Digital futures and African urban transitions: thinking with urban speculation
18 May - 24 June 2025
Biography
Liza Cirolia is a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Her current research focuses on recasting infrastructural imperatives and imaginaries for African cities, accounting for how both local and global forces come to shape – and are shaped by – infrastructural processes. While she has conducted collaborative research in many African cities, she has a sustained focus on Nairobi (Kenya) and Cape Town (South Africa).
Over the past seven years, Dr Cirolia has developed a coherent body of work on financing and governing infrastructure in Africa. Deploying relational methods from geography, planning, and anthropology, she has focussed attention on the complex and often contentious relationship between durable legacy networks (often controlled by struggling utilities) and decentralized/off-grid technologies (provided by the private sector or informal economies). Examples of her scholarly work include collaborative research on the use of decentralized sanitation technologies in middle-income housing projects in Addis Ababa and energy mini-grids in peri-urban Kampala. These technological devices serve as entry points for exploring questions of multi-level governance, urban statecraft, and heterogeneous infrastructures.
Inspired by her interest in both finance and technology, Liza has developed a sub-theme in her research related to fintech (financial technologies). This work began with a focus on pan-African remittance networks, but has since grown to include a range of collaborative projects that intend to intervene in the highly polarized debates on fintech in Africa through the deployment of more ambivalent and contextualized approaches. Through the lens of fintech, Dr Cirolia is interested in further exploring how digital platform providers, designers and users engage with calculations of urban risk, promise predictive capacity, deploy both mystical sensibilities, and expand speculation into new domains of urban life and economies.
She currently serves as a corresponding editor for Urban Studies, Finance and Space, and Platform Society. Through her research and publication support efforts, Dr Cirolia is actively involved in strengthening knowledge and policy networks, both across the global south and through brokering just and generative north/south collaborations. These collaborations include interdisciplinary scholars, as well as policy makers, activists, and artists. In addition to research, Dr Cirolia convenes two courses as part of ACC’s Master in Sustainable Urban Practice. This master is focussed on working professionals working in city and national governments in Africa.
Her most recent publications include:
Research Summary
Through her placement in Bristol for two months, Dr Cirolia plans to advance theorization on the techno-worlding of African cities. To do this, she will support synergies between two areas of work where Bristol has expertise: digital futures and African urbanization. While there is considerable excitement regarding the digital revolution’s unique impacts and implications for urban Africa, there is a need for critical, contextualized, and transdisciplinary scholarship at the nexus between these two contemporary and dynamic transitions. African urban scholarship would benefit considerably from deeper engagement with methods and conceptualization taking place within digital studies, in particular scholarship emerging from majority world contexts (such as China and India). At the same time, social scientists and humanity scholarship in the sub-field of digital culture and technologies could gain a richer understanding of the sorts of developmental imperatives, cultural logics, and infrastructural frictions that shape digital ecosystems in urban Africa.
The operationalize this objective, the proposal is anchored by Prof Roger Burrows (School of Policy Studies), who is also involved in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. He will provide academic mentorship and guidance for Dr Cirolia as she works to build these synergies between departments and debates. Dr Cirolia already has a strong relationship with the Perivoli Africa Research Centre, the Department of Geography, and Cabot Institute for the Environment, where she will also provide several lectures. .
Dr Cirolia's lectures and seminars are listed on our Events page.
You can contact Dr Cirolia's host Professor Roger Burrows for further information.
