Prince K Guma
Biographic Data
| ID | 191826 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Prince K Guma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Prince K |
| FAMILY NAME | Guma |
| SIGNATURE | GUMA P K |
| AFFILIATIONS | British Institute in Eastern Africa |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8511-5664 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 193 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 31 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Incomplete geographies of hustle
African cities are often portrayed as complex constellations embodying, on one hand, liminal conditions of hand-to-mouth survival, everyday struggle, and precarity, and on the other, shrewd, lively...
Data, AI, and infrastructures of resistance under authoritarianism
Existing studies across Geography and related fields have yet to develop a sustained account of how new and emergent digital technologies reconfigure popular resistance and dissent under authoritarianism. This article examines digital platforms as key sites of anti-establishment politics, focusing on how data-driven systems and artificial intelligence (AI) reshape the infrastructures through which protest is organized, coordinated, mediated, and …
Bibanda video halls in Uganda
In Uganda, bibanda video halls have emerged as important vernacular spaces where foreign films that circulate globally are translated, interpreted, and reimagined for local audiences. This paper examines bibanda video halls as spaces highlighting cultural and performative dimensions of vernacular transcreation and cinematic reworlding in progress. Drawing on site visits and artistic visualisations, interviews with veejays (video jockeys), video h…
Urban lives, worlds and frontiers of (and beyond) the Concrete City
Contestations over space
This paper examines the intersection of urban land appropriation with greening and ungreening in informal settlements, focusing on how internal power struggles drive displacement and exacerbate inequality. Using Nairobi’s Pumwani–Majengo as a case study, the research applies the Situated Urban Political Ecology (SUPE) framework, grounded in environmental justice, to analyse disputes over green spaces. Fieldwork combined semi-structured interviews…
Transforming the smart city ideal from the margins
Under construction – towards critical perspectives on infrastructuring and infrastructured labour in Africa
The unending corridor
Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and…
Where is the African urbanist? Decentering and pluralizing global urban thought
Everyday Infrastructures of Urban Life
Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of modernity, leading to the frequent oversight of everyday infrastructures. Extensive capital-intensive infrastructures that are fully integrated and have paled into the background of everyday life are commonly dismissed, criticized, or misconstrued as deteriorating, incongruous, and in need of repair and reinforcement to 'measure up'. Similarly, ordinary …
Humanistic" City in the Age of "Capitalocene
The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the “humanistic” core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. Firs…
Displacement, Out-of-placeness, and urban research in the south
Interdisciplinary engagements encounter a significant challenge in surmounting defensive barriers within conventional urban research. This emphasizes the necessity of creating space for comprehensive dialogs to tackle pivotal issues related to social justice in urban practice and academia. Urban research in the global south mandates a specific perspective that extends beyond the common oversight and veiling of specific viewpoints and encounters. …
Smart cities and their settings in the Global South
Smart cities have gained increased traction worldwide. This commentary situates smart cities in the context of Southern urban settings. I demystify urban informality and recast informality as a valuable marker in the study of smart cities. Reiterating Prasad et al.'s appeal to explore the centrality of informality for smart city planning and development in the Global South, I contend that informality holds epistemic value, particularly in highlig…
Urban way of life as survival
Southern cities have become increasingly inscribed in broader postcolonial and neoliberal development forces. In tandem with global pandemics, digital threats, and migration and climate crises, these forces have posed critical implications for all residents, decimating the middle class, widening the gap between elites and masses, deepening the cost of living for the urban majority, and making it harder to rise through the ladder. In such an envir…
Plug-in urbanism
Across Africa, cities have become fodder for grand-scale foreign investments and redevelopment projects signifying a distinct phenomenon synonymous with a new kind of urbanism. This paper offers a critical commentary on the proliferation of new infrastructure plans tailored as policy, technological fixes and solutions to urbanisation challenges, both real and perceived. We stir a conversation around the notion of ‘plug-in urbanism’: first, as an …
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Post‐pandemic cities
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis
The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infrastructures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a mere site of accumulation and exploitation. In this article, in contrast, we offer a more ambivalent a…
Nairobi’s Rise as a Digital Platform Hub
The Kenyan capital of Nairobi has become a host of thriving industries and innovations based on the production, consumption, and domestication of digital payments platforms such as M-Pesa. Adapting these mobile phone–based applications to its informal economies and urban culture, Nairobi has developed into a seedbed for information technology advances and constellations of new services. These platforms have played an especially prominent role in …
The Temporal Incompleteness of Infrastructure and the Urban
This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrast…
Smartness Beyond the Network
This article critiques decontextualized notions of smart urbanism by examining the variegated and spontaneous infrastructural configurations stemming from the deployment of a digital project in an informal urban setting. We offer an empirical examination of the rollout of water ATMs in Mathare Valley, Nairobi, to highlight three types of “smartness beyond the network”: first, where water ATMs evidence a smart digital infrastructure that transcend…
Post-, pre- and non-payment
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digitaltechnologi…
Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-Covid-19 university
We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore a…
Urban Popular Economies
What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, whic…
Recasting Provisional Urban Worlds in the Global South
This article contributes to ongoing calls that provoke a recasting of provisional urban worlds in the global South. I draw from informal and transient structures – shacks, shanties, micro-stalls – in Kibera, a high-density settlement in Nairobi, to offer an explication of provisional worlds that transcends teleological conceptions of what constitutes ‘the urban’. I argue that while often disregarded, sidelined, and marginalized in formal planning…
Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition
Work in policy and research circles tends to depict urban infrastructural heterogeneity as synonymous with failure or brokenness. Inherent in this tendency is the often-subtle expectation that infrastructures should evolve as do their counterparts elsewhere, or in a linear trajectory from less complete to more complete arrangements. This article opposes such completist lures and inclinations. I recuperate the notion of incompleteness as a constit…
Smart city making? The spread of ICT-driven plans and infrastructures in Nairobi
Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of emergent plans with ordinary realities of the African city. We demonstrate that while processes of sm…
Post‐pandemic cities
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
Smart urbanism? ICTs for water and electricity supply in Nairobi
In recent years, the study of urban infrastructure has become central to examining African cities. This paper is a contribution to this scholarship. Of particular interest is the interface between telecommunications and urban water and electricity utility systems. I examine the degree to which ICT deployments for urban water and electricity supply shape and are shaped by the urban context of Nairobi, Kenya. I show how in recognition of the city’s…
Plug-in urbanism
Across Africa, cities have become fodder for grand-scale foreign investments and redevelopment projects signifying a distinct phenomenon synonymous with a new kind of urbanism. This paper offers a critical commentary on the proliferation of new infrastructure plans tailored as policy, technological fixes and solutions to urbanisation challenges, both real and perceived. We stir a conversation around the notion of ‘plug-in urbanism’: first, as an …
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis
The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infrastructures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a mere site of accumulation and exploitation. In this article, in contrast, we offer a more ambivalent a…
Urban Popular Economies
What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, whic…
Urban way of life as survival
Southern cities have become increasingly inscribed in broader postcolonial and neoliberal development forces. In tandem with global pandemics, digital threats, and migration and climate crises, these forces have posed critical implications for all residents, decimating the middle class, widening the gap between elites and masses, deepening the cost of living for the urban majority, and making it harder to rise through the ladder. In such an envir…
Post-, pre- and non-payment
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digitaltechnologi…
Infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in urban Africa
Since its inception in the 1990s, mobile telephony in Africa has evolved, reflecting varied advances in technology. These advances have become particularly reminiscent of the role of mobile technologies in everyday facets of life. In this paper, we examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in an urban African context. We demonstrate how urban Africa is being instrumented through the incoming of mobile telephony, but also how the …
The unending corridor
Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and…
Humanistic" City in the Age of "Capitalocene
The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the “humanistic” core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. Firs…
Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-Covid-19 university
We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore a…
Everyday Infrastructures of Urban Life
Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of modernity, leading to the frequent oversight of everyday infrastructures. Extensive capital-intensive infrastructures that are fully integrated and have paled into the background of everyday life are commonly dismissed, criticized, or misconstrued as deteriorating, incongruous, and in need of repair and reinforcement to 'measure up'. Similarly, ordinary …
Transforming the smart city ideal from the margins
Smart cities and their settings in the Global South
Smart cities have gained increased traction worldwide. This commentary situates smart cities in the context of Southern urban settings. I demystify urban informality and recast informality as a valuable marker in the study of smart cities. Reiterating Prasad et al.'s appeal to explore the centrality of informality for smart city planning and development in the Global South, I contend that informality holds epistemic value, particularly in highlig…
Feminist solidarity
The rise of the contemporary feminist movement and its subsequent engagement with gender equality and democratic politics calls for further investigation. This study is a contribution to this end. It raises debate as to how feminist influence towards the theorization, reconstruction and dismantlement of existing constructions of sex and politics in non-patriarchal ways frames our thought, debate and perception, as well as policy outcomes on the s…
The governance and politics of urban space in the postcolonial city
With the fading of colonial memory in postcolonial Africa, dramatic changes are emerging and are shaping urban cities in quite significant ways. Urbanization is exploding. Large numbers of Africans are becoming town dwellers. Informal settlements alike are becoming the norm rather than the exception. Urban challenges have thus become complex, hence the need for an infrastructural rethink to urban governance and development in Africa. The interest…
Smart urbanism? ICTs for water and electricity supply in Nairobi
In recent years, the study of urban infrastructure has become central to examining African cities. This paper is a contribution to this scholarship. Of particular interest is the interface between telecommunications and urban water and electricity utility systems. I examine the degree to which ICT deployments for urban water and electricity supply shape and are shaped by the urban context of Nairobi, Kenya. I show how in recognition of the city’s…
Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition
Work in policy and research circles tends to depict urban infrastructural heterogeneity as synonymous with failure or brokenness. Inherent in this tendency is the often-subtle expectation that infrastructures should evolve as do their counterparts elsewhere, or in a linear trajectory from less complete to more complete arrangements. This article opposes such completist lures and inclinations. I recuperate the notion of incompleteness as a constit…
Smart city making? The spread of ICT-driven plans and infrastructures in Nairobi
Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of emergent plans with ordinary realities of the African city. We demonstrate that while processes of sm…
Recasting Provisional Urban Worlds in the Global South
This article contributes to ongoing calls that provoke a recasting of provisional urban worlds in the global South. I draw from informal and transient structures – shacks, shanties, micro-stalls – in Kibera, a high-density settlement in Nairobi, to offer an explication of provisional worlds that transcends teleological conceptions of what constitutes ‘the urban’. I argue that while often disregarded, sidelined, and marginalized in formal planning…
Infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in urban Africa
Since its inception in the 1990s, mobile telephony in Africa has evolved, reflecting varied advances in technology. These advances have become particularly reminiscent of the role of mobile technologies in everyday facets of life. In this paper, we examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in an urban African context. We demonstrate how urban Africa is being instrumented through the incoming of mobile telephony, but also how the …
Nairobi’s Rise as a Digital Platform Hub
The Kenyan capital of Nairobi has become a host of thriving industries and innovations based on the production, consumption, and domestication of digital payments platforms such as M-Pesa. Adapting these mobile phone–based applications to its informal economies and urban culture, Nairobi has developed into a seedbed for information technology advances and constellations of new services. These platforms have played an especially prominent role in …
The Temporal Incompleteness of Infrastructure and the Urban
This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrast…
Smartness Beyond the Network
This article critiques decontextualized notions of smart urbanism by examining the variegated and spontaneous infrastructural configurations stemming from the deployment of a digital project in an informal urban setting. We offer an empirical examination of the rollout of water ATMs in Mathare Valley, Nairobi, to highlight three types of “smartness beyond the network”: first, where water ATMs evidence a smart digital infrastructure that transcend…
Post-, pre- and non-payment
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digitaltechnologi…
Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-Covid-19 university
We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore a…
Urban Popular Economies
What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, whic…
Displacement, Out-of-placeness, and urban research in the south
Interdisciplinary engagements encounter a significant challenge in surmounting defensive barriers within conventional urban research. This emphasizes the necessity of creating space for comprehensive dialogs to tackle pivotal issues related to social justice in urban practice and academia. Urban research in the global south mandates a specific perspective that extends beyond the common oversight and veiling of specific viewpoints and encounters. …
Smart cities and their settings in the Global South
Smart cities have gained increased traction worldwide. This commentary situates smart cities in the context of Southern urban settings. I demystify urban informality and recast informality as a valuable marker in the study of smart cities. Reiterating Prasad et al.'s appeal to explore the centrality of informality for smart city planning and development in the Global South, I contend that informality holds epistemic value, particularly in highlig…
Urban way of life as survival
Southern cities have become increasingly inscribed in broader postcolonial and neoliberal development forces. In tandem with global pandemics, digital threats, and migration and climate crises, these forces have posed critical implications for all residents, decimating the middle class, widening the gap between elites and masses, deepening the cost of living for the urban majority, and making it harder to rise through the ladder. In such an envir…
Plug-in urbanism
Across Africa, cities have become fodder for grand-scale foreign investments and redevelopment projects signifying a distinct phenomenon synonymous with a new kind of urbanism. This paper offers a critical commentary on the proliferation of new infrastructure plans tailored as policy, technological fixes and solutions to urbanisation challenges, both real and perceived. We stir a conversation around the notion of ‘plug-in urbanism’: first, as an …
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Post‐pandemic cities
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis
The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infrastructures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a mere site of accumulation and exploitation. In this article, in contrast, we offer a more ambivalent a…
Humanistic" City in the Age of "Capitalocene
The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the “humanistic” core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. Firs…
Contestations over space
This paper examines the intersection of urban land appropriation with greening and ungreening in informal settlements, focusing on how internal power struggles drive displacement and exacerbate inequality. Using Nairobi’s Pumwani–Majengo as a case study, the research applies the Situated Urban Political Ecology (SUPE) framework, grounded in environmental justice, to analyse disputes over green spaces. Fieldwork combined semi-structured interviews…
Transforming the smart city ideal from the margins
Under construction – towards critical perspectives on infrastructuring and infrastructured labour in Africa
The unending corridor
Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (19 works) · Geography (15 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (15 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (10 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (10 works) · Economic geography (9 works)