yq2080

“We are also the skin of what we wear. The garment being cut and sewn is not only for us to wear; the city also wears us.” Using such a metaphor, Bratton talked about the sentient city, and the mutual interaction between the urban AI technology and citizens. A driverless car is a common example for urban sensing, as we all know, it has multiple sensors to detect situations and form its behavior by algorithms. However, a driverless car is just a small part of the road, a tool to make life more convenient. And what Bratton suggested in his article is an incipient mechanic sensate world – the whole sensing and thinking systems are built into the fabric of the city.  It’s interesting to read the author’s comparison between the cuttlefish and the sentient city. Based on material chemistry, the operating mechanism of the city is just like a cuttlefish, which can respond to different situations flexibly like the nervous system of the brain. However, some people also pointed out the potential risks of the sentient city in public health, national security and the environment. (Read more here)

A picture that compares the city to a brain system

Gabrys argued that telepathy is a form of invisible communication that can describe “how a wireless city talks to itself, circulating messages and programming urban ecologies.” (Pp. 50) Here the famous argument “The medium is the message” raised by McLuhan was applied to the urban telecommunication in a new way. The invisible particles in the atmosphere of urban city act as medium, and at the same time, they also make up the important electrical environment that change the people’s life. The author then talked about Paul Virilio’s discussion of the “overexposed city”, in which he pointed out that the electronic telecommunication changed the physical fabric of the city in both spatial and time dimensions. Here I found that his opinion was somehow similar to my thoughts about the mobile food delivery system. He said that, with telecommunications, the city exists all at once and so lacks “here and there”, and another assemblage of space and time emerges through the operation of invisible frequencies. Therefore, the modes of space and time are intensified, and electronic signals can transmit across stretches of space all the time.

When it comes to the Mobile food delivery system, I argue that it changes urban citizen’s understanding of space and time, and the invisible spatial and time infrastructures in the modern city. First, online ordering and delivery system have changed the standard by which people measure time. People’s estimation of time is largely shaped by the results generated by the platform’s big data and algorithms. The division of labor and the order-taking system continue to shorten the delivery time, thus intensifying such competition in the industry. Besides, the limited cold chain coverage prevents rural residents from buying foods with a short shelf life. Therefore, the difference in time perception between urban and rural residents can become more obvious. Secondly, the convenient mobile food delivery system makes the location of restaurants and food stores no longer important. Even if people often buy food from a restaurant, they may not know where some shops are located. Just as Virilio said, the virtual mirage of is presented in front of people with the help of digital technology, so people further reduce their attention to the street and physical location. Moreover, the rapid development of the mobile food industry has largely hit physical stores, leading to the emergence of some restaurants without physical storefronts, further aggravating the curl of urban space.

As the book’s introduction says, we have witnessed the tremendous changes that digital technology brought to society, but the transformation “is just getting started”- ubiquitous digital technology will continue to shape our world and our lifestyle. Urban life in the modern society is largely driven by technology, internet, and electronic infrastructures, and in fact, the convenience brought by the digital revolution are now being regarded as a major feature and advantage of urban life. The author traced the historical developments of the formation of smart city, which is very novel to read because our generation don’t have a complete understanding of this macroscopic evolution that brought about huge changes.

Clearly, digital technology accelerates the pace of life in the city and connects everything more closely. The Bryant Park mentioned by the author is a good example. “Disconnected, it was a place for office workers to relax. Connected, it had become a digital waiting room for the massive subway station beneath it.” With the coverage of Wi-Fi, it had a totally different role in the city’s transit system. However, the advancement of such technology also accelerates the inequality in modern society by widening the difference in life between urban and rural residents. When you are accustomed to enjoying the wireless network and electronic technology equipment that can be seen everywhere in the city, it would be difficult to accept the intermittent network in the countryside, let alone adapt to the life without convenient delivery services. This problem cannot be blamed on the defects of the infrastructure in rural areas-after all, from a realistic point of view, the ROI of investment on rural infrastructure construction is much lower.

