Despite the unprecedented incorporation of information and communications tools (ICTs) by marginalized communities worldwide, there is still a clear urban/non-urban access (and effective use) gap in ICT access across the world. This gap turns into a crucial infrastructure need as attention is turned to pressing issues faced by cities. The internet access gap is identifiable not only in the Global South-perceived as peripheral-but also in the Global North-regarded as advanced and the motor of technological development. This suggests the emergence and endurance of peripheries based on the level of techno-social development. Locally, this process accords with existing socio-spatial practices and with the ways ICTs are being introduced in the everyday. This book explores the recursive interaction between socio-spatial practices and the late introduction of the internet in three marginalized rurban communities in Brazil and in the UK. It brings to the fore challenges that cross North-South divides to propose an open theory of the connected rurban as a framework that addresses and accommodates the specificities of these communities in the first two decades of the twentieth-first century.
Lorena Melgaco is an urban scholar with a background in architecture and urbanism. Her research focuses on the forms of micropolitical agency within a global political structure of knowledge and technological production and its relation to the production of space, especially in the postcolony. She is interested in, among other things, the entwinement of digital technology and the production of space; the intersections of technological dependency, capitalist production of space and the socio-environmental crisis, and the challenges of planning education and practice from a socio-spatial justice perspective.
Preface Acknowledgements Chapter 1: The Emergence of the Connected Rurban: An Introduction to the Process of Socio-Technological Peripheralization Part 1: Developing An Appropriate Lens To Look At The Connected Rurban: A Multilevel Approach Chapter 2: Setting The Context Chapter 3: Peripherality And The Everyday Of The Rurban: Rethinking Methodology Part 2: An Introduction To The Everyday: On People, Places And The Internet Chapter 4: Santo Antonio do Salto Chapter 5: Pendeen Chapter 6: Noiva do Cordeiro Part 3: From The Global To The Everyday And Back Again: Bottom-Bottom Tactics As Means To Social Transformation? Chapter 7: Understanding Multilevel Peripherality In The Connected Rurban Chapter 8. A Conclusion, Or The Opening For Another Conversation: For An Open Theory Of The Connected Rurban References Index About the Author
