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- Convenors:
-
Silke Oldenburg
(Geneva Graduate Institute)
Barbara Heer (University of Basel)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH103
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
By moving social practices related to urban leisure and urban security to the centre of academic attention, this panel proposes to develop new perspectives on African urbanities outside of dominant narratives. We claim that African cities need to be rethought through the lens of the ordinary.
Long Abstract:
There is a strong tendency of urban research to focus on the special, the spectacular, the extraordinary, which usually becomes articulated by urban dwellers and researchers alike within hegemonic urban discourses. Current research on African cities, for example, lingers between complaints about the ungovernability of mushrooming cities and the appraisal of urban inventiveness.
Urban experiences rooted in lived spaces of African cities, are, though, much more diverse. Our panel starts from the assumption that urbanity in Africa (as elsewhere) is a dialectical process that is equally based on the agency of the actors and their take on the structured social and material environment which simultaneously shapes them. We derive from the hypothesis that the production of African urbanities needs to be empirically addressed through the lens of the everyday and the ordinary (f. ex. Das 2000; De Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1958). We assume that this lens is capable of addressing empirical and theoretical voids on African cities, usually uncovered by hegemonic discourses of development and creativity.
We conceptualise the urban dwellers' practices as a dialectic between encounter and distanciation, that is, how, when and where urban dwellers actively seek encounters or distance themselves from others. We invite papers which provide empirical studies on urban leisure and/or security, as these two urban realms tend to produce encounter and distanciation respectively, and are therefore especially adept for the study of African urbanities. We are particularly interested in papers which dare to analyse such urban voids from the perspective of the everyday (non-spectactular) city making.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Leslie Bank (Human Sciences Research Council)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the interplay between urban and rural influences in the consciousness and self-imagination of Pan Africanist youth formations.
Paper long abstract:
At Marikana in 2012 we saw migrants crouched on a hill cloaked in blankets that concealed pangas and sticks. They were preparing to face the might of the South African police. It was a startling image which was projected across the world, as they fell to police bullets. Their bodily dispositions and the cultural orientations seemed strangely archaic, like footage from an old movie reel from yesteryear, something out of the historical archive of 1960 Mpondo, or earlier moments of African primary resistance.
So what is the relationship then between the urban and the rural in Africanist politics, identity and cultural formation in South African cities? Are we right to assume that ANC- aligned formations have embraced progressive modernist politics and identities, while Africanists have generally turned back to their rural and traditional roots, as the migrants at Marikana did, as a cultural compass and source of strength, inspiration and imagination of freedom. This paper explores the complex issues in the formation of Africanist urban politics in South Africa. I focused particularly on what I call "cowboy revolutionaries", youth who spent their days in bioscopes watching westerns and in their township shacks plotting a revolution to overthrow the South African state. To understand the connections between leisure and politics, consciousness and social action it is fundamental to reflect on the question of "encounter" and "distanciation" in the urban setting.
Leo Hopkinson (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses the quotidian activity of walking to analyse the links between body, place and global industry. Walking is a practice of place-making for Accra’s boxing community, and my analysis of this process confounds the distinction between the ordinary and the exceptional in this urban space.
Paper long abstract:
The everyday act of walking through Ga Mashie, an area of central Accra, is an important process of place-making for Accra's boxing community. I focus on the long-standing association between boxing and this small area of Accra. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse walking as a quotidian process of creating affective bonds between persons and their environment. Walking through Ga Mashie facilitates encounters on a bodily scale between the boxing community and the public; encounters which are sought by both parties. In contrast, movement by other means, by car for instance, is considered spatially and socially distancing. Walking through Ga Mashie is an ethical practice of presence for the boxing community, which affirms both identity and place.
The association between boxing and this area is central to the pugilistic community's success in the global boxing industry. Thus pedestrian encounters become a way of engaging with the wider world. The exceptional is juxtaposed against the ordinary when pedestrians encounter renowned boxers in person beside material icons of the same sportsmen and women, such as posters and murals. In these everyday encounters the exceptional becomes banal, creating a sense of being in a place of global relevance.
I develop De Certeau and Ingold's approach to walking as a creative process of annunciation, and argue that place and identity emerge simultaneously as parts of a single phenomenon. This framework allows us to address the relationships between place, body and the global which are implicit in everyday practices.
