African urbanism

The peripheral contexts of urban agglomerations in sub-Saharan Africa are usually discussed in reference to peri-urban literature, which tends to be largely descriptive rather than theoretically engaged. The urban peripheral contexts of North America and Europe, however, have been highly differentiated as part of suburban literature, with a flood of proposed terms to better address them. The goal of this article, whilst engaging with peri-urban literature, is to confront the urbanisation occurring at the peripheries of Lagos with suburban theory. For the peripheries of sub-Saharan Africa to contribute meaningfully to the suburban debate, they must first be differentiated. This article attempts to show the diversity of forms, actors and processes that are producing peripheral expansion in Lagos, and the complexity and ambiguity of the multiple land systems at work. This challenges any easy assumptions about pervasive poverty and informality in the urban peripheries of Lagos, much less sub-Saharan Africa in general. In conclusion, the relevance and appropriateness of the suburb will be questioned, and its capacity to adequately address the diversity of forms and processes at work in the peripheral urbanisation of Lagos.

What visions for the future of the “Greater Maputo”? What territorial images and analytical interpretations we can build on to envision long- term strategies and political decisions to promote integrated and sustainable development?
Moving from these questions, through an innovative methodology and a transdisciplinary approach, the book offers a tool-kit for reading and rethinking the Maputo metropolitan region, from the perspective of a more balanced and comprehensive rural-urban relation. In addition, the volume outlines a combination of key guidelines and spatial scenarios for a possible agenda for the sustainable development of the Province of Maputo, with particular attention to the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus. The book presents a selection of the main results of the research project “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!” funded by Polisocial Award 2018 – the social engagement and responsibility programme at the Politecnico di Milano – to support PIMI, an ongoing educational and research programme at the Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo.

Approaching the informal construction and extension of infrastructures through the terrain of what I term “the incremental” opens up new platforms of analysis for post- colonial urban systems. This refers to ad hoc actions on the part of slum dwellers to connect to energy networks or carve out informal living spaces. I argue that incre- mentalism is produced and subsequently secured and scaled through material config- urations that seek to test and prefigure new forms of infrastructure and accompanying resource flows. I use a case study of energy and housing systems in a low-income neighborhood in Accra to define and examine these incremental infrastructures. I examine shifts in the Accra energy network as urban dwellers rework connections to flows of electricity. I also consider the material adjustment of housing and the role of cooperation in responding to threats of demolition and displacement. Together, incremental infrastructures and the ways that they are constituted articulate a prefigurative politics in which residents seek to generate access to new infrastructural worlds.

As Africa urbanises and the focus of poverty shifts to urban centres, there is an imperative to address poverty in African cities. This is particularly the case in smaller cities, which are often the most rapidly urbanising, but the least able to cope with this growth.This book argues that an examination of the food system and food security provides a valuable lens to interrogate urban poverty. Chapters examine the linkages between poverty, urban food systems and local governance with a focus on case studies from three smaller or secondary cities in Africa: Kisumu (Kenya), Kitwe (Zambia) and Epworth (Zimbabwe).
The book makes a wider contribution to debates on urban studies and urban governance in Africa through analysis of the causes and consequences of the paucity of urban-scale data for decision makers, and by presenting potential methodological innovations to address this paucity.As the global development agenda is increasingly focusing on urban issues, most notably the urban goal of the new Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, the work is timely.

Citation: Hyman, K. and Pieterse, E. (2017) “Infrastructure deficits and potential in African Cities”, in: Burdett, R. and Hall, S. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Urban Sociology: New approaches to the twenty-first century city. London: Sage Publishers

