Rethinking space: Urban informatics and the sociological imagination

Abstract

The analysis of urban informatics might initially sound like a rather technical and esoteric undertaking; something best restricted to a few specialised books, journals and conferences, rather than a topic that could potentially be of a more general sociological interest. The task in this chapter is to convince the, likely, sceptical reader otherwise that an analytic focus on urban informatics provides a plethora of insights into how the contemporary sociological imagination might be more productively rethought for the digital age. The notion of urban informatics is a relatively recent invention designed to conceptually register that we now live under circumstances where the well-worn ontological distinction between ‘a space of places’ and ‘a space of flows’ (Castells, 1996) is no longer sustainable. It is the study of how information and urban systems are meshing in order to produce, what for some is, a distinctive social ontology that demands a major rethinking of sociological practice.