Arbitraging China’s platform economy in the Silicon Savanna
Event Information
With Andrea Pollio, Assistant Professor of Political and Economic Geography, Polytechnic University of Turin
Offering a snapshot of my recent book, Silicon Elsewhere, this talk explores the concept of arbitrage as a central logic shaping Digital China’s presence in Kenya’s Silicon Savannah. Beyond geopolitical and geoeconomic narratives, I demonstrate how discourses of arbitrage identify and capitalize on perceived temporal and developmental lags between these two geographies, producing opportunities for speculative investment in the platform economy. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in Nairobi, I illustrate how both Chinese and Kenyan tech entrepreneurs and investors engage in the cloning and adaptation of successful Chinese business models. A powerful belief drives these experiments: that replicating China’s past successes can unlock future wealth and technological emancipation for Kenya. But rather than asking whether or not these tales hold water as truths, I would like to reflect on how they perform the value of technology in a world of connections and disconnections, a world where there is not just one Silicon Valley but many Silicon Elsewheres.
Presented by BESI Technology Network. Co-sponsored by Berkeley Geography.
About the speaker
Andrea Pollio is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow jointly at the department of Urban and Regional Studies at the Polytechnic of Turin and at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. As part of his fellowship, he is currently working on a project called “SURGE: Sinofinancialization and Urban Change along the new Silk Road in East Africa. His goal is to explore the impact of private Chinese capital on two East-African cities, Addis Ababa and Nairobi, that have emerged as key destinations for the urbanization of Chinese investments in the continent.
At ACC, he also collaborates with the Financing African Infrastructure working group and he is part of the reference team for the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations-funded project on the nexus of platform urbanism and paratransit mobilities. Pollio seeks to understand how platform algorithms multiply beyond the techno-capitalist domain in which companies such as Uber and the likes operate.
Pollio holds a Ph.D. in economic geography and urban studies from Western Sydney University. His doctoral research, which included an eight-month visiting period at the EGS department of the University of Cape Town, addressed the entanglements of digital technology, economic development and urban change in Cape Town, and has appeared in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning A, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and in Urban Studies.
Prior to his current fellowship, he worked as project manager in a large research consultancy that involved several local councils in metropolitan Sydney, supporting the development of cultural policy for the survival of creative spaces in the city. Recently, he was also involved in the design of an online game, “Antarctic Futures,” as part an intercontinental research project on the 5 Antarctic gateway cities (Cape Town, Christchurch, Hobart, Punta Arenas, and Ushuaia) that explored and experimented with how these Southern Ocean Rim cities could act collectively as global custodians of Antarctica.