The socio-spatiality of urban creative fairs: a Chinese perspective

Description

The seminar will take 2 hours (presentation + Q&A) and be streamed via Google Meet.
Scale has been widely accepted as constructed, therefore inevitably fluid, mutable and historic. Debates between the political-economic and post-structuralist geographers carry on, leading to a series of binaries: ontology or epistemology, fluid or reified, network or hierarchical. Scholars like Jessop et al. and Leitner et al. have cautioned treatment that privileges any single spatial terms, instead call to acknowledge the entanglements of scale, space, network, territory, and positionality. This paper takes issue with the scale/network binary through China’s socio-spatial reconfiguration to produce a transnational hub of creative fairs. I suggest a re-visit to Giovanni Arrighi’s concept of archipelago, with a modification through the lens of structuration. I reckon with MacKinnon’s pursuit of exploring scale as the common ground for both two schools and garner their strengths: the mutually constitutiveness of scale and network through mobilising the material and the role of agency (personae).

Period	28 May 2020
Event title	The socio-spatiality of urban creative fairs: a Chinese perspective
Event type	Seminar
Location	L'Aquila AQ, ItalyShow on map