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While you walking in the streets, or using smart phones, your facial and vocal information is collected by the camera above your head and the microphone on the bottom of the phone. Facial recognition has gained fierce discussion recently in China, always followed with ridiculous news like “Family Carries Paralyzed Old Man on Stretcher to Bank for Facial Recognition Authentication” “ ALERT! These apps are stealing your facial data…..”, etc. People are concerned about the widespread use of facial recognition, while smart phones and payment apps are all using facial recognition as the confirm-act method. What’s more, during the COVID-19 pandemic, facial recognition technology was also used for public health surveillance. In the workplace, facial recognition technology has been used to detect employees with fever and ensure that they wear masks. In Russia, surveillance cameras with facial recognition can monitor people who are isolated or who are self-isolated. In China, facial recognition technology is used to scan a crowd for signs of fever and can be used to identify people while wearing masks.

 

We can see that facial recognition nowadays is working in 2 areas: government public services and commercial consumer area. The latter is now the bigger market for facial recognition. Facial recognition is replacing various forms of old technology. For example, it replaces password or fingerprint in the field of cell phone unlocking, replaces the operation of third-party payment accounts in the field of payments, and replaces the traditional access card technology in the case of access to your apartment. However, in business scenarios, the suppliers of facial recognition technology have different technical capabilities, among which high-volume suppliers do not have the ability to develop facial recognition technology from the ground up, but only procure the corresponding SDK package through the upstream. Without the technical capability itself, there is no way to protect the security of user data. So large amount of data owned by these suppliers is in huge risk.

 

During this process, the private tech firms are also trying to embed their rules, their standards within the digital technical infrastructure. This indicate that the power is embed in the technical issues. Power is in rule setting, in standard setting.

 

This phenomenon has gradually been noted by the authorities. The “Personal Information Protection Law (Draft)” is closed for public comment process on November 19, which means the law enforcement is around the corner. This law makes provisions regarding facial recognition. The same, regulations put upon tech corporations gradually enact. Especially in China, in the economic system of government intervention to regulate the market, this power shift is inevitable, but here also comes a more dynamic convergence of technology, politic and economics.

In the video of “Beyond Smart City”, Professor Emerita talked about the three key economic imperatives that defines the surveillance capitalism. The very first imperative is extracting data in volume. And the second is scope. She said, “It’s not only volume. We can find rich, new varieties of data from what people say, when they are talking and walking through the city, where they are going, what they are doing, whom they are doing it with. Our faces our bodies, our blood streams, our brains, all of these are new varieties of data and constitute new supply chains that are flowing into these factories.” The third is intervening system. She said, “The very best predictive data comes from actually intervening in the state of play.” In other words, people sometimes proactively engage with certain technology, however, this technology is in return influencing them at the same time since the data is immediately collected, analyzed and given feedback. People tend to think that humans are subject, but in fact, human beings become the object under digital data analysis. Here, she quote from a data scientist that “we can engineer the context around a particular behavior and force change. That way, we are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.” This got me thinking.

 

We learn our own behavior systems and teach these skill to machines, making machines to imitate us, and finally, it is these machines (technologies) that are affecting our behavior in return. It sounds like a “Möbius strip”, which implicates the relation between human and technologies.

 

The city is like a conglomeration of technologies. People built huge cities piece by piece, and eventually it turns into a giant that beyond human control. A joke says that people think it’s a person walking a dog, while it’s actually a dog walking a person. It is very interesting that some people make analogy between technology and dogs here. The city is like a more intellectual species. I would rather compare it to the human child. Parents raise their children, but the children are not usually growing up the way parents expect. Children use dialogues, texts and acts to keep communicating with their parents, as the cities using neighborhoods, streets and space constructions to interact with their citizens. Children know their parents through long-time period together, observing and imitating, as the more and more smart cities know citizens through facial recognition, human-habits learning and adaption and all kinds of data collection.

 

I still remember an episode of black mirror called “social media”, in which people can see each other with a floating window above heads, showing each social likability and other parameters. It is exaggerate and imagined but has implications. In this digital era, we get to know someone by certain parameter——how many followers he/she has on social media, how high his/her Alipay rating and credit, how often he/she orders on Eleme/Meituan, etc. It seems that technologies, cities and all kinds of inanimate systems are learning us in this way as well. Human and inanimate systems get to know intellectual creatures in almost the same way. Human becomes mechanized, while machine becomes in intelligent.

