The digital urban frontier: Disparities in social media activity between consolidated and newly urbanized areas in Africa

Kurzfassung

Africa’s cities can be seen as the sites of the world’s current urban frontier, where potentials for urban growth and digital transformation are high. This study compares older and newer urban areas in Africa to investigate whether there is a digital divide in social media activity between them. Across 135 sites in Africa’s fastest-expanding cities, we identify age of built-up areas using remote sensing data and relate it to social media activity, measured by the density of geotagged tweets. We quantify disparities in tweet density and use permutation tests, descriptive statistics, and linear regressions to relate them to geographic regions, degrees of urban plannedness, and spatial structure of settlements. Findings show clear evidence of disparities. In most sites, more recently built areas featured significantly lower tweet densities than older ones, while the inverse case was not observed. These disparities were more frequent in Western Africa than in Northern and Southern Africa and decreased with increased plannedness and compactness of the settlement structure. We conclude that in many African cities, the digital urban frontier is lagging behind the physical one, creating a hitherto undocumented form of digital divide that should be considered in plans for the transformation of Africa’s cities.