Digital Peripheries

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.