国际媒介地理学年会Geomedia2017: Spaces of the In-Between 5月9-12日在瑞典卡尔斯塔德举行。本届年会最终接受了来自全世界19个国家、119位作者的84篇论文。我中心研究团队孙玮教授、谢静教授、潘霁副教授、赵民副教授和陆晔教授、周海晏博士和李美慧博士的五篇论文组成的panel“地方与空间：中国城市的数字实践”入选。
在为期四天的会议中，三位主题演讲嘉宾分享了他们的最新研究成果。法国巴黎高等电信学院（Telecom Paris Tech）信息与传播技术社会学教授Christian Licoppe以“Digital locative media in the city and the interaction order：Encounters between mobile 'pseudonymous strangers'”为题，从戈夫曼出发，探讨地理社交媒体上准匿名陌生人之间的互动交往以及这种实践对反思公与私、城市陌生人社会等概念的意义。英国科学院院士（Fellow of the British Academy）、开放大学文化地理学教授Gillian Rose的主题演讲“Visualising the smart city” 关注推特空间中关于智慧城市相关图片内容情感倾向的数据视觉化，以及关于智慧城市的网络图像表达对空间知识的再造。墨尔本大学文化与传播学院副教授Scott McQuire在主题演讲“Geomedia，urban communication and the participatory public space”中，介绍了地理媒介与参与型公共空间之间的复杂关系，以及地理媒介的无处不在性，位置性和实时反馈等特点如何改变了公共交往的前提条件，并为创造更为多元民主的社会形态提供了新的可能性。
除论文报告外，本届年会还有两部独立电影展映及导演对谈，分别是关于索马里难民Ahmed如何被欧洲难民政策“都柏林协议”影响的纪录片“I am Dublin”，和个人电影“Reflection”。以及艺术家Jacek Smolicki、Lars Tunbiork、Monica Furn的影像装置、摄影展。
图为艺术家Jacek Smolicki介绍其影像装置作品。
图为艺术家Lars Tunbiork在会议现场大厅的摄影展。
附：
Place and space: Chinese cities in digital practices
Panel Chair:
Dr. Scott McQuire
The University of Melbourne
Participants:
Dr. Sun Wei，Dr. Lu Ye，Dr. Xie Jing，Dr. Zhao Min，Dr. Pan Ji，Dr. Zhou Haiyan，Dr. Li Meihui
Center for Information and Communication Studies
Fudan University, Shanghai China
Introduction
By Pan Ji
Digital practices change the significance of and the relation between urban places in China. Compared with western cities, these changes are more radical. The popularity of mobile media, the embedding of geomedia into every facet of daily life and the entanglement of digital technologies with Shanghai’s mosaic landscape, its party-state regime and its fractured historical narratives contribute to the distinctiveness of urban spaces in Shanghai. This panel aims to address this distinctiveness and facilitate meaningful dialogues with the global scholarly community. It builds on the premise that digital mediation practices create city-specific new urban spaces/sociality. This panel comprises five Shanghai-based studies by scholars from the Center of Information and Communication Studies at Fudan University. We choose Shanghai as our research site for the city spearheads ICT development in China and it is composed by a large diversity of cultural/historical narratives and urban places. Among the five studies, Dr Sun Wei elaborates on the digital practices of knitting a “Chinese knot” of urban places, which features tight clustering of history, politics and individual spatial experiences in a multi-focal fashion. Dr Xie Jing discusses how digital media practices enhance body-place connections and produce new mapping practices that make communities. Dr Zhao Min and Dr Lu Ye conducts a series of in-depth interviews to explore how lawn music festivals in Shanghai generate new forms of place-based relationships, public spaces and social interactions. Dr Pan Ji conducts a textual analysis of Weibo discussion on the incorporation of Zhabei and Jingan districts in Shanghai to probe how digitally-enabled place identification practices relate to civic participation. Dr Zhou Haiyan conceptualizes Shanghai’s Mobike no-pile biking networks as a unique fourth model apart from mainstream western models.
Study 1
Knitting a “Chinese knot” of urban places: Urban communication as localism
A study on the space of Shanghai’s “Sinan Mansion”
Dr Sun Wei
With the concept of “global sense of places”, human geography endows “places” in the globalization era with new significance: Places are not necessarily fixated in a certain space. Rather, places reside in the subjective experiences of subjects who migrate between spaces. But this conceptualization has three problems due to its lack of attention to the impact of media and communication: First, a sense of place becomes identical with location of body; Second, the temporal dimension constituted by experience vanishes from most inquiries; Third, sense of place becomes a “spot” in form. This study focuses on Shanghai’s “Sinan Mansion” to find that its sense of place is filled with the intertwining and collage of different relationships whereby the location of body is related but not identical to spatial experiences; the experience of history/culture permeate the same place to create distinct senses of place; Sense of place mixes multiple threads and varied focal points, which interact not necessarily in a causal fashion. This mode of complex and inter-woven place consciousness is conceptualized as the “Chinese knot of place”.
Shanghai’s place identity was established during the first wave of globalization over a century ago. The Sinan Mansion is located in the center of the former French Concession area, which also doubles as the birth place for China’s Communist Party. Hybridizing and integrating cultural traditions from the west and the east, this area exudes Shanghai localism. This area is also a representative case for government planning to revive urban public life. Via space renovation, exhibition events, art performances and collective book-reading sessions, the municipality intends to activate public life and social interactions. The Sinan Mansion has become an example of Shanghai’s small-scale urban space building efforts as well a distinctive resource for Shanghai identity. Its Wechat account and its hyper-link networks with other related Wechat accounts integrate the virtual with the physical, which make Sinan Mansion a Chinese knot of place to be embedded into the global network of Shanghai identity. This study explores how urban communication promotes the rise of localism within the globalization era, thereby to re-conceptualize “place” and to shed new light on the inter-relationship between media, geography and urban places.
