Liza Rose Cirolia
Biographic Data
| ID | 258032 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Liza Rose Cirolia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Liza Rose |
| FAMILY NAME | Cirolia |
| SIGNATURE | CIROLIA L R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5850-2327 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 237 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Worlding Mogadishu: ‘New cities’ and material modes of urban speculation
Over the past 15 years, Mogadishu – the capital city of Somalia – has undergone rapid transformation. As the state was rebuilt following its collapse in the 1990s, the city became a site of diaspora return and investment. In this paper we explore the role of telecommunications companies in the development of urban land in relation to these contemporary, contested processes. We focus on Hormuud Telecommunications Company and its affiliated compani…
Coastal encounters with electrical hybridity: Karpowership in Africa’s energy transition
Karpowership’s large floating vessels provide electricity to millions of people in Africa’s coastal urban centers. Both the technology choice and the business practices of the family-run company are controversial. Not only do the ships use highly polluting heavy fuels, but there are also persuasive allegations of corruption and predatory practices. Extending this critique, we read powerships through the lens of both energy transitions and electri…
Durabilities in the age of disruption
Fintech 'frontiers' and the platformed motorcycle: Emergent infrastructures of value creation in African cities
Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa's…
Distributed energy technologies, decentralizing systems and the future of African cities
Within global debates, decentralization with respect to renewable electricity is positioned as pivotal in overlapping calls for decarbonization, energy access and just transitions. The promise is that technologies that are smaller and distributed will deliver a range of benefits, including enabling infrastructural innovations and expanding sustainable access, notably by empowering local authorities. While shifting to low-carbon systems is imperat…
Queer Infrastructures: Objects of and Orientations towards Urban Research Practice
Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of “queer infrastructure”. Queer infrastructure, as we deploy it, reflects both an object of and orientation towards urban research practice. As an object, we discuss the function, use, and practice of (our) queer networks, specifically for research assumed to be unrelated to studies of sexuality and located in the urban African context. Here we centre …
Ring roads, revived plans, & plotted practice: The multiple makings of Nairobi’s urban periphery
From the Thika Superhighway to the opening of the Expressway, Nairobi’s recent history has been marked by the rapid development of large-scale mobility infrastructures. The paper uses the recently built urban bypass highways that circle the city as a heuristic entry point to theorise the urban and contribute to debates on the nature of the urbanising periphery in Africa. The empirical contribution of the paper is structured into three parts: plan…
Algorithmic Suturing: Platforms, Motorcycles and the 'Last Mile' in Urban Africa
The 'last mile' is not only a powerful metaphor of contemporary life, but also the tangible site of a challenge, whether for governments wanting to reach their citizens or companies wanting to reach their customers. In urban Africa this challenge is compounded by the fragmented material condition of cities. As a result, a growing number of tech companies have been compelled by the possibility of creating digital platforms that address the unique …
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis: A Southern perspective on the frontiers of platform urbanism
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 statecraft: The governance of transport infrastructures in African cities
Through the lens of infrastructure governance, this article explores the configurations and operations of the urban state in sub-Saharan Africa. We deploy and extend the concept of ‘statecraft’, drawing on the recent scholarship within urban studies which explores city and municipal statecraft. Consolidating insights across several studies on transport governance in African cities, we identify three ‘sites’ of urban statecraft evident in urban Af…
From problematisation to propositionality: Advancing southern urban infrastructure debates
In this article, we explore the notion of propositionality to advance southern urban infrastructure debates towards more anticipatory forms of scholarship. By propositionality, we mean a research sensibility that engages, first and foremost, with propositions for infrastructure futures on their own terms. While scholarship on infrastructures in southern cities has contributed to very fruitful conceptual and methodological innovations, we argue th…
Apportioned city: Gendered delineations of asylum, work and violence in Cape Town
This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women f…
Precarity, Permits, and Prayers: Working Practices' of Congolese Asylum-Seeking Women in Cape Town
