Introduction

In 2017, I was invited to speak at a workshop in Calgary, Canada, on the African smart city. I found this to be a curiously ill-defined task given the size and diversity of the continent. The central message I hoped to convey was that the manifestation of digital technologies is intrinsically connected to people’s livelihood strategies. What distinguishes African cities, if one is to generalize, are a number of features that colour the incorporation of information and communication technology (ICT) into city processes: informality, crumbling infrastructure and increasing urban poverty. These facts are not surprising, and this is not a new argument, but I nevertheless experienced some challenges to my presentation. My choice of projected images of street vendors using mobile phones and billboards promoting ubiquitous connectivity juxtaposed with immediate city surroundings showing dilapidated road infrastructure was an uncomfortable contrast to the smart city imaginary. Corporate displays of smart cities in Africa are eerie in their similarities: tall, glass-clad skyscrapers interspersed with wide avenues and slick inhabitants glued to their mobile phones. They portray a strange ‘placeless-ness’ that could be Dubai, Singapore or Seoul. Regardless of the imaginaries that inspire them, they bear very little resemblance to the ‘real’ city, in Africa or elsewhere.

At the same event, a colleague remarked on how my hometown, Cape Town, had a mythical quality to it, a Shangri-La of sorts: beautiful and historically and geographically compelling, perched on the Southern tip of Africa and thus geographically remote enough to reinforce this fantasy. I was reminded of yet another compelling narrative: Cape Town as the ‘Silicon Cape’, the ‘Investment Connection into Africa’ displayed on a billboard at Cape International Airport. It struck me that my research included many aspirations: the smart city, the connected citizen and, of course, innovation as central to African livelihoods. I appear to peddle in fanciful ideas, but I believe it imperative to probe them and confront the contradictions contained therein.

The relationship between technology and social development has been subject to important areas of criticism that feature in a diverse range of disciplines: urban studies, development studies and urban geography are among them.