Liza Rose Cirolia: Techno-Worlding: Material Modes of Urban Speculation

Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr. Liza Rose Cirolia, African Centre for Cities

Paper ►

Bio: Dr Liza Rose Cirolia is a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Cities. Her work focuses on the relationship between hybrid infrastructures and urban governance, with a specific interest in technological transitions, urban statecraft, and fiscal assemblages. She is currently the Co-PI on several large research projects including: CLAIMS to energy citizenship (DANIDA); If Cities Could Speak: Spatializing vulnerabilities in Indian and African cities (Wellcome Trust); and Smartness as Wealth: Fintech in Nairobi (Volkswagon). She is the co-founder of the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop and the Platform Studies From Africa Network. She teaches two courses as part of ACC's executive master in Sustainable Urban Practice (MSUP). Link to bio and projects can be found: https://www.africancentreforcities.net/people/liza-cirolia/

Topic: This draft paper draws attention to the durable technological networks that facilitate the ‘worlding’ of African cities. Scholars of the Horn effectively document the role that Somalia’s uniquely home-grown telecommunications and remittance sector has played in post-civil war extra-statecraft and redevelopment. These insights echo calls from African urban studies and STS to showcase technologically rich and often ambivalent modes of African world-making that animate global networks. At this interface between technology and finance, we extend this argument, focussing attention on the capital city of Mogadishu and its ‘techno-worlding’. We show that telecommunications companies, working with networks of closely tied affiliate companies, constitute a speculative project, which at once imagines and produces Mogadishu as a global city. The perception of improved urban security has led to increasing interest in mobilizing the diaspora to invest in durable assets, such as land or logistics. This, we argue, can best be seen in the context of the material economy of real estate, particularly in the more recent expansion areas of the city and the development of satellite estates. It is here where the role of telecommunications companies extends far beyond their traditional remit of providing communications infrastructures and services. Mobilizing the tight relationship between transnational money transfer, financing instruments, and land and infrastructure development, telecommunications engage in the laborious work of both market-making and future-making

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