Datta, Ayona; (2024) Digital Timescapes: Technology, temporality and Society: by R. Kitchin, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023, 232 pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781509556403. [Review]. Space and Polity , 28 (2) 10.1080/13562576.2024.2363975.

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Abstract

‘Time is money’ is one of the often-repeated phrases which we are all familiar with. Indeed, the prioritization of time is said to be at the foundation of globalization and neoliberalisation of markets and economies. Yet it seems that there is far more work on the anthropologies and sociologies of time than on the geographies of time. This is surprising, given that modern cities and spaces have always been regulated by a linear model of clock time. This abstract metric calculation of time, which takes Greenwich as the ground zero of western modernity and progress, is at the heart of understanding how time and temporality shape geopolitics, international development, postcolonialism and even decolonization. That said, concerns around time have seen a resurgence in geography recently earlier time-use studies and time-management modelling, particularly through the coming together of approaches from STS, critical data studies and urban studies. Part of this is fuelled by what Kitchin and others have called a ‘digital turn’ (Ash et al., Citation2018) in geography that have seen a proliferation of scholarship on smart cities and algorithmic urbanism. A number of scholars are now increasingly concerned about the question of temporality, moving beyond a classic time-space compression thesis to unpacking time itself as one of the terrains of transformation in the rise of codes, algorithms and apps in our everyday lives. I have also been particularly interested in how the constructed temporalities of a mythical past, and a vanishing present impact on the imaginations of postcolonial urban futures (Datta, Citation2019). Indeed, given the rising interest in time in relation to smart cities and algorithmic governance, it is worth asking ourselves whether we are now seeing a ‘temporal turn’ in this geographical moment of technological ubiquity.

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