From city bureaucrats to data activists and GIS engineers: Actors, networks and the institutionalization of digital governance in Cape Town and Geneva

Abstract

Increasingly, attention is paid to the ways in which digitalization is harnessed for urban governance decision-making. Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated the uptake of digital artefacts for tracking citizens, their mobility, and their eligibility for services. These debates have tended to invoke an image of ‘the state’ that reflects a conscious and coordinated way of adopting digital technologies to pursue its governance aims and city-making plans. Yet as much as ‘the state’ cannot be conceptualized as a singular entity, so too is digitalization a plural pursuit, with multiple forms of digitalization evidenced in different contexts and in response to different crises and social, economic, and political imperatives.

Here, we examine a range of collaborating, competing, and conflicting actors involved in digitalization processes in relation to urban governance in two contexts, Cape Town, South Africa and Geneva, Switzerland. We make visible the different rationales, responses, and results of digital artefacts used for city-making by a network of actors who engage in questions of city transformation from different starting points – from bureaucrats at all levels of government, to GIS engineers, private sector specialists, and activists. We examine digital governance through the actors that shape it, the labour that underpins the making of the digital, and the varied inspirations and hopes it represents in these different city contexts. In juxtaposing experiences of digitalization in Cape Town and Geneva, we demonstrate the sometimes haphazard and always piecemeal ways digitalization opens up new incentives, collaborations, and narratives that place data politics at the centre of urban governance.