Digitalisierung und Informalität: Kapstadts Transport- und Mobilitätslandschaft im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Territorialität und Netzwerklogik

43. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, ‘Zukünfte der Gesellschaft’, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 28 September–2 October 2026

This talk investigates how digital infrastructuring interacts with different forms of spatial ordering and the distribution of governing capacities through the case of Cape Town’s transport and mobility landscape. It addresses the following central research question: How do spatially embedded digital infrastructures such as Google Maps contest and/or reinforce efforts to integrate diverse transport providers and modes of mobility? Cape Town’s transport and mobility regime is highly fragmented, informal, and car-centric. This fragmentation manifests itself on at least three interdependent levels: governance, transport provision, and modes of transport. A central tension arising from Cape Town’s post-Apartheid spatial regime and the resulting plurality of transport providers concerns the role of digital infrastructures as drivers of creating a more integrated transport system. Drawing on 31 qualitative expert interviews with policy-makers, we interrogate processes of digital infrastructuring through the lens of two dominant spatial figures – territory and network – and their respective logics of spatialization.