Digital Urbanism on the Margins: Chinese Migrants and Intensive Technology

Tricia Wang | www.triciawang.com

what can we learn from 300 million rural-urban migrants?

they can help us answer an important question

what the future of the internet will look like

how will the next 2 billion users experience everyday digital life?

Migration is taking place in a new technoscape

the cellphone is the lifeline for every migrant moving to the city

migrants come to the city for a better life

undergoing massive re-urbanization – laying the infrastructure for the new digitally ubiquitous city

cities are the site of this new technoscape

decreasing rural populationincreasing urban population

China’s increasing income per capita over last 200 years

China has largest internet community

384,000,000 (chart from 2008)

Convergence of processes unfolding in cities

re-urbanization

Digitization of information

Creation of largest middle-class

Tech infrastructure build out

we are digitally networking the consumption desires of millions of people

But can the planet support the a networked middle-class from China?

Will ICTs be the game changer?

do ICTs signal to a paradigm shift for society?

someone has theorized about this a lot…

Society of Control1950 - ?

Disciplinary Societies1700-1950

WE ARE IN A PERIOD OF TRANSITION

Gilles DeleuzeMichel Foucault

Deleuze theorized this in 1992!

How are people experiencing these changes today?

so what now?

I offer some initial thoughts and theories for how I’m thinking about this in terms of China

I propose a new urban assemblage

digital urbansim

an urban assemblage in which the materiality of living in cities and its digital infrastructures are becoming mutually constituted

materiality of living in cities

digital infrastructures

everyday life of digital urbanism

sites of tech access become the loci of sociality

driven by the virtualization of urban experiences and digitization of information

workings of digital urbanism

people

(subjectivity, identity)

product

(hardware, content)

tech & economic

policy(legislation)

protocol(code/networks/

standards)

software: social media/gaming

widespread infrastructure

Hardware: low-cost tech tools

rural-urban migration

digitization of information

practice

(communication, spatial)

state managed

growth

open web standards and programming

languages

organization workflow

non co-present communication

desires

dreams

DIGITAL URBANISMmillions of rural-urban migrants are becoming urbanized through low-cost digital tools

on the margins

urban life on the marginsuneven rights

disruptive citizenship

widely available digital tools

publicly virtual

internet cafes- digital “street corners”

immobile mobility (Wallis 2008)

SOME HYPOTHESES FOR A DIGITAL URBANISM ON THE MARGINS

based on the preliminary fieldwork that I’ve conducted over the last 3 years

1 tools/mediums of information matter less than

relations of information

tools/medium of information vs relations of

information• binary framework

• digital divide - haves or have-nots, one either has or doesn’t have access

• tech determinism

• linear reading, based on progress

• captures a snapshot of social relation

•ICT4D (information communication technologies for development)

• relative framework

• socio-digital sieves- complex interplay of social structures & processes

• avoids tech determinism

• de-centered reading, based on ruptures and possibilities

• captures change in process

I propose this perspective

people will experience urban space as a mix of cyberspace and code/space

Dodge & Kitchen 2003: code/space is where code dominates the production of space - it mediates socio-spatial processes

2materiality of living in cities and its digital infrastructures are becoming mutually constituted - produced through one another

most prominent in sites of tech access – internet cafes

change from the bottom up will take form in

disruptive citizenshipthis happens when people on the margins experience the limits of consumer citizenship 3

modulationdividualizing

disruption self-healing

ubiquitous

4structural characteristics of digital urbanism

5commercial sites of internet access become the loci of sociality – third places (Oldenburg 1989)

necessary spaces to build communitynot work, not home the new “street

corner”

several discursive regimes produce the space of digital urbanismwe will see increasing tension around information and digital

politics, what I call neo-informationalism6

artificiality is not superficiality

ubiquity and seamlessness is desired normalization and stigmatization of debt

discursive regimes

neo-informationalism

• information as site of wealth expansion

• information determinism as model of social change (Ames 2008)

“INFORMATION

• compliments neo-liberal economic policies

• internet freedom myth

ideology of

WANTS TO BE FREE”

neo-informationalismInformation functions like currency:

borderlessunregulatedmobile

in an ideology that information should flow freely between institutions, governments, and people to ensure democracy, free-markets, and equality.

neo-informationalism

While no entity promoting this mechanism has used this word, it is a concept that I have assigned to the practices of people and corporations who promote the ideology cum theology of free-information.

what are the processes that shape people’s everyday experiences in digital urbanism?

code/space (interwoven physical and virtual space)

governing data, not bodies

mediated remembrance through the archive

perpetual anxiety in credentials

how do we find some answers to these questions?

ethnographic imagination & grounded theory

living with migrants

hanging out in internet cafes

working in factoriesgoing to schools

I’m starting 1 year of fieldwork in a 2nd tier urban Chinese city

watching informal public spaces

research methods

mental mapping

deep ethnography

historical research

ICT mapping mobile diaries

photo elicitation

I’ll have some observations to report in 2012!

In the meantime, I will be sharing fieldnotes on www.culturalbytes.com

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control