Here comes to the close relationship between the digital technology with business and public affairs. The innovation and large-scale application of digital technology require a lot of capital, so commercial interests and competition play an important role in this process. In the case of Wi-Fi, many big wireless companies and start-ups wanted to “muscle in and turned public spaces into a commercial battleground”. (pp. 130) Additionally, it made the government to reinvent the infrastructure which could provide citizens with good service. After witnessing the rapid development of the Wi-Fi industry by major enterprises, the governments then begun to build related infrastructure to meet people’s demand. It also reminds me of a recent report about 6G, which showed the fact that China has launched the first 6G satellite in the world. ( Read more here) As we all know, 5G is still in its infancy and most mobile devices still use 4G for network. It seems difficult for people to imagine life with 6G technology. Maybe the network will become very fast at that time, bringing a seamless network connection experience. But obviously, this kind of technological innovation is not mainly driven by the actual needs of people in daily life – it bears more political meaning. To some extent, the research and development of digital technologies have become a battlefield for competitions between the world’s great powers.

The world’s first 6G satellite (Cr. Xinhua News Agency)

Infrastructure is generally perceived as a system of substrates like railroad lines, pipes and wires, all images of which are concrete and visible. But when it comes to the academic research, we can also see infrastructure as a part of human organization, the physical network through which goods, waste, ideas, power and people are trafficked-which definition seems to be more abstract. In The Ethnography of Infrastructure, the author pointed out several properties of the infrastructure: embeddedness, transparency, reach, links with conventions of practice, embodiment of standards, built on an installed base, becomes visible upon breakdown, and fixed in modular increments. Moreover, it provides a new perspective to combine observation, historical research, systematic analysis and data collection in studying the anthropologic project and the infrastructure. And the Worm Community Study mentioned in the article could be a great example for the opinion in the above discussion: changing the traditional way to “a linked set of interviews with potential users and ethnographies” (pp. 382) enables the improvement of efficiency.

In my opinion, the most interesting and meaningful feature of infrastructure study is systematic thinking. As we all know, the infrastructure is always built on a series of small, technologically-based parts, then these parts converge into a network to form a large-scale structure. In modern society, advanced technological systems such as telecommunications systems have reconfigured urban spaces to bundle water, energy, people, and streets into a series of infrastructure networks, thus bringing convenience to urban life for residents. Therefore, we need to look at “modernity” from a comprehensive perspective, as the city we live in is a system composed of tiny elements on different levels.

 

Infrastructure of modern city

We could apply such knowledge of infrastructure to the research of the topic about the modern city and mobile food delivery. Both food stalls and delivery man can be regarded as a part of the modern city’s infrastructure. With the fast development of online platforms such as Meituan and Eleme, the number of delivery man in cities of China has reached several million. Though it seems to be a labor-intensive industry, food delivery industry is actually based on the big data and high technologies including cloud computing, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and so on. The instant delivery platform develops an intelligent scheduling system by using machine learning, operations optimization, scheduling simulation and other technologies, which could track the direction and current position of the delivery man in real time. Combining the real-time situation, the platform is able to distribute and optimize orders in the most efficient way calculated by the system. Therefore, in addition to creating jobs and promoting the digital economy, food delivery system has become a part of urban life’s new infrastructure and the symbol of the upgrading transformation of modernization. There’s also a related report that reflects the growing number of delivery man, the boom of the mobile food industry, and their importance in the modern city. (Read more here)

Sollinger reviewed the economic development policies adopted by CCP since the establishment of China in 1949, and the corresponding management policies on the streets, focusing on the embarrassing and terrible living conditions of the urban poor especially. Personally speaking, I have always regarded vendors on the Chinese streets as a symbol, of which people’s opinions can reflect a fragmentation of value systems in the current society. Sollinger gave such phenomenon a great description: “For Western societies can hardly be seen to exclude those misfits more decisively than better-off Chinese urbanites and their political elite scorn older and unskilled, discarded workers who are victims of the scourge of poverty.” (Pp. 18) The views on street vendors on social media platforms are always polarized: Some people sympathize with their situation and reflect on the roots of their tragedies; While others condemn them for not striving hard enough to learn knowledge and skills, so they deserve to be abandoned by the high-quality job market. Obviously, the latter’s mental model is not innate, but a product under the influence of economic environment and the governing model. Therefore, the authority should be the object of blame for the urban poor’s long-term tragedy.

