Established in 2006, TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited operates as the nodal point for Tata businesses in West Africa. TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited has a strong presence in Nigeria with investments exceeding USD 10 million. The company was established in Lagos, Nigeria as a subsidiary of TATA Africa Holdings (SA) (Pty) Limited, South Africa and serves as the hub of Tata’s operations in Nigeria and the rest of West Africa.

What About Us

Recording of presentation introducing narrative analysis, outlining what it is, why it can be a useful approach, how to do it and where to find out more. Presentation given at methods@manchester seminar at University of Manchester on 4 March 2010.

What is Narrative Analysis

What are the differences between sustainable and smart cities

to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of \"theory,\" he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of \"poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation.\" At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, andMichael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions of theorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual.

/pdf/spaces-of-global-capitalism-towards-a-theory-of-uneven-2gyaazntwk.pdf

Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

This commentary characterises and critiques research on smart cities. I argue that much of
the writing and rhetoric about smart cities seeks to appear non-ideological, commonsensical
and pragmatic. More critically orientated scholarship, while making vital conceptual
and political interventions, presently has four shortcomings that inhibit making sense of
and refashioning the smart city agenda: the lack of detailed genealogies of the concept and
initiatives, the use of canonical examples and one-size fits all narratives, an absence of indepth
empirical case studies of specific smart city initiatives and comparative research that
contrasts smart city developments in different locales and weak collaborative engagement
with various stakeholders. These shortcomings are elaborated, accompanied with suggestions
for addressing them.

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Making sense of smart cities: addressing present shortcomings

This paper grounds the critique of the ‘smart city’ in its historical and geographical context. Adapting Brenner and Theodore’s notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, we suggest a greater attention be paid to the ‘actually existing smart city’, rather than the exceptional or paradigmatic smart cities of Songdo, Masdar and Living PlanIT Valley. Through a closer analysis of cases in Louisville and Philadelphia, we demonstrate the utility of understanding the material effects of these policies in actual cities around the world, with a particular focus on how and from where these policies have arisen, and how they have unevenly impacted the places that have adopted them.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2477482_code2185708.pdf?abstractid=2477482&mirid=1&type=2

The 'Actually Existing Smart City'

/pdf/the-actually-existing-smart-city-3zybfyr9tw.pdf

The ‘actually existing smart city’

This paper explores IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge as an example of global smart city policymaking. The evolution of IBM's smart city thinking is discussed, then a case study of Philadelphia's online workforce education initiative, Digital On-Ramps, is presented as an example of IBM's consulting services. Philadelphia's rationale for working with IBM and the translation of IBM's ideas into locally adapted initiatives is considered. The paper argues that critical scholarship on the smart city over-emphasizes IBM's agency in driving the discourse. Unpacking how and why cities enrolled in smart city policymaking with IBM places city governments as key actors advancing the smart city paradigm. Two points are made about the policy mobility of the smart city as a mask for entrepreneurial governance. (1) Smart city efforts are best understood as examples of outward-looking policy promotion for the globalized economy. (2) These policies proposed citywide benefit through a variety of digital governance augmentatio...

/pdf/ibm-s-smart-city-as-techno-utopian-policy-mobility-ymzso1qho7.pdf

IBM's smart city as techno-utopian policy mobility

Smart city initiatives have been adopted by cities worldwide, proposing forward-looking, technological solutions to urban problems big and small. These policies are indicative of a digitized urban condition, where social and economic exchange rely on globalized telecommunications networks, and governance strategies follow suit. Propelled through events such as IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, the smart city acts as a data-driven logic urban change where widespread benefit to a city and its residents is proposed, masking the utility of these policies to further entrepreneurial economic development strategies. In this article, I present a case study of the Digital On-Ramps initiative that emerged from IBM’s policy-consultation in Philadelphia. The initiative proposed a social media-style workforce education application (app) to train up to 500,000 low-literacy residents for jobs in the information and knowledge economy, but even as the city’s mayor declared the project a success, it did not meet expectations...

/pdf/the-empty-rhetoric-of-the-smart-city-from-digital-inclusion-44gmbbstv4.pdf

The empty rhetoric of the smart city: from digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia

“Traditionally, computers have been used to understand cities. After four decades of dazzling development, the same computer we deploy to understand our cities has become a new type of city. … the ...

/pdf/introduction-thinking-through-the-politics-of-the-smart-city-1me450ubcr.pdf

Alan Wiig

Papers

The 'Actually Existing Smart City'

The ‘actually existing smart city’

IBM's smart city as techno-utopian policy mobility

The empty rhetoric of the smart city: from digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia

Introduction: Thinking through the politics of the smart city