Digital technologies and services are increasingly used to meet a wide range of urban challenges. These developments bear the risk that the urban digital transformation will exacerbate already existing socio-spatial inequalities. Graham’s assumption from nearly 20 years ago (2002)—that European cities are characterised by various forms of socio-spatial segregation, which will not be overcome by digital infrastructures—thus needs to be seriously acknowledged. This contribution critically scrutinizes the dominant narratives and materializations of standardised smart urbanism in Europe. We investigate how the prospects of improved efficiency, availability, accessibility and quality of life through digital technologies and networks take the demands and effects of the gendered division of labour into account. By zooming in on platform urbanism and examples related to mobility and care infrastructures, we discuss whether and to what extent digital technologies and services address the everyday needs of all people and in the same way or whether there are exclusionary lines. Our objective is to bring digital and feminist geographies into dialogue, to stress the mutual construction of society and space by platform economies and to ask how gendered geographies in cities are produced through and by digitalisation.

Following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the concept of sustainability in general and of urban sustainability in particular has become increasingly significant in the course of the 1990s. Even if the environmental problems of cities are far from being solved, one can interpret this development as a change in the relationship between society and nature on both a discursive and a material level. At the same time the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has given rise to new forms of urban entrepreneurialism, with an absolute priority to economic competitiveness on the one hand and sharpened social conflicts on the other. Looking at the case of the Hamburg region, the article discusses the interaction of these processes. Contrary to the understanding of sustainability as a broadly accepted policy goal it conceptualizes sustainability as a terrain of conflict. As such, we will argue, the sustainability concept and the underlying change in social relations with nature contribute to containing the contradictions of capitalist societalization, which in the transition to post-Fordism have become more visible again.

Reaktion auf zwei Beiträge zum Thema Klimaschutz als Weltbürgerbewegung in GAIA: A. Brunnengräber (2014),C. Leggewie et al. (2015)

Abstract. Political ecology is a research field comprising studies with a critical perspective on human/nature-relations – critical in both a political and an epistemological sense. Fundamental questions of political ecology, here, are related to just and equal access to resources, their contribution and control, and to the regimes of regulation. The article specifies the empirical and epistemological approaches within political ecology in the last decades. It does not tell a linear history or a single story, because political ecology emerges out of a continuous process of mutual inspirations of academic debates and activist practices. The research strands in political ecology operate with different ideas on how to conceptionalize nature: as social product, technonature, hybrid, or as actant. These conceptualisations are related to different approaches of neo-Marxist and post-structural epistemology. This article discusses the present debate of political ecology in two steps. After introducing a broader perspective of what critique means in political ecology, it gives an account of the various approaches for analysis of both, geographies and materialities of uneven development. The early studies of political ecology explain human/nature-relations as socially produced, related to a Marxist understanding of historical materialism. In recent debates of political ecology, this approach was confronted with a new materialist thinking of more fluid interrelations between nature and non-nature; it also addresses postcolonial studies' claim to decentralize the perspectives on history and geography in order to understand new forms of connectivity of nature and culture.

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