CityLabs – inventing the future: A comparative study of “making” in four African cities

The CityLabs project asks what the current boom of so-called maker- or hackerspaces in Africa contributes to the experience of city life on the continent, now and –especially– in the future. To do so, we propose a comparative, ethnographic approach, both on- and offline, of the engineers, students, artists, crafts(wo)men and inventors who align and identify themselves with the Maker Movement in four African cities (Accra, Cape Town, Lomé and Nairobi). Such ethnography, we suggest, should rest on an analysis of five fields of tension concerning knowledge, art, technology, ecology and entrepreneurship.