Plug-in urbanism: City building and the parodic guise of new infrastructure in Africa

Abstract

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, both real and perceived. We stir a conversation around the notion of ‘plug-in urbanism’: first, as an entry point for the study of a model of city building that is exceedingly determined by reflex prioritisation of assumedly universal and transferable corporate-driven policy agendas; secondly, as a critique of unidirectional, homogenising and determinist technological ideas and infrastructures; and thirdly, as a recourse to inclusive and holistic planning. We present the case of the Nairobi Expressway, a recently launched two- to four-lane 27 km viaduct, and the largest in Africa, as an example of a ‘plug-in’ infrastructure project: i.e. pre-packaged state-of-the-art development installation that comes complete and tailored as a magic bullet and obvious solution to identified mobility and transport challenges in Nairobi city. We demonstrate how in its parodic guise, the expressway highlights a project that is designed and financed by foreign authorities and sustained in line with foreign standard ideologies of what a world-class city should look like, yet in reality only leads to piecemeal and incomplete growth and development. Drawing from a standpoint of multiple urbanisms, we argue for more inclusive urban futures and visions that are responsive to diverse, popular and heterogeneous articulations of cities.

Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis: A Southern perspective on the frontiers of platform urbanism

“…Despite incredible efforts on the part of states to provide urban services, African cities experience pervasive service delivery failures, leaving ample space for private sector players (both formal and informal) to intervene. In this nexus between development and enterprise, technological fixes (Guma et al 2023) have been interpreted as new frontiers of profit, where informal African economies are captured by digital platforms and transformed into new sites of capital accumulation. Recently, for example, the rise of fintech platforms that subsume informal financial practices into data-driven dashboards has been critiqued by scholars concerned with the neocoloniality of the technology-finance nexus (Langley & Leyshon, 2022; see also Langley & Rodima-Taylor, 2022 for overview).…”

“…At first glance, the platformization of two-wheel logistics on the African continent seems to follow the well-known playbook of what technology critic Evgeny Morozov (2013) has called “techno-solutionism”: a Promethean faith in the capacity of digital technology to fix broken systems, whether they are democratic institutions or, as in this case, unwieldy mobility systems. However, this arguably techno-pessimistic reading of so-called “platform urbanism” (Barns, 2019) leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a site of accumulation and exploitation (Guma et al, 2023), and minimal space to read different patterns of how platforms evolve and fail, or even to imagine their generative reconfigurations, as Leszczynski (2020) suggests. Such frames of reference tell us very little about the urban economies transformed by the processes through which mobility systems become platformed.…”

ALGORITHMIC SUTURING: Platforms, Motorcycles and the ‘Last Mile’ in Urban Africa

“…Such agility of movement is likewise necessary to bypass the thick traffic which clogs highways and intersections, and to overcome incomplete and under-maintained road networks (for example, navigating rutted surfaces unsuited for cars). Nairobi is a particularly fitting vantage point from which to observe this: a city splintered by early colonial plans (Ese and Ese, 2020) and contemporary large-scale bypasses (Guma et al, 2023), and dotted with leafy, middle-class cul-de-sacs, busy commercial malls, hyper-dense…”

“…Such agility of movement is likewise necessary to bypass the thick traffic which clogs highways and intersections, and to overcome incomplete and under‐maintained road networks (for example, navigating rutted surfaces unsuited for cars). Nairobi is a particularly fitting vantage point from which to observe this: a city splintered by early colonial plans (Ese and Ese, 2020) and contemporary large‐scale bypasses (Guma et al ., 2023), and dotted with leafy, middle‐class cul‐de‐sacs, busy commercial malls, hyper‐dense suburbs, master‐planned estates, sweeping informal settlements, warehousing precincts, and ‘plotted’ (Karaman et al ., 2020; Maina and Cirolia, forthcoming) peri‐urban fringes. In this context, motorcycles are a vital and rapid undercurrent.…”