It’s intriguing to read the author’s discussion about the “Right to the City “of the urban poor. Actually, I’m wondering who is the “master” of the city? Do we really have a say in the management of urban streets? In recent years, a majority of cities in China have launched actions to unify street shop signs. We gradually discovered that the distinctive shop signs on the street have become exactly the same reproductions, and they are completely indistinguishable without looking closer. In the discussion on this topic, the public showed an amazing consistency: the vast majority of people are criticizing this one-size-fits-all policy, believing that it harms the diverse and vitality of the streets. What is confusing is – how can such an important measure that is closely related to the lives of urban residents be carried out on a large scale without soliciting public opinions? Earlier, an anonymous netizen took a photo of a shop sign after the unification on Changde Road in Shanghai, the black-and-white color schemes of which were particularly lifeless and ugly. After causing a wide range of public opinion discussions, the relevant government departments immediately covered up all signs and stated that they would renovate them. However, why don’t they conduct a public opinion survey before the implementation of the project, and how can such a poor design pass the approval?

Black and white shop signs on the Changde Road in Shanghai

Moreover, the problem about “chengguan” shows a deeper separation between the upper authorities and the grassroots people. Just as Solinger said, chengguan had a period of violent law enforcement in history, and their behavior is typically painted as “beating an unlicensed hawker or smashing a street vendor’s stand”. (Pp. 19) But a post on Zhi Hu (a famous virtual social community for various discussion in China) changed my view several years ago. (Read the post here) Responding to a question about the street food, the user described his experience as a grassroots staff, chengguan, in detail. According to him, this group was stigmatized and misunderstand by the mass in China for a long time. They need to rush to check the stalls in various places with harsh environments every day, and his team has just discovered two street stalls with severely unqualified sanitation, from which they have confiscated illegal raw materials such as gutter oil. Consequently, he offered suggestion for people to eat less street food and expressed being aggrieved by such stigmatization. Indeed, media reports and political propaganda in this era should not continue to intensify the contradiction between chengguan and vendors. We all know that this is essentially a contradiction between the social system/city management and the urban poor. To solve this problem, we may still have a long way to go.

 

The contradiction between street vending and urban modernization seems to be a long-term problem that every country cannot circumvent in the development process. Generally speaking, the hawkers are always denounced as hurting legitimate business, accused of encroaching on public land and dirtying the streets by the people. Bluestone traced the constant changes of policies regulating the pushcart markets in New York City, which are closely related to the social development and economic condition of America. According to Bluestone, various reform efforts to curb the pushcart markets was particularly acute during the Great Depression of 1930s, when pushcarts represented just “another uncomfortable reminder of the instability and failure of national economic life.” (pp. 75) And in Mumbai, mentioned by Rajagopal, “hawkers become a mirror for all kinds of doubts and ills attending the transition from state-led development to market liberalization” (pp. 227). Indeed, rise and fall of the stalls in different historical periods are just symptoms of the market force. The actions of hawkers are driven by corresponding policies of the government in specific economic environments. The reason why the Chinese government encouraged the public to develop the stall economy at the beginning of this year was to change the sluggish economic development under the influence of Covid-19, to promote employment and stimulate consumption – so the various problems caused by stalls in city management can be temporarily put aside. The development of the stall economy is a double-edged sword in today’s society, while acknowledging its effectiveness, we should also recognize the need to refine urban management for the government. (Read an article discussed this two-sided influence of stall economy in China)

