relationship among people that is mediated by images” (1994, p. 5), images in their present form are encoded and integrated into corporate information infrastructure. This process influences urban morphology through design and emphasizes the value of vertical surfaces as carriers of messages. In the second half of the twentieth century, the screen emerged as the new constitutive element that upgrades the wall from opaque, passive agent and container of bodies to translucent, active vector of signs, signifieds and values (Brighenti, 2009; Tripodi, 2009b). The ‘city of screens’ epitomizes the shift from organizing and containing the circulation of people and goods to a vertical organization of semantic surfaces essential to the circulation of images and abstract values (Krajina, 2016). Urban planning moves from the logistics of its horizontal extension to programming successions of frames and streams of information, a matter of managing an urban palimpsest by deploying a logistics of perception (Virilio, 2005). The value of urban locations is increased by the potential capacity of shop windows and billboards, signage, and architectural facades to display messages and symbols. Tourism and commuting, part of the general mobilization dynamic, are fundamental drivers in the urban economy, combining the optimization of flows with the necessity to capture consumers’ attention. Complementing the suburbanization process (Keil, 2013), the renaissance of urban centers from the last decade of the millennium derives less from their procedural effectiveness in the physical movement of goods and bodies than from their potential as visual settings: prestige urban centralities act as a valuable aesthetic backdrop to build narratives, to add quality to human interaction and to define social class and status (Lees, 2003; Tripodi, 2011). The number of selfies and pictures uploaded to the net becomes an indicator of the value of downtowns and public spaces (Girardin et al., 2008). Replicating the mechanisms of the online attention economy, the gaze of the city-user becomes a measure of value (Davenport & Beck, 2001; Goldhaber, 1997).

The emerging concept of urban planning encourages using tools and techniques borrowed from the media industry and visual disciplines to determine and exploit value from the urban location (Gordon, 2010; Tripodi, 2009b). Branding and building the image of a place is the first step to attract and combine capital in order to achieve physical transformation (Lucarelli & Berg, 2011; Pike, 2015). Conflating urban landscape and mediascape, this new spectacular urbanism combines architecture and planning with advertising, graphic design, marketing, interaction design, software coding, and cinema. Film production stands as a model for spatial production in the cinematic city, where the development of fictional narratives is the framework for triggering and consolidating processes of urban restructuring (Tripodi, 2009a). The influence of entertainment industry and the media sector is increasingly entwined with spatial development and real estate, as shown in the key role of corporations such as Time Warner, JCDecaux, etc., in developing and managing urban spaces (Krajina, 2016; Sassen & Roost, 1999). But the entertainment and media industry itself is being rewritten by the current paradigmatic shift into the network society (Castells, 2000). The screens of movie theatres, advertisement billboards and even home TVs are being destabilized, fragmented, and exploded in the multiplicity of output channels and mobile devices ubiquitously connected. Ubiquitous computing, connectivity, and interface design are disrupting the specificity of places and their value (Dodge et al., 2009). And new corporate actors such as Google, AirBnB, Uber, and the plethora of protagonists of the emerging platform capitalism appear as the new forces reshaping (urban) economies (Evans & Gawer, 2016; Langley & Lehyshon, 2017). ³

The Orbital Unconscious

The colonization of vertical semantic surfaces laid the groundwork for the 360-degree immersive experience of attention capitalism (Terranova, 2012). The last decade saw extraordinary acceleration in the capacity to connect individuals and devices through digital networks and in computational power and access to data (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). As Amin and Thrift (2002, p. 125) declared, “[t]he modern city exists as a haze of software instructions. Nearly every urban practice is becoming mediated by code.” This has enormously increased the augmentation of public space in the mediated sphere, and opened up an unprecedented capacity to interact with location, both from individual and social perspectives (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001). The hyperconnectivity deriving from the large-scale combination of technological prosthesis and coded protocols (hardware + software) makes the situated experience of the city as a strategic space of exposure (as described in the previous paragraph) partially obsolete. Key urban spots are no longer exclusive vantage points to attract attention and extract value, as everybody can gain access to the internet from virtually any location. Still, such a techno-social paradigm is dependent on a vertical (con)quest through the consolidation of orbital satellite geography (Graham, 2016, p. 25). Geostationary satellites have pushed human vertical ascension to the limits where horizontality and verticality lose sense and dissolve into the absence of gravity. Almost unacknowledged publicly, they position themselves as a technological unconscious ⁴ , allowing visibility through the invisible (Millard, 2016). Satellites permit virtual accessibility to almost every place in the world, as well as control at a distance. Together with the deepest undersea cable, orbital infrastructures support the global coverage of internet, GPS, and mobile telephones. They allow a ubiquitous televisual experience of the planetary extension (Perkins & Dodge, 2009). The practice deriving from the convergence of satellite and computer technologies encompasses military monitoring and scientific observation as well as commercial entertainment and public broadcasting (Parks, 2005).

