Informational Peripheries: Rethinking the Urban in a Digital Age

An examination of how urban peripheries are being redefined in the digital era.

Moving beyond current scholarship in urban and regional studies, this volume 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 this concept is parallel to and overlaps with the urban periphery, the circulation—or restriction—of information has taken on additional significance with the coming of a digital age. The periphery is no longer confined to the slums or suburbia at a city's edge; it now also encompasses uneven and fragmented digital infrastructures. 

Providing empirical and theoretical contributions from cities in the Global South, this book advances scholarship in Southern urbanism, smart cities, and peripheral urbanization, conceptualizing the diverse ways in which informational peripheries are resisted, adapted, complied with, and lived in. 
 

Ayona Datta is a professor of human geography at University College London.

Fenna Imara Hoefsloot is a research fellow at University College London.