Workshop: Sated Cities? Probing sufficiency in digitalization, land-use and consumption in China’s urban centres

Workshop coordinated by NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and hosted and funded by the Nordic Centre.

This workshop explores the significant shift in China from traditional ways of organising urban everyday lives to an embeddedness of comprehensive technological solutions over the past 15 years. This shift includes public transportation, food sourcing and eating, and payment systems, to mention a few. Despite urbanisation and consumption trends showing growth, this growth is unevenly distributed, with urban areas seeing much higher per capita consumption expenditure than rural areas. Scholars suggest that e-commerce could help bridge the developmental gap between rural and urban areas by providing employment opportunities and easier market access. However, there are also intra-urban inequalities, such as job accessibility issues in suburban areas, challenges faced by migrants’ children in accessing housing and welfare services, and exploitation of food delivery workers. Digital commerce has increased material consumption more in urban areas than rural ones, and urbanisation and digitalisation have introduced new risks of social exclusion for vulnerable groups such as elderly, the disabled, children and those without access to urban infrastructures. It is an unanswered question whether new digital technology can help to reduce risks of social isolation, loneliness and alienation, close gaps in unmet care needs among the elderly and persons with disabilities, and foster the development of social capital and social cohesion.