Mega-Locality: Digital Innovation in Spatial Politics, Case of China

• In Event: Politics of Place and Space

Abstract

My ethnographic research seeks to ground a theoretical debate on factory floors in order to understand how space functions as part of a network of production in China. My research engages with a set of literature that looks at Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells’s discussion on spatial politics and the concept of network society because they try to understand how dynamic transformation happens from Industry Age to Information Age. In Castells' analysis, the place where someone is located, or where they come from, has a less substantial effect on the concept of space because the network connection is digitally based. In his own words, Castells says, “space is the material support of time-sharing social practices across places,” and/or it could be where “it changes their [place’s] functional logic and social dynamics.” Both Castells and Sassen use global cities as examples to understand the space of flows in a nonlinear network of “nodes and hubs.” From their viewpoint, a network of nodes and hubs creates a quality of social space that is considered beyond local culture, geographical significance, and existing spatial logic. My research uses the theories of Castells and Sassen to look at the function of space and its social relations within China’s shoe manufacturing network and how they were reassembled into a network adaptation because of mass customization.
China's shoe manufacturing network has evolved from mass production, Just-In-Time, to data-driven mass customization. As a result of the repackaging of this shoe production network, its social and spatial values were further extracted. In different spaces throughout the network, the scale and quality of production generated social inequality because of the interest in network flexibility on mass customization. Firstly, I challenged China’s current debates on the spatial duality between their urban and rural realms. My research looks at the flow of those spaces and how they extend beyond China’s network of cities to further contribute to a cross-regional network of space that is within China. Secondly, the local aspects of the place, such as land use, ownership, and community, defined the quality of the space within the network that could be either formal or informal. Thirdly, the collaboration with the workshops and factories from the urban and rural sectors of the shoe production network showed a non-linear flow within the spaces. Thus, this network became what I called extra-local. The extra-local production extended beyond a decentralized network of production, which was only possible through even tighter connections between each space. Therefore, a new assembly of production was created via the tiers of labor involving relationships, communities, and networks that were constructed together through the concept of extra locality. This method shines a light on not only the spatial collaborations, but also their social dynamics.
There are three scales that I used in this investigation because they fit the production of China’s spatial typologies. Beginning with the factory space, after thirty years of centralized production, they broke down into a space for mix-used production in the PRD region. Digital production played a crucial role in reorganizing centralized production, causing one factory to grow into hundreds of factories. To this end, a production space becomes integrated within a spatial network through the reassembly of digitization and labor. Secondly, urban villages in China that placement is located between urban boundaries within city limits serve as informal production spaces, due to their legal status. Thirdly, rural workshops that are in rural residential spaces where production networks expanded into rural regions and cities, in inland China.
Now, a shoe travels between factories, urban villages, and rural workshops, during the process of it being made. In 2018, my preliminary fieldwork was conducted in a rural workshop in Liuyang, Hunan. The workshop was in a village home, occupying the first floor of two buildings with more than twenty workers that were mostly women. The rural regions of China occupied a digitally driven production network, which compensated itself by generating networked flexibility. During 2020 and 2021, I traveled between the production hubs of Dongguan and Huizhou in the PRD region, as well as to Wenzhou, Putian, Jinjiang, and Fuyang, in order to understand how their network of space functioned. Currently, such networked production is often located inside industry parks that provide a cluster of production infrastructures, urban villages that have informal spaces for production, and the rural homes of factory workers. My research took place in a variety of spaces across these production networks. This new network of production facilitating data-driven production was very different from mass production, in post-Fordism. In the discussion of extra-localness, social collaboration through a change mode of production is generating a different network of spaces.

Author

• Na Fu