Digital insurgency: Urban mobilization and grassroots digital knowledge

Abstract

Technical and digital knowledge creation frequently homogenizes and marginalizes specific groups of people, thereby perpetuating oppressive power structures and utilizing technologies as instruments for top-down uneven urban development. The increased reliance on the flow of data facilitated by digital technologies has often reproduced existing inequalities through invisibility, oversimplification, or incomplete data sets. In contexts of urban informality, invisibility is particularly pervasive in self-built communities that are deemed illegible to and by the state and are subjected to neglect and removals, reinforcing historical patterns of oppression, exclusion, and racism in residents’ everyday lives. Similarly, insurgent planning illuminates grassroots efforts challenging systems and structures of oppression to spur change and collective urban rights. In the last few decades, the appropriation of digital tools and resources has allowed communities and movements to redefine their organizing means with digital tools and platforms, producing, expanding, and documenting urban insurgencies. This article puts forward a Digital Insurgency conceptual framework to highlight insurgent processes of knowledge production, organizing, and appropriation of digital and technological means that challenge hegemonic systems of oppression while advocating for collective urban rights. Case studies in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Fortaleza, Brazil, are analyzed through the proposed framework, considering movements’ political foundation, agency, practical implementations, utilization of digital and technological tools, and the crafting of counter-hegemonic narratives. The selected cases demonstrate the robust potential of Digital Insurgency in supporting the struggles for urban collective rights and social and spatial justice through grassroots digitalization of urban insurgency.