There is an overwhelming focus on the state and the private sector in the language and practice of privatisation, even though it calls for a tripartite arrangement that includes the people. A major consequence is the failure to comprehend and assess fully the important role of the people. While the people have a major part in supporting privatisation through payment of user charges, they are not often seen as key partners by city governments in Africa. Public participation has important implications for finance and cost recovery. Thus a people-centred approach to privatisation in which the users of services are consulted and involved in decision-making processes is crucial to the emergence of sustainable solid waste management systems in African cities. This study provides useful insights into the complexity of public participation in the context of privatisation of solid waste services and offers policy guidelines relevant to the major stakeholders.
Spatial inequality in service delivery is a common feature in African cities. Several factors account for the phenomenon but there is growing attention towards urban governance and the role of the state. Urban governance policies such as privatization serve as key strategies through which the state regulates and (re)produces spatial inequality in service delivery. This study examined how governance practices related to privatization and the regulatory role of the state reinforce spatial inequalities in the delivery of solid waste services in Abuja, Nigeria. It focused primarily on the issue of cost recovery. Privatization became a major focus in Abuja in 2003 when the government launched a pilot scheme. Although it has brought improvements in service delivery, privatization has also increased the gap in the quality of services delivered in different parts of the city. Drawing on empirical data, the study revealed that little sensitivity to income and affordability, and to income differentials between neighbourhoods in the fixing of user charges and in the choice of the billing method is contributing to spatial inequalities in service delivery. Furthermore, the study suggests that these practices are linked to a broader issue, a failure of the government to see the people as partners. It therefore calls for more inclusive governance especially in decision-making processes. The study also emphasizes the need for a policy document on solid waste management, as this would encourage a critical assessment of vital issues including how privatization is to be funded, especially inlow-income areas.
Jinja Town in Uganda, selected as one of five centres of growth in the post-WWII era of colonial developmentism, is perennially represented in the Ugandan media as the quintessential industrial town gone off-track. This is particularly evident for the case of the African housing estates built in Jinja in the 1950s where the dominant everyday rhythm is no longer dictated by the factory siren or the monthly wage but is instead a landscape scored by multiple rhythms. By conceptualising these estates as inherited machines – still loaded with a profusion of signs and objects from the era of the modern industrial ‘refrain’ – this paper seeks both to illustrate the colonial planning rationality and to examine contemporary processes of vernacular urbanism and contestations surrounding ‘re-occupations’ of the post-colonial city. It is argued that we need to seriously question any a priori invocation of a generic form of vernacular urbanism that is (or is not) to be prioritized over or ‘mixed’ with a Western planning cycle. Instead, the case study shows how historically mediated place specificities complicate the notion that the logics of place making can be unproblematically abstracted from.
This paper examines historical and contemporary processes of urban (re-)development and displacement in Uganda. Particular focus concerns the often conflicting strategies employed by urban managers and residents to plan, govern and live in both the late-colonial and early twenty-first century city. Both eras can be considered significant, even momentous, for the prominence of strategic projects of socio-spatial urban reconfiguration that incorporate(d) powerful discourses fusing land and housing development with societal progress and national development. The former project putatively centred on orchestrating African development and welfare, the latter on the more ambiguous project of re-development. The ‘Good City’ and the ‘Good Citizen’ are used as heuristic devices to examine the planning ideals and rationalities that inform(ed) these projects and the conflict of rationalities they provoke(d), particularly in terms of competing visions of the good city and good citizen. The paper emphasizes that current projects of redevelopmentalism do not take place in politically inert or historically benign space. Rather, it is shown how historical and place-based specificities articulate with and mediate the process of redevelopmentalism in Kampala and Jinja.
The development of industrial capitalism in Europe gave rise to conditions that motivated the rise of modern urban planning. In Africa, urban models for ordering society emerged in the late 1930s. Andrew Byerley looks at the laboratory of urban Africa.
