The digitalising state: Governing digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south

Abstract

This paper will investigate the emergence of a digitalising state in the global south through a focus on new techniques of governance initiated by the information age. It will discuss the mechanisms of the digitalising state across two realms – the governance of information infrastructures evident in the transition from paper to digital data, and the governance of informational peripheries emerging across digital and territorial exclusions. The paper argues that through these dynamics, the digitalising state is engaged in a politics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation where digitalisation becomes both a product and producer of regional urbanisation.

Digitalization of Solid Waste Management

“…There is no mechanism through which he would know what sort of problems could be escalated at what levels. This situation resonates with Datta's (2023) assertion that analog recordkeeping still remains central to the digitalization of urban governance in the Global South. It dismantles the claims that the app would streamline the grievance redressal system and that people would receive immediate remedies to their problems.…”

Being ‘Platform Citizens’ Today

“…Indeed, Graham (2020) argues that platforms are able to perform "strategic deployment of 'conjunctural geographies' -a way of being simultaneously embedded and dis-embedded from the space-times they mediate." This echoes with Datta's (2023) understanding of 'digitalisation' as a "far wider socio-technological process than the corporate driven global initiative of smart cities". Platform urbanisation, indeed, reminds of a chaotic and random process driven by software and software relations themselves, happening by symbiotic spreading and memes, and enabled by the capillarity and ubiquitousness of software, thus chiming with the notion of urbanisation itself as a dense 'exposure' and a 'background' to people's lives (Simone, 2019).…”

“…Following Lefebvre (1991), Brenner and Schmid (2015) suggest to untangle urbanisation through three dimension: spatial practices (the production of built environments), territorial regulation (planning) and everyday life (lived experiences and socialisation of urban space): "together produce the unevenly woven, restlessly mutating urban fabric of the contemporary world". For Datta (2023) instead, urbanisation is a "key mechanism of economic growth"; particularly in cities of the Global South, 'digitalisation-as-urbanisation' has more recently taken the form of a "key infrastructural push of the state and nation-building". This mostly chaotic process -happening at different scales, from systemic planning to the intimate body of citizens -is said to be increasingly driven and mediated through digital platforms and their related ecosystems.…”

Data Power in Action: Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis

“…While we acknowledge that much of the work on data so far has focused on the production and social shaping of data (Kitchin, 2014), the racialization and gendering of algorithms (Noble, 2018;Strengers and Kennedy, 2020), as well as the uneven geographies of digital infrastructures across different scales (Furlong, 2020;Guma, 2020;Datta, 2023), in this book we focus specifically on the political potential of urban data -in ways that it is both weaponized and democratized in urban contexts. This is a relatively new and topical theme in the context of current crises that are emerging in cities across the Global South in particular.…”

“…In the Global South, then, data may not translate seamlessly into information as it is often bound to its invisibility, scarcity, and even disconnectedness on the flows of data across people, workers, and institutions. As Datta (2023) argues, the uneven flows of data produce 'informational peripheries' of the state -spaces where 'exclusions are marked by both geographic and informational distance from the digitalizing state'. It is in the claims to a seamlessness of data in the digital age and the practices that expose its fractures across spaces and scales that we understand data politics to emerge.…”