The smart grid archipelago: Infrastructures of networked (dis)connectivity in Amman

This article examines the fragmented connections of Jordan’s smart grid, building on scholarship that questions how smart infrastructures reshape governance, sociospatial exclusion, and the fabric of urban life. Jordan’s ambitious smart energy program is often held up as a global model by investors, as it catalyzed over US$4 billion in private investment for new renewable and smart energy development. Yet smart energy transition is experienced in powerfully uneven ways, as distributed solar installations and smart grid technologies radically remake the spaces of urban life. Rooted in sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article traces the vertical materialization of the smart grid from the ground up, from in-home smart meters through the evolving interconnections that they enact. I argue that (post)colonial property relations engender an archipelagic landscape of (dis)connectivity that redistributes the benefits and burdens of digitalization. Drawing from Glissant’s archipelagic thought, I examine (dis)connection and urban fragmentation as a form of relation that links enduring (post)colonial relations to contemporary projects of smart development. In the (post)colonial world, as smart infrastructures are built into the conduits of uneven property relations, they come to incorporate not only capitalist logics but also racialized logics and historically contingent relations of exclusion and differentiation.