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