Bringing together geographers, sociologists, media researchers, anthropologists and more, Control, shift, govern marks a new generation of scholarship grappling with the digital as an irreducible fact of governance across local, urban, regional, national and transnational spaces.
—Aaron Shapiro, author of Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City

Ayona Datta is Professor in Human Geography at University College London
Mariana Reyes Carranza is Postdoctoral Research Associate at University College London

Introduction: Control, shift, govern

Part I. Control: Legacies and temporalities
1. Timing the state: Land digitisation in Africa’s Silicon Savannah
2. Zhi-Jie as the embodied statecraft of mapping in Taiwan’s ‘One Nation One Map’ (ONOM) digitalisation initiative
3. ‘Amrit Kaal’ [The elixir of time]: Decolonial myths of a digitalising state

Part II. Shift: Digital pivot
4. A tale of two frictions: Time, missions and urban climate transitions
5. Planning for digital futures: Seeing beyond the digitalising state
6. Entrepreneurship in the digitalising state: When Union Digital Centres fuse with patronage politics in Bangladesh
7. Broker bureaucracies: The subsidiary offices of the digitalising state

Part III. Govern: Data, information and automation
8. The state at risk: Automation and algorithmic governmentality in Latin America
9. Digital governance on the edge: Automating building control in the peripheries of Nairobi
10. The back and front stage of digital-urban statecraft in Cape Town, South Africa: Choreographed performances and bureaucratic software systems
11. The digital border: Assemblages of mobility, mediation and control

Epilogue: The time-space of digitalisation