Let us make a step back to consider the seminal moment of this paradigmatic transformation to stress again the weight of visuality in such a process. We can retrace a symbolic milestone of this technological evolution to the 1969 moon landing. A lot has been said about the conquest of space, but few remark on the fact that the epochal technological efforts in astronautics and computer science to bring the man on the moon were complemented by the technological revolution of the portable TV camera, which was needed to make this endeavor true. It was not sufficient to bring mankind to walk on the moon’s surface, it was also necessary to show it in real time. The first step of Neil Armstrong on the moon was reportedly the first universal TV show in history (Teitel, 2016). The development of optical, coding, and transmission technologies necessary to broadcast the event live has been one of the most difficult technical challenges of the lunar program (Wood, 2005). Interestingly, the wave of conspiracy theories suggesting that the moon-landing was staged in a film studio anticipated the current epistemological crisis of the concept of truth in the “fake media” age (Harsin, 2015).

While the physical conquest of the moon is yet to have practical impact for human life or economies, the boost to aero-spatial technologies had its main fall-out on information communication development (Dick & Launius, 2007). Computation and transmission capacities tested in that challenge are now a banal part of the everyday. The immense effort that led to the moon landing was undertaken at a time when the term jet-set society still described an elite access to airplane flights. A couple of decades later, the stratospheric vision of the world would be popularized by low cost flights, which progressively introduced the vision of the above to the masses, fostering mass tourism as an essential drive of urban economies (Judd & Fainstein,1999; Urry & Larsen, 2011). The postmodern era brought on a visual consumption of urban centralities regenerated as leisure spaces (Fainstein, 2007). Ultimately, internet and mobile devices made redundant the physical accessibility to places in favor of their steady visualization as digital representations. The vision of the earth from the moon, introduced as an extraordinary achievement 50 years ago, is today a banal standpoint in our personal digital extensions. Today the smartphone popularizes the vision of the above and provides virtual access to almost every place ⁵ . Mobile personal technologies permit, in a historically unprecedented way, to overcome the limitation of the body in the everyday. This emancipation from gravity and friction is accomplished through digital mediation, allowing a multidirectional, virtually ubiquitous sensing of the planetary extension constituting what Kitchin and Dodge (2011) define as code/space geography.

Among the current blossoming of innovative technologies, four main developments systematically sustain such an ‘elevation’ process:

Together with the diffusion of the touch screen, these technologies and related business models provide an almost universal set of powerful prosthetic extensions to human capacities to behave and interact spatially. Google Maps was first launched in 2005 and has become the most used mobile phone app in the world (Smith, 2013). Complementing the most exhaustive search engine of internet databases (Pasquinelli, 2009) with a parallel search capacity into geographical extension, it provides the ultimate interface layer, blending informational and physical space in the augmented spatial experience (Graham et al., 2012; Manovitch, 2010). Through a constellation of application programming interfaces, Google Maps’ instant geo-visualization (together with its open source alternative Open Street Map) is integrated in almost every application we use today (Goodchild, 2007; Kitchin, 2014). Together they allow us to visualize the whole planetary geographic extension and locate ourselves instantly, to find services, goods, cars, and accommodations available around us, to communicate our position to others, to calculate distances and itineraries, to follow other people’s positions, and to check practicability, weather, and transit info. Flat-rates, cheap prepaid SIMs, and roaming have made steady access to such features almost universally affordable ⁶ . An astonishing 3.5 billion people use a smartphone in 2020, and that number is forecast to increase to over 4 billion by 2022. ⁷

