Disrupted urbanism: understanding digital mobilisation in African cities

Abstract

The smart city discourse tends to be disassociated from the ‘real’ city. One of the qualities of South African cities that, for example, surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic is the inefficient city structure and resultant inequalities that define their everyday functioning. Several civil society organisations have engaged this dilemma directly and poignantly through a host of on- and offline strategies employed to heighten awareness of the marginalised, assist with resource mobilisation and put pressure on the state to address these issues more effectively. Through examination of two examples, this paper focuses on the qualities of these mobilisation strategies and how they combine technologies, strategies, and stories to enable collective action as a form of smart urbanist action from the bottom up. What emerges is engagement with public and private spheres, a play between emotion and coolheaded politics, and movement between rational strategy and expressed passion. All these qualities are enabled through a toolkit of digital and analogue techniques, displaying a material-human interface that is dynamic and reflexive, a data politics that is iterative and intersubjective.