Peripheralised Rural Areas: Digitalisation and Spatial Constructions

Digital (planning) tools change our communicative actions: The data-based co-production of spaces with the help of digital media has a significant influence on our spatial knowledge and actions, and in this way creates new cyber-physical spatial orders. While urban areas seem to process these changes without tension (see SFB project "Digital urban planning: Planning action and material-physical arrangements", duration: 03/2018-12/2021), tensions between digitalised forms of action and more traditional, analogue forms are suspected for peripheralised rural areas, on the other hand. These tensions are the focus of the project.

By examining actors from planning, politics and the population, the project will look at (1) which digitalisation strategies have been pursued and which digitalisation processes have taken place, (2) which changes can be observed in the actors' actions against the background of the available digital technologies and applications, and (3) to what extent spatial constructions of rural areas are changing in the respective cultural context as a result.

The aim of the sub-project in the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) is to conduct comparative research into the processual reconfiguration of spaces that takes place in the course of digitalisation, specifically using the example of peripheralised, structurally weak spaces in China/Asia and Chile/South America. In both countries, data will be collected through meta-analyses, expert interviews, problem-centred interviews, and participant observations during research visits. Grounded theory analysis methods will be used for data analysis.

The SFB 1265 is located at the Technical University of Berlin and is led by Prof. Dr. Martina Löw (Institute of Sociology, Department of Planning and Architectural Sociology) and Prof. Dr. Hubert Knoblauch (Institute of Sociology, Department of General Sociology) as spokespersons. Also involved in the successful application for the second funding phase are the Institutes of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning at Technische Universität Berlin, the Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the Institutes of Social Sciences, European Ethnology and the Institute of Geography at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research, the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and the IRS.