The Nordic Africa Institute & African Centre for Cities
7-8 March 2012, Uppsala, Sweden
Deadline for abstracts: 8 January 2012
Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are marked by high levels of harsh living conditions, large and growing income inequalities and few formal economic opportunities. Despite the challenging conditions, most urban residents go about their routine business of making livelihoods and life on the basis of very few material resources and mould various fields of social and economic association in order to get by. They build life-worlds in interstitial zones betwixt and between the informal and formal city, the makeshift and the sanctioned, the organic and the 'rationally' planned. Unsurprisingly, informal, makeshift and emergent forms of urbanism characterize the African urban condition.
One important field of inquiry has been concerned with making legible the actual everyday practices and meanings of non-formal activities through which urbanites remake the city from below. The diverse works of Asef Bayat, AbdouMaliq Simone, Garth Meyers, Achille Mbembe, Kate Meagher, amongst others come to mind. In a different body of work more explicitly concerned with urban planning and policy there is a long tradition of critique explicating how urban majorities are systemically excluded from urban opportunities. Recent work explicitly seeks to bridge the worlds of informal urbanism and urban planning and to theorize them in closer dialogue with each other. There is a closer attention to how specific urban planning modalities can act as tools for powerful actors to re-vision and re-make cities in their own image, and to how this relates to subaltern city making. Urban management and regulatory approaches often seek to impose narrow criteria for what constitutes legitimate and acceptable behaviour in the city. They work through forms of governmentality that construct urban majorities as deviant from the (modern) norm thus making them subject to various disciplinary regimes and practices. Indeed, such regimes and practices, and attendant discourses and representations, demarcate the lines between inclusion and exclusion, between rights-bearing citizens and those perceived as dangerous and/or undeserving. Disadvantaged urban residents often subvert (and/or resist) those lines and boundaries in multiple ways in order to construct their own urban orders, they nurture their own representations and visions of the 'good city' and sometimes engage in alternative (or insurgent) planning practices. However, such processes of re-making, and any emancipatory or material gains thus won, are often fragile, contested and contentious. They are always at risk of reversal, as conquered spaces can be reclaimed and subaltern visions silenced. As Vanessa Watson reminds us, competing rationalities are at work in how African cities are routinely constructed, lived and governed. Thus the city is in a permanent state of 'incompleteness', constantly being re-cast and re-spatialised.
This workshop will inquire into the friction zones, contestations and potentialities arising at the intersection between practices of planning and regulation from above and dynamics from below. The changing spatialities and contours of inclusion/exclusion resulting from ongoing and emergent processes in urban Africa will be examined. This will provide a platform for exploring the possibilities of articulating emergent, non-formal and state-driven planning and regulatory practices, and eventual innovative forms of interactive planning in Africa that are socially inclusive and consistent with the needs and aspirations of urban majorities. The workshop further seeks to critically examine new strands of conceptual work and theorisation that attempt to foreground the potentialities of subaltern urbanisms, and will explore the highly diverse, multi-layered, interstitial and fractured nature of these urbanisms in the African context.
Thematic areas will include:
• Urban visioning. Processes of city visioning are part of profiling and marketing cities as attractive for capital, tourism and 'desirable' inhabitants. Powerful representations of the 'good city' often underlie common strategies such as, high profile and modernist urban (re-) developments, city beautification measures, heritage/conservation, the proliferation of condominiums and the privatisation of public spaces. Such visions and interventions often engage circuits of ideas, finance and expertise that reach far beyond the city (Simone 2010). What are the effects in specific cities of dominant visions and strategies of city-making for life and livelihood opportunities? How do different groups of urban residents embrace, subvert or contest those visions and strategies, and eventually assert their right to define the city and their place in it? What alternative city visions are emerging?
• New claims on land and space. Contemporary developments warrant renewed attention to dynamics of access to urban land and space. Parallel to the 'occupancy urbanism' of unpropertied groups, powerful people in many cities are cordoning off advantageous urban locations for purposes of speculation, eventually squeezing out less influential groups or crowding them into remaining (peripheral) spaces. In a number of cities, simultaneous projects of land titling are supposed to give (a share of) informal occupants a more secure foothold in the city. Yet others face the risk of eviction from their homes and livelihood spaces. What are the outcomes and effects of such highly uneven and contradictory processes of space/land access and allocation for informal' land rights and vernacular urbanisms in specific urban contexts? What new spatialities and configurations of inclusion/exclusion are being created? Is a segregated and fragmented urbanism inevitable (all that there is), or are there practices and visions that seek to integrate the city and make it work as a functional whole?
• Informality and citizenship. The management of disadvantaged urban groups that rely on informal practices for survival often involves stereotyping, victimizing and criminalizing such groups and their informal activities. At the same time, elite driven informalities may be sanctioned and valorized by the state, facilitating various kinds of appropriation and accumulation. However, subaltern informality is also multilayered and segments within it may be partially incorporated into the strategies of formal city governance (for ex in service provision). While these segments hypothetically gain a measure of legitimacy, others may be re-categorized as being 'unproductive' or alien to the city. In the process, urban subjects are being formed and re-moulded. These complexities are manifested in ever shifting contours of who is seen as having the right to inhabit the city. How do people hang on to their spaces and reclaim lost ones? How do they struggle for recognition and legitimacy in the city? How do they influence processes of city-making in a context of highly unequal urban societies? What varied forms does this subaltern politics take, in space and time?
We invite original papers addressing the thematic concerns of the workshop in various urban settings in Africa. A selection of the papers will be published after the event.
The workshop will be followed by a day of lectures by three prominent urban scholars: James Holston (Univ California), Edgar Pieterse (African Centre for Cities)and Ananya Roy (Univ California) which will take place on March 9. The lectures are organized by the Development Research Network on Nature, Poverty and Power and the Department of Cultural anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. More information at www.csduppsala.uu.se
Please send your abstract asap or by the 8th January 2012 the latest to Tania Berger (tania.berger@nai.uu.se). Papers should be sent to Tania Berger by 20th February 2012.
Venue and financial arrangements: The workshop will take place in Uppsala (Sweden), located some 30 minutes from Arlanda airport. The organizers will provide free board and lodging for paper presenters, as well as return airfare (economy fare) from their place of residence to/from Uppsala.
The convenors:
The Nordic Africa Institute, Urban Dynamics Cluster, Uppsala, Sweden.
and
African Centre for Cities, Cape Town, South Africa
Contact details
Tania Berger, Research Administrator
E-mail: tania.berger@nai.uu.se
Tel.: +46-18 56 22 26
The Nordic Africa Institute
P.O. Box 1703
SE-751 47 Uppsala, Sweden
Fax: +46-18 56 22 90
