Odendaal’s book challenges the universal smart-city narrative by following digital urban practices in Sierra Leone, Kenya, Uganda, Zanzibar and South Africa. Instead of judging African cities against a fully integrated technological ideal, it examines situated initiatives around mobility, food security, social mobilisation and public culture. The iconic idea is “situated smartness”: technological urbanism as an assemblage shaped by local social relations, spatial practices, institutional conditions and forms of trust. Its theoretical contribution lies in shifting attention from imported smart-city templates to platform urbanism as a hybrid and negotiated process. The conceptual operation is relational: technologies are assessed through the connections they enable and the governance tensions they generate rather than through abstract levels of digital maturity. The bridge to African urban theory is exact. Digital systems become another field in which African cities do not represent delayed versions of a universal future; they produce distinctive socio-technical forms capable of revising what “smart urbanism” itself can mean.
URBANISM MEETS ART