In the current phase of globalization, successive technical and organizational modernizations are transforming the possibilities and historical conditions for the use of Latin American territories. The presence of different social actors implies unequal power relations, as well as asymmetries among places (Massey, 2007).
\nTransnational corporations are increasingly present in these territories, and the investments made create and restructure numerous geographic networks, principally urban networks. The global-scale development of capitalist accumulation implies the installation and expansion of technical systems in the territory that reorganize urban networks and rural territories according to regional and global dynamics, with significant environmental impacts in relation to the use of common goods in these places.
\nIn Latin America, the technical systems installed have been designed to facilitate the circulation of goods, money and information, although in accordance with the hegemonic demands of the international division of labor. Today, these processes are characterized by the dominance of information and a growing prominence of finance, which imposes itself as the “ascending, determinant and dominant variable of social and economic life” (Silveira, 2020).
\nAt the base of so-called digital capitalism (Schiller, 1999) or platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017) lies the unequal diffusion across places of what Santos (2000) identified as the technical-scientific-informational milieu. This is the geographic expression of globalization, sustained by advances in robotics, telecommunications, financial and internet networks and, more recently, the development of artificial intelligence.
\nThese general trends linked to new forms of connection and networked technologies are part of what Arroyo (2021) has termed the process of digitalization of territory. These are explained by physical infrastructures and technical objects such as: submarine cables, computers and smartphones with internet access, telephone antennas and, certainly, the data centers that constitute the “engine” of these contemporary functionalities of everyday life.
\nAs a result of the foregoing, new debates are beginning to emerge about the uses of AI and the digitalization of life, as well as their environmental and territorial impacts, since what used to be perceived as an intangible phenomenon when we spoke of the “cloud” is now becoming visible, and we know that it functions thanks to a large infrastructure that is transforming the territories in which it is established.
\nThe aim of this symposium is to analyze and problematize the emergence of new forms of territorial use arising from the financialization and digitalization of life that these same transnational corporations created as yet another form of accumulation (Harvey, 1990). This gives rise to new practices of land grabbing and territorial dispossession that are of the utmost importance to identify.
\nWe therefore believe that the Social Sciences and Geography can contribute significantly to understanding contemporary phenomena. In this sense, we wish to learn about the different theoretical and methodological perspectives from which these events are being studied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[61],"class_list":["post-10665","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-geografia"],"yoast_head":"\n