BRICS and the New Scramble for Space: Who Really Owns the Smart City Street?

It is 6:40 on a Tuesday morning in a city of eleven million people, and Amina is doing what a billion people across the Global South do every day. She is negotiating with her city. She is not in a meeting room. She is standing at a roadside stop where three minibuses, two app based ride services and a new electric feeder bus all compete for her attention, and the only interface between her and the operating system of her own neighbourhood is a phone screen that may or may not be telling the truth about when the next bus will come. The answer, as it happens, depends on a satellite, a data centre, a software licence and a trade agreement that were all negotiated very far from this kerb.

That distance, between the kerb and the negotiating table, is where one of the most consequential stories of the decade is being written. When the BRICS grouping expanded into BRICS+, adding Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates to a club that already included Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, most commentary focused on currency, oil, security and the architecture of global finance. That is understandable, because those are the subjects that make headlines. But beneath the summit communiques there is a quieter scramble underway, one that runs through bus lanes, ticket validators, traffic cameras, satellite feeds and municipal servers, and it is reshaping how cities in the Global South build and govern smart transport.

The New Scramble Is Not About Rockets

The phrase scramble for space usually conjures images of launch pads and lunar ambitions, and there is plenty of that to go around. India has landed near the south pole of the Moon, China is assembling a research station, and Brazil has been courting satellite operators for years. But the space that matters most to the daily lives of ordinary people is the contested ground of the city street, and the instruments of control are no longer gunboats. They are standards, spectrum, software and the terms on which data crosses borders.

Consider what a modern transport system actually requires. It needs positioning data, because without knowing where a vehicle is you cannot manage it. It needs connectivity, because a bus that cannot report its location is just a large moving object. It needs payment rails, because a system that depends on cash cannot be optimised. And it needs a governance framework that decides who may see that data, who may sell it and who may build services on top of it. Each of those layers is being negotiated right now, and the countries at the table are not the ones that wrote the rules of the last century.

Why Smart Transport Became the Battleground

For a long time, transport planning in the Global South was treated as a technical backwater, a matter of paving, subsidising and praying. The assumption, often unspoken, was that cities would follow a path already walked by the industrialised world and that the technology would arrive later, cheaper and simpler. What actually happened is that many cities leapfrogged, skipping fixed line telephone networks for mobile money and skipping legacy ticketing for contactless payments, and they did so while their populations doubled.

That leap has consequences. A city that has never had a legacy system has no legacy to protect, which makes it fertile ground for experimentation. Nairobi turned matatus into a data rich network before many European capitals knew where their own trams were. Jakarta digitised its bus rapid transit corridors and learned, painfully, that the hardest part is not the hardware but the institutions. Lagos built a transport authority from scratch and then discovered that authority without trust is a spreadsheet with ambitions.

The Data Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud

Here is the uncomfortable question that sits at the centre of this new scramble. If a foreign company supplies the sensors, the software and the cloud, who owns the picture that emerges when all three are combined? A transport system generates an astonishingly intimate portrait of a city. It knows where people sleep, where they work, which neighbourhoods are avoided after dark, which clinics are underserved, which routes carry the poor and which carry the powerful. That portrait is worth a great deal, and the terms on which it is shared are rarely discussed in public.

Researchers working on BRICS+ cities have begun to argue that this is the real terrain of sovereignty in the twenty first century, less about flags on the Moon than about who holds the keys to the municipal data lake. The concern is not that foreign technology is inherently dangerous. It is that dependency accumulates quietly, through procurement decisions that look pragmatic one at a time and through interoperability standards that lock in a vendor before anyone has asked what happens fifteen years from now.

Finance Comes With Conditions, and Conditions Come With Habits

Development finance is where the expansion of the bloc becomes concrete. The New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement were designed to offer alternatives to institutions that attach policy conditions to their lending, and infrastructure is the flagship. A loan for a metro line, a bus depot or an intelligent traffic management system is never only a loan. It carries specifications, reporting requirements, audit trails and the expectation that the borrower will adopt the lender preferred technical standards.

That is not a scandal. It is how infrastructure finance has always worked. The interesting question is whether a genuinely multipolar set of lenders produces genuinely plural standards, or whether it reproduces the same concentration with different flags. Early evidence is mixed. Some BRICS+ projects have emphasised local content and technology transfer in ways that older lenders did not, while others have simply moved faster and asked fewer questions, which is attractive to a mayor under electoral pressure and dangerous to a city that will still be running the system in 2045.

Standards Are Quietly Political

Nothing sounds less thrilling than a technical standard, and nothing is more decisive. The protocol a ticket validator speaks determines which companies can supply it. The format in which a data feed is published determines which apps can display it. The rules for satellite correction signals determine whether a bus can be tracked to three metres or thirty. Whoever writes the standard writes the market, and the market lasts longer than the government that signed the agreement.

This is why the space element of the story matters more than it first appears. A constellation of navigation satellites is not only a scientific achievement, it is a piece of public infrastructure that can be offered to partner countries along with receivers, ground stations and the training to operate them. When a country accepts that offer, it gains capability and it also gains a long term relationship. The scramble for space, in this reading, is not a race for prestige. It is a race for default settings.

What the Cities Themselves Are Saying

Here the storytelling gets more hopeful. In several BRICS+ metropolises, a new generation of transport officials has started to treat procurement as a form of diplomacy. They publish open data not out of ideology but out of tactics, because open formats make it harder for any single vendor to become indispensable. They write contracts that require source code escrow and exit clauses. They run pilot projects with clear expiry dates and no automatic renewal. They invite researchers in, rather than treating universities as a nuisance to be managed.

The result is a set of quiet experiments that rarely make the news and may well outlast the summits. A city in Ethiopia testing electric minibus fleets on routes that formal operators considered unprofitable. An Indonesian municipality building a fare system that accepts the payment app people already use rather than the one the bank prefers. A Brazilian consortium sharing anonymised crash data with neighbouring cities so that everyone learns from the same mistakes. None of this will appear in a communique, and all of it is the substance of the change.

The Risk of a Two Speed Urbanism

There is a danger in all of this optimism. Smart transport is expensive, and the cities most able to adopt it are usually the ones with the strongest tax base and the loudest political voice. If the new scramble rewards the capitals that can host the data centres and the pilot programmes, the secondary cities where most of the population actually lives may be left with the sensors and none of the skills. A two speed urbanism, where a handful of showcase corridors shine while the surrounding neighbourhoods wait for a bus that never comes, is a very real possibility.

Avoiding it requires something that technology cannot supply. It requires institutions that can plan across electoral cycles, and it requires a public conversation about what a transport system is for. Is it a platform for extracting value from movement, or is it a service that guarantees access? The answer is not determined by the size of a bloc or the reach of a satellite constellation. It is determined by whether the people at the kerb are treated as customers, as data points or as citizens with a right to the city.

Conclusion: The Scramble Is a Choice

Amina will not read the communique. She will not attend the summit, and she will probably never learn which standard her ticket validator speaks. But she will know, within a week of switching to a new service, whether her city has been built for her or merely monitored around her. That is the test that matters, and it is the test the enlarged BRICS+ club has set for itself, whether or not it intended to.

The scramble for space is often described as a competition between great powers. In the cities of the Global South it looks different, smaller and far more consequential. It looks like a bus that arrives when the app says it will. It looks like a fare that does not punish the poor for paying in cash. It looks like a dataset that a municipality can read, audit and argue with. If the new scramble produces those things, it will have earned its name. If it produces only new dependencies in old packaging, then the story ends where it began, with a woman at a roadside at 6:40 in the morning, still waiting.