Despite the fact that our society has slid into the “smart” everyday with stupefying naturalness, such techno-practices have profound anthropological impact (Figure 4). They alter how we relate to spatiality and how we perceive and situate ourselves in the world. They transform how places are perceived, understood, and experienced. They disrupt the condition of private and public spheres, erasing their boundaries and setting a fluid and shifting condition of publicness and privacy in permanent negotiation, disconnected by actual spatial location. The concept of public space in itself becomes problematic, as no space is inherently public or private anymore (Tripodi, 2004). While traditional public space is increasingly privately owned (Low, 2006) and its semantic surfaces dominated by corporate control through advertising, screens, and franchising, the internet colonizes the intimate sphere (Wahl, 2003). There is no substantial distinction anymore between a public square and a bedroom as spaces that potentially originate public interactions. Multiplied through social media, public life penetrates the most remote and intimate spaces and puts them to work in the value extraction process (Beller, 2006, p. 200). The almost complete subsumption of social life into the productive process by corporate agencies and service providers produces its implicit privatization, and engenders the nebulization of human behavior through a pervasively expanding technological infrastructure.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The logo of the city branding campaign “be Berlin”. The red frame installed in key urban spots is an invite to take selfies and upload images of the city joining the urban narrative of the creative city. Photo Manuela Conti / ogino:knauss.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

The camera of the Apollo mission. It is still there, visible with orbital telescopes. Public Domain-USGOV-NASA.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Berlin 2016. Hybrid mediascapes. Photo Manuela Conti / ogino:knauss.

Evaporation

“So the One Orb has imploded—now the foams are alive.” (Sloterdijk, 2016, 25)

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) famously described the emerging stage of modernity as “liquid,” and characterized by “fluidity.” The current condition characterized by hyperconnectivity and technological acceleration turns it rather into a gaseous state. Planetary space is increasingly innervated by infrastructural terminations, fibre-optic wires, microchips, and antennas able to generate and transfer data from and across the globe. Such an infrastructural capillarity produces what can be described as an evaporation process, where volatile bits of information are instantly created and made accessible, viewable, and trackable from virtually everywhere and by everyone. It is not by chance indeed that the cloud is the essential metaphor adopted to market the current socio-technical paradigm (Carr, 2008; Mosco, 2014): “The fog of data, the algorithmic atmosphere, the hazy geography of digital intelligence,” in the words of Shannon Mattern (2016) describe this nebulized mist of data enveloping the planet. We can easily push this metaphor to include the three stages of cinematic urbanization as we have theorized so far. Urbanization moves from the flat horizon of early modernity—anchored to the horizontal distribution and channelling of water— through the successive movement of ascension (understanding the vertical extension of architecture as a form of evaporation), to reach the gaseous state of the cloud that permits extreme pervasiveness, mobilization, and permanent repositioning. Ultimately, the horizontal and the vertical fluidly converge into the spherical experience of the globe. Such a progressive substantiation of a spherical plenitude resonates with the approach developed by Peter Sloterdijk in his monumental Spheres trilogy, where through Bubbles (2011), Spheres (2014), and Foam (2016) he moves his attention from the phenomenology of the intimate sphere, to the exploration of the geographical extension, and finally to the poetics of plurality.

Urbiquity

If last century’s revolution in transportation saw the emergence and gradual popularization of the dynamic motor vehicle (train, motorbike, car, plane), the current revolution in transmission leads in turn to the innovation of the ultimate vehicle: the static audiovisual vehicle, marking the advent of a behavioural inertia in the sender/receiver that moves us along from the celebrated retinal persistence which permits the optical illusion of cinematic projection to the bodily persistence of this ‘terminal-man’; a prerequisite for the sudden mobilization of the illusion of the world, of a whole world, telepresent at each moment, the witness’s own body becoming the last urban frontier. (Virilio, 1997, p. 11)

The disruptive combination of innovative technologies, economic models, and social practice results in the condition provocatively named here as technological urbiquity, a term that merges the urban quality with the ubiquitous telepresence sustained by technology. ⁸ This condition of constant global connection allows virtual access to any place (or constructed visualization of a place) as well as any service or good, while being located and constantly tracked in a geographic position. No longer constrained by the need to physically reach an object or be present in a space, the hic et nunc of the individual is virtually projected to every position, altitude, or scale of representation. While we are able to expand our penetration and agency throughout the global web, our trajectories, social interactions, and consumptions are traced, recorded, stored, and processed in the cloud architecture (Kitchin, 2014; Pasquinelli, 2009). Urbiquity means paradoxically and schizophrenically concentrating on ourselves while exploding our presence all over. Urbanity as a lifestyle and as a class condition is potentially extended into a fluid continuum that transcends scale and proximity.

