Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition: Scenarios from the mobile age in Nairobi

Abstract

Work in policy and research circles tends to depict urban infrastructural heterogeneity as synonymous with failure or brokenness. Inherent in this tendency is the often-subtle expectation that infrastructures should evolve as do their counterparts elsewhere, or in a linear trajectory from less complete to more complete arrangements. This article opposes such completist lures and inclinations. I recuperate the notion of incompleteness as a constitutive feature and explanatory category for urban infrastructures that, while diverging from so-called norms and ideals, cannot be described as failed or broken. I argue that, rather than devising universalizing solutions to processes of infrastructural heterogeneity, it is perhaps better to see infrastructures as emergent, shifting and thus incomplete. I make this case looking at three successive infrastructures in Nairobi: the Simu ya Jamii kiosk, the M-Pesa stall and the M-Pesa platform. I examine these infrastructures not simply as raw materials or empirical conduits, but as the very starting point in theorizing urban infrastructures from the South. Ultimately, this study not only opens up a vital frame for situated analysis and understanding of urban infrastructures in transition, it also adds to and extends STS analytical frames into non-Northern contexts.