Digital transformations of the urban – carbon – labor nexus: A research agenda

Digitalization is profoundly impacting natural resource extraction. Mines and wells are monitored and managed in new ways from real-time data streams to algorithmic decision-making to implementation of automated vehicles. How mines and wells are superintended is restructuring the geographies of employment as more of the day-to-day mining operations are centralized in urban locations distant from sites of extraction. Digital infrastructures allow for greater control over distant non-urban extractive geographies, but they also are remaking urban spaces. While the tendency today is to create ever more geographically extensive extractive-labor regimes, these regimes are increasingly modulated by digital technology advances, a feature that also central in the drive for cities to become “smart.”