1,721,008 research outputs found
Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital
Full text linkHeralded as Africa’s “Silicon Savannah”—a cradle of innovation—Nairobi has become a technology and innovation capital for Kenya and for the continent at large. With a national strategy that has prioritized digital technology for the last two decades, many Chinese digital champions, smaller start-ups, and investors have since chosen Nairobi as their African landing pad. Mapping the interface between Nairobi’s innovation scene and China’s digital presence there, Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio’s ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century
Making the silicon cape of Africa: Tales, theories and the narration of startup urbanism
Full text linkSilicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, but they also draw upon local arrangements of heterogeneous constituents: policy experts, entrepreneurs, reports, IT infrastructures, universities, coworking spaces, networking protocols and so forth. The making of one such ecosystem, Cape Town’s so-called ‘silicon cape’, is the topic of this article, which, however, does not try to uncover the specific economic and geographic factors of tech clustering. Rather, it addresses some of the narrative discourses that have framed Cape Town as the entrepreneurial capital of South Africa and Africa at large. It shows how these narrative praxes are both reflexive and ontological: they at once work as metatheories of entrepreneurial innovation in an African city and lay the groundwork for its very possibility. Via an ethnographic engagement of these textual discourses in the making, this article charts the uneasy relationship between technocapitalism and economic development in a city scarred by its colonial past and its racialised inequalities. In doing so, it shows how the discursive making of the silicon cape of Africa mobilised multiple economic sentiments, weaving together the search for profitable technology-based economies and the demand for social justice in a city of the Global South
Of Bloatware and Spreadsheets: Nairobi, Chinese Phones, and the Limits of Data Coloniality
Full text linkThis article charts the recent history of affordable Chinese phones in Nairobi, a city heralded by many as one of Africa's digital capitals. Here, cheap handsets manufactured in China are the material commodities that facilitate an increasingly competitive datafication of urban life. From crypto-wallets to distributed logistic platforms, Chinese phones are the enablers of new, datafied economies that seek to transform and incorporate so-called "frontier markets"-informal economies that have thus far escaped the circuits of digital capital. Yet the story of low-cost phones also reveals how these frontiers are sites of trials, negotiations, glitches, agency, and adaptations. In fact, it was urban data about Nairobi that shaped the making of these now ubiquitous devices. Combining oral history and an ethnography of the experts that punctuate the value chains of affordable cell phones, this article ultimately challenges some of the widespread assumptions about (China's) data coloniality in Africa
Technologies of austerity urbanism: the “smart city” agenda in Italy (2011–2013)
No full textIn the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring—an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, “smart city” policies became one of the foundational political technologies for the implementation of austerity measures. In this paper, I analyse how the smart city provided a lexicon for urban austerity through a series of different sites and vehicles of policymaking, from practitioners to companies and other institutions. I argue that smart city discourses and practices functioned as a political technology that was effective in justifying cost containment measures and supporting the shift to pro-innovation public expenditures. Yet, at the same time, the smart city techno-utopian vocabulary created spaces where other meanings and, potentially, alternative political outcomes were made possible by diverse alignments of knowledge and expertise
Between highways and fintech platforms: Global China and Africa’s infrastructure state
Full text linkIn this paper, we juxtapose two different sectors of China’s economic presence in Africa: transport and digital infrastructure. Using the case of Kenya, a country that hosts several flagship corridors funded by Chinese loans and where Chinese “digital champions” have been active for two decades, we highlight some of the differences and similarities between these two forms of China’s going-out capitalism in the continent.
Our argument is that these ‘varieties of capital’ are conterminous, and they operate through both strategic and contingent overlaps within the same ‘state-market nexus’ and at the interface with programmes and goals of the African ‘infrastructure state’. To illustrate this point, we draw on a comparative research effort inspired by a growing body of scholarship that has been labelled under the tag of ‘Global China’ and by a political economy reading of ‘the market-in-state’ system. This paper thus contributes empirically and conceptually to de-essentializing the Chinese presence in the African continent by recognizing the contextual agencies that shape it—the ambitious developmental agendas of the African state, in particular—as well as the interplay between its different corporate forms
Debunking Neoliberal Economics: What if Growth Could Only Happen Outside the Market? Stiglitz and Greenwald on Development and Innovation
No full textBook review of: Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development and Social Progress (2015) / Joseph E. Stiglitz & Bruce C. Greenwald, ISBN: 0231175493, Columbia University Pres
SMART CITIES AS HACKER CITIES. ORGANIZED URBANISM AND RESTRUCTU- RING WELFARE IN CRISIS-RIDDEN ITALY
No full textEste artículo está relacionado con la racionalidad discursiva de la “ciudad inteligente”, en el contexto en el cual se convirtió en una poderosa narrativa de cambio urbano durante la crisis en Italia - justo después de la primera etapa de la crisis en Europa, en 2011-2012. Mientras que el concepto funciona como un significante vago que podría ser utilizado para designar cualquier cosa urbana como “inteligente”, la “smart city” también entendió a las ciudades como actores del cambio, como “hackers” que podrían aprovechar la innovación tecnológica para responder a las crisis sociales y económicas. A partir de esta observación, dos argumentos son explorados en el artículo. En primer lugar, que las narrativas de las “ciudad inteligentes” siguen una larga tradición de urbanismo biológico que combina imaginarios tecno-utópicos con la cuestión más mundana de abordar las crisis económicas. En segundo lugar, que la representación de las ciudades como máquinas de crecimiento orgánico fue, al menos discursivamente, un experimento para repensar el estado de bienestar de una era de austeridad
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