This book interrogates everyday implications of digital developments in times of profound energy crises and transition to renewable energy in South Africa, mapping interrelated controversies. Drawing on more than two decades of ethnographic research on the Cape Flats on the outskirts of Cape Town, the book analyses what digital infrastructures and technologies do for- and to- people in this (former) township area on the 2 Cape Flats, and how this is related to energy in a myriad of ways. The authors empirically demonstrate how technologies emerge in, and with, societies and people’s everyday practices, building on fieldwork with households and local tech start-ups. They stake a claim for centering situated, everyday (work) lives and the innovation emerging from the Cape Flats in debates about just digital and energy futures at a time where energy systems are changing at rapid pace and scale.

Karen Waltorp is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her expertise is in the anthropology of technology, anthropology of energy, visual and digital anthropology, and gender and minority studies.

Asnath Paula Kambunga is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in how people use digital technologies in their everyday lives, develop technologies to address social problems, and in co-designed technologies that amplify marginal voices.