Short Abstract

Ride-share apps, delivery services, and mobile money produce unequal access and visibility in the African city. This panel invites grounded research on how workers, users, and people navigate a city refracted by technology and platform urbanism.

Long Abstract

Scholarship on platform urbanism has long recognized the role of digital intermediaries such as Uber, Bolt, and AirBnb in the reconfigurations of urban landscapes across the planet. In African cities, these digital platforms arrive as inevitabilities seeking new markets and producing uneven class-based overlays to transport, trade, housing, and credit systems that already function through dense “unformalized1” transaction networks.This panel interprets the conference theme of African Prisms as a metaphor for the ways in which these platforms and other modern technologies and their uses are reconfiguring African cities. Just like a prism, these technologies refract the city into many parts making some of it more legible for some and pushing other people and places further from view.

We invite papers that address the idea of this technologically refracted city and the realities of algorithmic life in African cities, especially those that consider how these divisions are produced and lived. We welcome papers that interrogate a variety of technologies from ride-share platforms, mobile money, artificial intelligence, and new transportation modalities, and also those that consider labor, policy, regulation, and resistance. We especially welcome papers from graduate students, junior scholars, and scholars based on the African-continent.

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