As African cities experience unprecedented urban growth, the integration of smart technologies presents both immense opportunities and structural challenges.
Much of the dominant smart city discourse originates from Western technocratic models, emphasising efficiency, surveillance and top-down governance. While these approaches often overlook Africa’s distinct urban realities − where histories of colonialism, informality and socio-economic inequality shape how technology is adopted − they are not the only challenge.
Traditionalist structures and entrenched governance practices can also hinder innovation, sometimes resisting change in ways that perpetuate inequality and limit opportunities for inclusive urban development.
A truly effective smart city approach must critically engage with external influences and internal constraints, ensuring technology is harnessed in a way that is both forward-looking and deeply rooted in local needs.
A different vision emerges when smart city development is approached from the lived experiences of those who inhabit these spaces. In many African cities, the process of urban transformation is deeply intertwined with cultural and historical narratives that resist the imposition of external models.
The engagement with smart technologies must reflect the rhythms of everyday life, where informality is not a problem to be solved but a fundamental feature of urban resilience.
The stories of communities like Westbury, a historically marginalised neighbourhood in Johannesburg, illustrate the necessity of repositioning smart city narratives to foreground local agency and knowledge.
Beyond technocratic efficiency
The conventional approach to smart cities has often framed technological advancement as a matter of governance efficiency, where automated infrastructures promise to streamline urban management. But this vision of efficiency often disregards the ways in which technology can reinforce inequality, privileging those who already possess digital access, while sidelining those on the margins.
The reliance on imported technologies, developed with assumptions about Western urbanisation patterns, creates tensions between the imagined future of smart cities and the actual socio-political dynamics of African urban life.
A city is smart not because it is automated but because it enables its residents to exercise agency in shaping its development.
A more grounded approach to smart cities recognises that urban life is not simply about managing data flows and optimising resource allocation. It is about people, relationships and the networks that sustain communities.
In Westbury, a participatory co-design process explored in recent research with my colleague Terence Fenn from the University of Johannesburg enabled residents to articulate their own visions of a smart neighbourhood.
Unlike corporate-driven smart city initiatives, which often introduce technologies without community consultation, this approach prioritised dialogue, collaboration and shared ownership of the urban future.
Residents expressed concerns about safety, advocating for smart surveillance but insisting that control must remain local, accountable to the people rather than to faceless external entities. The vision extended beyond security, to the ways in which smart technologies could enable cultural and creative expression, imagining augmented reality as a tool for historical storytelling and public art.
Sustainability as a community resource
The role of sustainability emerged as central to these discussions. The smart city is not simply a digital city but a place where ecological consciousness shapes urban design.
In the workshops, participants envisioned energy infrastructures that functioned as community assets rather than corporate utilities. Solar-powered microgrids were not seen merely as technical solutions but as tools for fostering autonomy and resilience.
The concept of sustainability was not imported from global environmental discourses but drawn from deeply rooted communal practices of sharing and collective resource management.
Challenging imported models of urban innovation
Reframing smart cities in the African context requires moving beyond one-size-fits-all technological solutions. The realities of urban life demand a more nuanced, historically informed approach that acknowledges the contradictions of modernity, where digital connectivity coexists with infrastructural gaps and where innovation emerges as much from necessity as from design.
The logic of informality, often dismissed as a developmental obstacle, is in fact a site of ingenuity where alternative economic and social structures take shape.
Smart city transformations must engage with these existing structures, recognising that innovation is not always about introducing the new, but about reconfiguring what already exists in ways that empower communities.
Smart cities as sites of local agency
This perspective challenges the dominant narratives of smart cities as spaces of total technological control and efficiency. A city is smart not because it is automated but because it enables its residents to exercise agency in shaping its development.
The lessons from Westbury suggest that participatory urbanism offers a more just and sustainable pathway to integrating smart technologies.
The expansion of African cities presents an opportunity to build futures that are deeply embedded in local realities rather than mere replications of foreign models. By acknowledging the complexities of African urban life, smart city projects can evolve into genuinely inclusive and adaptive spaces where technology serves as a means rather than an end.
The future of smart cities in Africa is not just a design challenge − it is a socio-economic and political one. It requires rethinking inherited models of urban development and embracing alternative approaches to space, governance and technology.
Success must not be measured solely by the volume of data collected, but by how seamlessly technology integrates into the social and cultural fabric of everyday life.
Addressing economic disparities, equitable resource distribution and social mobility must be central to this vision, alongside confronting power dynamics and reimagining policy-making to be more inclusive.
By reclaiming the smart city as a space for collective imagination and participatory design, African cities can chart new paths that honour their histories, identities and aspirations for the future.
* Based on a paper with co-author Terence Fenn in the Journal of Community Informatics.
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