Emerging Themes, Concepts, and Solutions to Urban Challenges in Africa: Comparing Smart City and Sharing City

Introduction

Smart city as a concept is broad and encompasses several approaches that are capable of employing software and digital infrastructure to promote more efficient, convenient, economic and sustainable cities that meet the present and future needs of city dwellers. The concept gained popularity in late 2000 and today has become a household name among politicians (city administrators), urban planners, and entrepreneurs. Some of these actors proposes, or have actually deployed the concept in a new or repurposed societal system to address systematically urban issues and activities given rise to smart city agendas. This practice and policy focus, particularly in developed countries have enabled what is termed ‘networked’, ‘programmable’, ‘data-driven’ urbanism, or more collectively smart urbanism. The success so far recorded or anticipated has deepen the idea of using ICT to execute urban activities, manage and govern cities particularly outside Africa.

Across media, academia, policy and corporate representatives, smart city have attracted polarized attention. One side of the pole relates to those who criticises the initiatives on the ground of power, capital, equality, participation, citizenship, labour, surveillance, and alternative forms of urbanism. As observed by Kitchin, (2016), these critics often provide little constructive and pragmatic (technical, practical, policy, legal) feedback that would address their concerns. Simple narratives from these critics usually identify economic imperative, over dependency on highly skilled digital platform, over simplicity of city structure and functions, lack of deliberative democracy, disregard to local specificities, speculative or mere fantasy in African context as the challenges and risk associated with smart city. Other fears expressed by smart city critics includes privacy, security and data protection bias, selected bypassing, tendency to customise infrastructures for investment enclaves, tendency to prioritises the values and investments of vested interests, reinforcement of inequalities and propensity to deepen levels of control and regulation.

Beyond these concerns that critics typically focus on, scholars such as Kitchin, (2016), and Boyko et al., (2017) advocates that more attention should be given to political, social or practical potentials inherent in smart city. They argued that smart city should be reoriented to formulate new visions of smart urbanism that seek to gain the promises of smart cities while minimizing their perils. One of their major suggestion is to explore the various criticisms of smart city rhetoric and deployments and to suggest social, political and practical interventions that would enable better-designed, more equitable and just smart city initiatives. Focusing on reframing, re-imaging and remaking of: goals; cities; epistemology; management/governance; ethics and security; stakeholders and working relationships as suggested by Kitchin, (2016), this paper proposes sharing city as African alternatives and supplement to smart city.

Starting with conceptual perspective, this paper in section 2 outlined some of the contextual challenges confronting smart city concept in Africa following extant literature to that regard and also paid attention to how sharing as a principle could be utilized in different domains to enhance the sustainability of cities. On section 3 the paper described the research approach adopted and finally, in section 4 the paper discussed the outcome of evaluating smart city and sharing city and interrogated how it can be strengthened in African cities.