Kola Heyward-Rotimi

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023–2024 Academic Year

The Development of Smart Cities in Southwestern Nigeria

In collaboration with corporate entities, multiple African states have begun construction of new "smart cities": urban environments built from the ground up, designed in totality by select stakeholders. The smart cities are typically marketed as an alternative to existing African cities, utilizing both eco-sustainability and "global city" narratives to attract the rising middle- and upper-classes. This project conducts preliminary fieldwork at two smart city construction sites in Nigeria, with the aim of locating points of connection and disjuncture across the cities' physical environments, the speculative imaginaries that fuel their marketing, and their virtual renderings

Kola Heyward-Rotimi, Department of Modern Thought and Literature

Kola Heyward-Rotimi is a PhD student in Modern Thought and Literature, studying how the advent of virtual space has influenced societies and urban environments. Currently, Heyward-Rotimi's work focuses on smart city projects, particularly how computer simulations and the narrativization of climate change factor into "smartness" as a design ethos in postcolonial states. He aims to delineate how the roles of speculative fiction, near/mid/far-future scenario planning, speculative finance, and architecture converge to validate the development of multi-billion dollar city projects. Before starting his PhD, Heyward-Rotimi worked as a Faculty Assistant at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. He has BAs in English and Computer Science from Amherst College.

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