‘Algorithmic nations’: seeing like a city-regional and techno-political conceptual assemblage

Abstract

There are changing dynamics among political regionalization processes and the rescaling of nation-states in Europe. However, updated and timely research remains scant, ambiguous and unable to meet the challenges of data-driven societies and uneven borders. Nations' physical boundaries matter as much as political borders in their pervasive and growing algorithmic, stateless, liquid and metropolitan citizenship patterns. This paper explores these new 'connectographies' from a regional science perspective, introducing the term 'algorithmic nations' as a city-regional and techno-political conceptual assemblage. A case study is presented of the small stateless city-regionalized European nation of the Basque Country through its analytical and transitional lens, locally known as 'Euskal Hiria' (Basque city-region in the Basque language). This paper questions whether the Basque Country could evolve by (1) modifying its governmental logics and (2) merging its three separate devolved administrations (3) while enabling their direct interactions with citizens (4) through blockchain technologies as the small state of Estonia is implementing and employing cutting-edge algorithmic governance frameworks. In doing so, this paper suggests how four driversmetropolitanization, devolution, the right to decide and blockchainmay be respectively invigorating four dynamicsgeoeconomics, geopolitics, geodemocratics and geotechnologicsin this transition towards the algorithmic nations. Ultimately, this paper concludes with an algorithmic nations research and policy agenda decalogue of how these geotechnological changes might determine the future position of small stateless city-regionalized nations in the European Union.

Urban growth strategies in rural regions: building The North Wales Growth Deal

“…This is based upon a neoliberal approach to economic growth informed by the 'New Economic Geography' (Krugman, 1998) and the 'New Regionalism' approaches (Breathnach, 2014;Harrison, 2018). In turn, this has prompted within the UK, a city-region-building process that has cemented the city-region scale as the geo-economic and geo-democratic scale for UK statecraft (Calzada, 2018). Calzada (2017Calzada ( , 2018 develops this to suggest a process of 'metropolitanisation' has developed through a 'techno-political conceptual assemblage' (Calzada, 2018, p. 267) that seeks to rescale the state to the city-region in geopolitical, geoeconomic and geo-democratic terms.…”

“…In turn, this has prompted within the UK, a city-region-building process that has cemented the city-region scale as the geo-economic and geo-democratic scale for UK statecraft (Calzada, 2018). Calzada (2017Calzada ( , 2018 develops this to suggest a process of 'metropolitanisation' has developed through a 'techno-political conceptual assemblage' (Calzada, 2018, p. 267) that seeks to rescale the state to the city-region in geopolitical, geoeconomic and geo-democratic terms. Waite and Morgan (2018) refer to this as 'metrophilia', whereby it is seen as fashionable to embrace uncritically such city-first approaches.…”

Platform and Data Co-Operatives amidst European Pandemic Citizenship

“…However, this virtual and analogic merger does not occur automatically, and has little respect for fixed territorial borders. As such, digital pandemic citizens today are increasingly (though unwittingly) connected through AI and machine learning devices that remain unevenly and pervasively distributed, fueling a liquid sense of global and algorithmic cosmopolitan citizenship [10,27,[92][93][94].…”

The Complex Adaptive Region-Assemblage and Local Economies: New Perspectives for Tackling Regional Inequalities

“…The Assemblage has been growing in popularity across various aspects of regional studies over the past decade. Part of its appeal lies in its ability to explore processes of fluidity amongst the assembled and re-assembled elements of a system (Calzada, 2018), and in its examination of the complex inter-connections between things, parts and wholes (Jones, Heley and Woods, 2019). Yet there is much more that the concept is able to do.…”