Trend data about the confluence of precarious work, makeshift housing, and expensive and intermittent access to essential services like water and energy in the context of dramatic youthful population growth instil an incurable desire for ‘catalytic solutions’. Since I spend too much of my time pondering over the spatial intersection of these and other trend lines – within the vortex of probability, it is difficult not to succumb to despair. This despair can of course be a badge of honour in a half decent university, but I have little interest in, or use for, this form of intellectual cachet. On the contrary, morbid fascination with the inevitability of the status quo demands a counterpoint; it calls out for a different sensibility.

The potentialities of platform urbanism seem to demand the clarification of what this sensibility might be. My always-at-hand dictionary baked into Apple’s OS informs me that the primary meaning of sensibility is ‘the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity…’ For lack of a better term, let’s call my uppermost emotional response to platform urbanism one of ‘cautious optimism’. ‘Cautious’ because I’ve been around the block of urban reform and planning a few times and am very aware of the sticky complexities involved in gaining traction for transformative ideas, let alone moving them forward once they have currency. ‘Optimistic’ because there is a promise in the notion of platform, of something that is available to everyone and therefore inherently egalitarian, or at least in its founding structuration. Of course, my wary voice will immediately point out the naivety of such an assumption. It is possible to substantiate the dispositions that flow from a cautiously optimistic sensibility along three tensions that invite inhabitation.

Tension 1: Urgency versus modesty. Given the scale of the urban need for access to basic socio-economic rights, routinised social violence, bureaucratic mendacity, and precarious and low-paid work amidst widening social and spatial inequalities, it is difficult to ignore the urgency of the urban development question in Africa and the global South. At the same time, the track record of failed top-down policy interventions is so stark and irrefutable that one cannot but speak with a voice of modesty and provisionality about intentional ‘development’.[1] I’d like to insist that learning how to nurture the fire in one’s belly about routinised injustice whilst working carefully and incrementally in specific contexts is the only way of advancing with a hope of achieving meaningful systemic change.

Tension 2: Novelty versus old hat. Across the websites of actors as diverse as the World Economic Forum, management consultancies (e.g. McKinsey and PWC), slum dweller movements, informal worker movements, technological hubs, science councils, innovation hubs, and so forth there is a palpable sense of optimism about what digital innovations could bring forth into the world.[2] Apps can solve the knowledge asymmetries that plague small-scale farmers; sensors in communal toilets in slums can yield valuable public health information; intelligent buildings and streets can re-route traffic and heat dynamics to offset health risks; and the list goes on, and on, and on… Most of these make perfect sense and seem so simple, so obvious, so logical, and most importantly, doable. Utterly seductive. Given the obvious benefits for large populations of cities, it is hard to resist the allure of these novel inventions and the can-do milieus that they tend to thrive in – maker spaces, experimentation labs, innovation clusters, etcetera. However, anyone who has spent even a modest amount of time with the mechanics of introducing new ideas, tools, processes, or formats, will tell you that uptake only succeeds if the process of implementation is able to embed the novelty into the fabric of what exists in social, cultural, institutional and economic terms.[3] If not, the host rejects the transplant or infusion, leaving disappointment and disillusionment in its wake. It is this insight that has driven five decades of theorising and experimenting with participatory decision-making practices. The sensibility that is called for remains open to new ways of thinking, understanding and doing, often mediated by new technological and processing possibilities, but also grounded in a commitment to understand social-cultural contexts and the kinds of innovations that may be incipient in that landscape.

Tension 3: Micro versus meso. A lot of great innovative ideas tend to only work when introduced at the micro scale: a household or organisation or a cluster of neighbours. This is related to the fact that it is easier to forge common purpose with a small group of people and more financially viable to test a new approach with a small group. Furthermore, broader political and economic interests are less likely to feel threatened by a micro project compared to an ambitious multi-scalar programme. However, returning to the scale and scope of the pressing challenges that confront most cities, simply proliferating thousands of micro initiatives is not enough to shift the systemic dynamics of the city. Any innovation that addresses an urban problematic or potentiality will have to figure out where it positions itself on the continuum between micro and meso, and that decision will have a temporal dimension and will need to adapt as conditions and opportunities shift. Inhabiting this tension demands an astute political and institutional reading that will always be incomplete.

Armed with an awareness of these tensions as productive reminders that I have to keep my cautiously optimistic sensibility in check, I want to situate the potentialities for platform urbanism in a simple normative frame that we use to foster common purpose among diverse institutions and actors in various policy realms in Africa. This normative frame is anchored by four urban development imperatives:

- environmental sustainability, which pivots people towards the green or sustainable economy;

- social inclusion through access to basic services (energy, water, sanitation, waste removal, education and health care) to address the unacceptably high levels of multi-dimensional poverty that stunts the potential of Africa’s youthful population;

- employment (across the formal, informal, social sectors); and

- institutional competence (capable state, effective civil society organisations, and productive businesses).[4]

These imperatives serve as normative anchors and political horizons. They are also elastic. They can have meaning in intimate settings and at the same time find expression at a global or continental scale. They can also fulfil a translational function. For example, global covenants such as the SDGs or the Paris Climate Accord can be read through these imperatives as well as the more homegrown Agenda 2063 of the African Union. This might make them meaningless, but in my mind, they open up potential for creative substantiation of new formats of infrastructure investment and deployment combined with highly distributed modalities of basic service delivery that can be planned, implemented and managed by communities themselves – a kind of embodied participatory development and governance model that can thrive with platform enablement. In the next two instalments I will explore this claim through a few examples.