Smart Cities for Informal Cities: A Theoretical Framework of Data, Legibility and Inclusion in the Digital Governance of Rapidly Urbanising African Settlements

Abstract

The smart-city model was designed for cities that are already mapped, metered, addressed and formally governed. Most urban growth in Africa is occurring in settlements that are none of these. This theoretical paper asks what a smart city can mean when the city is informal. Drawing on the critical smart-city literature, on urban theory and the scholarship on informality, and on recent research on digital technologies, remote sensing and community data practices in African cities, it distinguishes three functions that digital urban systems perform: rendering the city legible to the state, optimising the flows the state already manages, and extending services to residents. It argues that in informal cities the first function is contested because legibility has historically preceded eviction, the second is largely beside the point because the flows that matter are not state-managed, and the third is where the value lies but where investment is thinnest. The paper develops a framework in which digital urban governance is evaluated by its effects on the security, services and voice of informal residents rather than by sensors deployed or dashboards built, derives seven propositions about the conditions under which smart-city initiatives include rather than displace the urban poor, and examines community-generated data, participatory mapping and incremental formalisation as alternative models. Lagos anchors the analysis. The paper closes with implications for state governments, technology vendors, development partners and the research agenda of African urban studies. It concludes that a smart city built for the informal city would be one in which the residents who built the city are the first to benefit from knowing it better, which is a political choice before it is a technical one.