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- Convenor:
-
Laurent Fourchard
(Science Po)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH119
- Start time:
- 1 July, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore the way in which past, present and future is used as political resource by numerous local, national and international actors and how their articulation plays a decisive role in shaping urbanism in Africa.
Long Abstract:
Presentism which postulates that neither the future nor the past exist is very much dominant in a common understanding of Africa's cities. This is not only the legacy of a chaotic vision of urbanization of the continent, an ontological analysis determined by what cities lack (industrialization, infrastructures, government, public policies). It is also very much part of the uncertainty and elusiveness of urban life, the massive precariousness of work and the fact that people have so often replaced infrastructure. The present is no doubt powerfully shaping everyday life. Yet all Africa's cities have layers of history (from slavery to colonialism, nationalism, war or conflicts) which are mobilized by individual and collective actors to make claims. In a context of reduced resources, citizenship based on a community vision of the past is often used as a way to exclude groups from access to resources, jobs, houses or services. The future has eventually become another political possibility. It has been largely mobilized in the last decade: political leaders promote the narratives of a developmental state, draft digital cities of the future, design metropolitan plans for Dakar, Nairobi, Lagos or Cape Town, banks predict the emergence of an urban middle class and international companies see urban areas in the continent as the next promising consumption markets. This panel will explore the way in which past, present and future is used as political resource and how their articulation plays a decisive role in shaping urbanism in Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Thomas Fouquet (CNRS)
Paper short abstract:
A travers l’étude de jeunes femmes qui fréquentent quotidiennement le Dakar nocturne, on envisagera la nuit urbaine comme un terrain de contestation où critiques du présent et espoirs du futur s’enchevêtrent. Entre chronotopie et hétérotopie, la ville nocturne manifeste son potentiel indocile.
Paper long abstract:
S'appuyant sur une étude consacrée à des jeunes femmes qui fréquentent quotidiennement le Dakar by night, cette contribution envisage la nuit urbaine comme un terrain de contestation où critiques du présent et espoirs du futur s'articulent étroitement. La ville nocturne se prête remarquablement bien à l'approche en termes de chronotopie, alors que l'espace urbain se recompose en profondeur au rythme de l'alternance jour/nuit. Du point de vue de nombreux citadins, elle revêt simultanément un caractère hétérotopique, permettant que les conditions de vie présentes soient soumises à la critique d'un avenir autre - et ailleurs. Ce faisant, ces conceptions construisent la nuit urbaine comme un « temps du monde », tournée vers des mondes plus vastes et un futur riche de promesses, tandis que la ville diurne est fréquemment renvoyée à un localisme négativement conçu et teinté d'archaïsme. Les temps passé, présent et futur sont ainsi rabattus sur des espaces urbains, réels ou imaginés, proches ou lointains, actuels ou potentiels (à-venir). Ces configurations témoignent d'énonciations critiques quant au « retard » supposé ou allégué de l'Afrique dans le système mondial, en jouant sur des effets de contraste aussi bien spatiaux, culturels que temporels ; elles attestent simultanément l'enchevêtrement d'imaginaires du temps et de l'espace dans la production des identités citadines, et le potentiel d'indocilité qui s'en dégage.
Daniel Agbiboa (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
This field study of unknown time in Lagos urban transport suggests that the present and the future are not disconnected horizons of socio-spatial practice, but combine to produce urban space and city forms.
Paper long abstract:
Turning the table on Lefebvre's argument that the structure of everyday life is closely associated with the non-accumulative routing of cyclical or immanent time whereas it lags behind the forward-moving linear or transcendent time, I argue that cyclical and linear time are in fact intertwined in lived reality and popular imagination. This suggests that the spatial ebb and flow of time cannot be grasped in rigidly binary terms such as the opposition of cyclical and linear time. Interrogating popular arts like the rhythmic use of entextualised slogans that are prominently
painted on the bodies of commercial minibus-taxis (danfos) in Nigeria's city of Lagos, Africa's largest metropolis, I argue that the interaction of these seemingly conflicting representations of time affects and ultimately shapes the grounds of our meaning(lessness), (in)security, and our sense of being-in-the-city. At these interfaces and interstices of conflicting notions of time, and in the interchange between (un)familiar termini, a powerful sense of unknown (or future) time can emerge, which in turn reinforces the need for a more experimental re-positioning and re-orientation in everyday urban life.
