Smart city making? The spread of ICT-driven plans and infrastructures in Nairobi

Abstract

Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of emergent plans with ordinary realities of the African city. We demonstrate that while processes of smart city making have strongly been inclined toward technocratic approaches and deterministic appeals, this inclination is highly deceptive. We argue that rather than being deterministic, these processes are essentially politicized, highly contested, and shaped by the role and impact of local practices and context-specific realities. In making this argument, we draw from a social studies of technology perspective which engages with the notion of technological determinism to make this contribution to the academic field of critical urbanism.

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

“…This transformation is marked by a remarkable speed of regional urbanisation in the south (Aguilar et al, 2003; Datta and Shaban, 2017; Webster et al, 2014) that now uses the technologies available to the state through its partnerships with global corporations to render peripheral territories and populations visible and knowable to the state. Digitalisation-as-urbanisation processes in Guma and Monstadt’s words ‘have come to exemplify the actual realities of ICT-driven city making and infrastructure development in the postcolonial city’ (Guma and Monstadt, 2020: 377).…”

Recasting Provisional Urban Worlds in the Global South: Shacks, Shanties and Micro-Stalls

“…Likewise, Guma (2019) examines the utility of kiosks and stalls in Nairobi as sociotechnical constellations and non-networked 'leapfrog' connectors; and highlights their design as temporary, ad hoc and makeshift, and materiality as transient, continuous and contingent (Guma, 2020). According to Guma and Monstadt (2020), the ubiquitous spread and rise of these and similar structures in southern cities, are not simply a reflection of contrasts between realities on the ground and official processes of city making and planning, but also of varied possibilities of cities' endogenous innovation capabilities.…”

“…In so doing, these frameworks directly perpetuate a type of informality that continues to render provisional urban worlds illegal and unwanted. Both in Nairobi, as in many cities of the global South, formal plans remain largely at odds with the realities on the ground, constantly bypassing residents' needs, and unable to meet local demands (Cirolia & Berrisford, 2017;Guma & Monstadt, 2020). Yet, a better appreciation and understanding of provisional urban worlds would be beneficial for appropriately planning and discerning cities where the presence of these worlds is inevitable.…”

Web Service Applications and Consumer Environments Based on ICT-Driven Optimization

“…Although the integrated consideration of multiple relationships can improve the quality of service recommendation, there are still many challenges to effectively collaborate various relationships. With the rapid iteration of information and communication technologies, a large amount of network data can be easily accessed and further processed by deep learning techniques [20]. As a result, network embedding has been gaining attention as a convenient and effective method for learning network representations and has recently become a popular research problem based on neural networks and deep learning [21].…”