Chinese Londoners in Third Space: the digital and material making of an urban diaspora

Arrival, settlement, and the building of home are fundamental to the diasporic experience, highlighting the importance of exploring spaces, places, and spatial practices to understanding contemporary diasporas. In the digital age, media technologies and platforms have transformed how we move and communicate, rendering the notion of diasporic space yet more complicated. Conceptualizing diasporas and the processes of their formation today must therefore be couched within an understanding of how innovative media and communication technologies facilitate the creation of new diasporic networks and formations both on- and off-line. Cities have long served as sites in which diasporic lives are imagined, lived, and negotiated, and the urban lens is crucial to exploring practices of identity formation and strategies of belonging amongst diasporic communities, particularly in the digital age. This project builds upon existing theories of translocality, digital diaspora, and the mediated city, leveraging the concept of Third Space to understand the mediated, diasporic city as formed by both the physicality of conventional geographies and the networks and flows of digital spaces. I consider Third Space to be a space that manifests via the material realities and symbolic significances of our physical and digital worlds but ultimately supersedes the juncture of both to become something novel (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1996). This project proposes the urban as such a space for diaspora – key locales that are digitally and materially mediated anchoring sites for diasporas in which their formation, identity, and belonging are articulated. This study focuses specifically on Chinese Londoners in the years following the outbreak of COVID-19, when an invigorated diasporic community emerged in parallel with the accelerated digital mediation of everyday life. I leverage creative, affective, and participatory elements into a multi-method approach to capture a rich account of the Chinese diaspora’s entangling media and urban geographies in the Third Space of the city. Through an empirical investigation of London’s Chinese diaspora and its material and digital practices, this thesis explores the ways in which Chinese Londoners create Third Spaces of belonging through the stories they tell, the lives they lead, and the futures they build.