Prince Guma

This paper explores the interface between global circulations and local articulations of smart city plans and technological ideals in emerging urban contexts. Drawing illustrative cases from Nairobi's urban margins, I examine everyday regimes of labor and governance where local actors translate, recreate, and transform smart city initiatives based...

Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of modernity, leading to the frequent oversight of everyday infrastructures. Extensive capital-intensive infrastructures that are fully integrated and have paled into the background of everyday life are commonly dismissed, criticized, or misconstrued as deter...

This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, continge...

Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of e...

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 th...

Efforts to transform urbanisation processes highlight the state’s pivotal role in shaping unfolding digital futures. Datta and Hoefsloot propose the concept of the state as auteur to underscore the significance of time and the imperative of timing as a performative, strategic, anticipatory, and symbolic practice of the state to project, direct, exe...

Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation proc...

On the road to Uganda’s future.

All over the world, cities are being managed through new forms of technology that deliver maximum governance with minimum government. Some of these technologies can be environmentally beneficial, such as energy-saving machine learning technologies. Others, such as the use of COVID-tracing technology and facial recognition in policing and everyday g...

In this chapter, I examine articulations of platform work, everyday life, and survival in times of crisis. I offer an expanded approach to understanding articulations of data and data-driven solutions in terms of their everyday and mundane manifestations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This forum highlights three key contributions or 'pulses,' all underscoring the importance of collectively, incrementally, and continuously building networks and partnerships. Simultaneously, it addresses the eminent challenges of north-south research collaboration with introspection, intentionality, and sensitivity. These contributions emphasize t...

Smart cities have gained increased traction worldwide. This commentary situates smart cities in the context of Southern urban settings. I demystify urban informality and recast informality as a valuable marker in the study of smart cities. Reiterating Prasad et al.'s appeal to explore the centrality of informality for smart city planning and develo...

Interdisciplinary engagements encounter a significant challenge in surmounting defensive barriers within conventional urban research. This emphasizes the necessity of creating space for comprehensive dialogs to tackle pivotal issues related to social justice in urban practice and academia. Urban research in the global south mandates a specific pers...

Southern cities have become increasingly inscribed in broader postcolonial and neoliberal development forces. In tandem with global pandemics, digital threats, and migration and climate crises, these forces have paused critical implications for all residents, decimating the middle class, widening the gap between elites and masses, deepening the cos...

This afterword begins from a fairly modest premise that asks, how does incompleteness reframe the way we think about and theorize urban infrastructural futures? In addressing this question, I examine urban infrastructure through its incomplete futures. Accordingly, I offer a conception that highlights partial, provisional and contingent processes a...

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 theorizing contemporary cities and urban life in the global South, the question that continues to remain poignant has to do with how to read, understand, and examine urban forms and materialities that manifest not through contrasts but through embedded processes that are shaped through resident-initiated processes. Within urban and area studies,...

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, bo...

Covid‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city...

While digital infrastructure development projects often seek to impose techno dreams and fantasies of smartness upon ordinary places in African cities, urban populations have ultimately translated and hybridized such projects through varied appropriations, contestations, and technopolitics.

What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight th...

I highlight everyday coping strategies and mechanisms of individual and collective survival and beyond. I draw lessons and suggest solutions and strategies that tend to lie outside the structures and frameworks of the state and local governments. I demonstrate how the urban poor have developed the ability to solve their own problems through a combi...

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...

We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and r...

The Kenyan capital of Nairobi has become a host of thriving industries and innovations based on the production, consumption, and domestication of digital payments platforms such as M-Pesa. Adapting these mobile phone–based applications to its informal economies and urban culture, Nairobi has developed into a seedbed for information technology advan...

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 be...

Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on...

Due to complex and adverse effects of rapid urbanisation, conventional infrastructure networks in the Global South tend to be stretched in their capacity to deliver. Over the years, different studies have examined how diverse populations manage to operate successfully (albeit with constraints and limitations) despite limits on formal networks. Howe...

