Have a cup of coffee: the techno-spatial tactics of female urbanites and the production of “mobile publicness” in digital urban China

Female urbanites play a particularly visible role in the burgeoning coffee culture of megacities like Shanghai. The remarkable visibility of female coffee house consumers contrasts with the dominance of the male bourgeoisie in Jürgen Habermas' public sphere, making it a phenomenon worth investigation. Meanwhile, female participation in coffee houses is inseparable from digital culture. However, existing research has not connected women's digital technology use to urban space production. To bridge this gap, this paper adopts an approach derived from "everyday life" to conceptualize how women use social media to produce urban space in Shanghai. Building upon Michel de Certeau's conceptual framework, we propose to understand female urbanites' techno-spatial tactics as an extension of his concept of tactics. In the case of Shanghai's coffee houses, we argue that the techno-spatial tactics of female urbanites include hybrid appropriation, participatory storytelling, shared coding, and place collage. With these tactics, female urbanites have reconstructed the "publicness" of unconventional public spaces, which we term "mobile publicness." The mobile publicness of coffee houses can translate into a rejuvenated public life in twenty-first-century Shanghai, shaped and embraced by women's assertive digital power.