Study 2:
Community mapping: How mobile interfaces generate senses of connectivity and implacement
Dr Xie Jing
Mobility facilitated by transportation and information technologies is often deemed detrimental to the identity, sense of belonging and of places in traditional communities. Yet, with the spread of mobile/locative media, people start to re-construct the body-place relationships in qualitatively different modes. For instance, people build “communities of the self” with their own movement trace data; or they browse local news, produce content and participate in community activities via city newspapers’ mobile applications. Within the context, can communities be re-born? How does people’s sense of community change in the new human-place bond birthed by mobile interfaces?
Based on empirical materials of bodily spatial practices and the use of mobile/locative media in urban life, this study examines community experiences created by mobile interfaces. We propose that unlike identity construction in sedentary life, the sense of community created by mobile interfaces features “connectivity”, and extends traditional senses of place via “sense of implacement”. Specifically, the sense of connectivity and implacement within communities builds on embodied practices supported by mobile and locative technologies. It acquires unprecedented visibility with the support of mobile Internet, and produced new community mapping--these media practices constitute concrete symbols and tangible surfaces that make community. Via embodied and concrete media practices, people connect themselves with neighbors and settle within community spaces. Embodied media practices extend people’s proprioception and enhance the bond between body and places. Concrete media practice render visible sense of place that used to be obtained by immersion and by imagination. Places to settle body and emotion take form consequently.
Study 3
Lawn music festivals as landscape and public life in cosmopolitans
Dr. Zhao Min
Dr. Lu Ye
The impact of landscaping constitute a pivotal area of inquiry for music geography studies. Mobile social media further add to the complexity of the interactions between music, landscape and audiences. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with audiences to lawn music festivals in Shanghai, we examine how Shanghai’s landscape impacts audiences; how these impacts feed back to the reform of lawn landscaping to beget a novel mode of public life; and how audiences create online-and-offline music festivals via the creative use of mobile social media. Specifically, we focus on the following dimensions of the case: 1) The profile of lawn music festival goers, including their musical tastes and their relationship with performing artists; 2) Audience behaviors during/after the lawn music festival and the influence of these behaviors on urban public spaces; 3) How the he selection of music and the delivery of performances relate to the characteristics of specific urban spaces; 4) Audience perception of music festivals, especially the landscaping or spatial elements that exert a substantive influence on audiences’ musical experiences; 5) The reinforcement and re-construction of the symbolism of lawn music festivals via mobile social media practices by audience members (such as video-audio sharing, selfies and peer reviews).
Study 4:
Our places, our rule:
How weibo-bloggers create digital place identification protesting the Jingan-Zhabei incorporation
Dr Pan Ji
The Shanghai government incorporated Jingan district and Zhabei districts in December, 2015 despite wildfire public resistance. Local netizens protest the decision vehemently on the municipality’s official weibo account of Shanghai Fabu. Based on place identification literature, this inquiry examines how, via digital practices: 1) netizens make digital places by revealing human-place ties that used to be obscured in the mass media environment and by endowing non-official meanings to local places based on lived experience; and, 2) digital identification practices drive place-based civic participation online. Our Nvivo-assisted qualitative text analysis show “our places” are digitally created based on individual’s bodily experiences, collective memories and local culture-history. This creation distinguishes locals born and bred in Shanghai from non-local decision-makers, who are alienated from and bear no feeling for places in Shanghai. The authority’s exclusive and self-conflicting economic framing of “our places” further widens the cleavage. Digital place-making and place identification practices drive civic participation in the forms of satirized protests and demand for local autonomy about urban land use policies. In conclusion, this inquiry suggests that digital place-identification practices mediate the digital with brick-and-mortar experiences and give rise to digital-spatial politics, a emerging form of public engagement in Chinese cities. Policy implications of place identification based on digitally created “our places” are discussed.
Study 5
The Fourth model of the Public Bicycle Network
--A study on the no-pile sharing bicycle network in urban China
Dr. Zhou Haiyan
Dr. Li Meihui
Jan Gehl has classified public bicycle networks into three models, the Copenhagen model, the Paris model and the Developing Country Country model, while the Shanghai government has striven to transform it into the Paris model with limited success. The prevalence of the no-pile sharing bike network of Mobik has grown public bicycle networks in urban China into the Fourth model. The no-pile sharing bicycle network in urban China presents the following communicative qualities. Firstly, the network is a integration of the virtual network (APP) and the physical network (riding lanes). Secondly, the network is made up of numerous mobile nodes--no-pile parking lots, and the users can acquire information through their App's positioning function. Thirdly, it is a disperse network that allows parking on non-predesignated locations. Fourthly, the multi-dimensionality of the network strengthens sense of community through the process of bicycle/route sharing, location monitoring in the physical network, route-sharing practices and credits accumulation in virtual network. The Fourth model of the public bicycle network is a new mode of Geo-media-based communication. It suggests a recent trend of Internet Plus in the China's urban communication. With a high level of population density, urban China usually lacks physical spaces or public resources. Hence, it is necessary to build a public service network with Geo-Information systems that re-distribute public resources. Overall, a new logic of urban communication network with Chinese characteristics becomes increasingly visible.
