Designing the "Off-Grid" city: Empowering the transactions of infrastructure

Architectural Design, 2011

In the face of multiple, complex and contradictory urban phenomena, and the impossibility to define one kind of city/one urbanism, the present short contribution aims to reposition informal urbanism as one of the many existing legitimate processes that are contributing to city building. Over 1 billion people now live in 'slums' or 'informal settlements', a number expected to double by 2030, making what can be labelled 'informal urbanism' globally into the dominant expression of urban form. In our view, architects should formulate appropriate answers in the form of a responsive architecture, an architecture of engagement that has the capacity to reconsider and recalibrate design process within this contemporary urban condition, which could be called 'un-designed' or even 'un-designable'.

Urban Studies, 2023

Smart urbanism is an established research area in geography and the social sciences. We draw on 'worlding-provincialising' strategies identified in an Urban Studies Special Issue from February 2021 to explore how smart infrastructures, a form of smart urbanism, disrupt representations of informality and urban development in new and productive ways. Focussing on the disruptive or troublesome implications of smart infrastructures reveals site-level considerations for developing policy and practice, where acknowledging the nuanced context for its use can present opportunities for not only understanding energy transitions in the Global South, but also creates opportunities for cross-learning. Drawing on our collective insights on a solar mini-grid project in Qandu-Qandu, Cape Town, we sketch out three ways the disruptive aspects of solar energy can be helpful for rebuilding knowledge on the informal city by: (i) re-positioning notions of 'formal' and 'informal' infrastructure(s) in urban planning and policymaking; (ii) highlighting new avenues for citizen autonomy; and (iii) recasting the informal city as a site for continuous innovation and learning.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of modernity, leading to the frequent oversight of everyday infrastructures. Extensive capital-intensive infrastructures that are fully integrated and have paled into the background of everyday life are commonly dismissed, criticized, or misconstrued as deteriorating, incongruous, and in need of repair and reinforcement to "measure up." Similarly, ordinary and hybrid techno-popular infrastructures are frequently demeaned as alternative, informal, secondary, less modern, and not belonging. In an era where preference and priority are given to shiny new things and innovations, everyday infrastructures are seldom acknowledged as substantive modes of operation in their own right. This article advocates a shift in perspective. Drawing illustrative cases from eastern Africa, I examine everyday infrastructures as critical sites of reference for analyzing, theorizing, and organizing the urban. Rather than starting from a preconceived notion of modernity, I examine everyday infrastructures on their own terms. I propose a series of registers-incomplete relationalities, mundane temporalities, and heterogeneous modernities-to stimulate a reappraisal of how we view, read, and think about infrastructure. Accordingly, I reiterate the need to reorient the foundational parameters of infrastructure, advocating for a decentered and heterodox perspective that emphasizes infrastructural plurality, multiplicity, and inherent incompleteness.

Cultural Anthropology Online, 2012

A decade ago, a growing awareness emerged as to the need to approach the issue of urban life from a wider perspective, that of the (urban) Global South, in order to broaden our theoretical scope, and expand our common understanding of what 'urbanity' might mean. The figure of Kinshasa is often invoked, used, and abused, as a trope to represent the quintessential postcolonial city. Whether or not this is true, Kinshasa has certainly more than enough decentering power to force us into reconsidering many of the common definitions and taken for granted categories we have used so far to figure out the qualities of urban life today. The following lines pick up on this.

Urban Geography, 2022

There has been a resurgence in interest in the off-grid city, with a focus on off-grid urban spaces in the Global South, and on how the off-grid functions as a collection of places, lived spaces, and dynamic infrastructural configurations. As scholars and practitioners working in the off-grid urban context in South Africa, we contend it is necessary to question the assumptions of the "off-grid" concept in urban geography in terms of its implications for conducting research. We thereby identify four areas for further conceptual and empirical elaboration. The first area concerns the importance of continuing to redefine academic and practical understandings of the "grid", ultimately moving to redefine its meaning in the city. The second is a need to decolonise and decentre the relationship between global and technocratic urban development "standards", practices and discourses, and the 2 granular off-grid context. The third area is the imperative of critically engaging with narratives of inadequacy and imperfection as often applied to off-grid, informal urban spaces. The fourth is the priority of moving towards a needs-based approach to off-grid development, with a focus on coproduction of urban knowledge with local communities to ensure their needs and interests are met.

Today megacities in developing countries feature the world's highest rates of population growth, which causes modernization islands to stand next to large-scale informal urban settlements. In these informal territories, a deep concentration of poverty and social problems coexist with social and economic dynamics, creative initiatives and a sense of urbanity. Taking into account that currently one-third of the world's population live in slums and distant outskirts, and that the poor constitute the world's fastest growing group, it is vital that new intervention strategies are investigated based on the understanding of the informal territory. Thus, this whole new universe requires new research methods, new vocabularies, new concepts, and more dynamic design strategies to intervene in those areas with more flexible approaches, considering multiple futures, diverse types of urban design and different programs, rather than stable or permanent configurations. As our case study, we elected Heliopolis, a prime-location area in Sao Paulo, Brazil, undergoing constant (trans) formation and where most of the territory is still self-constructed. The intervention possibilities, which may trigger a chain reaction of improvements, range from possible solutions to the urgent housing issue to meeting the needs of leisure and interaction of the community. Most of all, they are supposed to involve joint work between professionals and the community as in a combined and creative building blocks activity.

In: E. Pieterse & N. Edjabe (Eds.) African Studies Reader: Pan-African Practices. 1 no. 1 (2009): 23-40., 2009

In spite of the fact that an analysis of the different physical sites through which the city exists and invents itself helps us to better understand the specific ways in which the materiality of the infrastructure generates particular sets of relations in the city, I would submit that in the end, in a city like Kinshasa, it is not, or not primarily, the material infrastructure or the built form that makes the city a city. The city, in a way, exists beyond its architecture . . . the infrastructure and architecture that function best in Kinshasa are almost totally invisible on a material level. 1

Research for Development, 2017

T he inner city of Johannesburg is about as far away as one can get from the popular image of the African village. Though one of Africa's most urbanized settings, it is also seen as a place of ruins-of ruined urbanization, the ruining of Africa by urbanization. But in these ruins, something else besides decay might be happening. This essay explores the possibility that these ruins not only mask but also constitute a highly urbanized social infrastructure. This infrastructure is capable of facilitating the intersection of socialities so that expanded spaces of economic and cultural operation become available to residents of limited means.