International policy emphasises the importance of slum dwellers' rights of access to cities and their social inclusion. Legalisation of land holdings in informal settlements is one way of enacting this policy. However, this measure favours house owners over the large proportion of tenants renting rooms in private houses in informal settlements in many cities in the global South. Rental housing is neglected by many governments. What role does the form of house tenure play in other processes of social inclusion in informal settlements? This article examines one of many forms of social inclusion: participation of tenants and owners in rotating savings groups and help groups in two areas in Mwanza city, Tanzania. The results indicate that both tenants and owners participate in groups, which are based not only on the geographical area of residence but on work, ethnicity and religion. The study also indicates that not all groups accept tenants as members, because of their high mobility.
The 2007 general elections in Sierra Leone marked a decisive moment in the country's post-war recovery. In this article we show how political parties strategically remobilized ex-combatants into 'security squads' in order both to protect themselves and to mobilize votes. We look at the tactical and strategic motives behind ex-combatants' choice to join the political campaigning and the alternatives (such as 'watermelon politics'), and we also examine the deep distrust between politicians and ex-combatants. Focusing on politics as the domestication of violence, we shed light on the continuation of pre-war and war-time mobilization of youth into politics and demonstrate how electoral moments can legitimize violence. In hindsight, the 2007 elections strengthened the democratic process in Sierra Leone, but this article shows on what fragile ground this success was built.
Africa's Informal Workers is a vigorous examination of the informalization and casualization of work, which is changing livelihoods in Africa and beyond.
Gathering cases from nine countries and cities across sub-Saharan Africa, and from a range of sectors, this volume goes beyond the usual focus on household 'coping strategies' and individual agency, addressing the growing number of collective organizations through which informal workers make themselves visible and articulate their demands and interests. The emerging picture is that of a highly diverse landscape of organized actors, providing grounds for tension but also opportunities for alliance. The collection examines attempts at organizing across the formal-informal work spheres, and explores the novel trend of transnational organizing by informal workers.
Part of the ground-breaking Africa Now series, Africa's Informal Workers is a timely exploration of deep, ongoing economic, political and social transformations.
The last decade has witnessed the rise of a great number of transnational social movements and activist networks. While many of these movements have been initiated in the North, some are driven by people from the Global South with the aim of addressing various forms of destitution and asserting a variety of basic economic and cultural rights. Such transnational organizing is increasingly evident in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of these initiatives relate particularly to the growing numbers ofpeople depending on forms of informal work for survival. This edition of Current African Issues looks into the transnationalization of a local association of informal workers as it becomes involved in an international network of grassroots organizations. While this transnational engagement opens up new political possibilities, it also poses new challenges. Participation in international activities is highly unequal and mediated rather than direct, as influential actors engage in practices of gate-keeping that tend to work to the disadvantage of women. Tensions also emerged as a result of the divergent gender ideologies espoused by different participants. The paper draws on various theoretical perspectives on spatial politics in the global age to interrogate the unequal and contested spatialities of this transnational activism. Feminist scholarship sheds further light on the gendering processes at work in the transnationalization of a grassroots association.
South Africa was expecting to benefit by hosting the World Cup 2010. For urban disadvantaged groups, however, the reality proved very different. Street vendors and marketers were among the excluded. Evictions caused many of them to lose their livelihoods, and strict regulations made it difficult for them to derive economic benefit from the mega-event. This Policy Note explores their predicament, as well as the responses of grassroots organizations. Finally, lessons are drawn for cities aspiring to host similar events in the future.
This policy note suggests a participative approach to housing design and delivery as a strategy for generating adequate housing. It further contends that this approach would help create convivial urban neighbourhoods in African cities by empowering grassroots networks to participate in the decisions of urban design and housing management.
The growth of cities is one of the most significant aspects of the contemporary transformation of African societies. Cities in Africa are the sites of major political, economic and social innovation, and thus play a critical role in national politics, domestic economic growth and social development. They are also key platforms for interaction with the wider world and mediate between global and national contexts. Cities are variously positioned in global flows of resources, goods and ideas, and are shaped by varied historical trajectories and local cultures. The result is a great diversity of urban societies across the continent. Cities in Africa are not only growing rapidly but are also undergoing deep political, economic and social trans-formation. They are changing in ways that defy usual notions of urbanism. In their dazzling complexity, they challenge most theories of the urban. African cities represent major challenges as well as opportunities. Both need to be understood and addressed if a sustainable urban future is to be achieved on the continent. The Urban Cluster of the Nordic Africa Institute, through its research, seeks to contribute to an understanding of processes of urban change in Africa. This discussion paper by Professor Garth Myers, commissioned by the Urban Cluster, is a valuable contribution to shaping the research agenda on urban Africa.
