Scoreboard Urbanism: Theorizing Mental Life in the Digitally Mediated Metropolis

Abstract

Georg Simmel famously argued that the sensory onslaught of the urban environment forces people to reduce the world to calculable quantities over colorful qualities and adopt a blasé attitude of muted emotions. Today’s digitally mediated city involves levels of quantification that Simmel could have scarcely imagined. However, rather than exacerbating the blasé attitude, this paper makes the case that digital technologies potentially increase our emotional and moral attachments to the urban environment—a phenomenon that can be called “scoreboard urbanism.” From Yelp ratings to Fitbit step scores, our relationship to the city is increasingly mediated by quantitative metrics. The purpose of this paper is to outline the basic characteristics of scoreboard urbanism as a distinct mode of life that entails new ways of perceiving and interacting with the urban public realm. In doing so, the paper argues that this phenomenon has transformed the city into a “gamespace” characterized by the competitive and exhilarating drive to score points.