1186 | 656 | The material foundation for the digitization of cities

The new information and communication technologies – ICTs – rest on a material basis which is made up of compounds and chemical elements which gradually become more and more precious. The European Union calls these resources «critical raw materials» – CRMs – by virtue of their importance in the processes that will lead to the double transition: green and digital._x000D_
CRMs owe their «criticality» not to their scarce presence in the earth’s crust – in fact, they are fairly abundant – but to the difficulties related to their extraction and refining as well as to their role in creating added value in the various stages of construction and assembly of high-tech products._x000D_
In fact, computers, smartphones, electrical and electronic networks, smart home and office devices, data centers, servers and a lots of other digital devices incorporate significant amounts of CRMs._x000D_
The scientific literature on the impact of digitization on cities – on their structure, form, organization and population – tends to focus on the effects of the use of ICTs by citizens and companies on urban spaces._x000D_
The article proposed here, on the other hand, tries to reverse the perspective, that is, it poses the following as the main research question: what quantity of CRMs is needed to decentralize a city? This is accompanied by a further question: what are the material endowments – understood as a certain set of natural resources – that allow us to overcome temporal and spatial constraints?_x000D_
The proposed research will answer this question through a systematic analysis of the literature, also trying to understand if, and to what extent, these resources can also be found on the «outer rim» of cities, in their processes of recycling urban waste and improving waste recovery services for electrical and electronic equipment.

Andrea Cerasuolo
Department of Political Science, University of Naples Federico II

ID Abstract: 656