Analyze

Over half of the neighborhoods in Santa Ana (shown in pink on the map below), California are designated disadvantaged communities (DACs) by CalEnviroScreen, the leading tool for assessing environmental injustice in California. GREEN-MPNA, a community-based organization in Santa Ana, is working to change this through its DAC-X campaign: an action-oriented movement to reduce disadvantage through pollution reduction, health equity, economic justice, and inclusive governance. Aware of the risks of gentrification, the goal is to x-out disadvantage in a way that empowers rather than displaces current communities. The University of California EcoGovLab has worked closely with GREEN-MPNA on the design and development of the DAC-X campaign. The four pillars of the campaign were chosen, in part, because they align with the State of California’s own criteria for designating communities as disadvantaged. DAC-X’s design also draws together a diverse array of advocacy organizations, government agencies and schools working against issues that contribute to disadvantage, knitting together threads of work that often run in parallel. The long term goal is to increase these organizations’ collective capacity to address disadvantage – in a way that recognizes the intersectionalities and cross-scale interactions that produce it. One tactic we have used to advance the DAC-X campaign is the staging of Environmental Justice Stakeholder Meetings that bring relevant governmental agencies together in one room to speak and respond to Santa Ana residents.Thus far, these meetings have focused on pollution reduction and inclusive governance. Going forward, we will continue to grow our network of alliances in Santa Ana by organizing Environmental Justice Stakeholder Meetings to address other pillars of the DAC-X campaign, bringing for example, health equity advocates to the table, or educational institutions that could support workforce development. The DAC-X campaign itself – and this poster – also results from an alliance – between EcoGovLab (Browne, Adams, Fortun) and GREEN-MPNA (Flores, Gutierrez & Rea).

Browne, Aiden, James Adam, Jose Rea and Kim Fortun. 2023. "GREEN-MPNA's DAC-X Campaign for Environmental Justice: Designing for Alliance." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

As of 13 February 2023, South Africa declared a national state of electricity disaster. In this paper we consider the impacts of global tech giants on the land, environment, people, heritage, and the technological landscape in Cape Town, South Africa. Our methods consist in long-term ethnographic fieldwork (Waltorp 2010, 2019, Waltorp et al 2022) and decolonial design anthropological approaches (Kambunga 2023) as we work with a group of local assistants and critical friends (www.digisatproject.com). We start from the controversy surrounding Amazon Web Services Headquarters: In 2021, the Observatory Civic Association and the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoi Indigenous Traditional Council filed an urgent notice with the High Court of South Africa to interject the construction of the Amazon River Park development on sacred land, where confrontations between the Peninsula Khoekhoe and the first Dutch settlers took place (genesis of colonialism in South Africa), and one of the only natural floodplains in Cape Town. Respondents argued that the site has no visible heritage significance, and the interjection will hinder economic development and job creation, an urgent concern, with Cape Town home to the most data centres on the continent. Data centres provide the computing and storage power that is essential to realising the smart digital futures furthered by corporate strategists and government policymakers. Yet, the data centres that underpin these futures are themselves energy-intensive enterprises (Howe et al. 2015) placing burdens on national energy supplier Eskom and energy shortages for the neighbouring communities (Pollio and Cirolia 2022). Data are entangled with water, wind, oil and other elements. Resource prospecting and extraction of energy were driving forces of colonial expansions. The material effects this has had on contemporary human and more-than-human life as well as geopolitical formations continue: How might we think together beyond techno-solutionism and -determinism to imagine technological futures otherwise.

Waltorp, Karen and Asnath Paula Kambunga. 2023. "Land, Legacies and Energy Futures in Cape Town, South Africa." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.