The Internet already represents a vast global library of information that can become more easily available to rural and remote residents of developing countries. Combining existing resources with locally relevant and culturally oriented information can increase peoples’ understanding of their own issues and contexts, and increase the rest of the world’s understanding of people in developing countries (FAO).
This design studio will investigate the relationship between countryside and city, observed via the traces of the internet's infrastructure. Moreover, on how internet infrastructures influence the present and future of the relationship between countryside and city under the area of food production. In other words how does the network change food production, distribution and consumption? At which scale design can investigate the interconnections and the disruptions of territories, workers and products?
The invisible internet which has an influence on the physical spaces can be searched at many levels: technologic distribution and transport infrastructures are central to the investigation —from phone apps to giant online platforms, from decentralised productive areas to city proximities, from automatic farming to manual labour, from connected territories to disconnected workers, from breaking the system to implementing technological control, from new forms of colonisation to independent businesses, from east to west. The groups will look for case studies which are specific to territories and food production cultures.