Informational Peripheries – Rethinking the urban in a digital age
‘Informational peripheries’ are a combination of digital, material, territorial, infrastructural and social marginalisations that emerge from informational control, redlining, manipulation and blockading. This book argues that in a digital age, the periphery is more than just a geographical location. Seen through an informational lens, it emerges as a temporal construct that continually evolves across virtual and analogue spaces. Informational peripheries are determined by a lack of access to informational flows, as well as a relational positionality of expulsion from crucial informational exchanges across geographic space-times.
Urbanisation and urban life in a digital age needs to be examined through a lens of information – encompassing both its politics and its geographies. The periphery in an information age is located simultaneously across the geographic centre and edge, across social, material and digital worlds. Moving beyond current scholarship in urban and regional studies, this book presents a case for ‘informational peripheries’ as an analytical lens to understand the uneven, fragmented and disconnected geographies of urban peripheries in the Global South.
While ‘unplanned urbanisation’ has been a key discourse in the production of urban periphery in the Global South, Informational Peripheries argues that the coming of an informational age destabilises the geographic location of the urban periphery. Informational peripheries capture the complexities of digital, material and social dispersal and fragmentation that emerge from informational extraction, redlining, manipulation and bypassing. Exclusions are marked by both geographic and informational distance from the state. It includes subjects who are uncountable, as well as territories that are digitally, socially and materially unmappable. This approach provides an important vantage point for interrogating the political and technological apparatuses that are reconfiguring the notion of the urban in a digital age.
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