nomic, cultural, and political practices? If so, does this alter higher-order claims we may wish to make about, say, commodification, the production of the subject, the creation of the mass, technological reproducibility, speed, and a host of other phenomena that go along with the rise of the late modern? One of the important elements of postcolonial and decolonial thinking has been to challenge historical narratives and discourses of modernity that emanate from Europe and which claim universality for what are, in fact, particular histories and epistemologies. My work shares this ambition to draw out histories of media and technology that operate at variance with normative histories of the modern. But this runs the risk of reifying cultural distinction and writing histories that focus on the exceptionalism of-in this case-Africa, rather than seeing its participation in a common media history. In this line of reasoning, mainstream histories of visual culture argue that its technological base and cultural techniques were formative to the production of modern forms of spectacle, attention, and capital, but that Kenya or Nigeria are different, anchored in cultural lifeways that provide an alternative to the march of the modern. 1 For some theorists this difference is liberatory, in that it offers a critical position from which Western normativity can be challenged and imagined otherwise. For others, the insistence on difference runs the risk of cultural reification. Achille Mbembe, for instance, has forcefully critiqued the tendency to assert cultural uniqueness. He argues that it repeats a long, racist history by which Africans-ever since the Enlightenment-have been conceived of as outside and separate from the modern, excluded from participating in the same historical and cultural processes as the rest of the world. He terms this the "principle of ontological difference" (2002: 247) and sees it as the grounds by which Africa is stigmatized as backward. 2 Instead, he argues, the "obsession" with uniqueness and difference must be opposed by a "thematics of sameness," an analysis of the ways African societies and nations take part in contemporaneous, reciprocal interaction with cultural, political, and economic flows from all over the world. 3 Decolonial thinking, emerging from Latin America, has been politically animated by the ques-1. It is precisely the attempt to account for this difference from Western epistemologies-delinking-that has animated much decolonial thinking. For an overview, see Mignolo 2007.

This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a television sketch about repeated electrical shock; the careers of freelance electricians known as vishoka; and encounters between residents and power utility inspectors. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, as well as long-term ethnographic research, the essay argues that zaniness manifests the structural paradoxes of entrepreneurial populations that have alternately been described as the lumpen, the informal, or simply the urban poor. Specifically, it argues that such populations are often consigned to permanent improvisation and that this engenders a social freedom that, in some respects, remains indistinguishable from constraint. The zany can thus critically nuance portraits of livelihood and citizenship practices in urban Africa by bringing their freedoms and constraints into the same frame.

Architecture can assume both liberating, empowering roles as much as also serving as oppressive. This has been evident under different political systems2 in African countries and especially in their post-colonial cities. Indeed, the colonial legacy had ingrained oppressive and suppressive objectives as part of the colonial project. As political scientist Mitchell (1988) narrates, the British spatial facet, for instance, was aimed at imposing the values of the coloniser to the subjects and this was best explicit in the urban plans and other architectural forms. In Kenya, this was evident in Nairobi within the African housing strategies (Makachia, 2011), urban planning and iconic buildings (Myers, 2003; Muthuma, 2013). At this stage, some assumed a racist agenda meant to be redressed with political independence. The post-colonial agenda was meant to redress this anomaly but often failed and mostly perpetuated the same spatial strategies but now tinged in economic segregationist strategies. This thesis is most evident in the housing strategies and their outcomes in Nairobi city.
The paper summarises the chronological spatial evolution of African housing in Nairobi since city’s emergence as the spatial and political nexus of the present-day Kenyan state. Through political and policy orthodoxy, housing strategies were used to realise architectural resultants that, a posteriori, can be perceived as mostly oppressive to the majority dwellers of the city. The governments of the Kenyan post-colonial state made a conscious choice to pursue policies similar to the British colonial ones in most urban planning and housing sectors but differed to the extent of giving opportunity to all races unlike the racial segregationist colonial ones. Thus, institutions like Central Housing Board3 (CHB) were emasculated with more powers and financial wherewithal, while others were created to support housing and building production, by a UN team (Abrams & Bloomberg, 1964). Indeed, in practice4, no ideological realignment has ever been adopted in Kenya since the advent of the British capitalist system at the turn of the 19th century.

The emergence of platform urbanism over the last decade prompts a reimagining of existing infrastructural geographies of the city and the labour that underpins the operation of urban life. This reflection draws on fieldwork conducted in urban East Africa over recent years to think through the labour involved in these urban dynamics.

Archaeological research on the Iron Age occupation at Lake Chad has focused so far on sites located in the clay plains to the
south of the lake. Apart from extensive investigations on the Later Stone Age occupation (ca 1800–400 BC), the area comprising the margins and sandy plains to the southwest remained virtually unexplored. Archaeological investigations conducted by the authors and other colleagues at a few sites north of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, Nigeria, now provide original information on the initial stages of the Iron Age occupation of the area. The research has revealed that this period started around the beginning of our era. It is characterised by the arrival of iron-using human groups bringing in a new pottery tradition and a
diversified subsistence economy, presumably mainly based on the cultivation of plants, particularly sorghum. In part, they lived
in extremely large, densely populated and, probably, fortified settlements, comparable to 16th–20th century AD regional centres known from south of the lake. The paper presents the data collected at each of the sites studied and discusses the significance of the new evidence in a regional and supraregional context.

