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- Convenors:
-
Jennifer Hart
(Wayne State University)
Martin Murray (University of Michigan)
Lalli Metsola (University of Helsinki)
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- Stream:
- Social Anthropology
- Location:
- Appleton Tower, Lecture Theatre 4
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The aim of this panel is to destabilize the way that conventional urban studies literature has theorized cities and urbanization in Africa. In this panel, we seek to explore alternative frameworks that move beyond conventional tropes of slums and informality as registers of urban dysfunctionality.
Long Abstract:
The aim of this panel is to destabilize the way that conventional urban studies literature has theorized cities and urbanization in Africa. For the most part, mainstream urban theories lay claim to the universal applicability of their concepts and categories as a way of explaining patterns of urbanization on a global scale. In particular, they operate with universalizing models that seek to impose a "one-size-fits-all" conceptual framework as a way of accounting for the trajectories of urbanism in Africa. By starting with the premise that "cities in Africa just don't work" (properly or efficiently), mainstream urban theories and planning practice offer no real understanding of the particular dynamics of African urbanism, but instead provide rather bland and predictable formulaic solutions to alleged dysfunctionalities. In this panel, we seek to explore alternative frameworks that move beyond the conventional tropes of slums and informality as registers of urban dysfunctionality in Africa. Recent calls for decentering Western theories have made some headway in rethinking urbanism in Africa. Scholars operating largely through a poststructuralist lens have promoted a distinctly "southern theory" (Connell), arguing that "seeing from the South" (Watson, Comaroff and Comaroff) provides an alternative vantage-point which undermines the exalted position of Western theory. By interrogating these alternative frameworks and others, this panel explores the potential for rethinking urban theory from African cities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Stephen Marr (Malmö University)
Paper short abstract:
Residents of Detroit have long coped with poverty and ineffective municipal governance. These characteristics echo circumstances common across urban Africa. The essay utilizes African urban theory to understand contemporary Detroit with specific focus on DIY efforts connected to sustainability.
Paper long abstract:
The paper situates Detroit in a conversation with African cities that share similar experiences of precarity, inequality, and urban comportment(s) often characterized by improvisation and unpredictability. The paper thus draws from works by Simone, Pieterse, Trefon, and other Africanist scholars to understand processes of contemporary urban practice(s) in Detroit. I discuss preliminary findings from fieldwork conducted in Detroit, Michigan during autumn 2018. The research investigates climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts at the urban "margins" in situations of uneven state presence. Given the state's long inability to provide services due to a lack of resources, Detroit has a lengthy history of citizen-led initiatives that have tried to fill the service provision void. These grassroots efforts continue into the present.
Questions engaged in the paper, include: what are the limitations and advantages for using urban theory developed in / for Africa in comparative context? How do urban citizens living with, and in, persistent and pervasive socio-economic, political, and spatial uncertainty conceive and implement sustainable climate solutions? What can formal institutions learn from solutions that happen "outside" the purview of the state? Throughout the essay, I advocate for the applicability of Africanist urban theory outside the Global South. Via observations, interviews, and document analysis, I pursue the above questions via the examination of themes connected to urban agriculture, eco-housing movements, and infrastructure decay.
JoAnn McGregor (University of Sussex) Kudzai Chatiza (Development Governance Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the rethinking of urban theory from African cities demands a better understanding of the politics of authority, property and citizenship in newly urbanizing spaces. It explores the case of large new informal settlements in Harare, controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues that the rethinking of urban theory from African cities demands a better understanding of the politics of authority, property and citizenship in newly urbanizing spaces. We take the case of large new informal settlements in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, originating in land occupations, resettlement projects and housing schemes. In these settlements, the ruling ZANUPF acts as de facto territorial authority and has promoted a view of access to urban land, housing and security as 'gift' conditional on demonstrations of party loyalty. Based on oral histories with residents of the settlements, we shed light on contestation over this notion of partisan citizenship. The paper contributes to broader conversations over citizenship in precarious urban peripheries in Africa and other parts of the global south by highlighting the role of the ruling party as actor shaping political ideas and everyday life on the city's margins. We use the Harare case to caution against celebratory accounts of urban land occupations as resistance. The discussion of historically situated practices to secure entitlements to land, property and security locates these acts within the contours not only of ruling party patronage, but also rights-based urban civic activism and a cross-cutting politics of possession.
Rose Marie Beck (Leipzig University)
Paper short abstract:
Following cables, wires, water pipes in Zanzibar Stone Town I explore whether "seeing like a city" is an alternative to "seeing from the North" and "seeing from the South".
Paper long abstract:
In their recent book "Seeing Like a City" (2016) Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift invite us to take seriously the complexity of the city. Indeed, they make us see what seeing like a city could be like. In my contribution I want to show how I tried to follow their advice by following and untangling bundles of electrical wires, assorted cables and water pipes attached to houses throughout the old kasbah city of Zanzibar. Trying to find their beginnings and endings turned out to be as impossible as enlightening and more and more irrelevant. Instead I found leaking pipes watering a miraculous garden in a dusty backyard. I found cables sneaking in and out of windows, histories of infrastructure identifyable through the degree that they were painted over, or not. Makeshift water connections attached to supporting poles of a house being pulled down in the next days. Trees hugging bunches of cables-water-pipes-telephone-cables. CCTV cameras in quiet back alleys overseeing what?! I ended up untangling not only infrastructure, but with it the recent political history of Zanzibar in its local, national and global connections.
