Beyond informality: Expanding the scope of Southern smart urbanism

Abstract

Prasad et al.'s (2024) article, ‘Smart City Planning and the Challenges of Informality in India’, makes an important contribution to understanding the limitations of smart city planning practices in a Southern context. However, whilst informality is a dominant feature of Southern urbanism, the appropriation of smart technologies by those at the margins tells an expanded story of smart urbanism from the bottom up, thereby challenging the underpinning notions of planning and smart urbanism.

Introduction

The application of the smart city idea in the Global South has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. A critical perspective has surfaced the inequities and narrow interpretations of the concept in India (Das, 2020; Datta, 2015), the governmentalities that inform implementation (Datta, 2018), the problematic discourses (Watson, 2015), and uneven application in South African cities (Söderström et al., 2021), among other critiques. Prasad et al.'s (2024) article, ‘Smart City Planning and the Challenges of Informality in India’, makes an important contribution to this literature. Informality is a valuable entry point for exploring the deepening of structural inequalities brought about by smart city planning as well as the governance issues that inevitably occur when a spatial narrative is imposed uniformly across different geographic contexts. Also of value is the connection made to planning practices and how the addition of ‘smart’ signals a return to the instrumental rationalities of yesteryear. Thus, their article makes an important contribution to our understanding of Southern interpretations of smart urbanism and its relationship to urban planning practices.

In this commentary, I argue for a more robust exploration of these ideas that engages the Southern urbanism literature more thoroughly and epistemically. Following on from previous work on how Southern interpretations could lead to expanded insights into sustainable smart practices (Aurigi and Odendaal, 2022; Odendaal and Aurigi, 2020), and more embedded, contextual understandings in relation to other infrastructures (Cirolia et al., 2023; Guma and Monstadt, 2021; Odendaal, 2021), I expand on the arguments made by Prasad et al. (2024) by looking at two dimensions of Southern smart urbanism. First, a consideration of the urban everyday in relation to smart technologies provides an entry point for understanding technological appropriation more granularly. Second, by engaging social mobilisation and activism, speaking back to power using digital tools foregrounds agency and social action. I conclude by exploring how this could inform a reinterpretation of the smart city concept in relation to informality.

The (smart) urban everyday

Recognising the agency expressed through everyday practices in Southern urban spaces expands on the notion of informality. Despite onerous economic conditions and political insensitivity, those living on the margins live in constant states of flux and movement, securing access to resources through informal means, but often also negotiating officialdom through kinship networks and negotiations. The notion of practices, and by extension smart practices using digital platforms and mobile phones, is in stark contrast to the corporatized and largely standard interpretations of smart cities in the Global South. As Watson observes, ‘[t]hese plans completely ignore the quite obvious human and social dimensions of smart – the role of social capital and networks of trust and reciprocity that are prerequisites for innovation’ Watson (2015: 37). These connections often provide the urban poor with access to the State, reflecting a heterogeneity that can range from informal bricolage to engaging political office-bearers directly, utilising ‘vernacular or traditional codes’ of engagement (Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011: 446). The practices of the everyday are, therefore, more granular than represented by an informal-formal dichotomy. Building on de Certeau's notion of everyday practices as sites of transformation and resistance, Rusca and Cleaver (2022), in their discussion on the politics of water access in the South, explore the ontological, epistemological, and empirical implications therein. Foregrounding informal and livelihood practices challenges our conception of the city and its governance as well as knowledge of the urban (Oldfield, 2015). It follows that this extends to how digital technologies are enrolled into daily lives.

In recent work, I have explored the notion of the smart everyday in relation to urban practices in South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya (Odendaal, 2021, 2023), and, together with Aurigi, how we could perhaps learn from these practices more universally (Aurigi and Odendaal, 2022). These practices range from developing home-grown applications to assist the para-transit sector in Kampala to technological solutions enabling a simplified food value chain that connects small-scale farmers directly with informal vendors in Nairobi. They span an array of interventions that draw on a wide range of technological and social strategies. Many of these are informed by a more distributed agency enabled through platform infrastructure (Odendaal, 2022).

Whilst these examples manifest as everyday smart practices that respond to urban problems, they are also components of a patchwork of initiatives that respond to the urgencies of place. Some of them are based on ideas from elsewhere, informed by scientific advances and technological solutions from other parts of the world that are repurposed to local conditions. As Prasad et al. (2024) demonstrate, the appropriation of digital tools has impacted informality, but the embrace of ‘smart’ is largely ignorant of such processes. The lack of sensitivity, or lack of cognisance, of the ‘everyday’ experiences of the urban poor is often at its most overt in official dealings with informality. The result is that such practices do often extend into the realm of oppositional politics.

Digital and platform activism

The precarious living conditions suffered by the urban poor and the absence of state commitment to service delivery inevitable leads to social mobilisation. In some ways, this can be interpreted as a means to enact citizenship and carve out spaces for counter narratives. When pursued effectively, social mobilisation can challenge and counter political discourses and contribute to new notions of citizenship, space, and economies (Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011; Rusca and Cleaver, 2022). The increasing use of social media and platform technologies by civil society organisations, referred to by Stokols as elements of the ‘insurgent smart city’, comprises digital tools, mobilisation strategies, distribution of information, and online challenges to public discourses, which can ‘re-program and re-activate’ urban spaces Stokols (2023: 4).

My own research finds such strategies to be hybrid in nature. Such actions are not entirely due to, or enabled through, the availability of technology, but the imaginations and socio-cultural energies that motivate and infuse appropriation. Digital activism is suffused with standing practices and histories. Such histories and place-specific experiences are often captured through story-telling and representation of personal encounters (Odendaal, 2023). The layering of subjective experiences with the traditional forms of social mobilisation, such as protest marches and judiciary action, enables an enhanced framing of issues that require state attention. For example, Ndufuna Ukwazi (NU) in Cape Town, South Africa, enables court action to force the local state to deliver on its constitutional mandate to make land available for inclusionary housing, protest marches respond to contentious policy moments, and online activity is used to contest state discourses and tell personal stories of those excluded from formal housing processes (Odendaal, 2023). Furthermore, access to municipal open data, and the availability of open access tools to capture and package information not documented by the state (Ricker et al., 2020), is increasingly becoming part of the data politics of cities in South Africa and elsewhere in the Global South.

Conclusion

The fleeting nature of everyday practices in the South, I would argue, is further enhanced through digital tools. Smart Southern urbanism is decentralised, locally driven, and co-productive. Smart features are appropriated in accordance with local needs, and neighbourhood priorities determine which media and platforms are utilised and for what. What makes such practices endogenous is that the problem to be solved is locally defined and analysed, the technological solutions refined or developed locally, and they are applied to situated issues and evolved to adjust to rapid change and are therefore representative of local place-based dynamics (Odendaal, 2023).

The innovation that flows from grassroots digital innovations is not entirely due to the availability of technology, but also the imagination and socio-cultural energies that are infused by local histories. Analysing the smart city from a Southern urbanist perspective recognises local embeddedness and rejects universalisms (Acuto et al., 2019). I would argue that such an approach is not only applicable to the Global South. Centring human agency allows for a more socially sustainable analysis and design of the smart city that departs from the threat of renewed instrumental rationalities in planning. Adopting a relational lens that is mindful of local histories and socio-cultural dynamics recognises that digital tools are very much part of the everyday in both the North and South. A Southern perspective surfaces the flows and connections that enable livelihoods and the spaces that result from these dynamics as well as the histories, current energies, and future hopes that infuse local places, contributing to an understanding of an urbanity that is constantly in the making.