The locational choices and interregional mobilities of creative entrepreneurs within Canada’s fashion system

Creative industries and talent have traditionally clustered in a handful of global cities. Yet, recent developments, including digital technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic are reshaping these spatial dynamics. Drawing on 30 interviews, this paper considers the mobilities of visual artists in South Africa and whether they need to locate in the established centres to realise their ambitions. It explores how these entrepreneurs choose a ‘home base’ for their operations and how they mobilise three forms of mobility: (1) temporary mobility, which entails physically attending exhibitions and residencies, (2) mediated mobility, which involves working with intermediaries to create a presence in key markets remotely and (3) virtual mobility, which harnesses the internet and social media to promote and sell products in local, national and global markets. The paper argues that although surviving in the marketplace is difficult, being permanently located in big cities, like Cape Town or Johannesburg, is not essential. It contributes to existing conceptualisations of mobilities by considering how they are practised and negotiated by individuals, with different circumstances, who operate within specific and challenging contexts. The paper demonstrates that there is no single approach for visual artists who instead flexibly adjust three key dimensions of mobility (time, space and modes of interaction) to overcome barriers and accommodate their needs and preferences. It also advances our understanding of creative labour, including the locational choices of creative workers and the strategies they use to overcome the challenges associated with global competition and the do-it-yourself (D.I.Y.) model.

El presente trabajo pretende ser una reflexión teórica sobre las rupturas y nuevas articulaciones de las formas de movilización política en el periodo postcrisis. Proponemos que en la década de 2010, catalizadas por las tecnologías digitales, cristalizan tres grandes rupturas: socioeconómicas, en las que la precarización de las condiciones laborales y vitales supone la reemergencia de una crítica social material; temporales, en las que la dinámica aceleradora del capitalismo tardío intensifica la primacía del corto plazo; y socioculturales, en las que la fragmentación se traduce en una sensación de inseguridad e incertidumbre. Todo ello deriva en una transformación en las formas de movilización, que tienden hacia una acción colectiva efímera, espasmódica. Esta puede dar pie al surgimiento del gran evento, donde lo primordial es juntar físicamente a personas y recuperar el sentido de comunidad.

The advancement of digital technology has made changes in the fashion system and trend development process inevitable. This article clarifies changes in the modern fashion industry system and the causes of comprehensive changes that result from the development of digital technology. The methodology of this study is based on literature and case studies based on the information magazine most used by fashion industry workers. This study classifies fashion systems into 5 types and 14 types in detail. The study results indicate the way to change the fashion style trend schedule per year, fast/ultrafast fashion system, fashion rental system, DTC system and change of fashion system by consumer participation. The causes of the changes in fashion system are indicated that an increase of trend sensitivity due to an increase in the diffusion rate of information, expansion of expression of personality through digital network, increase of possibility of grouping of small number of tastes and change of prosumer possible changes in the environment. This study provides basic data on fashion system research and the construction of an appropriate response strategy for a changing environment.

Fashion, like all ecosystems, is complex and dynamic. The fashion system comprises intangible, and tangible aspects, all of which have significant consequences. The linear structure of this system, used throughout the twentieth century—referred to as ‘take, make and waste’—has set artificial boundaries and driven a wedge between players in this system. This has led to the global fashion, and textiles industry being one of the world’s most polluting industries, and overshadows the potential of the fashion system as a powerful vehicle for social and environmental change. Design can be key to reorienting the fashion system and bringing the disparate parts together. Design research, and practice can generate new ways of understanding, being, and doing ‘fashion’ that acknowledges the complexities and the varieties of fashion(s) in an authentic twenty-first-century context. This exploratory design paper incorporates a multidisciplinary mixed methods approach, and a systems lens to the fashion system to examine the boundaries of conventional fashion practice, to encourage more complex interrelationships between, and around garments. The theoretical framework is informed by systems thinking, and a critique of the paradigm of growth, in conjunction with the ‘four orders of design’. It invites us to ask, through design research, what a holistic, flourishing, responsible fashion and textiles system for the twenty-first century might look like, by widening the parameters of the fashion system in order to critically examine the tension between analytical and systematic thinking for fashion. This study acts as a catalyst for a conceptual model showing how the fashion system can reconnect, and fashion design can engage with a higher order of design to encompass sustainable practices.

