This article examines the transition to prepaid electricity happening in Maputo, Mozambique, in order to reflect on the contemporary geographies of urban energy infra structure and urbanization in subSaharan Africa and other cities of the South. The article draws on fieldwork and archival research conducted in 2013 and 2014, arguing that prepay ment constitutes a productive juncture in the urban experience of electricity infrastructure in Maputo's postcolonial moment, not merely a neutral technology or a disciplining tech nique of government (as argued by some scholarship). The article examines the multiple rationalities implicated in the use of the electricity infrastructure via prepayment and the organization of urban life it engenders (and of which it is also a product) by focusing on the everyday practices surrounding prepaid electricity of urban dwellers in neighbour hoods where the 'modern infrastructural ideal' may never be fully realized. As a result, it contributes to an understanding of the experience of urban energy in cities where 'slum urbanism', uncertainty and provisionality are dominant aspects of the urban condition.

Access to 'formal' electricity networks remains a key challenge in many African urban areas. Significant attention has been paid to how access to an electricity connection should be provided, with much less attention paid to how electricity infrastructures are operated and maintained. Attention to how utilities govern the challenges inherent to 'informality' in the production of 'formal' networked infrastructure is less common, especially in African cities. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions, studies on infrastructure maintenance and repair treat 'informality' as a subtext to broader examinations of the uneven urban landscapes produced through infrastructures and its mediating technologies. Drawing on a socio-technical approach to electricity infrastructures, this article explores how utilities engage with 'informality' to produce access to 'formal' electricity networks through everyday processes of maintenance and repair. To this end, the article uses the empirical case of Mozambique's national electricity company, EDM (Electricidade de Moçambique, E.P.) and its transition to an electricity network mediated by prepayment technologies in the capital city Maputo. The article argues that a socio-technical approach to infrastructures provides key insights into how utilities implicate the spatial and socioeconomic dimensions of 'informality' in the design, delivery, and maintenance and repair of 'formal' electricity networks. They do so through pragmatic, situated practices that sustain and continuously produce and reproduce infrastructures in cities. This highlights how infrastructures are always 'precarious achievements' and service delivery always a process in the making. The article is based on deskwork, archival work, and fieldwork conducted by the author in Maputo since 2013.

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This article contributes to the ongoing scrutiny of the travels of critiques of 'neoliberalism' in urban studies. Using the case of a state-led urban regeneration program implemented in Portugal since 2000, the Polis Program, the article weighs in on metaanalytical discussions about the hegemonic status of neoliberalism as a theoretical concept and as an analytical framework and on discussions about the travels of dominant critiques of neoliberalism beyond the sites of epistemological production. The article argues that the current analytical overinvestment in neoliberalism may obscure important drivers of contemporary urbanization and that recourse to a diversity of concepts may be a more profitable line of inquiry. The article suggests that current efforts at epistemological renewal within urban studies benefit from taking up cities in the 'borderlands' of urban theory as relevant cases in their own right. The article offers further considerations on the purchase of 'neoliberalism' in contemporary urban literature.

Sub-Saharan Africa is seeing an influx of international interest and investment in energy projects designed to address the energy poverty and climate agendas. Often missing from these energy initiatives is an acknowledgement that bringing about energy transitions will require more than just the creation of efficient energy markets and technological leapfrogging. This article explores how we may begin to examine the spatial dimensions of contemporary energy systems in connection to the organization of social life in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on the seminal article by Bridge et al. (2013) on the spatial dimensions of energy transitions, on energy geographies literature and on various strands of social science research about Africa, the article examines the usefulness of a spatial perspective to researching how energy systems in sub-Saharan Africa came to be the way they are today. This historical understanding of energy systems is necessary if we are to make sense of future energy transitions, yet the connections between past, present and future remain understate in current policy interventions.