The rapid development of mobile Internet and digital economy is profoundly affecting the way of urban and rural elements flow, then a large number of new villages have begun to emerge. Village in flows is a theoretical abstraction of a large number of new villages, which is defined as the settlement with virtual agglomeration and physical dispersion. These villages in flows still maintain the rural landscape, but join in the regional and even global industrial division system, then provide the possibility to surpass the traditional urban-rural dual structure and one-way urbanization path. Based on the analytical perspectives of virtualphysical interaction and double agglomeration, this paper classifies the villages in flows into three categories, the type Ⅰ , Ⅱ and Ⅲ , according to the characteristics of physical and virtual dimensions. Then it summarizes the basic characteristics, evolution mechanism and development dilemmas of different types of villages inconjunction with the empirical cases, so as to form a complete and comprehensive cognition of the village in flows, and to provide guidance for the rural planning and governance practice in Mobile Internet Era.

This paper briefly introduces the intellectual background of “relational turn” brought about by poststructuralism, the origin, Chinese translation, main meanings of the idea of assemblage, its contribution and restriction and the main contents of six papers in this special issue. In favor of easily understanding assemblage and its backdrop of Deleuze-Guattari philosophy and actor-network theory (ANT), the paper briefly explains the concepts of “multiplicity”,“territorialization/deterritorialization”, “intensity/extensity/quality”, “the virtual/the actual/the real”,“rhizome/arborescent schema”, “becoming”, “agency”,“object”, “actor/actant”, “enact”, “translation”, “flat”, and “symmetrical”.

This paper reviews briefly a useful and plastic toolbox for urban studies provided by ANT with a broad pool of perspectives for questioning cities in new ways. What all these perspectives offer is a rich theoretical ground to develop radically relational and symmetrical understandings of the city, which decentres urban theory and research in different ways. Opening the actor-network toolbox for urban studies entails not only a new way of posing research questions, but provides also a new interdisciplinary space for the interplay of the social sciences and the humanities disciplines. The paper further points out that ANT destabilizes the monolithic assumption that the reality of the city has been understood in highly stable and bounded ways. Based on this, the paper criticizes the three traditions of urban studies of the Chicago School, Weber, and Simmel and indicates the main contribution that ANT approach lies in the delineation of an alternative ontology for the city, i.e., that the city is not socially constructed, but enacted into being in networks of bodies, materialities, technologies, objects, nature and humans. Thus, the city as multiple objects emerges from urban assemblages in the plural forms.

Assemblage of the city on the digital platform by mobile phones is the new form of the evolution of the city in its 12 400 years of non-linear development. It is advisable to analyze the process via assemblage theory of Deleuze and Delanda in order to enhance the assemblage of the city on the cloud computing platform in the climate change. Assemblage the origin of the city should be the new ground of architecture, urban studies and philosophy of design.

In this paper, the author considers what “assemblage” might offer a conception of the city. Although assemblage is gaining currency in geography and beyond, there has been little effort to consider how it might be conceptualized and what its specificity might be. In offering a conceptualization of assemblage, the author brings assemblage into conversation with particular debates around dwelling and argue, first, that assemblage provides a useful basis for thinking of the city as a dwelling process and, second, that it is particularly useful for conceiving the spatiality of the city as processual, relational, mobile, and unequal. Despite their distinct intellectual histories, the author suggests there is a productive debate to be had by bringing assemblage and dwelling into dialogue. The author examines some of the ways in which assemblage and dwelling might interact and reflect on particular moments of fieldwork conducted in S?o Paulo and Mumbai and on diverse examples ranging from “slum” housing to urban policy and mobility.