In China, Shanghai’s nascent fashion system seeks to emulate the Eurocentric system of fashion weeks and industry support groups. It promises designers a platform for global competition, yet there are tensions from within. Interaction with a fashion system inevitably means becoming validated or legitimized. Legitimization in turn depends upon gatekeepers who make aesthetic judgments about the status, quality and cultural value of a designer’s work. This article offers a new perspective on legitimization. I argue that some Chinese fashion designers are on the path to becoming global fashion designers because they have embraced a global aesthetic that resonates with the human condition, rather than the manufactured authenticity of a Eurocentric fashion system that perpetuates endless consumption. In this way, they are able to ‘self-legitimize’. I contend these designers are ‘designers for humans’, because they are able to explore the tensions of man, culture and environment in their practice. Furthermore, their design ethos pursues beauty, truth and harmony in the Chinese philosophical sense, as well as incorporating financial return in a process that is still enacted through a fashion system. Accordingly, cultural tradition, heritage and modernity, while still valuable have less impact on their practice.

The present study aimed to examine the factors associated with different forms of independent mobility (IM) to school (IM one way and IM both ways) according to their parents’ opinions. To do so, several variables were evaluated: how parents assess their children’s autonomy, the difficulty they perceive for IM to school, reasons for IM/no IM to school, parents’ willingness for IM to school, frequency of children’s IM for leisure activities, children having house keys and dangers perceived in the neighborhood. Family-related socio-demographic variables were also assessed: number of children, position occupied by them in the family, family composition, living with both parents or just one, and each parent’s nationality, level of education and job status. This study examined the data collected from 1450 parents (mothers and fathers) with children studying Primary Education years 4, 5 and 6 (M age = 10.53, SD = 0.90). The results showed that 42.3% of the schoolchildren did not practice IM to school, 18.1% practiced IM one way (they went to or from school alone), and 39.5% practiced IM both way (they went to/from school alone). These findings underline the importance of parents’ willingness for IM to school, and how the balance between how they perceive their children’s autonomy and difficulty for IM is relevant for greater IM to school.

Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 15 entertainers in Istanbul, this chapter shows how younger women migrants disavow discourses that would frame them as “victims” of trafficking. Entertainers often see new forms of mobility as creating a possibility of feeling cosmopolitan and modern, and unlike many other post-Soviet women migrants, they are comfortable with the possibilities sexuality affords. The chapter portrays how entertainers flaunt sexuality “without hang-ups”, along with ideals about intimacy, love, and romance, in their effort to provide the authentic “girlfriend experience” that Turkish men they encounter appear to seek. The chapter also reflects on the forms of agency post-Soviet exotic dancers have as they navigate within the constraints of a sexualized sphere of labor in Turkey.

Running is a unique form of mobility because while it involves traveling over distance, it is not usually done as a means of transportation. Although running can and does take place almost anywhere, bringing together hundreds or thousands of runners at a time via an event known as a road race enables a different, transgressive occupation of space that no one runner could accomplish on his or her own. In this paper, based on participant observation, I argue that the transgressive but sanctioned nature of the mobilities that road races allow, by temporarily taking over a space devoted to motorized vehicles and turning it into a space for pedestrians, defines these events as unique moments that are only possible through the collective nature of this usually solitary form of mobility and that allow for the pleasure of being transgressive without the risks that transgression normally entails. The paper further argues for considering ‘event mobilities’ as more than traveling in order to participate in an event, because some kinds of mobility are only possible in the context of an event.

Labelled as the third wave of migration out of post-reform China, the recent emigration of wealthy Chinese has attracted worldwide attention. Although this form of mobility involves primarily the richest 0.1 per cent of the Chinese population, the high profile of the people who move and the amount of wealth implied have made it a sensational social phenomenon. Through interviews, participant observation and media reports, this paper searches for the social meanings of this trend of emigration. Journalists generally attribute the exodus of the rich to a desire to secure their wealth, an aspiration for a different education for their children, or concerns with air pollution and food safety. What this paper argues is that underneath these stated motivations, emigration is in fact a form of class-based consumption, a strategy for class reproduction, and a way to convert economic resources into social status and prestige. “Emigration” (yimin), a form of mobility that may not entail settling abroad, is a path created by wealthy Chinese striving to be among the global elite.

A wave of emergent digital technology holds vast implications for the public sphere. Indeed, these new forms of mobile and ubiquitous systems, called pervasive computing, challenge some of our fundamental ideas about subjectivity, visibility, space, and the distinction between public and private. Together, these challenges reformulate our conception of the civic realm. From cell phones to wireless local area networks, smart buildings to embedded vehicular computers, an invisible web of digital technology already lies across the visible world creating new space for work, data, advertisement, investigation, communication, intimacy, and danger. This generation of computers is so well integrated with the environment that it will be difficult to distinguish between the two, which represents a profound transformation for everyday life.