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Recent archaeological research on the mid-1st millennium BC site of
Zilum has opened a new perspective for archaeological and historical studies
in the central Sudan. Located to the southwest of Lake Chad, about 60 km
north of Maiduguri, Zilum consisted of a densely occupied settlement dwelled
by a stone-using population that might have numbered ca. 1700-2500
individuals (Magnavita 2004). With a total extent of 12-13 hectares, the site’s
most prominent archaeological feature is a now decayed, supposedly
protective ditch-and-rampart-system which encompassed the entire settled
area over a length of one kilometre (Magnavita et al. 2006). Hitherto
archaeologically unknown for periods prior to about the 12th century AD
(Lebeuf 1980:16; Holl 1987:155), such protective structures, exclusively made
of clay, are commonly associated in the Chad Basin to settlements dated to
the last seven to six centuries (cf. Connah 1981; Lange 1987; Lockhart 1996).

Flood mapping is still rare in the large cities South of Sahara. The lack of information on the characteristics of floods, the orography of the sites and the receptors hampers its production. However, even with scant information, it is possible to create preliminary risk mapping. This tool can be used by local administrations in decision making on emergency plans or on climate change (CC) action plans. From 2010 onwards, the River Niger at Niamey (1.1 million inhabitants, 123 km 2 in 2014) swelled at unseasonal times. This new river flood pattern can be linked to CC. Each flooding event affected thousands of people and homes. The steady development of areas that did not appear to be flood prone in the past is the main cause of these impacts. These areas require special measures if further impact is to be avoided in the future. This chapter presents the preliminary flood risk map of Niamey 1:20,000. The map was built up using an historic approach (flooded area derived from satellite images) and considering risk (R) as the result of hazard (H) and damage (D), R = H * D. Risk was measured according to two scenarios: medium and high probability of flooding. The inverse of the return period of river and pluvial flooding (H) and the potential damage to buildings and crops according the water depth were used. Information to measure risk components was sourced by daily rainfall and daily discharge of the River Niger from 1946 to 2014, and from high-resolution satellite images (2014). The risk map id entifies hot spots for emergency and CC action planning. The fifth district alone contains 52% of the potential damage. Ninety-nine percent of the potential damage is concentrated within 225 hectars. Reinforcing existing embankments and constructing new ones to protect these areas seems more appropriate than resettlement.

Every now and again, the emperor must be disrobed. Disciplinary debates – shaped by the clothes of a thousand emperors past – become stale, and detached from the empiri- cal realities they purport to describe. Over the past two decades, AbdouMaliq Simone, among a number of poststructural scholars, has dutifully disrobed the field of urban studies, preparing the ground for a new vocabulary of urbanism that is better able to convey the dissonant realities of emerging city life in the Global South. Gone are the confident and well-worn concepts of ‘gentri- fication’, ‘entrepreneurship’, and ‘public space’. In their place stand an array of chal- lenging and often indeterminate notions, including those of ‘secretion’, ‘resonance’ and ‘re-description’, which reflect the unfold- ing paradoxes of urban life in the majority world.

This article reads the embodiment of fashion in the web series, An African City, as a geographical site for challenging dominant Eurocentric narratives about African women as insignificant to the global spaces of fashion.  By situating embodied fashion as a site of analysis, the article posits that the sartorial elegance in An African city is part of the “Africa Rising” discourse, in this case announcing Africa’s cosmopolitan worldliness on and through the bodies of upper-middle class “Afropolitan” women. While this use of fashion as a counter-narrative constitutes a critical intervention by the web series, the article also argues that An African City concomitantly contributes to the production of negative discourses about poor and “non-Afropolitan” African women as unfashionable.

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, residents, electricians, and power-utility workers tolerate some unofficial forms of modifiying the electrical network, such as unsanctioned reconnections and extensions. These practices, which can also involve theft, bribery, and other illegal activities, both undermine and sustain an increasingly expensive public infrastructure that is in disrepair and subject to routine bureaucratic neglect. But such modifications also have their tacit limits, and people judge as foolish those who have exceeded them. The limits reveal a modal reasoning at work in the relationship among technical systems, urban ethics, and informal economic arrangements. In each of these domains, people use modal reasoning to simultaneously alter and preserve an emergent future. Such reasoning illustrates how infrastructures constitute wholes that emerge from, but are not reducible to, their constituent parts. [infrastructure, electricity, modality, reasoning, urbanism, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania]

Most of the contemporary literature on urban globalization is focused on the major world cities of New York, London, and Tokyo. Much rarer are studies on the globalization of less prominent cities (especially those in developing countries) and their socioeconomic and morphologic transformation as a result of their interactions with the global economy.