In Nigeria there is a glaring absence of formal recycling of municipal waste. As a result, the informal sector has taken up the role of “critical but unacknowledged gap filler” in the waste recycling system, achieving low but significant recycling rates. This policy note deals with what can be done to improve recycling performance in Nigerian cities.
In international peacekeeping operations (PKOs) some individuals are involved in sexual exploitation and abuse of the host country’s population, buying of sexual services and trafficking of prostitutes. Far from being a new phenomenon it goes back a long time, and reports on the issue have increased over the years. All too frequently we read about peacekeepers visiting prostitutes, committing rape, or in other ways sexually exploiting host populations. Some peacekeepers are taking advantage of the power their work gives them, and becoming abusers rather than protectors in situations where the host population is powerless and in dire need of protection. Peacekeepers’ abuse of their mandate is inflicting severe damage on host societies and often results in a number of unintended consequences such as human rights violations, rapid spread of HIV, decreased trust in the UN as well as other international aid agencies, and harmful changes to gender patterns. Women and children, both girls and boys, are especially exposed. Having already suffered from war and instability they risk becoming even more physically and mentally wounded. Peacekeeping operations risk doing more harm than good in African war zones, and if they cannot learn from previous mistakes maybe they ought to stay at home. We do not argue for the latter; rather, we point towards the urgent need to change explicit and implicit patterns and habits in international peacekeeping operations in relation to sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in Africa. In this Policy Note we focus predominantly on military staff, but acknowledge that the civilian staff of PKOs, and international aid workers, are also implicated. On the other hand it should initially be pointed out that most PKO staff are not sexual exploiters and abusers.
Filmed during the 50th anniversary conference 'Fifty years with Africa in focus', 12 October 2012 in Uppsala, Sweden. 44 min. 40 sek.
The growth of cities is one of the most significant aspects of the contemporary transformation of African societies. Cities in Africa are the sites of major political, economic and social innovation, and thus play a critical role in national politics, domestic economic growth and social development. They are also key platforms for interaction with the wider world and mediate between global and national contexts. Cities are variously positioned in global flows of resources, goods and ideas, and are shaped by varied historical trajectories and local cultures. The result is a great diversity of urban societies across the continent. Cities in Africa are not only growing rapidly but are also undergoing deep political, economic and social transformation. They are changing in ways that defy usual notions of urbanism. In their dazzling complexity, they challenge most theories of the urban. African cities represent major challenges as well as opportunities. Both need to be understood and addressed if a sustainable urban future is to be achieved on the continent. The Urban Cluster of the Nordic Africa Institute, through its research, seeks to contribute to an understanding of processes of urban change in Africa. This discussion paper by Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, commissioned by the Urban Cluster, is a valuable contribution to shaping the research agenda on urban Africa.
This paper analyses the impact of neoliberalization on post-apartheid spatial practices at the new Gugulethu mall in Cape Town. It examines this impact at two levels: first, from the perspective of neoliberal processes and their ability to adapt to the local township environment and, second, from the viewpoint of the township and its permeability to these ideas and practices, specifically emphasizing the role of local brokers. We study how revolutionary discourses, imagery, spatial design and social engineering were employed to promote the business, and how these attempts were received at the everyday level in the township. We argue that contemporary, ordinary townships such as Gugulethu tell a localized story of neoliberalization processes through which global capital is rooted within South African townships.
In the Nigerian city of Jos, everyday life is shaped by interlacing rhythms of disconnection and reconnection. Petrol, electricity, water, etc., come and go, and in order to gain access inhabitants constantly try to discern the logics behind these fluctuations. However, the unpredictable infrastructure also becomes a system of signs through which residents try to understand issues beyond those immediately at hand. Signals, pipes, wires and roads link individuals to larger wholes, and the character of these connections informs and transforms experiences of the social world. Not only an object, but also a means of divination, infrastructure is a harbinger of truths about elusive and mutable social entities?neighbourhoods, cities, nations and beyond. Through the materiality of infrastructure, its flows and glitches carefully read by the inhabitants, an increasingly disjointed city emerges. Through new experiences of differentiated modes of connectedness?of no longer sharing the same roads, pipes, electricity lines, etc.?narratives are formed around lost common trajectories. By focusing on how wires, pipes and roads are turned into a divination system?how the inhabitants of Jos try to divine the city's infrastructure and possible ways forward, as well as how they try, through the infrastructure, to predict a city, a nation and a world beyond?this paper strives to find ways to grasp a thickness of urban becomings?a cityness on the move according to its own unique logic.
