‘Reading for difference' digital social innovation. Critical geography and the non-dualistic thinking of socio-technical agency in augmented cities

Digital Social Innovation initiatives (DSI) are mushrooming in cities around the world. This is both influencing and influenced by urban organizational logics, functional structures and operative processes. Over the last few years, these initiatives have increasingly attracted interest in a wide range of disciplines. However, they remain marginal in critical geography. In this paper, I analyze the reasons underlying this trend and explain how the analysis of spatial implications of DSI can bring novel exploratory insights. I build on recent critical geography analyses and use of digital methods in social innovation practices, and the concepts of smart cities and platform societies. I adopt Gibson-Graham's tripartite methodological approach of “reading for difference” in social agency. In so doing, I suggest that critical geographers' limited attention toward DSI is rooted in a dominant, polarised reading of DSI as neoliberal vs revolutionary, and in its association with the first pole of the dualism (i.e. its neoliberal reading). This underrates the space and spatialities of DSI. To eschew the dualist trap, I suggest the possibility of genuinely emancipatory socio-technological agency performed by heterogeneous networks in the urban context, and consider how DSI operating in the multi-layered spaces of everyday urban life are relevant for a critical geography, open to weak theorizing and emancipatory practices.