The condition of urbiquity provides remote access to almost everything that once was the reason for the city to exist as a specific and distinct spatial social form, including shops and markets, services, care, education, culture, entertainment, and social life. Theatrical venues and shopping malls, university courses, and bureaucratic services are only a few clicks away from anywhere in the world. This does not mean dissolving or making obsolete the material concentration of facilities, infrastructures, and symbolic spaces that took the form of the city as we know it. Instead it is wrapped and re-enclosed in a new hybrid continuum, an infosphere (Floridi, 2007; Toffler, 1980) that changes the substance and disposition, interplay, political economy, and psycho-geographical consistency of the urban. In this evolution, the city maintains a nodal status, but it becomes something more closely related to a processor, a portal or a search engine. It takes the form of an “attention assemblage” (Wise, 2011), whose capital is measured, monetized, and financialized through clicks, likes, views, followers, sharings, and downloads of digital items (Terranova, 2014). Technological urbiquity substantially expands and changes the way we sense and inhabit the city. From us wandering around the city, the cinematic mode of production turns the urban experience into the city moving around us. The urban becomes a dominant user experience mode that provides access to the global content geography ⁹ . Urban geography is augmented into a hybrid topology of places and inforgs (Floridi, 2007), an amalgamation of real space and cyberspace. The concentration of screens and semantic urban surfaces as described in the previous paragraphs, structured around cardinal spaces of exposure, is suddenly diluted into the capillary explosion of new, light, miniaturized mobile devices that constitute direct, personal prosthesis of our bodies. In a sort of prosaic, desacralized accomplishment of the vision from Cronenberg’s Videodrome, we are sucked into the screen, and beyond.

Telescoping the City

Among the effects of this technologically enhanced condition is the internalization of the “telescopic sense” as a banal, daily cognitive gesture. We find ourselves instantly above with the touch of a thumb. Zooming in and zooming out, we shift instantly from perceiving our body as bounded by corporeal presence and gravity to being a fleeting blue dot immersed in the planetary whole. Indeed, most banal daily actions go through such a factitious elevation, detaching ourselves from corporeal restrictions, projecting our presence from above, and again finding ourselves anchored to the ground (Steyerl, 2011). We instantaneously telescope our gaze to the point of view of the satellite, locate our presences on the planetary surface grid, and move down again, framing the most appropriate scale of visualization. From that superior vantage point, we can identify what we look for (or, what providers want to make appear more visible or relevant): be it a destination, a commodity, a lift, an event, or even a sexual mate (Toch & Levi, 2013). In walking to a café, one is still limited by physicality, but picking it is influenced by tips provided by a Silicon Valley corporation, crowdsourcing global ratings for the best cappuccino in the area and selling to the best offer their capacity to direct one towards their café rather than to another business (Zook & Graham, 2007). My choice of an itinerary through an alley will be less influenced by its look, atmosphere, or previous direct experience in the neighborhood, and more by the number of flags, stars, or likes that cluster on the aerial visualization on my screen. “Having been first mobile, then motorized, man will thus become motile, deliberately limiting his body’s area of influence to few gestures, few impulses, like channel surfing” (Virilio, 1996, p. 17). Telescoping the city means that the contextual, situated, and restricted capacity to apprehend and perceive space around us is somehow bound for atrophy, leaving space to a trans-scalar acknowledgment of the spatial continuum where one can receive inputs and information from the web at any moment. But this means also that any of our gestures, intentions, or consumptions are instantaneously tracked and recorded in the global database, create and attribute value to our agenc,y and contribute to individual and social profiling. Yet accomplishing the urbiquitous condition produces notable effects in the way we exercise and are subjected to power, as well as how we perceive and represent it. While fully enabling the panopticon scheme (Foucault, 1977), it influences a microphysics of power in Foucauldian terms, “its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault, 1980, p. 39).

