Toward a Theory of Digital-World Urbanization

Abstract

Enterprise digital environments increasingly combine interdependent applications, shared platforms, distributed data products, cloud infrastructure, human actors, and intelligent agents capable of initiating action. Existing research offers robust but fragmented explanations of these environments through enterprise architecture, information-system urbanization, platform ecosystems, digital infrastructures, data governance, sociotechnical systems, technical and digital debt, zero-trust security, and AI risk management. This conceptual paper develops Digital-World Urbanization (DWU) as an integrative framework for governing such environments as bounded sociotechnical territories. Using a preliminary integrative review of 28 selected academic, standards-oriented, and foundational professional sources published between 1977 and 2026, the study synthesizes seven interdependent systems: territory, districts, buildings, public infrastructure, mobility, subsurface, and inhabitants. It further develops the constructs of digital habitability, informal digital settlements, urban debt, and civic identity for intelligent agents, and proposes six relationships for future empirical evaluation. DWU does not claim that enterprise environments are literal cities; rather, it uses urbanization as a disciplined theory-building analogy for explaining placement, reuse, movement, authority, and controlled evolution. The paper concludes with boundary conditions, rival explanations, an illustrative hypothetical application, managerial implications, and a staged research agenda for construct validation, design-science evaluation, and comparative empirical testing.