Digital Peripheries : Internet and Socio-spatial Practices in the Rurban

Despite the unprecedented incorporation of information and communications tools (ICTs) by
marginalized communities worldwide, there is still a clear urban/non-urban access (and effective use) gap in ICT access across the world.

This gap turns into a crucial infrastructure need as attention is turned to pressing issues faced by cities. The internet access gap is identifiable not only in the Global South—perceived as peripheral—but also in the Global North—regarded as advanced and the motor of technological development. This suggests the emergence and endurance of peripheries based on the level of techno-social development. Locally, this process accords with existing socio-spatial practices and with the ways ICTs are being introduced in the everyday.

This book explores the recursive interaction between socio-spatial practices and the late introduction of the internet in three marginalized rurban communities in Brazil and in the UK. It brings to the fore challenges that cross North-South divides to propose an open theory of the connected rurban as a framework that addresses and accommodates the specificities of these communities in the first two decades of the twentieth-first century.