Organizing for the Smart African City: Leveraging the urban commons for exerting the right to the city

Abstract

To accommodate the need for community engagement and place-based approaches in smart city agendas in Africa, we build on the literature on smart cities, southern urbanism and the urban commons to develop a conceptual framework for urban commoning in Africa. We argue that commoning, as an organizing process, establishes institutions for urban commons that account for different urban dwellers’ needs, perspectives and knowledges thereby strengthening inclusion and producing knowledge-intensive smart city development. We explain how the proposed conceptual framework is particularly suited to the African context, as it can mitigate the formal-informal divide and enable marginalized citizens to meaningfully express their right to the city. By enabling citizens’ voice in planning and distributing urban resources, commoning helps redefine local bureaucracies, rendering them more open and inclusive while limiting the enclosure and marketization of cities, which is often a source of contestation in the development of smart cities.

Smartocracy: Context entanglement of the smart city idea and bureaucracy in Russia

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More Than Prefigurative Politics? Redefining institutional frames to reduce precarity under neoliberal capitalism

“…On the contrary, practices of horizontal democracy enable one to speak, discuss, agree and disagree and to materialize shared values in the present, yet outside existing institutions (Haug, 2013;Maeckelbergh, 2012;Reedy et al, 2016). They do not posit a welldefined goal beforehand, but rather create communal spaces in which members engage in collaborative decision-making (Parker, 2012), raising awareness about the necessity of change, activating participants to do things differently and to inspire others (Farias, 2017;Maier & Simsa, 2020;Peter & Meyer, 2022). Relations of affect, trust and solidarity within the community play a key role in nurturing new political subjectivities that distance themselves from existing institutions (Reinecke, 2018(Reinecke, , p. 1312; see also Haug, 2013) and oppose the impersonal, individualized and competitive subjectivity produced by neoliberal capitalist institutions (e.g.…”

Bureaucracy Meets Digital Reality: The unfolding of urban platforms in European municipal governments

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