E-gentrification: Digital Community Engagement, Urban Change and Digital Rights to the City

Abstract

Urban development has, for many critical urban scholars, long been complicit with gentrification. The prolific scholarship on gentrification has also, in recent years, taken a digital turn, analysts exploring the association between gentrification and the increasing use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) in urban governance. This chapter extends the book’s discussion on consultative digital platforms as sites of dialogue between citizens and governments, situating these initiatives within the wider investment made by governments and commercial providers in digital urban infrastructure. This investment, supported by imaginaries such as techno-solutionism, democratic participation and ideas of a rational citizen, is shaping the social, economic and spatial dynamics of cities, bringing critical attention to what scholars, following Lefebvre, have called the digital rights to the city. We analyse data from the Melbourne case study of the DEMUDIG project to explore what we term e-gentrification-the convergent trajectories of digital ICTs and of the gentrification of formerly working-class urban locations. We contend, through using a framework of assemblage theory, that the implementation and use of digital engagement platforms may be a constituent of gentrification processes.