The Digital Dimension of Mobilities: Mapping Spatial Relationships between Corporeal and Digital Displacements in Barcelona

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which technologies reshape everyday activities, adopting a mobility perspective of the digital environment, which is reframed in terms of the constitutive/substitutive element of corporeal mobility. We propose the construction of a Digital Mobility Index, quantified by measuring the usage typology in which the technology is employed to enable mobility. Through a digital perspective on mobilities, it is possible to investigate how embodied practices and experiences of different modes of physical or virtual displacements are facilitated and emerge through technologies. The role of technologies in facilitating the anchoring of mobilities, transporting the tangible and intangible flow of goods, and in mediating social relations through space and time is emphasized through analysis of how digital usage can reproduce models typical of the neoliberal city, the effects of which in terms of spatial (in)justice have been widely discussed in the literature. The polarization inherent to the digital divide has been characterized by a separation between what has been called the “space of flows” (well connected, mobile, and offering more opportunities) and the “space of places” (poorly connected, fixed, and isolated). This digital divide indeed takes many forms, including divisions between classes, urban locations, and national spaces. By mapping “hyper- and hypo-mobilized” territories in Barcelona, this paper examines two main dimensions of digital inequality, on the one hand identifying the usage of the technological and digital in terms of the capacity to reach services and places, and on the other, measuring the territorial demographic and economic propensity to access to ICT as a predictive insight into the geographies of the social gap which emerge at municipal level. This approach complements conventional data sources such as municipal statistics and the digital divide enquiry conducted in Barcelona into the underlying digital capacities of the city and the digital skills of the population.