Regional Futures: The territorial politics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south

Project Information

REGFUT

Grant agreement ID: 101019318

DOI

10.3030/101019318

EC signature date 21 August 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 862,00

EU contribution

€ 2 499 862,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REGFUT (Regional Futures: The territorial politics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the last two decades, an information revolution in the global south has profoundly shaped the urbanisation of metropolitan regions. Global and national initiatives to adopt smart technologies in local governments, with the claim that opportunities presented by digitalisation will resolve the challenges of urbanisation – are now literally automating regional futures. This project is conducting the first comprehensive South-South investigation of the dynamics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation – the transition to automated planning processes in metropolitan regions, and its impacts on regional urbanisation. The project will conduct research in peri-urban municipalities of three rapidly growing metropolitan regions in India, Kenya and Mexico where municipal digitalisation is directed towards strategic regional planning. These municipalities face major challenges with transforming paper-based colonial and postcolonial bureaucracies into automated planning processes within highly unequal contexts, and therefore represent the wider experience of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south. Through detailed ethnography, interviews and information audit trails in digitalising municipalities, the project will investigate a) the rescaling of the digitalising state in local governance; b) the territorialisation of information infrastructures; and c) territorial politics of digitalisation.

Why is it important to society?
Federal governments in India, Kenya and Mexico have invested heavily into national digitisation programmes. Their efforts to ‘automate’ regional planning and urbanisation have brought about sweeping transformations in the material, social, cultural, infrastructural and political contexts of metropolitan regions, creating new forms of territorial politics while reinforcing existing social and spatial inequalities. Peripheral municipalities with legacies of paper bureaucracies and poor digital capacity are now part of public sector reforms to decommission paper documents, build digital record rooms, establish centralised information systems and automate planning processes.

Aims and Objectives:
a) To build new ‘southern theories’ of urbanisation focussing on the digitalisation of regional governance.
b) To produce empirically original evidence of digitalisation-as-urbanisation through South-South comparisons of metropolitan peripheries of Mumbai, Nairobi and Guadalajara.
c) To develop innovative methodologies that combine interdisciplinary approaches from geography, anthropology and regional studies in investigating digitalisation-as-urbanisation.
d) To disseminate findings that are empirically rich and theoretically produced from the global south across multiple academic and lay audiences.
e) Build capacity among research institutions and early career researchers across the global south.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Achievements of the project so far:

1) Continue to build new ‘southern theories’ of digitalisation-as-urbanisation including several conceptual innovations.
- Territorialising the everyday digitalising state: We have published one agenda setting paper on the 'digitalising state' (Datta 2022) and one on the temporality of the state (Datta and Hoefsloot, forthcoming 2024) in high impact peer-reviewed international Journals and further have recently also received a contract (Datta and Reyes) from Manchester University Press for a book titled 'Control, Shift, Govern: Technologies of state power in the digital era'.
- Governing information infrastructures: We are conceptualising the governance of information across the materialities of paper and digital formats. To this end we have published one agenda setting paper (Datta and Muthama 2024) and have submitted a book manuscript under contract with UCL Press titled 'Informational Peripheries: Rethinking the urban in a digital age'. Two other journal papers are under review (Reyes and Muthama; Hoefsloot et al.) with high impact international journals.
- Governing territorial politics in the ‘digital turn’: A major contribution of this project so far is in understanding how the state governs territorial politics in an era of municipal digitalisation. By focussing on the 'digital turn' in global, national and local urbanisation initiatives we are re-examining the terrain of territorial politics through the transformation of state spaces and the governance of information infrastructures. To this end we have three book chapters forthcoming (Datta and Muthama; Datta and Demerutis; Gupta and Datta) in edited volumes.

2) To produce empirically original evidence of digitalisation-as-urbanisation through South-South comparisons of metropolitan peripheries of Mumbai, Nairobi and Guadalajara. So far, the team has conducted over 300 interviews and 50 ethnographic observations across three cases with a wide range of state and non-state actors, and community members. The team has authored 3 reports (one from each case study) published on the project website.

3) To develop innovative methodologies that combine interdisciplinary approaches from geography, anthropology and regional studies in investigating digitalisation-as-urbanisation. We are developing a series of novel methodologies including organograms, information audit trails and annotated databases.

4) To disseminate findings that are empirically rich and theoretically produced from the global south across multiple academic and lay audiences. In 4-5 Sep 2023, we organised an International symposium titled 'The Digitalising State' in London that was attended by 30 participants including international team members. The team has also organised a series of sessions in international academic conferences (RGS and AAG) in 2023 and 2024 where international team members presented findings from the project. We have also held 4 local policy and stakeholder workshops - 2 in Nairobi, and one each in Mumbai and Guadalajara, that are enabling more democratic and sustainable pathways to land digitalisation. Reports link: https://www.regionalfutures.org/en/outputs
The PI has delivered 8 keynotes in international academic and policy audiences including a keynote in June 2024 in the UN-Habitat conference in Hamburg.
A total of 13 Blogs have been written by team members and published on the project website. (available here: https://www.regionalfutures.org/all-blog)

5) Build capacity among research institutions and early career researchers (ECR) in the team spread across the UK, India, Mexico and Kenya. This includes following activities:
- fortnightly local team meetings to check on progress and provide constructive feedback,
- monthly brainstorming sessions to reflect upon findings and discuss conceptual innovations,
- a fortnightly reading group led by postdocs and attended by all 12 team members,
- regular full team training sessions on ethics, risk assessment, data management, conducting interviews and field observations and so on,
- ECRs have presented findings in conferences and workshops in Ireland, Germany and South Africa.
This continuous training has led to successes as the two UK based post-docs have both recently received seed funding from UCL to conduct focus group workshops with stakeholders and communities in Mexico and Kenya. This funding supplements our ongoing work with communities in the metropolitan peripheries.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

REGFUT project has five key objectives, all of which are on target to being achieved, and often exceeded. These objectives are being realised through partnerships and collaboration with thress international research institutions in Kenya, Mexico and India as well as a good relationship with the European Commission. Importantly, these objectives are having a real impact on local governments in the global south, on the work of state officials, private sector and other non-state actors. Significantly it has already substantially built research capacity of early career researchers in the global north and south.

EXPECTED RESULTS
We expect to make major contributions in conceptualising the theme of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south through detailed examinations of municipal digitalisation and its dynamics with urbanisation. Specifically we expect to contribute to the following themes.
- Territorialising the everyday digitalising state
- Governing information infrastructures
- Governing territorial politics in the ‘digital turn’

BEYOND STATE OF THE ART
1. Temporalities of the digitalising state. The project is highlighting how time and temporality works in a through the digital-urban. The digital fantasy is all about temporal order and is reflected in the grandiose ambitions of the state. This temporal ordering is not by chance but by design, and timing is a strategy of digitalisation.

2. Urban AI spectrums: This was unplanned in the proposal, but has become a significant theme. In much of our fieldwork, AI remains an aspirational discourse in state departments that are often derailed by their inability to pool together the necessary technologies and human resources to make this possible. Yet AI is not just a fantasy – indeed AI is used in specific parts of land digitisation projects, which we are also examining in the fieldwork.

The Informational periphery