Disrupted African cities: an introduction and a Conclusion

The practices documented in the previous four chapters span an array of interventions that draw on a wide range of technological and social strategies. Many of these are informed by the current platform infrastructure that enables a more distributed agency. I would argue that this differs from what some authors may have had in mind when the notion of technological leapfrogging in Africa was first pronounced. In the mid- to late 1990s, when several authors first starting exploring the impact of telecommunications on cities (Warf, 1995; Graham and Marvin, 1996), many African countries were recovering from structural adjustment policies. The forced reduction of public spending on social infrastructure, the retreat of the state and the emphasis on economic growth had an adverse impact on livelihoods and social services (Fonjong, 2014; Konadu-Agyemang, 2000). South Africa was in its democratic nascency, and while it had significant advantages in relation to telecommunications infrastructure, a slow and confused deregulation transition frustrated efforts at enabling ubiquitous Internet access (Lewis, 2005). It is not entirely inaccurate to argue that most African countries joined the information revolution on the back foot and that the leapfrogging phenomenon was an overestimation.

The emphasis on technology as a development tool is inevitable and, in many ways, a continuation of a discourse that embraces ICT as a means to modernization (Schech, 2002; Moodley, 2005). Fortunately, the ICT4D area of work has broadened and become more granular in its analysis of tech appropriation among Africans, but technological determinism still permeates bilateral and national policy discourses. While the notion of technological determinism has become somewhat passé in STS, it is still very much visible in public discourse and developmental aid – the idea that ‘development is propelled by K & T [knowledge and technology]’ (Cherlet, 2014: 775). In his discussion of the evolution of development discourses in relation to knowledge and technology transfer, Cherlet explores the genealogy of two determinisms in this regard: technological and epistemic. This dynamic is more recently discernible in smart city proposals, where engineering and technology multinationals offer pre-packaged solutions to urban problems.