Fluidities and Fixities: Examining the Alignment of Digital Platforms Within Nairobi's Heterogeneous Infrastructural Configurations

Abstract

Across the Global South, digital platforms have become increasingly present in the understanding, management, and operation of cities and their infrastructures. In examining the impact of digital platforms within urban infrastructures however, the experiences of cities of the South, and especially informal urban settlements, remains significantly overlooked when considering the impact of digital technologies on urban processes. With digital technologies and associated platforms becoming ever more embedded within the infrastructures of informal settlements, the lack in understanding around the consequences of this insertion for one billion of the world's population, is something that urgently needs to be addressed. This paper attends to this deficit by examining how digital platforms are being designed in respect of the socio-technical setting of informal settlement infrastructures and the consequences for infrastructural change of their insertion. Focussing on four digital platforms deployed within Nairobi's water and energy infrastructures, the paper builds on the theoretical efforts of urban political ecology framing infrastructures as power laden socio-environmental constructions and goes on to utilize the analytical entry points provided by the notion of heterogeneous infrastructural configurations. The findings identify that, although the digital platforms developed new avenues for infrastructural change via opportunities for utilizing data as leverage, they also created fixities for users that caused disjuncture with the natural fluidity that existed within the informal settlements. The findings note that not only do digital platforms reconfigure dynamics of power within heterogeneous infrastructural configurations but they also create opportunities for learning around the intersection of infrastructural flexibility and digital fixities.

Infrastructures of Large-Scale Geothermal Energy Projects in Kenya: Materialization, Generativity, and Socio-Economic Development Linkages

“…In doing so, Lawhon et al (2018) push thinking around infrastructures to better consider and incorporate the numerous other complexities embedded within infrastructure construction, including stakeholder interests, thereby allowing for a distinguishing or separating infrastructural artifacts from one another, based on their interests and rationale for materialization and generativity. In this sense, infrastructures of large-scale projects are therefore not independent apparatuses but are often geographically embedded and networked in wider socio-material configurations of relations and operations, possibly in network with other technical and social infrastructures, with socioeconomic and political implications (Silver 2014, Chambers 2019, Thekdi and Chatterjee 2019.…”

“…By so doing, this study responds to the growing calls to situate and understand infrastructure provisions in the realities faced by many countries in the Global South (Jaglin 2015, Coutard andRutherford 2015). Empirical analysis of large-scale infrastructure projects in the Global South begs for wider thinking of the complexity and dynamism of infrastructure configurations, which challenges the predominant binary notion of their materialization and impacts (Lawhon et al 2014, Silver 2014, Greiner 2016, Lawhon et al 2018, Chambers 2019, Barry 2020.…”

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“…In doing so, Lawhon et al (2018) push thinking around infrastructures to better consider and incorporate the numerous other complexities embedded within infrastructure construction, including stakeholder interests, thereby allowing for a distinguishing or separating infrastructural artifacts from one another, based on their interests and rationale for materialization and generativity. In this sense, infrastructures of large-scale projects are therefore not independent apparatuses but are often geographically embedded and networked in wider socio-material configurations of relations and operations, possibly in network with other technical and social infrastructures, with socioeconomic and political implications (Silver 2014, Chambers 2019, Thekdi and Chatterjee 2019.…”

“…By so doing, this study responds to the growing calls to situate and understand infrastructure provisions in the realities faced by many countries in the Global South (Jaglin 2015, Coutard andRutherford 2015). Empirical analysis of large-scale infrastructure projects in the Global South begs for wider thinking of the complexity and dynamism of infrastructure configurations, which challenges the predominant binary notion of their materialization and impacts (Lawhon et al 2014, Silver 2014, Greiner 2016, Lawhon et al 2018, Chambers 2019, Barry 2020.…”

Rethinking Smart Urbanism: City-Making and the Spread of Digital Infrastructures in Nairobi

“…Most recent accounts have examined ICT-driven infrastructures as socio-technical constellations supported by international companies and social enterprises (Brill and Reboredo, 2018;Chambers, 2019;Chambers and Evans, 2020). Brill and Reboredo (2018) have pointed to how the development of these infrastructures in peripheral settings of many African cities demonstrate the speculative nature of private sector-led digital infrastructure projects through 'world-class city' aspirations, yet exacerbating existing problems such as spatial inequality and environmental degradation.…”