Based on a year-long ethnographic research into everyday life in Santiago's dense high-rises, this paper analyses the emergence of everyday digital economies among building occupants through messaging applications. In this context, novel neighbor-based commercial interactions have, to some extent, overturned the impersonal character of Chilean verticality. Infused with a communitarian ethos, these transactional encounters reshape residents' perceptions of neighborliness in dense, heterogeneous vertical settings, fostering a sense of togetherness reminiscent of traditional neighborhood imaginaries, while enabling residents from diverse backgrounds to generate unexpected relationships. I therefore argue that consumption practices within these buildings add complexity and nuance to the experience of living in verticalizing South American cities. Specifically, they reveal alternative ways in which seemingly rigid residential structures are transformed through ordinary inhabitation as neighbor relations become more digitalized. In doing so, this paper contributes to the expanding interest in understanding vertical ordinariness in the region.
Biocomputing data centers are facilities that use human neurons cultured from stem cells as their computing substrate. These pose a challenge to urban governance that it is not equipped to meet. Because biocomputing is assembled through data centers, biomedical precincts, energy regimes, and experimental planning environments, it is both a bioethical issue and an urban problem of siting, infrastructural regulation, and public oversight. Focusing on the emergence of facilities in Melbourne and Singapore, this paper argues that urban infrastructure studies implicitly assume the material substrate to be inert. Pipes, cables, fiber, and code do not raise questions of sentience, consent, or biological sourcing. Yet biocomputing disturbs that assumption. The paper identifies a qualitative break with people-as-infrastructure, ghost work and clinical labor, each of which retains the whole person as its unit of analysis. Biocomputing incorporates fragments of the human body that are stripped to their biological minimum. This life is present in the data center to compute, yet remains absent from urban governance. Singapore's convergence of Smart Nation ambition, Biopolis strategy, and serious energy constraints makes it a theoretically productive first case for exploring the conceptual landscape of urban infrastructure studies post-inert turn.
