Reimaging Smart City Transplants for the Global South: A Post-Colonial Lens on Human Rights and Digital Sovereignty

With digitalisation threading at the heels of urbanisation, the world’s largest future smart megacities are expected to be located in Africa – where safety remains a vital need. However, safe, smart city technologies fail to account for the overwhelming social, political, cultural, and even tech-related landscape differences between the Global North (GN) and the Global South (GS). They risk enhancing inequalities, reinforcing digital colonialism and disempowering economies, communities, and even individuals in the GS. Furthermore, they feature human rights risks and may threaten democratic development. We focus on Lagos, Nigeria, as an example of a megacity in the GS and the EU as a reference point for the GN and argue that the European design-based legal approaches for governing human rights risks of technology are not directly replicable in the GS, because they fail to account for technological and legal dependencies. In contrast, city-centred human rights-based approaches to governing technology are better attuned to local needs and values. Overall, smart city technology in Africa should be governed with the aim of enhancing digital sovereignty and the fulfilment of human rights in smart cities. We explain the benefits of digital sovereignty and conclude with suggestions for empowering the GS at the regional, national, and city levels to achieve self-determination.