This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers with temporary permits, navigate Cape Town's informal urban economy. We argue that the intersections of temporary permit status and gender, as well as the particularities of diaspora flows and settlements, compound the precarity of everyday life. We engage with how precarity shapes and is shaped by what we define as 'working practices.' These practice…
Fintech urbanism in the startup capital of Africa
From innovations in mobile money to bookkeeping devices, the burgeoning of financial-technologies (fintech) in the Global South has been critiqued by scholars concerned with financialization, datafication, and recently, neo-coloniality. While sympathetic to these concerns, this paper argues for a more descriptive, ambivalent, and urban reading of the implications and stakes of this fintech boom. Using Cape Town as a case study, we explore how the…
Conflicts Between and Within: The ‘Conflicting Rationalities’ of Informal Occupation in South Africa
One of the most pervasive planning challenges in Southern cities is the formal housing shortage. In South African cities informal occupation of vacant buildings and land is one way in which urban dwellers meet their housing needs. This paper uses land occupations in Cape Town, South Africa, as a lens to explore conflicting rationalities. We show that there are conflicting rationalities both between the state and occupiers, as well as within the s…
Infrastructure governance in the post-networked city: State-led, high-tech sanitation in Addis Ababa’s condominium housing
Ethiopia’s mass-scale subsidized housing delivery programme has driven the rapid expansion of middle-income, mid-rise settlements on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, requiring the provision of infrastructure to newly developed areas. In the case of the Kotari housing project, established sanitation systems were deemed inappropriate for the site, resulting in the deployment of novel technology, a Membrane Bioreactor (MBR). Such decentralised technolo…
Transfers, taxes and tariffs: Fiscal instruments and urban statecraft in Cape Town, South Africa
Municipal revenue is an important site of urban statecraft. Against the backdrop of the metropolitan consolidation of Cape Town’s urban governance in 2000, this paper traces two key revenue sources: national transfers to local government, with a focus on conditional grants; and the City’s own sources, including property tax and service charges. While the design of these instruments intends to be redistributive and support metropolitan autonomy, t…
Remittance micro‐worlds and migrant infrastructure: Circulations, disruptions, and the movement of money
Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end‐users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno‐fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyd…
Fractured fiscal authority and fragmented infrastructures: Financing sustainable urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa
The current global development agendas provide relatively little guidance on how the incredible challenge of sustainable urban development in Africa can and should be financed. This paper makes the case for understanding this development challenge at the nexus of urban governance and city infrastructure. Tracing African urban development trends over the post-colonial period, the paper makes three arguments. First, African cities experience fractu…
Contested fiscal geographies: Urban authority, everyday practice, and emerging state-finance relations
The study of fiscal geographies foregrounds the spatialities of fiscal instruments, such as taxes or bonds. Of central concern in the fiscal geographies literature are the ways that fiscal spaces are co-constituted with state-form and the built environment. Recent scholarship argues for ‘placing’ fiscal geographies in urban studies, drawing attention to the ways in which fiscal tools shape urban governance and the material development of city spa…
Incremental housing as a node for intersecting flows of city-making: Rethinking the housing shortage in the global South
Incremental housing drives urbanization worldwide, and is recognized as the basis for socially relevant solutions to housing shortages in the global South. However, scholarship on incremental housing continues to focus largely on tenure, building materials and housing conditions at a local level, while incremental housing is embedded in – and dependent on – larger urban and regional systems and flows. We argue that a further reconceptualization o…
Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings
Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity …
Contournements. Fiscalité et exceptions informelles dans les villes de M'Bour et de Kisumu
Cet article est une analyse comparative du prélèvement de l'impôt foncier à M'Bour (Sénégal) et à Kisumu (Kenya.) Il part du constat que les autorités fiscales s'abstiennent parfois de prélever cet impôt, alors qu'elles ont l'obligation légale et l'autorisation de le faire. Dans cet article, nous questionnerons deux pratiques d'exceptions informelles à la loi, ainsi que la manière dont elles sont justifiées. À M'Bour, les administrateurs fiscaux …
