Andrea Pollio

• Phd
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Cape Town

Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, b...

A lot has changed in the global machine of international development since its inception, but the language of technological acceleration remains ubiquitous today. In this paper, I trace one of the lineages of this new acceleration in the post-dotcom boom Silicon Valley. Informed by the technophilic culture of what Richard Barbrook and the late Andy...

Recent interest by human geographers and urban scholars in the spatialities of platform companies such as Uber and Airbnb has generated a wealth of contributions on platform urbanism – a concept that captures the urbanization of algorithmic business models and sharing economies. This article explores the interface between platform-mediated labour o...

Technology incubators are one of the infrastructural ends at the urban frontiers of capital. When built in areas of poverty in cities of the Global South, these hubs cultivate entrepreneurialism and opportunities for profit at the intersection of development and technological innovation. They promise to address the social challenges of urban margin...

In Cape Town, as in other cities of the Global South, the paradigms of millennial development are continuously mobilised in specific material ways. The idea that poverty can be fought with profit is manifest in a series of urban experiments that involve informal entrepreneurs, corporations, real estate developers, local architects, economists, NGOs...

Writing about the digitalisation of subnational administrations in Kenya, Datta and Hoefsloot make the case for engaging the temporality of the state as a locus of power and its expression. As a cinematic auteur, they argue, the state times and sequences the asynchronous moments of its action. Building on this insight, the following commentary adds...

Convenience is the feeling and aspiration that animates our platformed present. As such, it poses urgent techno-political questions about the everyday digital habitus. From next-day delivery, gig work, and tele-health to cashless payment systems, data centers, and policing convenience is an affordance and an enclosure; our logistical surround. Driv...

Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, spe...

This article charts the recent history of affordable Chinese phones in Nairobi, a city heralded by many as one of Africa’s digital capitals. Here, cheap handsets manufactured in China are the material commodities that facilitate an increasingly competitive datafication of urban life. From crypto-wallets to distributed logistic platforms, Chine...

Over the course of 2024, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the City of Los Angeles convened more than a dozen listening sessions in support of the city's development of its first-ever Africa Trade and Investment Strategy. The listening sessions brought new voices, perspectives, and geographies directly into the policymaking process...

Review of Jon Silver's 'The Infrastructural South' by the FOS (Flow/ Overflow/ Shortage) Research Collective

In this paper, we juxtapose two different sectors of China’s economic presence in Africa: transport and digital infrastructure. Using the case of Kenya, a country that hosts several flagship corridors funded by Chinese loans and where Chinese “digital champions” have been active for two decades, we highlight some of the differences and similarities...

Despite the economic challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, venture capital (VC) investments in African startups have remained resilient, surpassing $5 billion in 2021 and experiencing a staggering 264% growth compared to the previous year. Notably, more than 60% of these investments were directed towards fintech companies. The surge in finte...

The 'last mile' is not only a powerful metaphor of contemporary life, but also the tangible site of a challenge, whether for governments reaching their citizens, or companies their customers. In urban Africa, this challenge is compounded by the fragmented material condition of cities. As a result, a growing number of tech companies have been compel...

The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infra-structures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a m...

In the last decade, research on southern cities has fruitfully contributed to infrastructure debates and theorisations. A critical thread challenges the 'networked infrastructure ideal' and celebrates the diverse ways people secure access to services in the absence of uniform and centrally provided delivery systems. This chapter reflects on the val...

Drawing on Ahmed's seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of 'queer infrastructure'. Queer infrastructure, as we deploy it, reflects both an object of and orientation towards urban research practice. As an object, we discuss the function, use, and practice of (our) queer networks, specifically for research assum...

CfP - FLOW/ OVERFLOW/ SHORTAGE: MEASURING AND MANAGING EXTREME URBAN CONDITIONS. This symposium will explore the idea that overflow and shortage are increasingly pertinent infrastructural problems which usefully call attention to two widespread forms of urban extremes today. From droughts to stampedes, from data leaks to toxic spillages, we invite...

From large-scale projects to compute climate data, socio-technical experiments with 'smart' energy grids and 'smart' cities, to the attempts of traditional energy companies to decarbonise through alternative fuels, post-carbon futures are imagined as digital and ethereal by corporate capitalism, governmental, and supra-governmental organisations. T...

This chapter makes a case for conceiving urban economies as, always, urban political economies. While cities are customarily seen as sites having intrinsic characteristics of economic dynamism, this chapter argues that urban economies do not simply happen to cities, but are the result of place-specific assemblages that enact specific rationalities...

