Prince Karakire Guma

African cities are often portrayed as complex constellations embodying, on one hand, liminal conditions of hand-to-mouth survival, everyday struggle, and precarity, and on the other, shrewd, lively...

This chapter posits incompleteness as a vital paradigm for analyzing and understanding infrastructures in the making, thereby reframing the infrastructural turn across diverse contexts. To illustrate its conceptual relevance as a paradigm, I apply it to the use of digital technologies in the water and electricity sectors in post-networked city contexts. Specifically, the chapter engages with the empirical conditions of urban eastern Africa and ethnographic strategies of following and analyzing infrastructure to grasp its constant making and remaking. It first highlights that incompleteness as a frame allows for a broader interpretation of infrastructure than conventional, completist frames do. Second, it enables a deeper understanding of infrastructure as a relational plurality with incomplete others. And third, incompleteness foregrounds infrastructure development as a process influenced not only by neoliberal interventions but also by situated and socio-material practices.

Bibanda video halls (i.e. shack-like video-viewing spaces), designed to conceal viewers in a darkened environment that approximates the cinematic experience of formal theatres, have emerged as impo...

This paper examines the intersection of urban land appropriation with greening and ungreening in informal settlements, focusing on how internal power struggles drive displacement and exacerbate inequality. Using Nairobi’s Pumwani–Majengo as a case study, the research applies the Situated Urban Political Ecology (SUPE) framework, grounded in environmental justice, to analyse disputes over green spaces. Fieldwork combined semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, life histories, field observations, and archival review with GIS and Landsat-based spatial analysis. Adaptive sampling, reflexivity, and methodological triangulation were used to navigate sensitive contexts and ensure data robustness. Displacement extends beyond physical relocation, severing social, cultural, and economic ties that are vital to resilience. Residents respond through resignation, negotiation, or active resistance. ‘Greening’ and ‘ungreening’ occur simultaneously, politicised and tied to dispossession, enclosure, and green ‘evictions’ that disproportionately affect vulnerable groups, particularly in riparian areas. Land changes create socioeconomic enclaves, privileging wealthier newcomers and marginalising low-income residents. The study challenges the notion of urban green spaces as neutral public goods, showing their appropriation for elite interests, and contributes to debates on environmental governance and land commodification in informal contexts by illustrating how green space disputes reproduce socio-spatial inequalities in rapidly growing cities.

Efforts to transform urbanisation processes highlight the state's pivotal role in shaping unfolding digital futures. Datta and Hoefsloot propose the concept of the state as auteur to underscore the significance of time and the imperative of timing as a performative, strategic, anticipatory, and symbolic practice of the state to project, direct, execute, accelerate, and synchronise circulating technological ideals. In this commentary, I introduce three attributes – time essence, time thicket, and time passage – to further emphasise the centrality of time and timing for the auteurist state in the digital age. Finally, I interrogate what the state as auteur framework might overlook, particularly given that Southern digital futures emerge through multiple open-ended and incomplete essences, thickets, and passages of time.