Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach

Abstract

This paper develops a geographic understanding of urban energy transitions in subSaharan African towns and cities. In doing so this paper seeks to critically reßect on the value and limits of urban transitions analysis as a framework for understanding energy networks beyond the largely integrated systems across the Global North. We explore how these potentials and deÞcits can be addressed by examining promising developments across a series of debates in urban studies that can help sensitise this approach to energyscapes in the African context. By reviewing urban transi-tions analysis through these debates the paper offers four important contributions to expand existing ways of understanding energy transition. These include the particular urbanisation dynamics of African towns ands cities, the need to locate the urban across energy regimes, the agencies of various intermediaries and urban actors and the contested politics inherent in the governing of energy networks. In the conclusion we reßect on the speciÞc directions that have emerged from the paper in relation to our contributions, offering a geographically informed framework that allows us to better examine the challenges and speciÞcities of transition across these rapidly growing urban regions.

Space and energy transitions in sub-Saharan Africa: Understated historical connections

“…Despite the latest investments, the number of people without access seems to be rising -not decreasing -due to a combination of natural population growth, increase in energy exports, as well as an intensification in demand through urbanization (IEA, 2014). This reinforces the argument of various authors who think that addressing sub-Saharan Africa's energy future will require a joint consideration of Africa's ongoing 'urban revolution' (Parnell and Pieterse, 2014;Silver and Marvin, 2017).…”

“…that energy transitions will have the power to flatten the spatial unevenness of energy systems. In contrast, the work of Silver and Marvin (2017) highlights how urban transitions are infiltrated by contestation over infrastructure and service provision. Given the historical patterns embedded in contemporary energy systems and other economic assumptions about the roll-out of efficient electricity markets (e.g.…”

Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations

“…Researchers have sought to explicate the everyday experiences and logics of so-called 'informal' urban infrastructure, attending to the range of nodes, actors, and connections and disconnections to various forms of so-called 'formal' infrastructure. Such work shows how infrastructures have become layered by multiple and partial infrastructures including different coverage, technologies, operations, logics and ownerships (Anand, 2011;Chattopadhyay, 2012;Graham and McFarlane, 2014;Silver and Marvin, 2017). Literature on Southern urban infrastructure has also called attention to new possibilities for social organising, ownership and power relations both with and outside of the state.…”

The map is not the territory: A sympathetic critique of energy research’s spatial turn

“…My argument is that, by paying attention to geographies of knowledge production, and processes of differentiation and disassembly, social science energy research has the potential to inform and critically extend the social science literature (primarily in human geography) on space and society. [32,63,64]. The point, however, is that the geographies of knowledge through which these fields emerged continue to loom large: in the sets of concerns through which research is framed, the theoretical and conceptual frameworks adopted, and methodological considerations such as presumptions about key actors.…”