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.