Incubators at the Frontiers of Capital: An Ethnographic Encounter with Startup Weekend in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

Abstract

Technology incubators are one of the infrastructural ends at the urban frontiers of capital. When built in areas of poverty in cities of the Global South, these hubs cultivate entrepreneurialism and opportunities for profit at the intersection of development and technological innovation. They promise to address the social challenges of urban marginality with remunerative market solutions. In Cape Town, Africa’s so-called Silicon Cape, the largest technology incubator of the city ventured into its most marginal township—Khayelitsha—in 2015, pledging to lay the infrastructural groundwork for fruitful entrepreneurial innovation. This article recollects, ethnographically, an important moment at the outset of this incubator: a fifty-four-hour franchised hackathon, Startup Weekend, which took place in September 2015 as an inaugural event. The argument of this article is that such an incubator was a sociotechnical formation meant to create the conditions for entrepreneurship in a deprived urban area, relying on a web of material and immaterial connections; that it materialized the rationalities of millennial development as well as alternative goals; and that, as infrastructure, it was patched with diverse aspirations and improvised forms of sociality. The article thus contributes to an urban geography of development that acknowledges its uncertainties and singularities as political openings. Key Words: Cape Town, infrastructure, millennial development, technology incubator.

技术孵化器是城市资本前沿领域中的基础设施之一。随着南半球城市在贫困区中修建技术孵化器，这些技术枢纽通过发展和技术创新的结合，孕育了企业家精神也提供了盈利的机遇。它们承诺可以用回报丰厚的市场解决方案来处理城市边缘化所带来的各种社会问题。开普敦号称非洲硅谷，其最边缘化的小镇 Khayelitsha（卡雅利沙）于2015 年修建了该城市最大的技术孵化中心，承诺打下基础设施的根基，并帮助企业获利。本文从种族志的角度，回溯了这个孵化器在启动伊始，即 2015 年 9 月作为启动活动一部分的一场重要活动：一场名为 Startup Weekend 的 54 小时经授权的黑客马拉松赛。本文认为，这样的孵化器作为一种社会技术形态，可依靠物质和非物质连接的网络，在一个贫困的城区为企业家精神创造所需的条件；它实际体现了千禧发展目标以及其它目标的合理性。此外，做为基础设施，它由各种不同的多样化理想组成，呈现更具随意性的社会形态。因而，本文所探讨的发展城市地理学，认为其做为政治性的方式具有不确定性和唯一性。关键字：开普敦、基础设施、千禧发展、技术孵化中心。

Las incubadoras de tecnología son uno de las estrategias infraestructurales del capital en las fronteras urbanas. Cuando se trata de este tipo de núcleos construidos en el Sur Global, la estrategia es promover el empresarismo y las oportunidades de ganancia en la intersección del desarrollo y la innovación tecnológica. Se ofrece ahí la promesa de enfrentar los retos sociales de la marginalidad urbana con soluciones remunerativas del mercado. En Ciudad del Cabo, el así llamado Cabo Silicon de África, la mayor osadía fue ubicar la más grande incubadora de tecnología de la ciudad en 2015 en el asentamiento más marginal––Khayelitsha––con el compromiso de acometer allí el acondicionamiento infraestructural preparatorio de una innovación empresarial fructífera. En este artículo se rememora etnográficamente un momento importante del principio de esta incubadora: la franquicia para un hackathon de cincuenta y cuatro horas, el Fin de Semana de Nuevas Empresas, que ocurrió en septiembre del 2015, como evento inaugural. El argumento del artículo es que la incubadora fue una formación sociotécnica creada con la intención de generar condiciones para formar nuevas empresas en un área urbana deprimida, confiando en una red de conexiones materiales e inmateriales; que el proyecto materializó las racionalidades del desarrollo del milenio lo mismo que objetivos alternativos; y que, como infraestructura, se le parchó con diversas aspiraciones y formas improvisadas de socialidad. De ese modo, el artículo contribuye a una geografía urbana del desarrollo que reconoce sus incertidumbres y singularidades como brechas políticas. Palabras clave: Ciudad del Cabo, desarrollo del milenio, incubadora de tecnología, infraestructura.

Acknowledgments

Two sections of a first draft of this article were presented at the 2016 Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference, in a workshop organized by Donald McNeill, Sarah Barns, Ned Rossiter, and Brett Neilson, and at the 2017 American Association of Geographers annual meeting in Boston, during a session organized by Katharine Rankin and Dinesh Paudel. Generous feedback on both those occasions informs the article throughout. Nancy Odendaal and Fran Tonkiss offered insightful comments on earlier work that has filtered down to the current article.

Notes

1 This resonates with what feminist geography has described as “reading for difference” (Gibson-Graham 2008).

2 On the “privilege” of fieldwork in technological fields, see Mattern (2016).

3 For “operations” see Mezzadra and Neilson (2015).

4 As I wrote elsewhere (Pollio 2019a), the presence of Uber in Cape Town signifies a success in its world-city aspirations, but it also a reenactment of developmental narratives of entrepreneurialism.

5 Technologies of debt and credit, as James (2014) showed, are inextricably interwoven into the making of economic subjectivities in postapartheid South Africa.

6 As a matter of fact, there are several informal, semiformal, and formal systems for avoiding profligacy in condition of indebtedness (see James 2014). These technologies of saving, however, were seen by Lindile as perpetuating old-school approaches to debt.

7 See https://maqtoob.com/on-the-move (accessed October 12, 2016).

8 See https://blog.maqtoob.com/south-africa-on-a-crazy-road-trip-mother-nature-and-hope (accessed October 12, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

The article’s presentation in this final form has been made possible by a Fondazione San Paolo starting grant and FULL–Future Urban Legacy Lab, through the kind support of Francesca Frassoldati and Francesca Governa. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes on contributors

Andrea Pollio

ANDREA POLLIO is Research Fellow at the Future Urban Legacy Lab, through the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino, 10125 Torino, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests lie at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, development, and urbanism in the Global South.