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Paper short abstract:

I pay particular attention to the pursuit of aspiring tech innovators in Kinshasa who invent digital solutions in order to make urban life more efficient and less cumbersome - two pillars of the imagination of "smart cities". Their inventions propose to "thin", even "short-cut" urban relationships.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I will pay particular attention to the pursuit of aspiring tech innovators in Kinshasa who invent digital solutions in order to make life in Kinshasa more efficient and less cumbersome - two pillars of the imagination of "the smart city". Rather than attending to the local adoption or appropriation of smart designs from abroad, I zoom in on "Kinois" digital products. The tech world attracts many Kinshasa’s young adults, because it formulates novel vocabularies, proposes new scripts for a livable, “better life” (vivre mieux), and claims particular understandings of precarity, vulnerability and interdependence. Their technological innovations need to be understood as a direct dialogue with a particular experience of the everyday, one in which (Kinois) daily life is understood to be in need of remedy, and technology can provide a solution. In particular, as I will show, Kinois tech developers assess their lifeworld as “socially precarious”, and formulate tech-based “solutions” in order to find a way out. Relationships and ethics in the city are reflected upon; new tools for navigating the urban social space are proposed; and new modalities of becoming and relating to urban others are imagined. All in all, these innovations are expressions of fraught, even excessive sociality. While imagining new solutions, tech entrepreneurs become mindful of their relationships, some of which appear as ambivalent and in need of “thinning” and even “short-cutting”.