Related Papers
Utrecht University
Rethinking Smart Urbanism: City-making and the spread of digital infrastructures in Nairobi
2021 •
Prince Guma
Rethinking Smart Urbanism is an empirical exploration of the multiple ways in which cities and infrastructures are constructed and reconstructed through ICT innovation and appropriation. Drawing on the case of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, the study explains existing infrastructure constellations through countervailing processes and rationalities in the context of splintered urbanism. In doing so, the study examines the relationship between urban plans and digital infrastructure development, place-based contexts that shape digital infrastructures, and the extent to which these infrastructures facilitate utility companies’ ambitions of extending centralized networks to new territories. It draws on the theoretical and empirical base of urban and infrastructure studies, particularly in the fields of smart urbanism, postcolonial urbanism, and Science and Technology Studies. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative research design and presents in-depth case studies that combine ethnographic methods with a thorough investigation of written sources. Ultimately, it is hoped to enhance our understanding of urban and digital possibilities, and add new insights to debates on technology and urbanity in Africa and beyond.
Environmental Science & Policy
Imagining urban transformation in Kenya
2022 •
Rose Cairns
This paper examines the diverse ways in which science and technology are implicated in collective imaginations of urban futures in Kenya. Despite calls for a 'deep reimagining' of African urbanisation (UN Habitat 2014), globalised narratives of urban 'smartness' are intersecting with pan-African tendencies toward top-down Master Planning to constrain spaces for collective imagining of urban futures. Using the conceptual lens of sociotechnical imaginaries and the methodological approach of Q method, we hope to open up and navigate the space of tension between the violence of narratives of failure and crisis in African cities, and the sometimes 'blinding power' of certain hyper-modernist visions of urban futures. We argue that powerful global hegemonic forces around urban transformation can sometimes be most effectively balanced, not by reproducing the same assertive idiom of stylised monothetic categories and set-piece contrasts but by illuminating diversity in the implicated imaginations. Our research describes three distinguishable overlapping imaginaries of Kenya urban futures, which we call: 'Working towards equitable, culturally-vibrant urban habitats for all'; 'Transforming our cities and ourselves to become 'smarter' and thrive sustainability in a digital future', and 'Pragmatically harnessing technology for more inclusive, equitable, liveable cities'. Our findings highlight salient dimensions of difference between the imaginaries including: diverse understandings of technology and culture in urban areas; diverse imaginaries of the urban dwellers of the future; and diverse imagined processes of change. Through detailed analysis of the distinctiveness and similarities/overlap between these imaginaries, we draw out implications for urban governance in Kenya.
Urban Studies
Plug-in urbanism: City building and the parodic guise of new infrastructure in Africa
2023 •
Prince Guma
Across Africa, cities have become fodder for grand-scale foreign investments and redevelopment projects signifying a distinct phenomenon synonymous with a new kind of urbanism. This paper offers a critical commentary on the proliferation of new infrastructure plans tailored as policy, technological fixes and solutions to urbanisation challenges, both real and perceived. We stir a conversation around the notion of 'plug-in urbanism': first, as an entry point for the study of a model of city building that is exceedingly determined by reflex prioritisation of assumedly universal and transferable corporate-driven policy agendas; secondly, as a critique of unidirectional, hom*ogenising and determinist technological ideas and infrastructures; and thirdly, as a recourse to inclusive and holistic planning. We present the case of the Nairobi Expressway, a recently launched two-to fourlane 27 km viaduct, and the largest in Africa, as an example of a 'plug-in' infrastructure project: i.e. prepackaged state-of-the-art development installation that comes complete and tailored as a magic bullet and obvious solution to identified mobility and transport challenges in Nairobi city. We demonstrate how in its parodic guise, the expressway highlights a project that is designed and financed by foreign authorities and sustained in line with foreign standard ideologies of what a world-class city should look like, yet in reality only leads to piecemeal and incomplete growth and development. Drawing from a standpoint of multiple urbanisms, we argue for more inclusive urban futures and visions that are responsive to diverse, popular and heterogeneous articulations of cities.
Smartness Beyond the Network: Water ATMs and Disruptions from below in Mathare Valley, Nairobi
Prince Guma, Alan Wiig
The paper critiques decontextualized notions of smart urbanism by examining the variegated and spontaneous infrastructural configurations stemming from the deployment of a digital project in an informal urban setting. We offer an empirical examination of the rollout of water ATMs in Mathare valley, Nairobi, to highlight three types of ‘smartness beyond the network’. First, where water ATMs evidence a smart digital infrastructure that transcends the networked urban water supply. Second, where residents, in their adoption and use of water ATMs, unsettle their original operation, in the process driving them further away from their original design through disruptions from below. And third, where persistent manifestations of pre-existing mechanisms that are non-state and non-networked and sometimes integrate digital technologies indicate heterogeneous articulations and smartness from below. In sum, we argue for unpacking Southern and alternative visions for smart digital infrastructure, considering that smartness, within diverse urban settings, is informed not just by hegemonic and aspirational articulations of city making, but also dwellers’ context-specific and nonlinear processes of place making.