“The issue is not urban poverty. The issue is not the larger, over-arching thing. The issue is for us to recognize that these are neighborhoods—— this is legitimate form of urban development, and that cities have to engage these residents, because they are building the city of future.” Robert Neuwirth said in the video.

 

The “shantytown” in capitalist countries is to some extent different from that in China. In the video of “shadow cities”, migrants, or to say, squatters, in Turkey can build a house overnight and claim sovereignty over the land as long as they were not discovered by the authorities. With the house, they will not be evicted again. However, this is impossible in China where government owns the land. Shanghai has shantytown as well. Li Yanbo, an associate professor at Tongji University’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, said, “If urban architecture erases it (the squatters), then the city of Shanghai is likely to be out of balance in the future, at a certain age and at a certain level.”

 

A few years ago, Shanghai began a shanty renovation, and at the same time, the renovation of group rental housing. Shantytowns and group rentals have always been closely related. The shantytowns are mostly concentrated in the northeast of Shanghai, scattered in Hongkou, Yangpu, and Zhabei districts (downtown areas are discussed here, the suburbs like Jiading, Qingpu districts are beyond the scope of this discussion). Most of these houses here are low-rise, old-fashioned buildings with no more than three stories along the street. I recent read about an article of a photography exhibition regarding Hongzhen old street in Hongkou district, which was the largest shantytown in the downtown area. A few years ago, I cycled past Zhou jia zui Road in Hongkou District, which has already begun to be rebuilt, and I was impressed by the dilapidated streetscape, which has now disappeared.

Similar situation can also be seen near Xin tian di. As you walk along Zhaozhou Road, you are switching views from fancy modern high-rise building and old-fashioned, low-rise huts. The Lao xi men neighborhood used to be one of my favorite places to go, because there are a lot of local snacks in that crowded shantytown. These streets is home to dozens of migrant workers from all over the country, and many authentic local flavors are bred in this neighborhood. Vibrant food cultures, local supermarkets and hardware store permeated with thick life breath, all kinds of informal economy flourished here.

 

Here we can see the hidden connections between the city’s inhabitants, their neighborhoods, and their economic patterns. In addition to physical connections, urban settlements also have a profound cultural connection with their inhabitants.

 

The term “shantytown” not only represents a material form of urban poor community, but also has been condensed into a cultural label for the urban underclass society and people, with rich connotations of urban poor culture and underclass immigrant culture.

In the creation of modern Haitian culture, the social identity of the characters is always unconsciously related to their housing location, i.e., the relative position of their living place in the urban space, as well as the type of hierarchy of the residential area. This makes it possible for the author to combine the social attributes of the characters, such as occupation, education, etc., with the geographic space in which they live, in order to observe the living conditions and social network of different social classes.

Infrastructure is not solely associated with hardware, actually it never was. All infrastructures are in fact socio-technical in nature. It was like a net on which every elements is co-working and exchanging with each other. It was a dynamic net that every knot of the net is in the flow. This flow is a man-made process which continuously and collaboratively produce and distribute essential goods and service.   

 

The infrastructure is an invisible background of modernity. Some scholars argued that this gigantic system both enable and constrain human beings. The author had the automobile/ road infrastructure as an example, but here,  I want to develop further this idea. I would like to abstract some ideas from Paul’s article, in which he said that computation begin to manifest itself as an aspect of everyday environment. And he argues that this transformation is move from a concern with virtual spaces to a concern with physical one. He actually focus on the embodied action and bodily encounters between people and technology here, but I think this “virtual-physical” transformation can be applied to other things, such as the transformation of infrastructure.

 

Before technology revolution and the popularization of internet, infrastructure may mostly refers to those giant project undertook by the government. However, with internet becoming part of our life, this meaning of infrastructure is widely expanded. Since this word ultimately describe a flow of essential goods, the internet came on the stage which provides people with a platform to do economic, social and historical exchange with each other, no matter the user of it is an individual, an organization or a state. Zoom in the contemporary world, where computation and algorithms are almost the dominate power of our society, which lead to a new situation that the infrastructure is focusing more on silicon and electronic cables.

