ABSTRACT
This chapter unpacks a particular aspect of the emerging urban digital platform: the coming together of digital tools, digital/data activism and political asymmetries in both re-imagining and re-making the city’s environment. It focuses on the forms of digital activism that seek to intervene in the broadly defined “urban environment” and the city’s ecological flows (e.g. transport, energy, water, sanitation, waste and other infrastructures), as well as in the city’s potential capacity for environmental stewardship and socio-ecological sustainability. The empirical material for the chapter was collected via a web-based desktop review of seven cities in Brazil, where the popularity of the free and open-source software movement has shaped the civic tech community. It highlights the need to differentiate between digital activism that originates from within the city’s civic-tech community and digital activism geographically and socio-politically grounded within traditional forms of urban activism.
