The post-global city

Katrien Pype reflects on flows, technologies and hotspots in urban Africa

Last week the anthropologist Katrien Pype (KU Leuven) gave a remarkable talk at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities. It was based on her recently published book The Post-Global City: Theorizing Technology Cultures in Urban Africa (2026, University of Michigan Press), co-edited with Omolade Adunbi and Michael M.J. Fischer.

Here are some quick notes I took at the event, plus some additional reading.

Pype and colleagues describe the book as follows:

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork carried out in urban spaces in Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Gabon, Cameroon, and Tanzania, The Post-Global City brings together voices from Africa, Europe, and the United States to inquire into the dialectics between technology and the urban on the African continent.

This ethnographic grounding made all the difference to her spirited talk. This was no exercise in armchair theorising or a loose, Žižekesque orgy of idea associations. Instead, the rich array of empirical examples helped us think in new ways about networks, ‘scapes’, technologies, flows and affects in Africa (and indeed elsewhere).

In the book, Pype et al argue that is is time to move beyond Saskia Sassen’s influential 1990s theory of the global city — in which the Global South was barely an afterthought — towards a portrayal of post-global cities as emerging formations where local people use networks and technologies to ‘operate around, under, and beyond the state and the international “order.”’ Far from utopian realms, these cities are always ‘terrains of struggle’.

Where the global city approach posits a Global South dependent on Northern metropolitan largesse for its survival — often under the guise of humanitarianism or foreign aid — the post-global city model proposed here tracks South-South flows of people, technologies and ideas while not ignoring the legacy of colonialism and globalisation. For instance, the geeks studied by Pype in Kinshasa share a post-global imaginary where their vernacular expertise contrasts with the state’s global city imaginary of Silicon Valley investment in a supposedly low-tech South. For these geeks, what matters is not the ‘benchmarks’ set by expat consultants and their local counterparts but rather new technologies as (potential) connectors.

One keyword in Pype’s conceptual repertoire is ‘affect’, a notion popular in anthropology since the 1990s that overlaps with ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’. White and De Antoni define affect as ‘sensations and physiological shifts in intensity’ that sometimes morph into culturally recognisable feelings. They write:

An uneasy tingling of your skin when you pass through an unknown patch of forest; a sigh of comforting relief when you taste a familiar home-cooked dish after months away; the joyous energy of singing along with friends—word-for-word—the lyrics of a hit song; the high-intensity movements of a shamanic ritual; the low-intensity stillness of meditation; a dampness in the spleen; a longing in the heart; an ache. Many experiences are sensed but are not easily identified with a familiar emotion word like ‘fear’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘joy’, ‘transcendence’, ‘equanimity’, ‘worry’, ‘heartache’, or even ‘pain’.

In her talk, Pype included under the affects rubric ethnographic examples such as the boredom of being stuck at home in Khartoum during the civil war, the joy of selling goods from that same home via WhatsApp (to chase away boredom rather than poverty), the humiliation of being denied a visa by the French or Belgian embassy, the frustration experienced by Kinshasa geeks when dealing with their own government, and others.

A less well known keyword she discussed was ‘hotspots’, those urban sites where people and technology come together: cybercafes, street markets, motorbike taxi ranks, university campuses, and so on (see also Pype 2016). These are often sites of experimentation — a term Pype prefers to ‘bricolage’ which she finds derogatory. They are places ripe for ethnographic research into who is doing the experimenting or what kinds of affects are at play. Hotspots are not always highly visible; some might be associated with stigma and operate under the radar.

Ethnographic fieldwork, argues Pype, can shed light on the dynamic ‘urban webs’ formed by delivery boys, motorbike taxi drivers, entrepreneurs, geeks, shoppers and others, revealing sets of relationships and locales not found on Google Maps. Urban anthropologists should attend not only to people, but also to the non-human entities traditionally studied by science and technology researchers, for example, to the Chinese parts (sometimes broken ones) creatively assembled into Cameroonian motorbikes designed to withstand the rigours of the local roads.

Yet another productive keyword was ‘rhythms’. These will vary greatly depending on the city area, time of the day, weather and other factors. City life can be fast at times, yet it also have moments of stillness. Money, gossip, political news and other social forms can travel at different speeds. The immobility of a traffic jam can generate new webs of (dis)connection via mobile phones, roadside hawking, and other means. Screens and streets are inextricably entangled.

All this makes me want to read the book as soon as my own life entanglements allow it. Judging by Pype’s seminar, it promises to be a treasure trove of human stories and theoretical insights, some of which will likely inspire researchers like myself working in Southeast Asia and other regions. This is the kind of work that demonstrates the value of serious scholarship in an age of meretricious metrics and synthetic blandness.

The book is open access and can be freely downloaded from the University of Michigan Press website.

Reference

Pype, K., 2016. On Interference and Hotspots: Ethnographic Explorations of Rural-Urban Connectivity in and around Kinshasa’s Phonie Cabins. Mededelingen der Zittingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Overzeese Wetenschappen, 62(2), pp.229-60.