 

Back to the initial meaning of infrastructure, which often refers to important, widely shared, human-constructed resources. And according to the dictionary, it refers to the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society. In this sense, mobile food delivery system, which built on computation and big data and relied on the function of internet and electricity, is growing to be the new kind of infrastructure, especially during the pandemic. When the city is hit by the pandemic, the delivery guy acts as a ferryman to keep the city running. They connected quarantined businesses and consumers, the online and offline. They are part of the infrastructure, the delivery infrastructure. This inorganic system finally meet with organic lives. Infrastructure is not only associated with concrete, cement or silicon, but also the flesh and blood. As Paul mentioned in his article that certain infrastructure could be considered to be a force or time amplifier, the delivery system was more like a speed and connection amplifier.

 

However, as an infrastructure, it surely has its constrains. We can see that in mega city like Shanghai, the consumption of delivery food is awfully high, which means most people in the city rely on the delivery system. But if a restaurant does not register on the delivery platform, the business and income it has will decline, to some extent. It is not about business and income only. It is about exposure on the internet, which has a profound influence on its business. To costumers, we are blind and disabled without this food delivery system. We can see the sales volume and comments on this food store to decide if we are going to order this. The delivery system facilitate us in some way, but it also give us constrains.

There is a scene in the Hong Kong movie “Swordsman III” where a foreigner asks a local Chinese “where is Jianghu?” and asks to be taken to Jianghu. It’s an interesting question: can anyone tell us where Jianghu is?

 

It is always difficult to translate this Chinese word “Jianghu” into English. It first appeared in 《Zhuangzi》, and was further extended in meaning by martial arts novels. Nowadays, “Jianghu” conveys much more meanings, like brotherhood, all corners of the country, underworld or a world filled with love, hatred, passion and revenge, etc..One has to look deeper into the Chinese to see that there have always been two “societies”, one in which the state makes the rules, and in which official laws and advocated morals govern the way people behave, and the other in which the people spontaneously develop certain rules that are not necessarily systematically regulated. The latter may not always be in conflict with official rules, but they are certainly different in nature from each other.

 

Streets are essential components of “Jianghu”, even the stages of it. We can see in martial arts novels that spy and killers are most likely to go to a teahouse (Chaguan in Chinese) to pry into their targets’ affairs. Sometimes not only the tea house, but also food or grocery stalls along the street, are main spots to spy out secrets needed. In wangdi’s book, he singles out the tea house, since tea houses are associated with commercial operations whereas streets are mainly about daily life. The amount of tea house in chengdu appears phenomenal that worth a seperate story, but in many other cities of china, especially ancient china, tea house was more like a stall set up on the street, open to the public without a confined space, living with the streets.

 

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and why does that happen?

 

In wangdi’s book, he mentioned a very unique architectural development model in chengdu, which can be applied to most Chinese cities, that houses develop in parallel, with people’s homes and storefronts separated by a single threshold in most cases. In my perspective, this parallel structure in architecture is to some extent a microcosm of Chinese collective values. This model helps build a intimately connected atmosphere among streets. Streets are places for daily life and interactions with neighborhood.

 

Streets, apart from burdening the city’s traffic, serves as a carrier for daily life and economic behavior. It is thought that outsiders can distinguish one city from another by observing features such as city walls, shop fronts and hawker stalls. For example, you can easily differentiate Hongkong from many other Chinese cities, since streets and billboards there are so cyberpunk. Another city, Chengdu, as I observed before, shows its slow-pace in life by numerous public benches under the trees along roads. If you get tired of walking, you can just sit down and enjoy the view. And food stalls, as this city is famous for its food, are all along the roads a few steps away. Here, I noticed that street hawkers are closely linked to public spaces,especially transport systems. In the past, hawkers were at city walls, bridges, along river banks, temples, etc. Now, similarly, you can find them at subway entrances, under overpasses , at train or bus stations, etc. The hawkers seem to be closely connected to the transport system.

 

Back to the main points ——“ Jianghu”, a highly socialized world, is able to be experienced through streets as night falls. I do not want to name it as night markets which gives a sense of gathering, since the food stalls I talk about are often separated and scattered. We could see people drinking and laughing in the stalls at night, most of whom are from the lower class.

Several people sit at tables, as you walked by, you could even hear them talking about national events, such as US-China relations, even though these things seemed far away from them. People spend their evenings socializing at the stalls expressing their boredom and stresses of their work and lives.

The stall is a “Jianghu” that strips people of their original class. Here, no elitism, no authorities, no ruling ideologies, everyone is equal —— waiting for the call from the food stall owner, “ Here, yours!”

