Disrupting Digital Doom and Delusion: Emergent Urban Futures in Africa
Convenors: Luke Boyle (Arizona State University), Geci Karuri-Sebina (University of the Witwatersrand)
Track: Alternative Futures
Keywords: Digital Urban Futures, Everyday Urbanism, Alternative Futures, Urban Imaginaries, Decolonial Futures
Friday October 25, 13:45–15:15, A3, John Moffat Building
SESSION 23
DISRUPTING DIGITAL DOOM AND DELUSION: EMERGENT URBAN FUTURES IN AFRICA
Smart urbanism has dominated imaginaries for urban transformation in Africa. Utopian and universalizing smart city visions are rationalized as the counterpoint to a dystopic present and future of African cities, systematically excluding the rich plurality of African anticipatory systems from planning processes and urban imaginaries. Transformative change requires breaking out of these tired tropes to imagine diverse possible trajectories for digital and urban transformations in African cities. These future pathways are already being imagined, produced and inhabited through the rich terrain of local knowledge, cultural practices, and community-driven initiatives that pervade cities across the continent. The central quest of this panel is to expand our concepts, epistemologies, and vocabularies of futuring to elevate imaginaries that exist outside the frameworks of prevailing developmentalist imaginaries in order to extend greater legitimacy towards more nuanced and locally-derived urban imaginaries for the continent.
To this end, the panel invites theoretical, methodological, speculative, ontological and empirical contributions that explore the following questions:
- How do alternative imaginaries for urban futures challenge smart city visions and what are their implications for urban inequities in Africa?
- How can examining digital dimensions of everyday urbanism expand theorizations of futurity that support alternative pathways for urban futures on the continent?
- How can expanded theorizations and imaginaries for Africa’s urban futures be used by planning institutions, practitioners and government agencies?
In exploring these questions, the panel aims to (re)frame the multiple past and present realities of urban Africa as a point of departure for imagining a plurality of radically different futures.
Presentations
Infrastructura superlegerra: the future of metabolic infrastructure in African cities
The presentation conceptualises and speculates on the future of the emergent, servicedriven (metabolic) infrastructure in African cities. Infrastructura supperleggerra embeds mutability and process as functions of delivery and governance to adapt to climate futures
From Smart to Shrewd– Provincializing “Smart” Urbanism through the Heterogeneous Infrastructure of Waste Work in Kibera and Mathare, Nairobi
Global waste crisis demands sustainable urban waste management. Smart city concepts, predominantly from the Global North, integrate digital systems for efficient waste handling. This study in Kibera and Mathare explores grassroots waste management, revealing a disconnect between official smart city discourse and reality. It advocates for a "street smart" approach, grounding solutions in Southern cities' lived experiences while exploring alternative futures for an African smart city.
Innovation in Emerging markets– Understanding Urban AI applications in/on Africa
In this article, we look at 5 AI applications across Africa to explore under what circumstances AI innovations in Africa succeed and/or fail. Furthermore, we use previous work on systematic innovation to dismantle the complexity of impact technologies in Africa.
To Math the Gantry of an Uncertain Urban Future
The temporary measures are often counterintuitive and they seem to contradict established wisdom to our crisis. The notion of ‘temporary answers’ means a constant computation of rapidly shifting realities, leading to an iterative, indeterministic, yet perpetually responsive urban system.
Utopia in Speculative Fiction– Examining Space in Cape Town
Speculative Fiction in South Africa addresses the trope of utopia and its use in mediating spatial conceptions of Cape Town through physical and digital urbanisms. In this regard, I examine Thirteen Cents, Moxyland, and It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way for their competing representations of the privatisation of space in Cape Town, and for their contributions to theorizations of futurity in the urban setting.