Aidan Mosselson (University of Johannesburg and University of the Witwatersrand)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the everyday tactics and processes which produce and maintain order and security in a volatile urban environment. It argues that security and management are contingent practices which adapt to, rather than dominate, the socio-spatial realities they are confronted with.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I examine the tactics and processes through which urban security is produced and maintained in a volatile, 'disorderly' urban environment. I argue that the production of urban security rests on processes of contingency and adaptation, as much as it relies on spectacle and the enactment of force. Research from Johannesburg's inner-city reveals that even powerful actors, such as private security personnel, have to engage in contingent, everyday practices which adapt to the socio-spatial realities they are confronted with in order to effectively create regimes of security and order. Whilst research about urban management, security and governance in Johannesburg has concentrated on spectacular displays of force, such as police raids and 'crackdowns', I demonstrate that, whilst these displays are important for the performance of urban governance and policing, the creation of an urban order rests on more mundane and everyday processes too. As the session conveners note, actors, although creative, are also shaped by the material environment which they are located in. My presentation demonstrates this theoretical insight in practice, by showing how urban management and security personnel, although engaged in practices which actively shape a particular urban environment and the ways people can behave in it, also have to adapt their views and ideals of order and management and practices in relation to the urban social reality they are present in. Thus, management and security are not only spectacular acts of force, but are everyday, contingent processes and practices in which spatial reality, power and agency are mutually-constitutive.
Emilie Pinard (Laurentian University) Jørgen Andersen (School of Architecture, Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
In the face of rapid growth, how is everyday city-making manifested? Here two far apart cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are examined - Maputo, Mozambique and Dakar, Senegal - focusing on design ideals, production of urban commons, leisure and security in the emerging built environment.
Paper long abstract:
In the face of rapid demographic growth, Sub-Saharan African cities are expanding fast - horizontally and vertically. The majority of this expansion has very little regulation or guidance from the state - i.e. local authority planning and/or building control. Nevertheless there are strong socio-cultural values that regulate and guide such development. This paper examines how these are manifested in two cities/countries as far apart as could be in the macro-region: Maputo in Mozambique and Dakar in Senegal.
There are remarkable similarities in processes of how peri-urban land and housing is developed in both countries despite significant social and cultural differences - underpinning key aspects of socio-cultural regulation of wider importance. The everyday practice of dwelling in these cities is arguably producing forms of 'popular' urban architecture - i.e. something between the 'erudite' architecture designed by architects and the 'vernacular' traditions that were developed previously in rural areas.
The paper focuses on how design ideals and desires are produced in these urban areas and which influences are prevalent? It discusses the issue of the production of urban commons, as state-led interventions often are minimal. Finally it looks at how leisure and security are manifested in the emerging built environment.
In conclusion the paper attempts to highlight how professionals engaged in urban development and housing may learn from these practices and how low-income and middle-class residents can be assisted to improve these themselves? The paper examines at how knowledge is embedded socially and culturally in these processes as the key to answering such queries. (this paper was developed together with Paul Jenkins)
Kristin Kastner (LMUMunich University)
Paper short abstract:
Fashion is an important feature of Greater Dakar. Examining the interconnectedness between everyday fashion practices and the city's social spaces offers additional perspectives on the making of urban identities.
Paper long abstract:
In Senegal, fashion and the presentation of the bodily self play a decisive role in the configuration and negotiation of identities. Fashion as part of material culture and expression of sociocultural and aesthetic practices is an omnipresent phenomenon in Dakar and shared by all spectra of society. Especially textile markets and tailor shops function as social spaces, and the streets of Dakar resemble a gigantesque catwalk. Moreover, life cycle and religious ceremonies provide an opportunity for the public display of new fabrics and styles. The cityscape and its inhabitants have been shaped for centuries by translocal and transnational encounters, references and imaginations. While the city of Dakar is a source of inspiration for tailors and designers, the so-called traditional robes are subject to change as people meet the claims of urban lifestyles. The frequent and often excessive changing of one's clothing, which is widely shared via social media, as well as the shaping and styling of the body are popular activities connected to prestige and social mobility. I argue that analyzing the interplay between everyday fashion practices as both spectacular and ordinary and the urban environment can foster new perspectives on old dichotomies like local/global or traditional/modern and provide us with useful approaches to trace the formation of urban subjects.