The territorial politics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south
Global and national initiatives to adopt smart technologies in local governments, with the claim that opportunities presented by digitalisation will resolve the challenges of urbanisation – are now literally automating regional futures. This project will conduct the first comprehensive South-South investigation of the dynamics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation – the transition to automated planning processes in metropolitan regions, and its impacts on regional urbanisation. The project will conduct research in peri-urban municipalities of three rapidly growing metropolitan regions where municipal digitalisation is directed towards strategic regional planning. These municipalities face major challenges with transforming paper-based colonial and postcolonial bureaucracies into automated planning processes within highly unequal contexts, and therefore represent the wider experience of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south.
THEMES
Digitalising state
- How is the ‘digitalising state’ assembled in the municipal scale?
- How does the digitalising state automate urbanisation?
Information Infrastructures
- How is information stored, circulated and retrieved?
- How are information infrastructures territorialised?
Territorial Politics
- How does digitalisation capture new territories for expansion?
- How is territorial expansion contested and disrupted in the peripheries?
Project details https://www.regionalfutures.org/
Blogs
Digitization of Land Information Management Systems in Kenya: An Inevitable Messy Affair
Land Brokers and Co-Production of Land Administration Services in Nairobi’s Urban Peripheries
Sessions https://www.regionalfutures.org/all-outputs/aag-regionalfutures