Africa’s development requires substantial investment in infrastructure systems, such as water, energy and telecommunications. These systems are essential in ensuring that contemporary processes, such as industrialisation and urbanisation, can be leveraged to create real and sustained value for cities, countries, regions and global networks. One of...

Increasingly recognised as a pivotal infrastructure for inclusive economic development and social justice in Africa, information and communication technology is a fundamental component of the continent’s infrastructure budget. DFIs, such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank, have long included digital infrastructure and connectivity p...

While technological innovation is often associated with cities like San Francisco or Bangalore, several African cities are experiencing an agglomeration of ICT related companies. Both Kigali and Nairobi have been dubbed ‘Silicon Savannahs’, celebrated for their adoption of smart city programmes and projects. In these two cities, this research explo...

From innovations in mobile money to bookkeeping devices, the burgeoning of financial-technologies (fintech) in the Global South has been critiqued by scholars concerned with financialization, datafication, and recently, neo-coloniality. While sympathetic to these concerns, this paper argues for a more descriptive, ambivalent, and urban reading of t...

ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affermate nella ricerca geografica fino a diventarne una componente fondamentale. Eppure ‘fare etnografia' in geografia non è certo né scontato: richiede un adattamento alle esigenze e agli obiettivi della riflessione geografica, ma anche alla complessità del 'cam...

Many have argued that the technocratic apparatus of development is sustained-and not undermined-by its fallacies. Building on previous failures, development experts envision new plans, new analytical tools and new modes of governance. One recent example is the bottom of the pyramid approach (BOP), a development doctrine predi-cated on the failure o...

Artists and creative workers have long been recognized as playing an important role in gentrification, being often portrayed as forerunners of urban change and displacement in former industrial and working-class suburbs of 'post-Fordist' cities. However, as is well represented by recent research, the relationship between the arts, gentrification an...

Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outcome and a subject of academic research. In this article, we detail the results of workshops with young residents of five “Antarctic gateway cities” (Hobart, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Cape Town) who helped design and evaluate an online gam...

Recent literature on Antarctic futures includes sobering scenarios for the Southern Polar region in the era of Anthropogenic climate change. Contrasting current trajectories with what might be accomplished through appropriate policies and stewardship, such studies acknowledge that change involves more than exhortation through scholarly venues of co...

This chapter charts the background, the implementation, and the aftermath of #nevicata14, an experiment of smart tactical urbanism in Milan. The aim of the experiment was to foreground the possibility of pedestrianizing a large monumental square, which had long been used as a busy car intersection. The chapter shows how tactical urbanism projects,...

In this commentary, we reflect on the limitations, somber difficulties, and possibilities of new geographies of care that have emerged as a result of our limited personal geographies during the time of COVID-19.

The sharing economy, often phrased as ‘platform capitalism’, enables firms such as Uber and Airbnb to monetize, through specific technologies of mediation, the networks, the assets and the precarious labour of those who are described as ‘the entrepreneurs of sharing’. This article explores the urban geographies of ride‐sharing in the marketization...

This report was commissioned to assist the Inner West Council in developing a greater understanding of the nature and extent of future needs for creative space in the local government area (LGA), with a focus on infrastructure for cultural creation and production. The research focuses on the relationships between artists, creators, their activities...

This research was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing an up-to-date, wide-ranging understanding of its future needs for creative space, especially with regard to cultural creation and production. Most studies of creative space tend to focus on the material aspects of cultural venues and infrastructure, such as capacity, design o...

In this chapter we consider the approaches and techniques that global cities researchers use to research the often secretive, heavily capitalized interventions in urban space by global ‘urban’firms. By focusing on ‘global urbanists’, our aim is to take a purposely wider view than is sometimes the case in the urban policy literature. Notwithstanding...

Este artículo está relacionado con la racionalidad discursiva de la “ciudad inteligente”, en el contexto en el cual se convirtió en una poderosa narrativa de cambio urbano durante la crisis en Italia - justo después de la primera etapa de la crisis en Europa, en 2011-2012. Mientras que el concepto funciona como un significante vago que podría ser u...

In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring—an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, “smart city” polici...

Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual è l'origine della smart city e (ii) quanto le pratiche smart si differenzino o meno dalla maniera tradizionale (e neoliberista) di pensare e trasformare la città