Author(s): Sufeng Xiao
Over the past two decades, digital platforms have accelerated transformations across rural territories worldwide. Rather than a linear shift from “rural” to “urban,” these changes increasingly take the form of rurbanity: the co-presence and entanglement of rural and urban practices, temporalities, and governance arrangements within shared spaces and livelihood strategies.¹ Such conditions challenge analytical frameworks that treat rural and urban as separate domains and call for approaches attentive to their operational interdependencies. In China’s Yangtze River Delta, platform infrastructures such as e-commerce, social media, and tourism booking systems intersect with village-based collective institutions, reshaping labor routines, visibility, and coordination.²˒³ Rather than directly urbanizing rural life, these encounters produce rurban conditions characterized by algorithmic logic, reputational pressures, and fragmented operational demands. These conditions complicate established modes of rural governance grounded in collective ownership, consensus-based decision making, and long-term social relations. This paper examines how design-trained professionals mediate within rurban systems. Beyond delivering discrete spatial projects, designers increasingly engage in infrastructuring practices, assembling institutions, regulatory narratives, and operational routines to coordinate platform logics with rural collective life.⁴ Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Yangtze River Delta, the paper asks: how can mediation reduce dependency while enabling durable rurban coordination under platformized conditions?
Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez
ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4