Since its inception in the 1990s, mobile telephony in Africa has evolved, reflecting varied advances in technology. These advances have become particularly reminiscent of the role of mobile technologies in everyday facets of life. In this paper, we examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in an urban African context. We demonstrat...

This article contributes to ongoing calls that provoke a recasting of provisional urban worlds in the global South. I draw from informal and transient structures -- shacks, shanties, micro-stalls -- in Kibera, a high-density settlement in Nairobi, to offer an explication of provisional worlds that transcends teleological conceptions of what constit...

ICTs are increasingly stimulating infrastructure development and social innovation in African cites. In Eastern Africa, public and private companies are engineering far-reaching ICT-based projects for urban service delivery. In their appropriation, these projects have become subject to overarching dynamics. This chapter follows recent deployments o...

Work in policy and research circles tends to depict urban infrastructural heterogeneity as synonymous with failure or brokenness. Inherent in this tendency is the often-subtle expectation that infrastructures should evolve as do their counterparts elsewhere, or in a linear trajectory from less complete to more complete arrangements. This article op...

The digital age has reshaped the supply of infrastructure services in African cities. Over the last decade, Nairobi’s water sector has opened up to infrastructure investments enabled by the uptake and integration of digital technologies. These investments have focused on one particular group: the urban poor. This paper examines a new hybrid piped w...

In recent years, the study of urban infrastructure has become central to examining African cities. This paper is a contribution to this scholarship. Of particular interest is the interface between telecommunications and urban water and electricity utility systems. I examine the degree to which ICT deployments for urban water and electricity supply...

Over the past decade, a rich body of research has considered the civil society increasingly important in political organization, social mobilization, and economic empowerment, perhaps more so in developing countries. However, most studies in Sub-Saharan Africa have tended to associate civil society with associations and foundations, and the act of...

With the fading of colonial memory in postcolonial Africa, dramatic changes are emerging and are shaping urban cities in quite significant ways. Urbanization is exploding. Large numbers of Africans are becoming town dwellers. Informal settlements alike are becoming the norm rather than the exception. Urban challenges have thus become complex, hence...

Business in the urban informal economy can be seen as a challenging terrain with enormous hurdles for women entrepreneurs. This paper explores major barriers that obstruct smooth development of women entrepreneurship in Uganda’s urban informal economy. The study provides some useful academic insights and offers some practical suggestions for improv...

The rise of the contemporary feminist movement and its subsequent engagement with gender equality and democratic politics calls for further investigation. This study is a contribution to this end. It raises debate as to how feminist influence towards the theorization, reconstruction and dismantlement of existing constructions of sex and politics in...

While organizational management was originally theorized from a scientific point of view, Peter F. Drucker's thoughts and ideas have recently generated liberal reviews and critical debates among practitioners, experts and consultants. This essay is a contribution to the later. Its designed to offer a radical and philosophical reconceptualization of...

The traditional portrait of many governments worldwide, synonymous with a massive bureaucratic machinery operating inefficiently, unresponsively and at high cost, is gradually fading. Over the past two or so decades, Sub-Saharan African countries, have witnessed wide-ranging Public Sector reforms often in search of effective and efficient systems o...

Administrative reform has become an ever present slogan of modern life. Developing countries, Uganda inclusive, have often looked abroad for ideas about how to reform sometimes under duress but often quite willingly. However these processes have often been disastrous. Yet, no one seems to possess a coherent explanation as to why they should fail wi...

The arrival of colonialism in Africa disrupted the people’s cultural beliefs and traditions and led to the transplant of Western organizational practices and standards into the African context. However, with business leaders being confronted with numerous contemporary challenges, it is almost certain that they require not only generic, but also rea...

This study makes an important contribution to both theoretical and practical barriers to commercial credit and security with regards to SMEs in Africa.