ABSTRACT
Understanding a city or a metropolitan region in terms of its built topography is, perhaps, increasingly inadequate in a global digital era. Topography is crucial in that it captures much of what a city is about, but it does not help us interrogate or go beyond today's dominant accounts about globalization and digitization which evict place and materiality. Yet, as I will argue below, the digital and the global are deeply imbricated with the material and the local, especially in global cities. Although topography is about place and materiality it is not conducive to capture these imbrications and hence the fact that particular components of a city's topography might be spatializations of global power projects and/or may be located on global circuits. Such spatializations and circuits destabilize the meaning of the local or the sited, and thereby the topographic representation of these cities.