A BBQ stall – A representative of street stalls in China

Here’s also a special characteristic of the hawkers in China. As Ray said, some people who have lost their jobs will choose to run a street stall as a transitional career until they find a formal one in the job market. Such “transitional” feature is especially common and prominent in street vending of China, but in a different sense. Influenced by the long-term cultural tradition of “An Tu Zhong Qian” (which means be attached to the living place and unwilling to leave it), Chinese people always long for buying their own houses and take root in the place of life, even paying a great price. Therefore, almost all the vendors have a final goal to purchase their own storefronts, carrying out regular and stable sales of goods. Depending on the business situation, this struggle process may take the stall owners from one year to several decades, or it may never be realized. During my undergraduate studies, as a regular customer, I became friends with a stall owner who sells Tanghulu near my university, then I learned that his family lives by street vending and his mother had been selling sugar-fried chestnuts in front of a nearby market for more than ten years. His business has been very good in the past two years, so his family quickly decided to buy a storefront near the entrance of the university. Obviously, the end of the mobile stall life is an important turning point for him and his family. He gained a sense of security and confidence, got married last year, and now begins to sell a variety kinds of food to expand their business.

Swislocki Mark defined the term “culinary nostalgia” as the “recollection or purposive evocation of another time and place through food”, which’s a time-honored Chinese tradition. It’s intriguing to read his discussion about food as local knowledge. After quoting Duara’s idea about “the local”, Swislocki then analyzed the essay “Selling Candy” written by Zhou Zuoren, in which he illuminated how food operated as a subject of chronotopic discourse (pp. 18) First, Swislocki pointed out that the candy can help people conjure a sense of place and remind them of those days in the hometown. Secondly, Zhou made Shaoxing Food culture (represented by the candy) into a “chronotope that transcended the problems of the day” (pp. 19) as he lived in turbulent times of China.

As a loyal reader of Zhou Zuoren’s works, I would like to add some views on this issue. Zhou really likes to write short essays about food (at least dozens of his articles mentioned food), themes of which are closely related to the hometown, nostalgia, local characteristics, and changes in Chinese society under the influence of the West at that time. In my opinion, rather than saying that Zhou sought to carve out a cultural realm that transcended the secular world by writing on food, it is better to say that he was practicing a “culinary nostalgia” on the dual level of time and space in a more profound way. His writing about food culture can show the individuals’ memories of the past and the cuisine of their hometown, at the same time, also show a collective recollection of traditional Chinese culture and social conditions of that generation. For one thing, like the essay “Selling Candy”, Zhou described many of the delicacies he ate in his hometown – Shaoxing. In the essay “Fried Ghosts” (You Zha Gui, a snack similar to fried dough sticks), he recalled the process of making fried ghosts and compared the differences of such fired snacks in various places of China; In “Wild Vegetables in My Hometown”, he mentioned that Shaoxing people often pick wild vegetables in spring to stir-fry them with rice cakes or make pastries. As a native of Ningbo (Ningbo and Shaoxing are both in Zhejiang Province and very close), I can easily resonate when reading his essay, and miss the local dishes and my home. For another, in the era of social transformation, Zhou’s description of the old-style exquisite food shows a nostalgia that travels through time and space, also a recollection of the culinary traditions that have passed away. In the “Dim Sum of the North and South”, he discussed in detail the old-style dim sum in the north China and the south China, both of which have a wide range of varieties, are exquisitely made, and follow strict making standards. He even criticized the popular tea food at that time for being nondescript, not learning foreign snacks successfully, also losing the original exquisiteness. Such ideas reflect a reminiscence of old traditions and a certain kind of nostalgia for the stable life in the previous history.

                                                                                                          Stir-fried Rice Cake with Wild Vegetables

Read more about “Fried Ghosts”

Read more about “Wild Vegetables in My Hometown”

Read more about “Dim Sum of the North and South”