Informational Peripheries
Rethinking the urban in a digital age
Ayona Datta (Editor), Fenna Imara Hoefsloot (Editor)
Urbanisation and urban life in a digital age needs to be examined through a lens of information – encompassing both its politics and its geographies. The periphery in an information age is located simultaneously across the geographic centre and edge, across social, material and digital worlds. Moving beyond current scholarship in urban and regional studies, this book presents a case for ‘informational peripheries’ as an analytical lens to understand the uneven, fragmented and disconnected geographies of urban peripheries in the Global South.
While ‘unplanned urbanisation’ has been a key discourse in the production of urban periphery in the Global South, Informational Peripheries argues that the coming of an informational age destabilises the geographic location of the urban periphery. Informational peripheries capture the complexities of digital, material and social dispersal and fragmentation that emerge from informational extraction, redlining, manipulation and bypassing. Exclusions are marked by both geographic and informational distance from the state. It includes subjects who are uncountable, as well as territories that are digitally, socially and materially unmappable. This approach provides an important vantage point for interrogating the political and technological apparatuses that are reconfiguring the notion of the urban in a digital age.
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 An introduction to informational peripheries
Ayona Datta and Fenna Imara Hoefsloot
Theme I: producing the informational periphery
2 Peripheralised labour: the digitisation of Nairobi’s land information system
Ayona Datta and Dennis Mbugua Muthama
3 Waste as an economic and informational resource: the datafication of waste collection labour at India’s informational periphery
Josie Wittmer
4 Informational peripheries by design: land, layer and leverage in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area Juan Angel Demerutis Arenas, Ayona Datta and Jesus Flores
5 The peripheralisation of informalised communities in Kenya’s digital land administration
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot and Catherine Gateri
Theme II: territorialising the informational periphery
6 The logistical periphery: territory, land and people in the margins of a digital age
Ayona Datta
7 Informational peripheries as ecological peripheries: vignettes from Guiyang
Calvin King Lam Chung, Jingya Dai & Jiang Xu
8 Follow the data: computing the algorithmic periphery with credit scores and property values
Julien Migozzi
9 Digitising peripheral property: assetisation, platformisation and disconnection
Thomas Cowan
Theme III: informational agency from the peripheries
10 Paper truths, digital authentication: India’s interstate migrants and the path to urban citizenship
Shoshana Goldstein
11 Separate informational worlds: urban governance and speculative futures in the periphery of Mexico City
Julie-Anne Boudreau
12 Infrastructural injustice: the peripheralisation of urban water consumers in Lima, Peru
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot
13 Conclusions: towards global informational peripheries
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot and Ayona Datta
14 Epilogue: Of digital frontiers and peripheries
D. Asher Ghertner
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800088894
Publication date: 04 August 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800088894
EPUB ISBN: 9781800088900
Hardback ISBN: 9781800088870
Paperback ISBN: 9781800088887
Ayona Datta (Editor) 
Ayona Datta is Professor of Human Geography at University College London.
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot (Editor)
Fenna Imara Hoefsloot is Research Fellow at University College London.
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