Splintering Urbanism or Split Agendas? Examining the Spatial Distribution of Technology Access in Relation to ICT Policy in Durban, South Africa

Abstract

Changes in the composition, distribution and availability of information and communication technology (ICT) have taken place in the past two decades. Digital technology is now a ubiquitous business requirement, whilst the availability of mobile/cellular telephones has ensured on-going connectivity. Little has been published on the distribution of ICT and other networked infrastructure in developing countries. This paper seeks to address that by examining Durban, South Africa. The spatial distribution of new technology access is examined in relation to urban change and the city’s ICT policy. It becomes evident that current spatial patterns mirror overall investment patterns. Whilst the city’s policy claims to address distribution and access, its innovations are focused on the business sector, rather than last-mile access, essentially reflecting spatial inequalities.

The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India's 100 smart cities

“…Sundaram noted that this splintering “has become a significant theatre of elite engagement with claims of globalisation” (2004, p. 64) in India. This is also evident in South Africa, where Odendaal () noted that digital access has been spatialised across existing investment patterns, which consolidates social and economic inequalities. The Indian smart city emerges in this moment to rewire historical–material–social inequalities in postcolonial cities through new power–knowledge networks of ubiquitous connectivity.…”

“…Moreover, while there now exists rich scholarship on smart cities in the global North, research on this theme is only just emerging in the global South (Datta, ; Odendaal, ; Shin, ). This is surprising, given the take up of smart cities in the global South has been at a faster rate than in the West, with countries like India, China, Korea, Saudi Arabia and others being the largest “consumers” of the global smart city market (McKinsey, ).…”

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

“…These include the historically Ôsplintered urbanismÕ of towns and cities both during and after the colonial era (Graham and Marvin, 2001;Swilling, 2011) including those of subSaharan Africa and that, unlike the Global North, reveal the historically pro-duced and ongoing fragmented and divided nature of urban (energy) systems in Global South contexts that have favoured colonial and later post-colonial elites (Bakker, 2003;Furlong, 2014;Jaglin, 2008;Odendaal, 2011;Silver, 2015). These historical forms of uneven urban infrastructure provision shape distinct geographies in which the rise of the Ôinfrastructural idealÕ (Graham and Marvin, 2001) offers only a partial narrative of how colonial and postcolonial logics of control, segregation, exploitation and various forms of development mediate unfolding energy transitions.…”

Free to Work Anxiously: Splintering Precarity Among Drivers for Uber and Lyft

“…Given these tensions, and drawing on research on splintering urbanism (Graham & Marvin, ; Odendaal, ), we describe our interviewees as experiencing a kind of splintering precarity . Our interviewees' sense of precarity—understood as a feeling of insecurity and instability in regards to work—is a splintered or differential version of that of more regularly employed workers at Uber and Lyft and other places of venture labor (Neff, ), from whom our interviewees inherit a mythical climate of autonomy that is further complicated by their own independent contractor status.…”