The metropolis of network capital: socio-spatial mobilities and urban inequities

Abstract

The circulation of bodies, objects, and information is intrinsic to the definition of city. However, what asymmetries in access arise from these movements and what mobility regimes stratify them within our globally interconnected world? By approaching mobility as both the object of analysis and the analytical framework, I propose the idea of "metropolis of network capital" to account for territorialities that organize themselves on a continuum between physical and digital spaces, in which multiscale movement becomes a "way of inhabiting." Such territorialities find, in the ambivalence of mobility – simultaneously a right and a coercive device –, their main factor of stratification. These epistemological reflections presuppose that cities are relational and politically contested spaces of systemic mobilities – the expression of intersections between infrastructures, materialities, and signs.