The importance of (thinking beyond) hyphens

Fenna Hoefsloot

Our research field, urban geography, has many hyphened words it relies on. From geo-information, and socio-technical and more-than-human, to space-time and e-governance, we have glued concepts and words together to get a grip on the increasingly intertwined and ever-changing reality of everyday urban life. These hyphenated concepts emphasize the relationality and rationale of the urban. They indicate how today’s cities are only understood through the dialectic relationship between the material, social, and digital elements that structure them. An interconnectedness that is constantly reshaped and redefined as new urban landscapes emerge.

Within Regional Futures, we will be dealing with many more hyphenated words, not in the least the main concept of this research - digitalization-as-urbanization (Datta, 2022) - to capture the socio-technical-material hybridity of current cities. Digitalization-as-urbanisation apprehends the relationship between the city and digital technologies as so all-embracing that we cannot separate them.

Yet, during fieldwork in Nairobi, I came to realize that our emphasis on hyphens contains the risk that we overlook the processes of detachment that are as much part of the city and city-making. Through interviews with spatial planners, land registrars, and GIS engineers, it became apparent how futile it has become in today’s land administration system to detach the concept of land from information, and by extension, the digital from the urban. It is through the processes of mapping, registration, digitalisation, and verification that land becomes a resource or a terrain through which communities try to establish their settlement. It is digitalisation-as-urbanisation.

At the same time, in conversations with civil society actors, I listened to the great frustration there is regarding the government-led processes of digitalization, and how it reveals the tensions between the formal and informal, and all the people who exist in between. In the absence of the state, people and communities innovate and create new governance models and infrastructures to organize urban live in foresee in basic needs. In Nairobi’s land sector, this means that there are a wide variety of certificates and conventions that communities use to regulate land use and transactions outside of the legal regime of conventional land administration. Nevertheless, the attempts of registration and getting land tenure security by communities living in informality in Kenya are a request for help that is treated as a threat.

While disconnection is perhaps most evident within the socio-political and geographical margins of the city, it is not only the urban poor who are detached from urban infrastructures. On the flip side, the elites find ways to disengage themselves from the fabric of the city. For example, through the creation of gated communities and resisting to become part of the collective by opting out of the reciprocal relationships of neighbourhood and community.

At the outset is the question how do we research the things that are beyond the grasp of our conceptual frameworks? As Simone (2022) explains, while a dedicated focus on the relationality of the urban may be capable of grasping how certain urban formations are fabricated in the city, there are processes and spaces that are just beyond the narratives we tell. Simone extends this argument to show how extensive subaltern structures – the surrounds - are constantly created and operating outside of, or in partial detachment from, the infrastructures of the state. This conceptualization provides a useful understanding of the spaces and processes that are defined by their disconnection and exclusion without placing them in dichotomies such as formal/informal or visible/invisible. Moreover, it steers away from only defining them in terms of absences: the deficiency of the state, the scarcity in basic services, or the lack of registration. Rather, Simone turns our gaze towards the heterogenous modes of being and diverse opportunities and strategies for living outside of registration.

As we chart the interplay between material and digital, between land and data, in our research, thinking through hyphens has become useful. These hyphened words make visible the scope of the technological impact on the city, inviting readers to digest this information from the perspective of both construction and emergence, and witness the marks, physical and virtual, that technology sets on the city. Nonetheless, while we research the digitalized city from a relational perspective, we should maintain conceptual space for the structuring power and continuing importance of dis-connection, malalignment, and exclusion from material and digital infrastructures. Specifically, as we start paying attention to the processes of peripheralization through information infrastructures and how these tend to reproduce the patterns of extraction along colonial and racialized lines, we need to be mindful of the implications of the politics of being exposed and to what extend the gaze from the outside can be let in and what has to be warded off.

References:

Datta, A. (2022). The digitalising state: Governing digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south. Progress in Human Geography, 47(1), 141-159.

Simone, A. (2022). The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture. Duke University Press