Paper short abstract:

Technological determinism to e-waste recycling tends to view micro-scale, ingenious activities developing around e-waste, especially from the Global South, unpalatable. Hacking activities which spontaneously arise out of unregulated patches create platforms for potential un-projected urbanisation.

Paper long abstract:

Hacking defunct electronics (i.e. refurbishing, recycling, reusing and repairing) envisage a future through ingenuity and creativity employed by informal workers. All that is needed is to stretch our gaze beyond burning cables and dump sites and follow the material extracted from defunct devices as they are transformed, integrated and percolate into the city, the social, cultural, and economic activities. Hacking e-waste is not just compensational for lacking techno-infrastructure and ‘compensation for the lack of successful urbanisation’, African cities are complex and still saddled with colonial, post-colonial, and late capitalism ramifications. They appear not necessarily to follow any particular trajectory of urbanisation that confuses policymakers, let alone researchers. However, these complex ‘micro activities’ are valuable in building the city and the world.

This paper argues that the value extracted from e-scrap materials through informal labour not only supplements the poor waste management infrastructures in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Furthermore, they challenge models of e-waste governmentality copied from the Global North and pasted in the South. When infrastructure for waste management is absent or incapacitated, quotidian hacking activities arise to fill the vacuum by inserting localised knowledge to create livelihood out of what is discarded. This paper is about stretching our imagination and seeing the intersectionality of e-waste and lived experiences of the city-zens.