The instantaneous and popularized capacity to elevate and ubiquitously telescope our gaze is consequently producing a displacement of where we symbolically locate power. Either in spiritual or in political terms, we no longer need to raise our eyes in search for expressions of power and domination. Power pervasively infuses our environment and bodies. It is not perceived anymore in terms of capacity to overlook, looming from above; rather it penetrates or infiltrates. Light-heartedly, we carry in our pockets and with our wearables the means for controlling our behavior. Hackers have become the key strategic corps guaranteeing military supremacy. In architectural terms, the skyscraper has lost attraction, while spherical, globular, or spread models take over—see the circular shape of the Apple headquarters or the Google campus constellations. Still, the control of the elevated standpoint is a key in the exercise of power (satellites infrastructure and antennas), but its agency in the capacity to permeate the everyday: the capillarity of the infraordinary (Perec, 1997, p. 207) supplants the distant elevation of the extraordinary.

The Dark Side of the Cloud

The positive interpretation of such an anthropological evolution tends to stress its value as a development of collective intelligence, highlighting the democratizing impact of crowdsourcing processes and heralding optimistic brandings like sharing economy and the likes (Benkler, 2006; Frenken & Schor, 2017; Friedman, 2013). However, the extraordinary expansion of individual autonomy in the quotidian practices obstructs the critique of its abuse and manipulation. Inebriated by the exploded capacity to visually dominate and ubiquitously access the planetary urban grid, our augmented mediated agency obliterates the role and political signification of the underlying infrastructure, the invisible but concrete network supporting data transmission and their value capture (Bridle, 2018; Crang & Graham, 2017). The existence and management of such an infrastructure tends to be perceived as a new natural order and not as the consequence of a hard-core capitalistic system that exploits limited resources and subjacent inequalities. While the scope of this paper does not permit to tackle at length the “dark side” of the condition of urbiquity, it is important to acknowledge the many obscure and threatening implications of this process. The investigation of the consequences of generalized immersion in a condition of permanent connection needs to find a place in the wider critique of looming global sociopolitical order and in the planetary struggle for social justice. Among the many points that call for further critical examination, I shall only stress here two evident, but not sufficiently acknowledged pitfalls. First, technological urbiquity permits great manipulation, exploitation, and censorship outside transparent political democratic process and consolidated territorial governance. It is based on the alienation of proprietary data from the bodies originating them, and on an extremely sophisticated capacity to fabricate and corrupt reality out of public control. Post-truth, fake-news, and alternative facts are only a few of the terms that are populating public debate in an age when pervasive instruments of digital fabrication are massively available for propaganda and misinformation, announcing the disappearance of reality (Harsin, 2015; Romel, 2017).

Second, short-sighted and devoted to rapid exploitation as it is, its development is implicitly fragile and unsustainable. The augmented reality it settles and populates of data and interactions, is labile, unstable, and degradable. It requires enormous energy and care to be kept in operation and existence (Mosco, 2014). The acceleration of vaporized and apparently immaterial exchange that it sustains catalyses a frenzied extractive activity at the margins of the field of vision, outside the focus of our attention (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2017). Ultimately, technological urbiquity produces unsustainable ecological footprint and fosters the reproduction of injustice at global scale.

Planetary Urbanisation

If technological urbiquity indicates a radical anthropological transformation in the way in which the individual self experiences spatiality, from the perspective of urban studies, it can be associated with the recent epistemological shift towards the planetary urbanization discourse (Brenner & Schmid, 2012; Merrifeld, 2013). Preconized by Henri Lefevbre’s hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society in his seminal La Revolution Urbaine (1970), the argument for this theoretical paradigm is that the city as such cannot be considered a meaningful object of analysis anymore or be reductively framed as a spatial container. Rather, the focus must be shifted to processes of urbanization that connect economies and ecologies at planetary scale. According to Brenner and Schmid (2014), the intensified pace of urbanization during the last 30 years has induced far-reaching worldwide transformations that created new scales of urbanization, blurred and rearticulated urban territories, disintegrated hinterlands and dissolved wilderness. No outside can be identified anymore to the urban territory that is not significantly affected by productive and reproductive processes engendered, directed, and multiplied within or through urban concentrations. While the planetary urbanization theory is far from being undisputed in its articulation, orientations, and demands, and still needs to define its influence on emancipatory politics (Ruddick et al., 2016; Shaw, 2015), its basic assumptions are corroborated and expanded by the urbiquity hypothesis. Technological urbiquity is a key factor in endorsing the process of planetary urbanization. It blurs boundaries between cities and between urban and non-urban worlds. It captures the exacerbated capacity of urban economies, lifestyles, and imaginaries to affect the planet as a whole, potentially absorbing all sorts of rural, wilderness and oceanic spaces that lie beyond the traditional urban cores into the worldwide urban fabric. Through digital mediation, locally engendered consumption patterns reconfigure splintered production processes into complicated transnational assemblages (Swyngedouw, 2016). Broadcast fashionable metropolitan identities capture the desire and desperation of the marginalized and dispossessed, attracting migratory movements. Diasporic communities share and reconnect through social media and devices reconfiguring in a trans-scalar and transcultural urbanity (Appadurai, 1996). The frenzied and parametric assemblage of attentions and consumptions through IT infrastructure feeds the extraction of material resources, energy, and labor wherever it is easily and cheaply available, and fosters the establishment of extra-state zones and new spatial configurations that transcend traditional territorial arrangements. Infrastructure space (Easterling, 2014) acquires a paramount role in rewiring, redirecting, and reassembling geopolitical orders. The planetary urbanized entity resulting from such a techno-political acceleration gains an unprecedented level of complexity and fragility, which calls for intensified critical attention and engagement.

