Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2024

Material politics on and off the grid in Sub-Saharan African urban electricity configurations: an essay on hybrid urbanism

Résumé

In the highly heterogeneous cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, electricity remains a rationed good. Based on a comparative analysis of several case studies, this chapter interrogates the hybridisation and infrastructuring processes at work in electricity configurations composed of multiple socio-technical dispositifs, both centralised and decentralised. The aim is twofold. Firstly, to understand whether and how these dispositifs can ‘act as infrastructure’; and secondly, to explore the terms of an alternative urbanism that socially and spatially organises their diversity into sustainable and affordable services. Based on the materiality of existing socio-technical arrangements and their underlying imaginaries, the chapter introduces three ideal-types of infrastructuring paths (the ‘augmented’ network, plug-and-play arrangements and modular dispositifs), from which we sketch a reflection on what a hybrid urbanism could look like. Examples suggest that the resulting electricity configurations are far from always inclusive. Furthermore, conceiving a hybrid urbanism is compounded by the fact that, for both public authorities and urban dwellers, the dominant imaginary remains tied to the network and hinders any ambitious policy on heterogeneity.
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Dates et versions

hal-04846320 , version 1 (18-12-2024)

Identifiants

Citer

Sylvy Jaglin, Mélanie Rateau, Emmanuelle Guillou. Material politics on and off the grid in Sub-Saharan African urban electricity configurations: an essay on hybrid urbanism. Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities, Edward Elgar Publishing, pp.196-211, 2024, 978-1-80088-914-9. ⟨10.4337/9781800889156.00022⟩. ⟨hal-04846320⟩
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