The Smart Grid Archipelago: Infrastructures of Networked (Dis)Connectivity in Amman

Keywords: smart infrastructure, property, digital capitalism, postcolonial urbanism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Building on scholarship that questions how smart infrastructures reshape governance, sociospatial inequality, and the fabric of urban life, this paper examines the fractious connections of Jordan’s emerging smart grid. Jordan’s ambitious smart energy program is often held up by investors as a model for global smart energy growth, as it catalyzed over $4 billion US dollars in private investment and created an enabling framework for the development of over 2GW of renewable and smart energy. Through this program, smart energy transition is framed as a pathway towards greater domestic energy security, decarbonization, and resource diversification. Yet transition is experienced in powerfully uneven ways, as distributed solar installations and smart grid technologies radically remake the spaces of urban life. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork based in Amman, this paper shows how Jordan’s evolving smart grid materializes through the contested terrain of postcolonial property relations. I argue that the situated material relations of exclusion embedded within these property relations constrain the promises of digital infrastructure, engendering an archipelagic urban landscape of (dis)connectivity. Instead of seamless flows of perfectible data, the materialization of Jordan’s smart grid reveals a “hidden system” of uneven property relations that engenders new concentrations of data and debt.