Land-based financing in sub-Saharan African cities
Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several Afric…
Politics/matter: Governing Cape Town’s informal settlements
Through the lens of South Africa’s informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agentic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not a…
From problematisation to propositionality: Advancing southern urban infrastructure debates
In this article, we explore the notion of propositionality to advance southern urban infrastructure debates towards more anticipatory forms of scholarship. By propositionality, we mean a research sensibility that engages, first and foremost, with propositions for infrastructure futures on their own terms. While scholarship on infrastructures in southern cities has contributed to very fruitful conceptual and methodological innovations, we argue th…
Negotiated planning’: Diverse trajectories of implementation in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare
This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare. Three planning implementation instruments form the basis of the comparison across cities. These instruments aim to give effect to plans and include development regulation, infrastructure investment, and land allocation. In contrast to reading African planning efforts as a catalogue of failures, this analysis allows us to see the many actors and…
Urban statecraft: The governance of transport infrastructures in African cities
Through the lens of infrastructure governance, this article explores the configurations and operations of the urban state in sub-Saharan Africa. We deploy and extend the concept of ‘statecraft’, drawing on the recent scholarship within urban studies which explores city and municipal statecraft. Consolidating insights across several studies on transport governance in African cities, we identify three ‘sites’ of urban statecraft evident in urban Af…
Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings
Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity …
Incremental housing as a node for intersecting flows of city-making: Rethinking the housing shortage in the global South
Incremental housing drives urbanization worldwide, and is recognized as the basis for socially relevant solutions to housing shortages in the global South. However, scholarship on incremental housing continues to focus largely on tenure, building materials and housing conditions at a local level, while incremental housing is embedded in – and dependent on – larger urban and regional systems and flows. We argue that a further reconceptualization o…
Politics/matter: Governing Cape Town’s informal settlements
Through the lens of South Africa’s informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agentic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not a…
Towards Habitat III: Confronting the disjuncture between global policy and local practice on Africa's ‘challenge of slums’
The ‘challenge of slums’ is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where in 2001 71.9% of the urban population lived in slums. This article reviews the housing programmes of a selected number of African countries (Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa) to argue that while until recently African shelter policies at least in name continued to be mostly in line with international enabling and participatory approaches t…
Remittance micro‐worlds and migrant infrastructure: Circulations, disruptions, and the movement of money
Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end‐users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno‐fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyd…
Fractured fiscal authority and fragmented infrastructures: Financing sustainable urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa
The current global development agendas provide relatively little guidance on how the incredible challenge of sustainable urban development in Africa can and should be financed. This paper makes the case for understanding this development challenge at the nexus of urban governance and city infrastructure. Tracing African urban development trends over the post-colonial period, the paper makes three arguments. First, African cities experience fractu…
Contested fiscal geographies: Urban authority, everyday practice, and emerging state-finance relations
The study of fiscal geographies foregrounds the spatialities of fiscal instruments, such as taxes or bonds. Of central concern in the fiscal geographies literature are the ways that fiscal spaces are co-constituted with state-form and the built environment. Recent scholarship argues for ‘placing’ fiscal geographies in urban studies, drawing attention to the ways in which fiscal tools shape urban governance and the material development of city spa…
Land-based financing in sub-Saharan African cities
Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several Afric…
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis: A Southern perspective on the frontiers of platform urbanism
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…
Fintech urbanism in the startup capital of Africa