Design, Control, Predict: Cultural Politics In The Actually Existing Smart City
2018 •
Aaron Shapiro
Urban Geography
On data cultures and the prehistories of smart urbanism in "Africa's Digital City"
2022 •
Jonathan Cinnamon
Data is variably imagined and practiced according to values, behaviors, and norms fashioned over an extended temporal register, meaning data initiatives are not only influenced by contemporary technological and structural conditions, but also by the forces of history and culture. This claim is advanced by situating Cape Town's smart city plans in a national historical context, highlighting how desires to be a "global city" driven by data, evidence, and openness come up against a data culture largely incompatible with these goals. A genealogy of South Africa's politicized history of recordkeeping, biometrics, databases, and information sharing reveals the roots and legacy of an ambivalent data culture, which poses a considerable challenge to today's data ambitions. Through this example, the paper makes two contributions to critical understandings of urban data. First, it advances the notion of data culturesthe values, behaviors, and norms ascribed to data by groups or organizations that together shape practices of data collection, management, use, and sharing. Second, it draws attention to the multi-scalar production of smart cities, when global data imaginaries meet national-scale characteristics at local places. These findings present a new lens for understanding the relative success or failure of (urban) data initiatives.
Social Studies of Science
Incompleteness of Urban Infrastructures in Transition: Scenarios from the Mobile Age in Nairobi
2020 •
Prince Guma
In dealing with urban infrastructure, there is sometimes a tendency in policy and research circles to depict occurrences of infrastructural heterogeneity as synonymous with failure or brokenness. Inherent in this tendency is the often-subtle expectation that infrastructures should evolve the same way as their counterparts elsewhere or in a linear trajectory from less complete to more complete arrangements. This paper is a counteractive to such completist lures and inclinations. I recuperate the notion of incompleteness as a constitutive feature and explanatory category for urban infrastructures which while diverging from so-called norms and ideals, cannot be described as failed or broken, but as something else entirely. I argue that rather than devising universalizing solutions to processes of infrastructural heterogeneity, it is perhaps better to see infrastructures for what they really are: as emergent, shifting, and in that sense incomplete. I make this case drawing on three successive infrastructures in Nairobi, Kenya's capital that include the Simu ya Jamii kiosk, the M-Pesa stall, and the M-Pesa platform. I examine these infrastructures not simply as raw materials or empirical conduits, but as the very starting point in theorizing urban infrastructures from the South. Ultimately, this study is hoped to not only open up a vital frame for situated analysis and understanding of urban infrastructures in transition, but also add to and extend STS analytical frames into non-western contexts.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
How Smart Cities Became the Urban Norm: Power and Knowledge in New Songdo City
2019 •
Glen Kuecker
Proceedings of the African Conference on Information Systems and Technology (ACIST) 2015
Smart city agendas of African cities
Judy Backhouse
Increasing numbers of people live in cities, making cities an important focus for development. Cities have common problems associated with many people living together comfortably: food supply, water and power, waste management, transportation, accommodation and keeping order. These problems are now being faced on previously unimagined scales. One understanding of Smart Cities is that new technologies, like new information and communication technologies, present opportunities to manage these problems more effectively. Africa is home to some of the oldest and largest cities in the world and several African cities are important centres of learning, political power and international trade. Research shows that the approaches cities take to becoming a Smart City relates to factors like economic development, geographic location and population. So it is likely that African cities approach smart city agendas in ways that reflect these contextual issues. This paper investigates how African cities understand the idea of a Smart City by examining what smart city agendas are being pursued in five cities on the continent and how these agendas are informed by local realities. The paper identifies competing discourses of social inclusion and development that benefit all city residents and smart-looking cities that benefit business and the elite.
Built Environment
New Master-Planned Cities and Local Land Rights: The Case of Konza Techno City, Kenya
2019 •
Femke van Noorloos, Diky Avianto, Romanus Opiyo
Consortia of investors, developers and architects, sometimes in collaboration with national governments, have proposed a number of new utopian urban megaprojects or 'new cities' across Africa. While such speculative, planned forms of satellite urbanization increasingly gain attention in urban development debates, empirical evidence on their impacts is lacking, particularly when it comes to access to land and livelihoods of surrounding populations. In this paper we delve into the Kenyan experiences with Konza Techno City, the newly planned city south of Nairobi envisioned to become Africa's main ICT hub or 'Silicon Savannah'. While there is currently little more than a fence that has been put up around the planned city, real life effects are clearly visible. As a buff er zone was established around the project to prevent 'informality', surrounding villages experience insecurity of land tenure and livelihoods. On the other hand, the area has attracted many people seeking opportunities or speculating on future pro fit. The case illustrates that the mere announcement of a new city can trigger various forms of direct and indirect exclusion. It also shows that the fast-tracking of the project by high government interests can cause problems for community consultation and participation, but also that the state is highly ambivalent, and has little power to prevent delays or control informal development. Rather than being a simple instance of 'land grab', spatial differences and temporal changes make for a constantly shifting landscape of actual and potential impacts. The main problem of new cities lies in the failure to accept 'informal' development as being an intrinsic part of African cities.
