Urban futures of digitalized fossil labour

Little research to date has drawn out the connections between digitalizing extractive labour and digital urbanism. In this article, we argue that these are complementary, mutually reinforcing processes: digital urbanism enables the digitalization of extractive labour, and digitalization centralizes extractive labour in urban centres. More specifically, ‘smart’ digitalization as a political-economic strategy works on both the extractive labour and urban levels, as seen in smart cities as well as extraction’s intensifying use of automation, sensors, digital twins, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Here, we draw on a four-year ongoing case study of the digitalizing oil and gas industry in the city of Calgary and the province of Alberta, Canada, to situate the dual smartness strategy within a shared process of future world building. The Calgary smart city promises a future economic diversification from the oil and gas industry toward high technology, and digitalizing oil and gas labour promises a low-carbon future. What seems to be happening empirically, however, is that digitalization in Calgary is not reducing extraction’s centrality to Alberta’s economy, but coming to coexist with it through ‘cleantech’ economies. Besides theorizing this dual smartness, here we show that smartness operates as a pervasive epistemological framing rather than a mere set of formal municipal programmes. We also suggest that while the production and unrolling of smart futures is a quotidian process in practice, the potential of a revolutionary future discursively creates the conditions for the everyday futuring

Bespoke · Everyday life · Futures contract · Happening · Urbanism · Water Governance and Infrastructure