Fieldwork Spotlight: Mapping Digital Urban Futures of the Global South

Ayona’s research explores how digitalisation is reshaping urban peripheries in Nairobi, Guadalajara, and Mumbai. By interviewing state officials and residents in these rapidly transforming areas, the project investigates how digital tools, such as smart planning platforms, land registries, and automated governance systems, are used by the state to extend control over marginal urban spaces. At the same time, the fieldwork captures how these processes are being contested and redefined by the communities most affected by them.

The central questions guiding this summer’s research were:

• How does digitalisation enable the state to “see” and capture new territories for metropolitan urbanisation?
• How is this territorial capture resisted, negotiated, or reshaped in the everyday lives of citizens?

Ayona’s team is tracing how urban studies concepts in the global south can be brought into conversation with the everyday politics of digital governance. The aim is to map the tensions between automated planning processes and the lived experiences of peripheral communities, highlighting how digital technologies both enable and obscure state control.

Despite the intensity of the research, Ayona finds great joy in fieldwork:

She also notes the personal enrichment that comes from experiencing diverse geographies, cultures, languages, and sometimes making new friends.