Allen Xiao (National University of Singapore)
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic case study of Gowon Estate in Lagos, Nigeria, this paper will explore how urban individuals in a state-led housing enact city-identification practices while narrating everyday lives in temporal senses of individuals’, the neighborhood’s and the city’s trajectories.
Paper long abstract:
African urban studies tend to problematize African cities by revealing the malfunction of urban governance, unbalanced socioeconomic structures, and haunted colonial legacies. On the other hand, they underline the potential of African urbanism by unveiling the vibrancy of urban informalities, the dynamics of entrepreneurial transnationalism, and the upsurge of materialist aspiration. This contradictory assemblage of two seeming extremes in the structural analysis of African cities shadows the multiplicity of city-identities which city residents may construct, negotiate, and contest over the time and the politics of time in articulating city-identities.
Based on an ethnographic case study of Gowon Estate in Lagos, Nigeria, this paper will explore how urban individuals in a state-led housing enact city-identification practices while narrating everyday lives in temporal senses of individuals', the neighborhood's and the city's trajectories. Built by the federal government in 1975, apartments in Gowon Estate were allocated to civil servants recruited from all over the country. Without any maintenance by the state in the 1980s, the housing was privatized and only lower-class residents remained. There are two distinct generations of residents still living in the estate: the elder are migrants retiring from civil services; the young are their children born and raised up in the estate, who are currently struggling with underemployment in Nigeria. The ethnographic portrait of both generations will shed light on grassroots conceptualization of time as politics and nuanced identification of city as experiences. This exploratory research suggests further studies of interconnected practices of time-narration and city-identification in urban Africa.
Julia Gallagher (SOAS, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the past is used in representations of the state in public architecture in post-apartheid South Africa.
Paper long abstract:
My paper will explore how the past is used in representations of the state in public architecture in post-apartheid South Africa. Public buildings often incorporate myth and history as a way to establish national identity and state authority. New architecture can be a prominent way to do this in post-colonial regimes, and the South African state has built many new buildings that draw on pre-colonial and apartheid histories in a variety of fascinating ways.
The paper compares four iconic state buildings built since 1994. The Northern Cape Legislature in Kimberley, and the Departments of Trade and Industry and International Relations and Cooperation buildings in Pretoria all draw on ideas and imagery from pre-colonial history; while the Constitutional Court building in Johannesburg draws directly on the apartheid past. The paper explores the ways in which these buildings attempt to embed the community and state in South Africa's past, and their success in incorporating history to establish state legitimacy. It is based on fieldwork carried out in June-September 2016, and draws on photography, ethnographic observation and non-elite interviews.
Alex Wafer (University of the Witwatersrand)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the ways in which young immigrant men in Johannesburg construct meaningful lives in a context of what Jane Guyer (2007) calls a “hollowed out near-future”. In a context of uncertain futures, young men invest in short-term relationships and impossible future fantasies.
Paper long abstract:
Based on research among young unemployed immigrant men who attend a Bible-study and soup kitchen in inner-city Johannesburg, this paper considers the ways in which such young men remake urban spaces in response to precarious presents and uncertain futures. Drawing on Jane Guyers (2007) discussion of the "hollowed out near-future" that characterises the everyday lives of many African urban residents, I demonstrate how narratives of (mythical) past, (urgent) present and (uncertain) future are materialised in urban space. In particular, I discuss how the inner-city neighbourhood in which these young men live is associated with the urgent present: the need for food, shelter and other means of survival and actualisation. While this frequently implies some kind of ethical compromise (in the form of petty crime, hustling or gambling), seemingly-impossible future fantasies of success and ethical integrity are associated with escape from the inner-city. In a context of increased precarity, these young men suggest not a marginal urban practice but rather an increasingly ubiquitous typology. This paper suggests ways in which we might usefully rethink temporality and urban space.