(D)evolving smartness: exploring the changing modalities of smart city making in Africa

ABSTRACT

The paper identifies an under-researched mode of smart city-making in Africa characterized by municipal deployments of ICT-driven innovations. This departs from typical framings that view African smart city development as nationally driven, master planned new city developments. An in-depth analysis of the City of Cape Town’s Digital City Strategy provides insights into the mechanisms and processes grounding smart city concepts in African municipalities. Thus, situating Africa’s municipal ICT-driven strategies in the context of a global discourse of smart urbanism and local (and continental) processes of decentralized governance reform. In Cape Town, these global and local forces converge to drive ICT-inspired urbanism that reinforce market-oriented logics of urban governance, largely at the expense of transformative and contextually sensitive ICT deployments. By highlighting the multi-scalar production of smart cities inspired by global discourse yet subjected to local dynamics, the findings offer insights into the political realities of municipal ICT deployments in Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart city development
• ICT-driven urbanism
• decentralization
• municipal governance reform
• Africa

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the life and memory of Vanessa Watson whose contributions to urban planning on the continent formed the foundation for this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The paper uses the term information and communication technology (ICT) to refer to as a diverse set of tools and resources that transmit, store, create, share or exchange information. (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2009).

2 Cape Town's population grew by 57% between 1996 and 2016 (CoCT, 2017).

3 The EMT represents the administrative level of CoCT’s organization. Above this sits the Mayoral Committee which is where the political leadership resides. Each directorate has a head at the administrative/EMT level and a political/Mayoral Committee level. The Executive Mayor oversees the Mayoral Committee.