Post-Pandemic Cities: An Urban Lexicon of Accelerations/Decelerations

COVID-19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with 15-minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’-COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio-material contours. The urban lexicon makes three contributions. First, to explore how the pandemic has accelerated certain processes and agendas while at the same time, other processes, priorities and sites have been decelerated and put on hold. Second, to utilise this framing to examine the impacts of the pandemic on how cities are governed, on how urban geographies are managed and lived, and with how care emerged as a vital urban resource. Third, to tease out what might be temporary intensifications and what may become configurational in a variety of urban domains, including governance, platforming, density, crowds, technosolutionism, dwelling, respatialisation, reconcentration, care, improvisation, and atmosphere. The urban lexicon proposes a vocabulary for delineating, describing, and understanding some of the key aspects of the emergent post-pandemic city

Urban Popular Economies

What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, which sustain their imaginations of well-being as part of a process of being with others—in households, neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. What is it that different kinds of workers have in common; what links them; where does the household begin and end; what is the difference between productive and reproductive work

Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-COVID-19 university

We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore avenues to build solidarity across institutions and geographies, to ensure that the conduct of urban research, and support offered to ECAs, allows for more inclusivity, diversity, security and equitability. *The Urban ECA Collective emerged from a workshop series described in this article which intended to foster international solidarity among self-defined early career academics working within urban research.ITESO, A.C

Resisting or reinforcing the neoliberal present? : the LGBT struggle for democratic space in Uganda

The ascendancy of neoliberal ideals and aspirations in Uganda has dramatically changed the citizenship terrain, leading to structural, tactical, and strategic exclusion and dis-empowerment. It has also drastically led to enormous shrinkage and fragility of democratic space. Consequently, different groups of collective identity, including lesbians and gay men, have for the last two or so decades created cohesive movements seemingly in opposition to neoliberalism. The LGBT struggle has over the last decade become more and more visible, often responding to neoliberal effects of exclusion and dis-empowerment in ways that reflect attributes of a critical movement. Of course, while this emerging movement is part of an apparent broader resistance to neoliberalism, it sometimes seems to serve the role of reinforcing neoliberal policies, discourses and practice

Rethinking Smart Urbanism : City-Making and the Spread of Digital Infrastructures in Nairobi

Rethinking Smart Urbanism is an empirical exploration of the multiple ways in which cities and infrastructures are constructed and reconstructed through ICT innovation and appropriation. Drawing on the case of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, the study explains existing infrastructure constellations through countervailing processes and rationalities in the context of splintered urbanism. In doing so, the study examines the relationship between urban plans and digital infrastructure development, place-based contexts that shape digital infrastructures, and the extent to which these infrastructures facilitate utility companies’ ambitions of extending centralized networks to new territories. It draws on the theoretical and empirical base of urban and infrastructure studies, particularly in the fields of smart urbanism, postcolonial urbanism, and Science and Technology Studies. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative research design and presents in-depth case studies that combine ethnographic methods with a thorough investigation of written sources. Ultimately, it is hoped to enhance our understanding of urban and digital possibilities, and add new insights to debates on technology and urbanity in Africa and beyond

Rethinking Smart Urbanism : City-Making and the Spread of Digital Infrastructures in Nairobi

Rethinking Smart Urbanism is an empirical exploration of the multiple ways in which cities and infrastructures are constructed and reconstructed through ICT innovation and appropriation. Drawing on the case of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, the study explains existing infrastructure constellations through countervailing processes and rationalities in the context of splintered urbanism. In doing so, the study examines the relationship between urban plans and digital infrastructure development, place-based contexts that shape digital infrastructures, and the extent to which these infrastructures facilitate utility companies’ ambitions of extending centralized networks to new territories. It draws on the theoretical and empirical base of urban and infrastructure studies, particularly in the fields of smart urbanism, postcolonial urbanism, and Science and Technology Studies. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative research design and presents in-depth case studies that combine ethnographic methods with a thorough investigation of written sources. Ultimately, it is hoped to enhance our understanding of urban and digital possibilities, and add new insights to debates on technology and urbanity in Africa and beyond

Smartness Beyond the Network: Water ATMs and Disruptions from below in Mathare Valley, Nairobi

This article critiques decontextualized notions of smart urbanism by examining the variegated and spontaneous infrastructural configurations stemming from the deployment of a digital project in an informal urban setting. We offer an empirical examination of the rollout of water ATMs in Mathare Valley, Nairobi, to highlight three types of “smartness beyond the network”: first, where water ATMs evidence a smart digital infrastructure that transcends the networked urban water supply; second, where residents, in their adoption and use of water ATMs, unsettle their original operation, in the process driving them further away from their original design through disruptions from below; and third, where persistent manifestations of pre-existing mechanisms exist that are non-state and non-networked and sometimes integrate indicating digital technologies heterogeneous articulations and smartness from below. In sum, we argue for unpacking Southern and alternative visions for smart digital infrastructure, considering that smartness, within diverse urban settings, is informed not just by hegemonic and aspirational articulations of city making, but also by dwellers’ context-specific and nonlinear processes of place making

Post-, Pre- and Non-Payment: Conflicting Rationalities in the Digitalisation of Energy Access in Kibera, Nairobi

Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digital technologies, and the ways in which actors incorporate social relations into these systems and negotiate them through these systems. Specifically, we consider the politicians, donors, residents of Kibera and informal power distributors. We show how upon the deployment of the digital systems in Kibera, residents and informal power distributors enact rationalities that conflict with those of the utility provider, donors and politicians. These conflicting rationalities make the formalisation of electricity provision in slum areas through “technological fixes” a particularly daunting task. Ultimately, we contend that this study of actors' conflicting rationalities in the deployment of digital prepaid electricity systems is an important contribution to studies of digital geography as it explains the complexities relating to digital interventions and offers critical perspectives on their hybrid outcomes and politics within contested urban geographies in the global South and elsewhere