ABSTRACT

The article examines the dynamics of access to electricity in two West African cities: Cotonou (Benin) and Ibadan (Nigeria). Due to poor supply from the grid, households are developing varied ways of accessing electricity, based on different socio-technical dispositifs. In this paper we first demonstrate that access to electricity is based on co-production processes that must be approached from a multi-scale perspective (from the household to the urban scale). We then argue that particular attention to the socio-technical and spatial dimension of co-production arrangements makes it possible to interpret urban electrical configurations and their evolution. We thus show that co-production processes, relying on many actors and technologies to meet a growing and diversified demand for electricity in cities, support an ongoing movement of extension-hybridisation of electricity configurations on an urban scale, thus offering an interesting perspective on power changes in sub-Saharan Africa.

摘要

本文研究了两个西非城市的电力供应动态：科托努（贝宁）和伊巴丹（尼日利亚）。由于电网供应不足，家庭正在根据不同的社会技术条件开发各种获取电力的方式. 在本文中，我们首先证明电力的获取是基于必须从多尺度视角（从家庭到城市尺度）处理的共同生产过程。然后，我们认为，对共同生产安排的社会技术和空间维度的特别关注使得解释城市电气配置及其演变成为可能。因此，我们表明，依靠许多参与者和技术来满足城市日益增长和多样化的电力需求的联合生产过程支持了城市范围内电力配置的扩展混合动力的持续运动，从而为电力提供了一个有趣的视角撒哈拉以南非洲地区的变化。