Recently, our research project ‘Infrastructure as Divination: Urban Life in the Postcolony’ received funding from the Swedish Research Council. This three-year project explores the often overlooked qualitative aspects of infrastructure, and focuses on how the inhabitants in the Nigerian city of Jos try to predict the comings and goings of the infrastructure, as well as how they, through the infrastructure itself, try to predict the future of the city and the nation. Hence the word ‘divination’ in the title, which means ‘prediction,’ ‘prophecy,’ or ‘forecast.’
There are signs hidden in the infrastructure. In the Nigerian city of Jos, the unpredictable availability of power, fuel, water, etc. becomes a vehicle of meaning. In many settings across the globe, infrastructure is often made invisible, and the centre stage that it takes in everyday life remains unrecognized. In Jos, however, as in many African cities, the constant need to predict its flows contradicts the prefix infra (below); rather than being hidden beneath the realm of experience it is brought to the surface as a puzzle to be figured out. These explorations in turn come to reveal matters beyond the infrastructure itself. Just as diviners infer the state of the world from the stones they have thrown, reading significance out of the seeming randomness of matter, the infrastructure turns intricate questions into tangible clues. It becomes a suprastructure - a divination tool giving clues about the past, present and future of the Nigerian nation.
Since its establishment in the beginning of the twentieth century, the inhabitants of the ethnically and religiously diverse Nigerian city of Jos have inhabited very different places and travelled along opposite trails – patterns that in recent years, with an escalation of violence, have gained new dimensions. By bringing people’s movements into focus, this article highlights how movement comes in different ways to mediate between people and a city in flux. Brought to light is how movement in several different modalities – fast, slow, in total arrest; clothed in Christian or Muslim attires; by car, on foot, or on horseback; assertive or explorative, in triumph as well as in fear – by mediating between people and the city, brings forth a metaphysical landscape that otherwise is hard to get hold of. In this vein, movement as a medium has become a form of ‘social envisioning’ – a tool for understanding and foretelling the city.
The photo exhibition ’Suprastructure’ was first displayed at Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala between 17 November 2012 and 5 March 2013. It was digitally published in March 2013 as part of a research project entitled ‘Infrastructure as Divination: Urban Life in the Postcolony,’ financed by the Swedish Research Council. The scholars behind the exhibition, Ulrika and Erik Trovalla, are researchers in cultural anthropology and ethnology. They are based at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, and Uppsala University. Drawing on their photographs from the million city Jos in central Nigeria, they here give a glimpse of their research into the meanings of infrastructure in everyday life.
With nearly five centuries of history and major war-related impacts in the second half of the twentieth century, Luanda has recently been subject to outstanding changes that make the capital of Angola an important urban case study for Africa. Today, the city is not only an evident materialization of the oil wealth being channelled into reconstruction after decades of civil war, but also reflects and translates the diverse perspectives of its residents and policy makers regarding the city and urban life. As it is reconfigured, it also transforms the mentalities and daily lives of urban dwellers and policy stakeholders, reinforcing the idea of improvement and modernity. In order to better understand the processes of physical and social change that have taken place within the city and the intertwined logics, this article makes reference to three distinct key stages of its history, pointing out their main features and the transformations that have occurred: the colonial period of sociospatial dualization (1576-1974), the period between independence and the last peace agreement (1975-2002) of profound and extensive urban mixture, and the post-war period (2002-present) marked by accelerated sociospatial reconfigurations. More specifically, it analyses the very recent urban phenomena, the urban plans and new urban features, discussing the correlations between physical transformations and the rationalities and perspectives that accompany them, both of the urban planners and of the urban dwellers, discussing the implications in terms of new inclusions and exclusions in the city.