21/11/2024 (Thursday) 13:00-14:00 E21B-G002
Place-weaving and community-texturising through neighbourhood group-shopping in post-Covid Wuhan
Abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has been said as a “digital pandemic”. Different societies have experienced the unprecedented permeation of digital technologies and platform applications in people’s daily life both during and after Covid. How has this “digital pandemic” reshaped urban neighbourhoods and our sense of community? This paper approaches this question by focusing on the four years (2020-2023) of practices of neighbourhood group-shopping in three neighbourhoods in Wuhan. When Wuhan became the first city in the world that encountered the breakout of the pandemic and whole city was put in lockdown, neighbourhood group-shopping based on social media and platform technologies organized by various institutions turned out to be the most effective solution for people to get foods and other essential goods. Some of the networks and infrastructures remain until now. To gain a nuanced understanding of the impacts of this new species of platform society stimulated by the pandemic on urban neighbourhoods, a new theoretical framework called “place-weaving” is developed to replace the traditional framework centred by “place-making”. Based on Tim Ingold’s idea of “textility of making” and Andrew Jansson’s concept of “texturisation”, this framework sees the place of neighbrourood as a form of assemblage through various meshworks between people, place, and technology, which is underlined by constant shifting between coding and recoding, coupling and decoupling, giving rise various levels of fullness and rhythm. The paper firstly conceptualises the practice of group-shopping as a process of “threading” and uncovers three mechanisms of threading to run group-shopping: chain, cord, and yarn. They are performed by the platform enterprises, the local government, and resident group leaders to achieve different goals. It then analyses the time-space traces engraved by various practices of group-shopping as a form of “texturising” and figures out two patterns: plain weave, exercised by the platform enterprises and the local government, and Jacquard weave, exercised by resident group leaders. Although both patterns are functional in providing goods to residents, the plain weave results in smooth and homogeneous space favouring scaling and efficiency, while the Jacquard weave results in heterogeneous space full of folds and knots, which ties residents closer and makes every neighbourhood different from each other. The paper concludes by calling for a new approach to build community resilience in global south in an increasingly mediated and platformed world.
Bio:
Dr. Yan Yuan is a professor at School of Journalism and Information Communication at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. She earned her Doctoral degree from School of Media, Art, and Design at University of Westminster. Her research interests span wide areas including media geography, media materiality and digital anthropology. She published a book titled ‘A Different Place in the Making – Everyday Practices of Rural Migrants in Chinese Urban Villages’ (Peter Lang, 2014), translated Paul Adams’ book “Geographies of Media and Communication” in Chinese. Her recent journal articles cover studies on tourist landscapes, domestic robots, slow media, and weaving.
