Reading the digital city in Africa

Aims:

This research studies the development of the digital city of Douala (Cameroun) and its relationships with the physical city, by analysing the online presence of socio-economic categories, their origin, online visible/invisible urban spaces, and their evolution over the time. 

Key findings and ideas:

We need to combine synchronic/diachronic views to get a comprehensive representation of how a digital city is produced and how it is evolving. The synchronic view provides a static picture of the digital city and the emerging online representation mirrors a parallelism between digital and social inclusion/exclusion; the diachronic view depicts the movement, the changing picture of the digital city in the making and the social transition of Douala toward becoming an information/knowledge society.