Liminal right to the ‘coffee map’: Geomedia and the digital dilemma facing independent coffee houses in China

Abstract

The term ‘coffee map’ refers to the digital mapping of coffee houses within urban environments, collaboratively produced and circulated on digital platforms. Drawing the concept of the right to the city and recent theories in geomedia studies, this article critically examines how coffee maps mediate spatial power dynamics, visibility, and entrepreneurial subjectivity among independent coffee houses in urban China. Based on fieldwork conducted in Guangzhou, it argues that independent coffee businesses occupy a liminal position shaped simultaneously by opportunities for urban autonomy and constraints from algorithmic visibility regimes imposed by digital infrastructures such as Dianping, Meituan and Xiaohongshu. On one hand, geomedia affordances enable these businesses to craft their own urban narratives and assert agency in reshaping residential neighborhoods, exemplifying a grassroots form of gentrification. On the other hand, these platforms also impose significant constraints through data-driven governance, competitive rankings, and rapidly shifting policies, contributing to a condition of precarity and digital resignation. This dual role positions independent coffee houses in a constant negotiation of spatial agency, platform dependence, and structural marginalization. Under such context, rather than escaping digital constraints, it is also found that independent coffee houses strategically engage in recursive narratives of instability and performative liminality to remain relevant. Thus, the coffee map, as both a representation and an instrument of spatial governance, reveals the complex interplay between entrepreneurial aspirations, neoliberal urbanization, and platform-mediated urban participation, highlighting critical implications for contemporary understandings of geomedia and the right to the city.