The food stands suddenly disappeared after the summer holiday of 2016.

I was a sophomore in ECNU (Minhang Campus) back then. When I entered the college in 2015, the food stands around our school were flourishing. You can find different types of food like Rou Jia Mo, dumplings, grilled tofu, deep-fried, Kao Leng Mian, fried rice noodles, etc. I can literally list all kinds of food stands that appeared around my school since I am a huge fan of food stalls. Some of the stall owner became my friends later because of my regular appearance.

 

However, something prophetic happened before that summer, which gradually raised our students’ awareness that these food stalls may no longer be permitted in this area. Before, authorities, known as city management officer (Chengguan), in most cases, would turn a blind eye to these vendors since the atmosphere in the neighborhood of universities is relatively special. College students has a great demand on these stalls because the stuffs sold there are cheap and students do not have to go far away to buy those essentials, which considerably add to the comfort and convenience of the general public. Most importantly, it encouraged the vitality and diversity in university neighborhood when Minhang campus back then was surrounded by farmland and construction site. The urbanization there hasn’t took place until 2016, the first shopping mall in our neighborhood came into use. Since then, houses, subways, overpasses mushroomed. It seems that that area was finally taken into municipal consideration and urbanization planning.

One day, I was buying some deliciousness between those food stalls, city management officers (Chengguan) suddenly showed up. Instead of sitting in their cars labeled “Shanghai Chengguan”, chatting and smoking, they walked out and were trying to confiscate the portable tables around the stalls. The crowd fell into completely disorder and chaotic. Those who hadn’t been reached rapidly got packed and rode way, with tofu on the pan sizzling. And here came most ridiculous scenario: groups of students followed behind, trying to catch up with the electric tricycle across the six-lane road, in that they had paid for the food but didn’t get it. I was absolutely one of them and finally found the vendor in the wood of a park nearby.

 

This typical cat-and-mouse game with municipal workers chasing street vendors was also shot in many domestic film and television product. View here. And I haven’t seen most of those vendors since that summer, while some of them who were still trying to make a living here, rent a storefront to continue. With loans, definitely.

 

After years of suppression of these vendors and stalls in cities, on June 1^st of 2020, Premier Li Keqiang said that the stall economy is “the fireworks of the world, the vitality of China” during an inspection in Yantai, Shandong, and expressed his positive attitude towards the stall economy. Subsequently, the central government canceled the assessment of urban land stalls, and local governments gradually liberalized them to allow stall economy. The core reason for the liberalization of the stall economy is probably to stabilize the employment situation under the impact of the corona pandemic. At the press conference of the first quarter of 2020 by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, Zhang Ying, Director of the Employment Promotion Department, said: “From January to March this year, 2.29 million new jobs were created in cities and towns across the country, and the unemployment rate in the national urban survey in March was 5.9%. The employment situation is more severe than in previous years.”

 

We know that setting up a street stall, benefiting from its low cost, convenient and quick advantages, is the best way for the unemployed and laid-off workers at the bottom to make a living. However, the stall economy was once banned in the city due to problems affecting the appearance of the city. Therefore, this time, the governors not only want the stalls to give the city a “ life breathing atmosphere”, but also to keep the appearance of the city relatively clean, which in the end calls out a gathering and collective stalls —— “night market”.

 

I highly doubt the function and prosperity of these “night markets”. On one hand, food stalls grow up with the streets and neighborhoods, which stands for the breath of life in the vicinity. And gathering them together chokes it. On the other hand, this solution seems not that effective in the long term, more like a stopgap remedy. The stall itself has the attribute of “emerging and perishing of itself”. It does not pay taxes, has no fixed income, work location, and legal protection. It is understandable for individuals to set up stalls for their livelihood, but stalls are definitely not an ideal “economic form” because of its liquidity, temporary nature. Street stalls will make life easier for some people, but they will not make “economic prosperity”. “Developing the stall economy” itself implies a paradox. The stalls must be individual and scattered, and cannot be planned and “developed”. The organized stall, like a “night market”, is no longer a stall, but something that can be organized and built, which on the other hand can also be banned in an organized manner. This kind of carnival of “all people setting up a street stall” and the “romantic” atmosphere deliberately conveyed by the media have concealed economic and social problems. Persuade the unemployed to go to the street, and thus “unemployment problem” is solved?