In my contribution I am interested to explore whether and how"seeing like a city" could be an alternative to "seeing from the North" and "seeing from the South".
Martin Murray (University of Michigan)
Paper short abstract:
Making sense of urban transformation in Africa requires that we turn away from the received wisdom of mainstream urban theorizing. We need a new conceptual vocabulary to unpack realities on the ground.
Paper long abstract:
As a general rule, mainstream theorizing about cities in Africa has tended to focus on what is lacking: stable markets for landed property, formal rules shaping the use of urban space, efficient regulatory regimes and good governance, and workable infrastructure. Framed through the lens of the 'slum' and informality', cities in Africa just "do not seem to work" in accordance with the modernist (and high-modernist) imaginary of efficiency, rationality, and predictability. How do we theorize about cities in Africa that rejects and moves beyond the inherited dualisms of First-World and Third World, formality and informality, and dynamic and static? Rethinking urban transformation in Africa requires a revised conceptual vocabulary that enables us to make sense of cities "outside the West" as objects of inquiry in their own right.
Adeline Masquelier (Tulane University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the daily micropolitics through which spaces of citizenship are created in fadas, the tea-circles of unemployed young men in urban Niger. Rather than focusing on fadas as symptoms of urban dysfunctionality, I explore how young men deploy social immobility as an asset.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the daily micropolitics through which spaces of belonging are elaborated in fadas, the tea-circles fashioned by unemployed young men in urban Niger. As a vernacular expression of sociality that charts new paths
to recognition in the absence of conventional avenues to self-realization, the fadas make visible how disenfranchised young men lay claim to public space. At the fada young men spend a lot of time sitting, a practice dismissed by many as idleness. They keep watch while others sleep—and turn sitting into a form of labor—something they can do because they have nowhere to go. By deploying their social immobility as an asset—a mode of alertness to nocturnal threats—they insert themselves into the shifting landscape of crime prevention. Sitting, rather than betraying structural liminality, becomes part of an informal apparatus of nighttime surveillance and a tactical expression of civic engagement. It exemplifies the "makeshift,
adaptive pulse of the city" (Simone and Pieterse 2017). By discussing the fada through the lens of security and civism, I call attention to a social experiment under way in a part of the world long considered irrelevant to the centers of power and capitalist production. For the conditions to which the fada is a response—persistently high unemployment, intensifying informalization, etc.—are no longer specific to the Global South but are, in fact, increasingly relevant to what is happening in the Global North.
Susann Ludwig (University of Leipzig)
Paper short abstract:
Taking up a spatial perspective, this paper explores ways in which to account for 'becoming' beyond the binary of the event and the everyday and towards an understanding of people's practice of possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
"Ficgayo" is an empty space the size of two soccer fields. It is surrounded by the main roads and located at the center of Yopougon, the most densely populated district of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Ficgayo is a multipurpose venue. Back then, the imaged future of this space was to have the form and function of a town hall. Today, it is something else. But what? For reasons that I explore in this paper, the space is an infrastructural assemblage providing ground for possibility to operate. The primary purpose of Ficgayo is "multiple". It is a space of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari).
"At Ficgayo there's nothing going on, unless there something going on", people in Yopougon say. From the perspective of Ficgayo itself, however, there is always something going on. Therefore, taking up a spatial perspective is key in order to illuminate "what is going on when nothing is going on".
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at Ficgayo in Abidjan, this paper attempts to account for 'urban becoming' beyond the binary of the event and the everyday and to rethink possibility when there is nothing else available but space. Every single day, Ficgayo acts as a space in which people are busy hosting soccer matches, funerals, a driving school, meetings, school, business, prayers and people taking shortcuts, medical advice, a break, a bite or a bus. The question is: How are these practices accomplished, recognized and, therewith, made intelligible?
Katja Werthmann (University of Leipzig)
Paper short abstract:
The contribution of anthropologists to the study of urban Africa has been overlooked or forgotten both within and outside the discipline. This paper reviews anthropological contributions to the study of urban Africa since the 1930s.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological research in urban Africa covers a broad range of topics, spaces and social worlds. However, the contribution of anthropologists to the study of urban Africa has been overlooked or forgotten both within and outside the discipline. This paper reviews anthropological contributions to the study of urban Africa since the 1930s. Anthropologists introduced methodological innovations and made specific contributions to the study of cities as life-worlds and to topics such as ethnicity, gender relations, housing, migration or urban sociality. The pioneers of urban anthropology in Africa were female scholars like Monica (Hunter) Wilson and Ellen Hellmann who looked at informal economies, changing social relations and emerging middle class aspirations among labour migrants well before the researchers at the Rhodes Livingstone Institute. Other important early contributions include Balandier's and Miner's studies about Brazzaville and Timbuktu. These and other anthropological approaches to cities in Africa anticipated perspectives and topics that only later became part of the anthropological mainstream: the attention to individual experiences, the focus on new forms of social organization rather than on "culture", the appropriation of modernity through material culture and alternative life-styles, and the application of unconventional methods.