From innovations in mobile money to bookkeeping devices, the burgeoning of financial-technologies (fintech) in the Global South has been critiqued by scholars concerned with financialization, datafication, and recently, neo-coloniality. While sympathetic to these concerns, this paper argues for a more descriptive, ambivalent, and urban reading of the implications and stakes of this fintech boom. Using Cape Town as a case study, we explore how the…
Infrastructure governance in the post-networked city: State-led, high-tech sanitation in Addis Ababa’s condominium housing
Ethiopia’s mass-scale subsidized housing delivery programme has driven the rapid expansion of middle-income, mid-rise settlements on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, requiring the provision of infrastructure to newly developed areas. In the case of the Kotari housing project, established sanitation systems were deemed inappropriate for the site, resulting in the deployment of novel technology, a Membrane Bioreactor (MBR). Such decentralised technolo…
Reframing the ‘gap market’: Lessons and implications from Cape Town’s gap market housing initiative
Fintech 'frontiers' and the platformed motorcycle: Emergent infrastructures of value creation in African cities
Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa's…
Algorithmic Suturing: Platforms, Motorcycles and the 'Last Mile' in Urban Africa
The 'last mile' is not only a powerful metaphor of contemporary life, but also the tangible site of a challenge, whether for governments wanting to reach their citizens or companies wanting to reach their customers. In urban Africa this challenge is compounded by the fragmented material condition of cities. As a result, a growing number of tech companies have been compelled by the possibility of creating digital platforms that address the unique …
Ring roads, revived plans, & plotted practice: The multiple makings of Nairobi’s urban periphery
From the Thika Superhighway to the opening of the Expressway, Nairobi’s recent history has been marked by the rapid development of large-scale mobility infrastructures. The paper uses the recently built urban bypass highways that circle the city as a heuristic entry point to theorise the urban and contribute to debates on the nature of the urbanising periphery in Africa. The empirical contribution of the paper is structured into three parts: plan…
Precarity, Permits, and Prayers: Working Practices' of Congolese Asylum-Seeking Women in Cape Town
This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers with temporary permits, navigate Cape Town's informal urban economy. We argue that the intersections of temporary permit status and gender, as well as the particularities of diaspora flows and settlements, compound the precarity of everyday life. We engage with how precarity shapes and is shaped by what we define as 'working practices.' These practice…
Distributed energy technologies, decentralizing systems and the future of African cities
Within global debates, decentralization with respect to renewable electricity is positioned as pivotal in overlapping calls for decarbonization, energy access and just transitions. The promise is that technologies that are smaller and distributed will deliver a range of benefits, including enabling infrastructural innovations and expanding sustainable access, notably by empowering local authorities. While shifting to low-carbon systems is imperat…
Transfers, taxes and tariffs: Fiscal instruments and urban statecraft in Cape Town, South Africa
Municipal revenue is an important site of urban statecraft. Against the backdrop of the metropolitan consolidation of Cape Town’s urban governance in 2000, this paper traces two key revenue sources: national transfers to local government, with a focus on conditional grants; and the City’s own sources, including property tax and service charges. While the design of these instruments intends to be redistributive and support metropolitan autonomy, t…
Contournements. Fiscalité et exceptions informelles dans les villes de M'Bour et de Kisumu
Cet article est une analyse comparative du prélèvement de l'impôt foncier à M'Bour (Sénégal) et à Kisumu (Kenya.) Il part du constat que les autorités fiscales s'abstiennent parfois de prélever cet impôt, alors qu'elles ont l'obligation légale et l'autorisation de le faire. Dans cet article, nous questionnerons deux pratiques d'exceptions informelles à la loi, ainsi que la manière dont elles sont justifiées. À M'Bour, les administrateurs fiscaux …
Coastal encounters with electrical hybridity: Karpowership in Africa’s energy transition
Karpowership’s large floating vessels provide electricity to millions of people in Africa’s coastal urban centers. Both the technology choice and the business practices of the family-run company are controversial. Not only do the ships use highly polluting heavy fuels, but there are also persuasive allegations of corruption and predatory practices. Extending this critique, we read powerships through the lens of both energy transitions and electri…
Apportioned city: Gendered delineations of asylum, work and violence in Cape Town
This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women f…
Overcoming the disjunctures: Competing discourses on informal settlements in South Africa
Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, community groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and how they should be addressed. …
(W)Escaping the Challenges of the City: A Critique of Cape Town’s Proposed Satellite Town
Overcoming the Challenge of Vertical Consolidation in South Africa's Low-Income Settlements: A Case Study of Du Noon
Reframing the ‘gap market’: Lessons and implications from Cape Town’s gap market housing initiative
Towards Habitat III: Confronting the disjuncture between global policy and local practice on Africa's ‘challenge of slums’
The ‘challenge of slums’ is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where in 2001 71.9% of the urban population lived in slums. This article reviews the housing programmes of a selected number of African countries (Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa) to argue that while until recently African shelter policies at least in name continued to be mostly in line with international enabling and participatory approaches t…
Overcoming the disjunctures: Competing discourses on informal settlements in South Africa
Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, community groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and how they should be addressed. …
Negotiated planning’: Diverse trajectories of implementation in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare
This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare. Three planning implementation instruments form the basis of the comparison across cities. These instruments aim to give effect to plans and include development regulation, infrastructure investment, and land allocation. In contrast to reading African planning efforts as a catalogue of failures, this analysis allows us to see the many actors and…
Land-based financing in sub-Saharan African cities
Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several Afric…
Politics/matter: Governing Cape Town’s informal settlements
Through the lens of South Africa’s informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agentic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not a…
Incremental housing as a node for intersecting flows of city-making: Rethinking the housing shortage in the global South
Incremental housing drives urbanization worldwide, and is recognized as the basis for socially relevant solutions to housing shortages in the global South. However, scholarship on incremental housing continues to focus largely on tenure, building materials and housing conditions at a local level, while incremental housing is embedded in – and dependent on – larger urban and regional systems and flows. We argue that a further reconceptualization o…
Towards a multi-scalar reading of informality in Delft, South Africa: Weaving the ‘everyday’ with wider structural tracings
Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity …
Contournements. Fiscalité et exceptions informelles dans les villes de M'Bour et de Kisumu
Cet article est une analyse comparative du prélèvement de l'impôt foncier à M'Bour (Sénégal) et à Kisumu (Kenya.) Il part du constat que les autorités fiscales s'abstiennent parfois de prélever cet impôt, alors qu'elles ont l'obligation légale et l'autorisation de le faire. Dans cet article, nous questionnerons deux pratiques d'exceptions informelles à la loi, ainsi que la manière dont elles sont justifiées. À M'Bour, les administrateurs fiscaux …
Fractured fiscal authority and fragmented infrastructures: Financing sustainable urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa
The current global development agendas provide relatively little guidance on how the incredible challenge of sustainable urban development in Africa can and should be financed. This paper makes the case for understanding this development challenge at the nexus of urban governance and city infrastructure. Tracing African urban development trends over the post-colonial period, the paper makes three arguments. First, African cities experience fractu…
Contested fiscal geographies: Urban authority, everyday practice, and emerging state-finance relations
The study of fiscal geographies foregrounds the spatialities of fiscal instruments, such as taxes or bonds. Of central concern in the fiscal geographies literature are the ways that fiscal spaces are co-constituted with state-form and the built environment. Recent scholarship argues for ‘placing’ fiscal geographies in urban studies, drawing attention to the ways in which fiscal tools shape urban governance and the material development of city spa…
Conflicts Between and Within: The ‘Conflicting Rationalities’ of Informal Occupation in South Africa
One of the most pervasive planning challenges in Southern cities is the formal housing shortage. In South African cities informal occupation of vacant buildings and land is one way in which urban dwellers meet their housing needs. This paper uses land occupations in Cape Town, South Africa, as a lens to explore conflicting rationalities. We show that there are conflicting rationalities both between the state and occupiers, as well as within the s…
Infrastructure governance in the post-networked city: State-led, high-tech sanitation in Addis Ababa’s condominium housing
