Informational Peripheries: Rethinking the urban in a digital age (under contract, UCL Press)
Ayona Datta and Fenna Hoefsloot (eds.)
In this edited volume we present a case for ‘informational peripheries’ as an analytical lens for understanding the new configurations of the urban periphery in a digital age. The informational periphery extends the notion of an urban periphery beyond geographic to informational space. Following Datta (2022, 2023), we define ‘informational peripheries’ as a combination of digital, material and social dispersal and fragmentation that emerge from informational redlining, manipulation and bypassing’. In the informational periphery, social exclusions are marked by both geographic and informational distance from the state, it includes subjects who are uncountable as well as territories that are unmappable – digitally, socially and geographically. The informational periphery then overlaps with the urban periphery but also extends to informational spaces. The informational periphery is located both materially and epistemologically in the intersection of multiple imaginaries of the urban and digital, the desire for governability and expansion, and is a space of transformation and movement.
Why does the informational periphery merit specific attention? And what constitutes the urban periphery in a digital age? As Shaw and Graham (2017) argue, the increasing reliance upon data and digital technologies in cities has led to an ‘urbanization of information’. Current scholarship in urban and regional studies points to the emergence of the periphery through a focus on suburbia or slums at the city’s edge. While this has been a key element in the production of urban periphery so far, the coming of a digital age complicates the material geography of the periphery. The periphery need not necessarily be in the urban edge; rather the uneven and disconnected infrastructures of a digital age produce a far more fragmented and dispersed nature of the periphery. We take our cue from Chan (2013) who argues that we need to focus on the nature of fragmented and splintered relationships that are being produced across cities and regions that makes peripheries both geographically grounded and spatially dispersed. Instead of considering the periphery as a material geography on the fringe of the metropolitan city, we argue that uneven and disconnected physical and digital infrastructures of a digital age produce a far more fragmented and dispersed nature of the periphery today. The periphery is now located simultaneously across the centre and edge and across material and digital worlds. It is entangled with regimes of digitalization, capital, land transfer, and governance across several scales (from the urban to the global) and includes subjects who are uncountable as well as territories that are unmappable – digitally, technologically and geographically. Therefore, we propose that the empirical and theoretical development of informational peripheries can provide an important vantage point for interrogating the political and technological relations that are at the heart of the emergence of urban peripheries in three important ways.
The informational periphery is more than just flows and networks, however. It is layered over historical accumulation of developmental delays, infrastructural deficits and access to information that would enable critical awareness and consciousness of rights and privilege. The informational periphery is layered over structural and geographic disadvantages to produce informational marginality. The informational periphery is a particular product of an informational turn in urbanisation that focusses on speedy, on-demand real-time information for some while withholding the same information from others. The information periphery is built upon an informational economy where, as Manuel Castells (2011) had argued ‘the power of flows takes precedence over the flows of power.’
The book’s scope is an interdisciplinary examination of the ways that ideas of the periphery have been reconfigured with the penetration of digital infrastructures, tools and technologies across various layers of state and society, and what this tells us about urban and regional futures in the global south. It is broad in both intellectual and geographical scope, but also specifically framed around the production, territorialization and progressive potentialities of the idea of the informational periphery. Its purpose is to move beyond the recent scholarship in science and technology studies as well as critical data studies which have made important contributions to the study of technologically mediated cities (Kitchin & Lauriault, 2014; Dalton, Taylor & Thatcher, 2016). It will instead analyse how the digital age has transformed information into a geographical, political and technological apparatus of society and how therefore informational peripheries are produced, resisted, mediated and subverted. In doing so, it seeks to probe how the informational periphery is produced by the state in its march towards technological modernity and at the same time becomes a productive space from which marginalized citizens seek to sustain their lives and livelihoods.
The book comprises of 13 empirical chapters written by early, mid-career and established international scholars to conduct an empirical and theoretical development of informational peripheries across the global south. The book has been organised along three main themes:
(i) the production of the informational periphery, through the grafting of digital information onto colonial and postcolonial paper-based information systems in uneven and unequal ways.
(ii) territorialising the informational periphery, through the material and immaterial actors that shape the periphery as networked absence or presence. and
(iii) re-imagining the informational periphery from below, which examines how information infrastructures are generating new spaces for repair, co-optation and manipulation by ordinary citizens.
Through these themes we see the informational periphery emerge in, amongst others, the production of standards, codes, and protocols for information infrastructures that exclude people living in informality in Nairobi, the maintenance of a segregated housing markets through the layering of platform databases in Cape Town, or the embodiment of informational peripheries among India’s internal migrants who are invisible in urban and rural land records as well as state digitisation platforms. The book concludes that a shift in lens from urban to informational peripheries provide an important vantage point for interrogating the political and technological apparatuses that are reconfiguring the notion of peripheries in the digital age.
References
Castells, Manuel. 2011. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. London: John Wiley & Sons.
Chan, Anita Say. 2013. Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dalton, Craig M, Linnet Taylor, and Jim Thatcher (2016) “Critical Data Studies: A Dialog on Data and Space.” Big Data & Society 3 (1): 2053951716648346. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716648346.
Datta, Ayona. 2022. “Digitalising State: Governing Digitalisation-as-Urbanisation in the Global South.” Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325221141798.
Datta, Ayona. 2023. ‘The Informational Periphery: Territory, Logistics and People in the Margins of a Digital Age’. Asian Geographer, September, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10225706.2023.2253233.
Kitchin R, Lauriault TP and McArdle G. 2015. Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards. Regional Studies, Regional Science 2(1): 6–28
Shaw, J. and Graham, M. 2017. An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information. Antipode. 10.1111/anti.12312