Abstract

This talk will focus on temporality as a significant aspect of state power as it digitalises and transforms how we might conceive of the ‘urban’. In the global south, a key strategy to address the challenges of urbanisation has been a push towards digitalising the state’s territorial information management systems that are reliant upon the increased use of algorithmic scripts and machine learning. Here the state acts as a ‘time-fixer’ as it shapes in the most fundamental ways, the time-bound nature of policy, the adoption of new technologies for mapping territorial expansion, and its relationship with past, present and future urban worlds. Based on the findings of a five-year international research project across Kenya, Mexico and India, I will examine how our understanding of the ‘urban’ is in fact ‘time-bound’ with the temporal power of the digitalising state that mediates when, where and how territories are drawn into fugitive landscapes of urbanisation. Drawing upon examples of territorial struggles in the metropolitan peripheries of Nairobi, Guadalajara and Mumbai, I will show how indigenous and marginal communities also in turn get entangled with the time-bounded nature of the digitalising state in the peripheries where place is assumed to be timeless, and history is enacted through their struggles with the state’s temporal power to assert control over the nature and meaning of what it means to be ‘urban’ in the global south.