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14 - On the Need for Sustainable Digital Urban Infrastructure in Twenty-First-Century South African Cities

from Part III - Sustainable Urban Planning in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2023

By
Stefan Chavez-Norgaard
Edited by
Patrick Brandful Cobbinah  and
Eric Gaisie
Patrick Brandful Cobbinah
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Eric Gaisie
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Summary

In South African cities, achieving sustainable urban development requires reckoning with segregated and unequal geographies of apartheid. Apartheid-era planning logics were deliberately designed to sequester and exclude the majority of city residents and remain systemic impediments to sustainable urban living. While scholars typically consider sustainable physical infrastructures, this chapter considers the need for equitable digital infrastructures as complementary sustainable urban interventions across apartheid’s fault lines. Drawing on critical scholarly engagements with urban sustainability and infrastructure, and ethnographic approaches with employees and customers at a grass-roots ICT centre in Cape Town, it was found that while digital infrastructure appears highly formal and planned, residents often gain access to that infrastructure from grass-roots initiatives achieved through socio-technical and relational assemblages, themselves infrastructural in nature. Scholars and practitioners must attend to these assemblages: they offer potential for a reimagined African urban planning regime in which sustainable urban development exists alongside community self-sufficiency and enhanced democratic engagement.

Keywords

South Africaurban sustainabilityinformation and communications technology (ICT)infrastructureinformality
Type
Chapter
Information
Reimagining Urban Planning in Africa , pp. 239 - 260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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