By Nolan Young
When I first got to Shanghai, it rained for two straight weeks. Still wanting to get a feel for the city, I set out cautiously with an umbrella and a charged phone. I found some kind of protection along the tree lined streets of Xuhui, as well as in the metro. Some stations branched off into shopping centers and food courts, and others had passageways that themselves were mini-malls, with bakeries, convenience-stores, and retail outlets. I could have hid from the rain in this underground city, but I did pop my head up to see mist-shrouded skyscrapers, to walk through some densely fragrant parks, and, of course, to eat.
Ordering food is often done through these QR codes, which take you to a digital menu when scanned. These apps have translation functions and allow you to order and pay instantaneously — and with practically no face-to-face interaction, unless you seek it out. One of my goals for the trip was to practice speaking Chinese. But as anyone who has travelled abroad while still in the process of learning the local language, immersion can be challenging and stressful. But I quickly found that digitization of the city and its services could erase much of this burden of intermediating everything through another language. I had to make sure to not be dependent on these apps and lose out on these small but important everyday interactions. Yet I still appreciated the comfort and fluidity of the digital platforms that mediated and facilitated every exchange, and at times relished in zipping through exchanges in my digital bubble.
This digital ecosystem revolutionized how, as a foreigner, you can travel through and interact with a city. But I was also aware that this was only scratching the surface of how digitally enmeshed life was for residents of these increasingly sentient cities. From the provision of public services for city residents, to public health measures, to traffic flows, to surveillance, to rezoning plans — it was difficult to comprehend the immediate and far-off possibilities of how cities may begin to function differently.
(From the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center: Shanghai’s zoning, and models for ‘New City’ areas)
The topic I was focusing on for this fellowship was somewhat related to these issues. However, rather than focusing on a large, advanced city like Shanghai, I was interested in how digital platforms were spreading and affecting the development of more rural areas. Particularly, I wanted to investigate how Chinese e-commerce platforms, through a public-private partnership with the state, functioned as a model of rural development. Throughout the summer I sought to learn more about this process, and its implications for conceptions of public-private partnerships, and the future of development, urbanization, and digital governance.
From my initial adjustment period to a city as international and cosmopolitan as Shanghai, I was becoming aware of just how much distance there was between me and the society I was in, and so I was looking forward to being able to speak with local scholars and other experts. From this network, I was grateful to gain a variety of informative and endlessly thought-provoking perspectives on Chinese society, politics, and economy— some of which I’ll get into in my second blog post.