Crisis-led urban governance and the contingent reshaping of state-public encounters: the digitalizing South African state

Digitalization is harnessed for crisis-led urban governance, from the COVID-19 pandemic to crises of migration management and housing delivery. This paper engages with the ways in which state actors, networks, and bureaucratic practices shape the adoption and institutionalization of digital technologies in Cape Town, South Africa, where crises are episodic and everyday. This paper contributes to understanding the layered practices of the “digitalizing” state by exploring digital interventions and the actors that produce them in and beyond the state. These include the COVID-19 dashboard, a public health tool; an online asylum seeker permit renewal system by the Department of Home Affairs; and a long-term digitalization of the housing allocation system to produce an equitable city-wide housing database. A conceptualization of layers unpacks and makes visible the critical work of digital interventions in urban governance. In their layers and logics, these interventions embody ideals of modernity, efficiency, and neutrality, but expose the contingencies inherent in the digitalization of the state across a terrain of crisis. For the South African state, crisis is not an exception to governance, it is a mode of governance itself– one that thrives on digital fixes that are never quite fixed.