Ethiopia’s mass-scale subsidized housing delivery programme has driven the rapid expansion of middle-income, mid-rise settlements on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, requiring the provision of infrastructure to newly developed areas. In the case of the Kotari housing project, established sanitation systems were deemed inappropriate for the site, resulting in the deployment of novel technology, a Membrane Bioreactor (MBR). Such decentralised technolo…
Transfers, taxes and tariffs: Fiscal instruments and urban statecraft in Cape Town, South Africa
Municipal revenue is an important site of urban statecraft. Against the backdrop of the metropolitan consolidation of Cape Town’s urban governance in 2000, this paper traces two key revenue sources: national transfers to local government, with a focus on conditional grants; and the City’s own sources, including property tax and service charges. While the design of these instruments intends to be redistributive and support metropolitan autonomy, t…
Remittance micro‐worlds and migrant infrastructure: Circulations, disruptions, and the movement of money
Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end‐users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno‐fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyd…
Urban statecraft: The governance of transport infrastructures in African cities
Through the lens of infrastructure governance, this article explores the configurations and operations of the urban state in sub-Saharan Africa. We deploy and extend the concept of ‘statecraft’, drawing on the recent scholarship within urban studies which explores city and municipal statecraft. Consolidating insights across several studies on transport governance in African cities, we identify three ‘sites’ of urban statecraft evident in urban Af…
From problematisation to propositionality: Advancing southern urban infrastructure debates
In this article, we explore the notion of propositionality to advance southern urban infrastructure debates towards more anticipatory forms of scholarship. By propositionality, we mean a research sensibility that engages, first and foremost, with propositions for infrastructure futures on their own terms. While scholarship on infrastructures in southern cities has contributed to very fruitful conceptual and methodological innovations, we argue th…
Apportioned city: Gendered delineations of asylum, work and violence in Cape Town
This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women f…
Precarity, Permits, and Prayers: Working Practices' of Congolese Asylum-Seeking Women in Cape Town
This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers with temporary permits, navigate Cape Town's informal urban economy. We argue that the intersections of temporary permit status and gender, as well as the particularities of diaspora flows and settlements, compound the precarity of everyday life. We engage with how precarity shapes and is shaped by what we define as 'working practices.' These practice…
Fintech urbanism in the startup capital of Africa
From innovations in mobile money to bookkeeping devices, the burgeoning of financial-technologies (fintech) in the Global South has been critiqued by scholars concerned with financialization, datafication, and recently, neo-coloniality. While sympathetic to these concerns, this paper argues for a more descriptive, ambivalent, and urban reading of the implications and stakes of this fintech boom. Using Cape Town as a case study, we explore how the…
Queer Infrastructures: Objects of and Orientations towards Urban Research Practice
Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of “queer infrastructure”. Queer infrastructure, as we deploy it, reflects both an object of and orientation towards urban research practice. As an object, we discuss the function, use, and practice of (our) queer networks, specifically for research assumed to be unrelated to studies of sexuality and located in the urban African context. Here we centre …
Ring roads, revived plans, & plotted practice: The multiple makings of Nairobi’s urban periphery
From the Thika Superhighway to the opening of the Expressway, Nairobi’s recent history has been marked by the rapid development of large-scale mobility infrastructures. The paper uses the recently built urban bypass highways that circle the city as a heuristic entry point to theorise the urban and contribute to debates on the nature of the urbanising periphery in Africa. The empirical contribution of the paper is structured into three parts: plan…
Algorithmic Suturing: Platforms, Motorcycles and the 'Last Mile' in Urban Africa
The 'last mile' is not only a powerful metaphor of contemporary life, but also the tangible site of a challenge, whether for governments wanting to reach their citizens or companies wanting to reach their customers. In urban Africa this challenge is compounded by the fragmented material condition of cities. As a result, a growing number of tech companies have been compelled by the possibility of creating digital platforms that address the unique …
Geography (20 works) · Economics (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Economic growth (14 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (12 works) · Business (11 works) · Economic geography (8 works) · Engineering (8 works)