Jonathan Silver. The Infrastructural South: Techno-Environments of the Third Wave of Urbanization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. ix + 305. $50.00. Paper. ISBN: 9780262546874.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, wallowing in the mire.Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth interrogated decolonized African states as representations of "racist logics of colonial planning shaped cities" (128).This description also illustrates the "extended time/space of infrastructure" needed to develop Africa for Western modernity.However, Jonathan Silver's The Infrastructural South challenges these stereotypes, revealing precolonial African cities, colonial-built legacies, modernity as a European concept, and the emerging urban wave of techno-environments shaping everyday life in Africa.Thinking about urbanization through infrastructures means understanding the creation and construction of a dynamic, "complex and interconnected entanglement facilitating the flows and circulations required for everyday social reproduction for households" (10).Engaging with technology in Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, Silver captures how urban dwellers in "ordinary" or "secondary cities" struggle to "catch up" with digitized infrastructures found in large metropolitan regions.This gap prevents an understanding of the diversity of processes, trajectories, and futures in smaller urban centers (164).Silver's text employs ethnography, in-depth interviews, and personal encounters to present his findings on the innovations of the "networked city" in the Global South.He discusses how these innovations manifest in enclave imposition, corridor digital, and postcolonial metropole scenarios, which differ from what might be expected when applying the "abstracted universalized model of urban modernity from the West to urban Africa" (242).Frantz Fanon's perspective of underprivileged cities lacking essential resources has influenced the urbanization of African cities.The development of these cities now relies on "incremental techno-environments" to address challenges related to electricity, water, sanitation, and housing.For millions of people, living in the city means dealing with and adapting to the technologies required for social reproduction due to the absence of a fully functional networked system.Silver describes this urbanization from below as a process where residents, communities, and informal (and sometimes formal) service providers strive to manage and manipulate resource flows to sustain the urban experience despite its instability (85).
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2024.134
Author: Mathias Chukwudi Isiani
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Media Technology
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402884868