Brown Bag Seminar with Prince Guma, "Of Things Incomplete: Infrastructure and the Urban"

Summary: The world we inhabit is a perpetual work in progress, marked by inherent incompleteness. This incompleteness invites us to comprehend the evolving nature of relations that shape it. Consider, for instance, the built environment: cities, infrastructures, and spatial configurations are continuously evolving, shaped by shifting social, economic, political, and environmental forces. Even the most meticulously planned urban domains are subject to adaptation, decay, and reconfiguration as new needs, technologies, and ecological conditions emerge. In this case, incompleteness reflects the provisional, contested, and negotiated nature of life and the world itself. Thus, I advance ‘incompleteness’ as a vital frame of analysis and explanatory category that allows for broader understandings in the social sciences beyond conventional and completist frames. It offers a deeper framing of the relational plurality of things through their incomplete others and highlights contemporary development as a process shaped not only through foreign interventions but also by ongoing and continuous situated and socio-material practices and inscriptions. In line with this, I posit grammars, geographies, and cosmographies of urban, infrastructural, and technological change, articulating what it means for things to be inherently--and instrumentally--incomplete. 

Link to article.

Prince Guma is an interdisciplinary social and political scientist whose work sits at the intersection of critical urban studies, infrastructure studies, and technology studies, with a focus on development, political economy, and social justice. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, where his research explored the diffusion and adoption of new plans, ideas, and technologies in urban and infrastructure domains. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, where he previously served as Assistant Country Director. From 2008, Prince spent three years working with regional institutions on programs aimed at building capacity and promoting justice. In 2012, he transitioned into academia, initially focusing on public-sector management and civic governance before shifting to the geographies of the built environment, the digital, and the urban. His work seeks to open new avenues for exploration, contribute fresh insights from the global South, and expand possibilities for alternative theorization. He serves on editorial boards including Urban Geography, Dialogues in Urban Research, Digital Geography and Society, Erdkunde, and UCL Press Urban Africa Book Series. ( ORCID )