Making the silicon cape of Africa: Tales, theories and the narration of startup urbanism

Abstract

Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, but they also draw upon local arrangements of heterogeneous constituents: policy experts, entrepreneurs, reports, IT infrastructures, universities, coworking spaces, networking protocols and so forth. The making of one such ecosystem, Cape Town’s so-called ‘silicon cape’, is the topic of this article, which, however, does not try to uncover the specific economic and geographic factors of tech clustering. Rather, it addresses some of the narrative discourses that have framed Cape Town as the entrepreneurial capital of South Africa and Africa at large. It shows how these narrative praxes are both reflexive and ontological: they at once work as metatheories of entrepreneurial innovation in an African city and lay the groundwork for its very possibility. Via an ethnographic engagement of these textual discourses in the making, this article charts the uneasy relationship between technocapitalism and economic development in a city scarred by its colonial past and its racialised inequalities. In doing so, it shows how the discursive making of the silicon cape of Africa mobilised multiple economic sentiments, weaving together the search for profitable technology-based economies and the demand for social justice in a city of the Global South.

Helping Entrepreneurs Help Themselves: A Review and Relational Research Agenda on Entrepreneurial Support Organizations

“…Only three works offer explanatory or predictive theoretical contributions at this level of analysis (Hackett & Dilts, 2004a;Kim & Wagman, 2014;Theodorakopoulos et al, 2014) Nearly half of the studies at this level of analysis fall into the first category, "Describe, Classify, Compare," which consists of those that provide high-level or rich descriptions of ESOs, classify them into typologies, and/or compare forms. Examples of studies that primarily "describe" include: incubators (e.g., Carayannis & Von Zedtwitz, 2005;Hansen et al, 2000); accelerators (e.g., Adomdza, 2016); maker spaces (e.g., Browder et al, 2019); hubs (e.g., Bachmann, 2014;Littlewood & Kiyumbu, 2018); other related forms (e.g., Pollio (2019) study of a Startup Weekend or Nowak and Grantham (2000) discussion of virtual incubators). Generally, these works list the resources and services the ESO provides (office space, networking, legal or financial advice, direct or indirect funding, etc.…”

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

“…Second, algorithmic suturing speaks to a growing body of literature that specifically maps the patchworked nature of digital technologies in urban Africa, offering a perspective on the incomplete, piecemeal and adaptive remaking of platforms, and challenging simplistic visions of domination and leapfrogging (Guma and Mwaura, 2021;Guma, 2022;Guma and Wiig, 2022;Odendaal, 2021). This work fits into a wider body of scholarship on digital transformation and entrepreneurship in the continent (Friederici, 2018;Pollio, 2020;2022a;Guma and Monstadt, 2021;Odendaal, 2023).…”

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

“…The notion of “startup urbanism” (Rossi & Dibella, 2017) or the “startup city” (McNeill, 2017) capture precisely the ways in which cities across the globe have engineered their “innovation complex” (Zukin, 2021), an assemblage of institutions and infrastructures that nurture the germination of digital platforms. In urban Africa, characteristically, the making of these innovation ecosystems has also been couched in the developmental rationalities of the state (Guma & Monstadt, 2021; Pollio, 2020; Pollio & Cirolia, 2022). This of course aligns with the push by international lenders to use ICT to spur entrepreneurial forms of development (Heeks, 2017).…”