ABSTRACT
Understanding a city or a metropolitan region in terms of built topography is increasingly inadequate when global and digital forces become part of the urban condition. What we might call the topographic moment is a critical and a large component of the representation of cities. But it cannot incorporate the fact of globalization and digitization as part of the representation of the urban. Nor can it critically engage today’s dominant accounts about globalization and digitization. These accounts evict place and materiality even though particular components of the global and the digital are deeply imbricated with the material and the local and hence with that topographic moment. A key analytic move that bridges between these very diverse dimensions is to capture the possibility that particular components of a city’s topography can be spatializations of global and digital dynamics and formations. Such particular topographic components are then one site in a transnational multisited circuit or network. These spatializations destabilize the meaning of the local or the sited, and thereby of the topographic understanding of cities. This holds probably especially for global cities.
