Who builds Shanghai's fiber-optic network? Thinking urban infrastructure through migrant construction labor

Abstract

While a growing body of literature understands infrastructure through the social relations and labor that make it possible, the work of construction in infrastructure projects remains under-theorized. Drawing on participatory research with migrant construction workers in Shanghai, China, I consider the outcomes of a reliance on informal, migrant labor in Shanghai's multi-year “Overhead-Underground” infrastructure renovation project, which moves overhead fiber-optics cabling underground. Like other Chinese infrastructure projects, this reconstruction of Shanghai's fiber-optic network relies on large quantities of on-the-ground construction labor, drawn from a low-wage, precarious, and largely informal migrant workforce that is not expected not be incorporated into the city. Through engagement with scholarship that has viewed people and social relationships as infrastructure, I demonstrate the processes by which informal migrant construction labor facilitates both physical construction and the accumulation of infrastructural knowledge, both of which are necessary to the completion of infrastructural upgrading projects.

Technologies of migration and citizenship: Life and work at the base of Shanghai’s digital infrastructure stack

“…As Michelle Buckley has argued, understanding connections between construction labor, forms of citizenship as labor management practice, and urbanization are an under-researched but fruitful ways to understand how cities are built (Buckley, 2014; 2019). This is particularly true in the case of Chinese digital infrastructure, where migrant workers have gradually displaced urban workers at all levels of the industry, becoming essential to the continued (re)construction and maintenance of the network (Johnson, 2023, p. 801).…”