The bulk of the research community’s work to date has been focussed on the so-called ‘developed’ world— contexts where there are already well-established technical infrastructures and digital resources. These contexts have users who have relatively high level of computer literacy, typically have a high degree of textual literacy and have undergone a formal education. Examples include sophisticated ‘smart’ homes with digital noticeboards and even interactive fridge doors [3]; embedded technologies for amusement parks [2]; and, cities and urban dwellers with time to, ‘‘marvel at mundane everyday experiences and objects that evoke mystery, doubt, and uncertainty. How many newspapers has that person sold today? When was that bus last repaired? How far have I walked today? How many people have ever sat on that bench? Does that woman own a cat? Did a child or adult spit that gum onto the sidewalk?’’ [1]. But pervasive digital technology is no longer the preserve of the developed world. The ITU reports that in the developing world, some 68% of people have access to the cellular network [4]. Furthermore, 90% of the world’s population, and 80% of its rural population, live within range of the cellular network. Therefore, there are hundreds of millions of users, and billions to come in the next 5 years, in places like India, China, and Africa, whose first, and perhaps only, experience of computing will be in the form of mobile and other ubicomp technologies. This Theme Issue is about the billions of people who previously lay outside the domain of digital technology. Take Sambasivan et al.’s contribution, for instance. It examines how technology is diffusing through resourcepoor groups in the urban slums of India. In particular, they examine how the constraints built into the technologies are overcome, as these new users come to understand the technology and appropriate it for their situations. And it is not just ‘developing’ countries. What about those who were previously marginalised in our ‘developed’ world—the urban poor, the ill-educated, the homeless, the computer non-literate; i.e., those without access to what many of us take as essential digital infrastructure? Woelfer and Hendry’s paper, then, looks at the types of digital systems required to support young homeless people in Seattle, WA; a city that is one of the homes of digital innovation globally, yet through this work, we see many of its citizens have hitherto been bypassed by digital progress. Many of these users will never live in the sorts of home, or work in the types of office, or daydream in the parks, or take a day-off for the sorts of amusement park envisaged by earlier ubicomp research. A new discipline, currently called HCI4D, is trying to re-imagine how we conduct user research for these new communities of users. As this research grows, we find that we have to reconsider the methods we have held dear and challenge the assumptions that underlie them—for example, how does one do participatory design with someone who has never seen a computer interface before? Putnam et al. tackle this issue in their contribution, seeking to find methods appropriate for creating designs for these new groups of users. In her G. Marsden ICT4D Centre, University Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: gaz@acm.org

The global trends of the constant increase in the digital component indicate that the economy is increasingly tilting into the “virtual plane”. Digital technologies are fundamentally changing almost all existing professional areas. Digitalization is not only fundamentally transforming labor relations, but also requires and facilitates the development of new forms of migration. A “transnational virtual space” is emerging, in which vast amounts of data across national borders without the physical movement of workers. With an aging population, virtual migration is becoming one of the most important conditions for the dynamic development of the digital economy. The purpose of this report is to investigate the algorithmic organization of work, combined with flexible labor relations and contributing to the inclusion of mobile labor in a stratified global labor market focused on the penetration of digital technologies into all sectors and spheres of life. The method used by the author is the analysis of the main trends in the development of virtual migration. The novelty of the study lies in examining the impact of digitalization not only on labor relations, but also, in terms of the development of new forms of mobility.

The article then examines how modern notions of human omnipotence persist and are reinforced by digital technologies, and argues for a shift toward new forms of interaction between humans and technological artefacts. Instead of domination or complete delegation, these relations should take the form of mobile, negotiated exchanges that preserve difference and enable creativity.

If the internet were a state, it would be the sixth largest consumer of energy and the seventh largest emitter of CO2 on the planet. Facing an ongoing climate change emergency, the collapse of biodiversity, and the depletion of resources, everyone must rethink their models. Within such a perspective, digital technology becomes much more than a technical tool as it allows us to develop new ways of working, of obtaining information, of acting and making new forms of mobilization, collaboration, and sharing possible. Facing such a major challenge, states have begun to mobilise their diplomatic efforts in the service of an ecological and social transition. But under what conditions? This chapter sheds light upon how multilateral environmental agreements seek to find a solution towards maintaining sustainable development and foreseeing a resource efficient economy.

This article explores the interplay between digital work and mobility through a look at the career trajectories, remote work practices and im/mobilities of professionals in the information technology (IT) sector. We draw upon a qualitative study conducted with IT professionals who work remotely for Swiss or Swiss-based international companies. IT professionals have been pioneers in practising virtual work long before the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis and have long engaged in various forms of mobility, including tourism and labour migration. A focus on their remote work and im/mobility practices can shed light on the possibilities and challenges of the virtualization of work, especially in the context of the pandemic. We discuss how geographical immobility, combined with digital technology, becomes important in building a career and a personal life, staying ‘rooted’ and reconstituting the boundaries between work and non-work.