The political economy of land data assemblages in informal settlements

Debates on data assemblages have extensively accounted for their technical nature, emphasizing the labors of gathering, the spatiality of assemblages, the material consequences of data infrastructures, among other things. A growing amount of literature has employed a political economy analysis to deconstruct the “black boxes” of data assemblages with the view to unpacking the choices and rationalities that inform prevailing data systems. They have treated assemblages as processes through which orders of knowledge and orders of value are fundamentally inscribed in ways that are sometimes both materially and epistemically violent. In this paper, we employ data assemblage as an analytical framework to understand the data imaginaries and the specific arrangements of power and authority that are enacted in the construction of land information systems across two informal settlements in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya. We draw on in-depth interviews with actors situated at different locations in the development of the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM), a ‘pro-poor land rights recording system’ to understand its underlying political economy and how its imaginaries are translated into the concrete in Mathare and Kwa Bullo informal settlements. This approach enables us to showcase the imaginaries that are advanced by the advocates of STDM and the on-the-ground politics that feature in its experimentation. From this analysis, the paper demonstrates the limits of data imaginaries and alternative property rationalities that are introduced in the absence of clear commitments to land redistribution by the state. This invites us to explore possibilities of more insurgent data practices which build on the creative elements within social movements to not only expand the epistemic control of data by residents located in the informational peripheries but to also advance their political projects of recognition.