Major taxation reforms over the past decade have been interpreted as facilitating the transformation of Lagos: once widely seen as a city in permanent crisis, it is now seen by some observers as a beacon of megacity development. Most academic attention has focused on personal income taxation, which comprises the lion’s share of government revenue in Lagos. Less attention has been devoted to another crucial innovation over the same period – the Land Use Charge – and other forms of tax related to property. In this paper we show how the story of property taxation in Lagos since the early 2000s is important, not only in terms of the enormous increase in collection, but because of the ways in which property-related taxes have helped to support personal income taxation and to solidify the fiscal contract between state and society more broadly. Moreover, we explore how the payment of the Land Use Charge is interpreted by taxpayers, and how it is used alongside a plethora of other documents and processes to try and shore up fragile claims to property. In a context of intensely insecure tenure, particularly but not exclusively at the lower ends of the socio-economic spectrum, both taxation and other kinds of formal and informal payments play a key role in efforts to incrementally build and solidify property rights.

In many parts of Africa, societies that remain primarily rural are experiencing accelerated urban growth and highly visible booms in property development. In the absence of significant industrialization, investment is pouring directly into what Lefebvre and Harvey characterized as the 'secondary circuit' of capital. Debates about the drivers of investment in real estate are longstanding in relation to the global North, but have given little consideration to low-income and late-urbanizing countries in Africa. Yet such contexts offer important opportunities to reflect on existing theory. Focusing on Kigali and Addis Ababa (both transformed virtually beyond recognition over the past two decades), this article explores the drivers and consequences of investment in urban real estate in countries striving to structurally transform their economies. It argues that a range of formal and informal incentives and constraints have led to high-end real estate being viewed as the 'safest bet' for those with resources to invest, even where demand is limited and governments are promoting other kinds of investment. While some people are reaping urban fortunes in largely untaxed rents, much of the construction is purely speculative, creating landscapes of unused and underused high-end properties in contexts where investment is desperately needed elsewhere.

This thesis aims to understand the important features of resilience for individuals living in poor urban areas. There is currently little understanding of the role of ecosystem services, or the key components of adaptive capacity in these areas. As urbanisation continues apace, it is of utmost importance that we understand how to build resilience in slums and informal settlements. This thesis contributes to this challenge by finding determinants of adaptive capacity, the degree to which ecosystem services are used, and significant heterogeneities in slum adaptive capacity.

The research is based on empirical fieldwork in three slum areas in Kampala, Uganda. Study areas were chosen at differing distances from the city centre to the periphery, with data collected at the individual level. Mixed methods were used and included pre-study open interviews, a random survey questionnaire, and focus groups. A total of 720 questionnaires capture the bulk of the information, and contain two relatively novel methods – a presentation of adaptive capacity statements, and a social network analysis.

The thesis finds that slum residents use local ecosystem services very little but where there are green spaces, they are valued for benefits such as recreation or aesthetics. Slum residents tend to deal with problems with the help of others, and social networks are critical for adaptive capacity. Other significant determinants of adaptive capacity include innovation, feelings of control, and a sense of place. There are significant differences in adaptive capacities and social networks between slums areas, and specific population groups. These results give policy key features of resilience to build on, and highlight the importance of assessing where strengths and weaknesses lie. The determinants of resilience in poor urban areas are unique, but once understood, enable us to reduce vulnerability for a vast proportion of the world's population living in slums and informal settlements.

A growing body of work has highlighted the centrality of verticality to the making of contemporary urbanism, pushing scholars to begin conceptualising inequality, politics, and planning as multi-scalar in nature. This paper builds off these interventions to argue that verticality should be understood as a fragile and unstable achievement, a fra-gility heightened when the oft-taken for granted workings of the state and private sector, which enable the appearance of verticality as a seamless achievement, fail. Drawing on research conducted in Luanda, Angola, this paper explores how residents, planners , and real estate developers discuss the difficulties of maintaining the experience, materiality, and imaginations of verticality as embodied in the architectural form of the high-rise. The paper shows that in the context of ongoing urban decay and the seeming abnegation of most state responsibility for provision, urban residents are forced to engage in the production of a DIY verticality-constantly patching and repairing buildings to keep them viable, actions which in turn pull them into relationships of privatized belonging with the city. As such, the paper argues that the material politics of the high-rise in Luanda both highlights the fragility at the heart of verticality as well as the shifting forms of privatized belonging immanent to this fragility.

Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in the struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action. Fleshing out the materiality of trash and degraded labor, Fredericks illuminates the myriad ways waste can be a potent tool of urban control and rebellion.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the activities of a young, pro-democracy group in Senegal significantly increased youth's willingness to participate in politics. Senegalese youth share a history of political distrust and protest that correlate with waves of incumbent rule and anti-incumbent opposition. Most recently in 2011, the Movement of the 23 June (M23) halted President Abdoulaye Wade's attempts to change the constitution in his favor for the 2012 presidential election. The group, Y'en a marre, emerged at the forefront of the movement, crystalizing youth's grievances through hip hop music and catalyzing the larger opposition coalition to oust the incumbent. Social movements can affect change by expanding methods of political engagement and increasing political efficacy, the belief that one can produce effects through political action. To determine whether Y'en a marre achieved these aims among youth, this study conducts political opinion surveys of 88 people aged 18 to 30 in six Dakarian villages. Although inconclusive, the results provide a political pulse on Senegalese youth post-2011 and enhance social movement and political efficacy literature in Africa.

As the global South, and Africa in particular, becomes increasingly urbanized, scholars have called attention to the limited explanatory capacity of existing theory. In response, ROY (2009) suggests developing conceptual vectors based on regional histories and contexts that shape cities. Here we identify and develop two such vectors. We suggest that the developmentalist focus of African urban work provides insights into the challenges of linking academic theory with progressive changes in practice, what we call ‘engaged theory- making’. We also suggest that conditions of informality enables ‘platforms of engagement’ — particular modes of organizing towards radical incremental change. Our intention is to highlight strengths of African research, raise critical questions and encourage further work.

New Towns in development across Africa are overwhelmingly designed according to twentieth-century planning models ranging from functionalist Chinese grids to American gated communities. Contemporary African New Towns based on these models are often unable to adapt to stimuli and, as a result, exacerbate both spatial and ecological challenges. The objective of this paper is to argue that African New Towns require a substantial shift from current practice and that planners must imagine new, hybrid planning strategies. This paper takes an exploratory approach and identifies the spatial challenges specific to contemporary African New Towns. Building on the argument that planning benefits from linkages between critical social theory and environmental science, this paper asserts that an adaptive urban planning approach that effectively engages citizens can be a more sustainable alternative to current practice. The paper concludes with implications for future research on the translation of challenges into potentials for African New Towns.

Missionaries introduced the western education in Kenya as they first settled in the East African coast by 1557. The first wave of missionaries being the Roman Catholics and then followed by the Lutherans through the Church Missionary Society(CMS) of the likes of Johan Ludwig Krapf, Johann Rebman and Jacob Erhast. The missionaries purpose was to transform African natives to Christianity, but also as a means of rehabilitating slaves who had been captured by the Arabs. This made the missionaries set their first camps and missionary centers in the coastal area. Frere town in Mombasa being among the key examples of such missionary establishment.
The missionaries used education as a powerful tool with which to break down African traditional society and to spread their own beliefs. Their curriculum was reading and writing to establish a high degree of literacy for the understanding and transmission of the scripture. For them, it was more important to win souls and convert Africans to Christians, which they found it difficult to do so in the coastal area hence prompting them to venture into the mainland in Kenya. The missionaries were more concerned of limiting the spread of Islam into the mainland and therefore their quick measure to build more centers than any other actor during the Kenyan colonial period.

This paper addresses a specific aspect of the social and cultural life of the Luso-Chinese in Mozambique, whose first contingents came from the Chinese province of Guangdong in the second half of the 19th century. Most settled in the city of Beira. By the 1950s, the Chinese community was already well integrated into modern life in colonial Beira. The city was going through an unprecedented urban and architectural boom. At that time, the Luso-Chinese, who were essentially merchants, also began to stand out in the field of photography. Based on a multi-sited ethnography among the Portuguese-Chinese diaspora – and their family photo albums – this paper reflects on two inseparable aspects of late-colonial modernity: architecture and photography.