In Conclusion: Icarus Reloaded

The intention of this paper has been to actualize a theory of cinematic urbanism in view of recent social and technological innovations—innovations that popularize the personal dimension of smart cloud computing and locative media while expanding individual sensorial cognizance to the above and the ubiquitous. My main argument is that we are now experiencing the ultimate accomplishment of the cinematic urbanization process in the condition described with the neologism “technological urbiquity,” and that this dynamic contributes to the establishment of the new epistemology of the urban postulating planetary urbanization. Beyond undermining any residual urban/non-urban opposition, I noted that such a paradigmatic shift is marked by the further dissolution of traditional constitutive dichotomies of geography and political economy. I first argued the disintegration of the horizontal/vertical opposition in the ubiquitous pervasiveness made possible by the satellite orbital infrastructure, which allows a new unconstrained, televisual, multi-scalar capacity through digital mediation to access distant space and transcend gravity and location. The capacity of this telescoping gaze to extend beyond corporeal limitations has also produced a blurring of the distinction between located and ubiquitous entity, virtually spreading the presence and existence of individuals all over the planetary cloud architecture. Therefore, I emphasized how this results in the demise of the traditional distinction between public and private space and the institution of a permanent state of negotiation of privacy and publicness filtered by corporate powers and surveillance apparatuses. Furthermore, the shift towards attention economies in the age of cognitive capitalism obliterates the difference between the roles of producer and consumer, as well as actor and audience: the totality of social interaction is put to work by the cinematic production chain and its value extraction process enacts the full financialization of the bios. En passant, I suggest that a further essential and constitutive dichotomy of human social ethos is put at risk, subject to a crucial epistemological crisis, namely, the distinction between true and false.

The essential hypothesis advanced in this text is that the successive unwinding of the horizontal and vertical structuring of human spatiality has reached a new stage, the ultimate stage of cinematic urbanization, allowing a rather spherical cognition of the planetary extension. The capacity to real time scope from any height means the possibility to adjust to any scale of representation and dissolve geographical boundaries into virtual global continuity. The maximum height combines with the greater detail, and the instantaneous capacity to cross scales and access distant viewpoints produces the fluid granular experience of urbiquity. Reverberating through many narratives employing metaphors as cloud, foam, gaseous state, or algorithmic atmosphere to develop a spatial phenomenology of the present, “technological urbiquity” describes a condition in which the conquest of elevated standpoints has determined a new and unprecedented degree of pervasive penetration in the individual and social body. It endorses a subtle and soft form of control administered through the visual, or the televisual, mediated through satellites and fiber optics infrastructure.

The fabrication of the networked media scape, as an infosphere incorporating and interconnecting planetary geography in a matrix of spatial products, operational networks and communication protocols is an exhilarating experience augmenting human capacity, imagination, and inventiveness. It is also a vertiginous jump into an era of uncertainty and destabilization. What the inebriating condition of urbiquity tends to obscure is its extreme dependency on a complex and totalizing infrastructure owned, developed, and governed by a mix of corporate powers and military agencies, whose logic responds to the ideological imperatives of a neoliberal capitalism cloaked in techno-mystical authoritarianism. Talking about the drive to height and elevation, the reference to the myth of Daedalus and Icarus seems somehow inevitable here as a gloss.