Dalang Fever 3.
Data to Control or to Empower? Image: Ester van de Wiel Het Nieuwe Instituut and the International New Town Institute (INTI) joined forces for the participatory research project Dalang Fever 3. How Data Can Empower a Migrant Society. The project aims to understand the desires and needs of the migrant workers of Dalang, a rapidly transforming area on the outskirts of Shenzhen. Dalang Fever 3 combined the extensive working experience of INTI in Dalang with knowledge on data and the smart society from the DATAstudio programme of Het Nieuwe Instituut. Dalang Fever 3 consisted of research, an exhibition at the 2019 (...)

Chinese urbanization through the lens of Da Lang Shenzhen is a city that has been raising eyebrows for years, because of its fast development and exceptional position. However, the everyday reality in Shenzhen can be unruly. As a city, Shenzhen mainly thinks in top-down strategies and simply adds new hardware – the sum of infrastructure, buildings and industries – in order to encourage urban and therefore economic growth. It is less interested in the question of which existing social dynamics need to be accepted or improved in order to strengthen the city’s potential, let alone the socio-economic conditions that are necessary to (...)

DA LANG FEVER Shenzhen is upgrading its industry. It results in empty factory buildings and in huge demographic changes within the migrant population. It implies a transition from a blue-collar to a white-collar society. The economic success of Shenzhen is based on cheap labor. Nonetheless, blue-collar migrants are considered to be both problematic and vulnerable. But do we really understand and therefore appreciate the economic and social value of the current generation of migrants in Shenzhen? Da Lang Fever is the story about the potential of a self-organizing migrant society in Da Lang (...)