Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at practices for rolling out and accessing prepaid electricity in Maputo, Mozambique as a way to develop new approaches and understandings of urban Africa, particularly in terms of service delivery in poorly resourced and highly informalized urban areas.

Paper long abstract:

There is now a considerable debate about the conceptual and practical challenges that African urbanization raises to mainstream urban theory, planning, and governance. The challenges are evident in the shortcomings of programmes for slum-eradication and the provision of utilities such as water, sanitation, and electricity. Prepaid systems are increasingly popular in the delivery of urban services in Sub-Saharan Africa, but remain under-theorized. Some scholars highlight the advantages of prepayment to consumers and service providers in the face of weak governments, scant infrastructure planning, unclear land tenure, and persistent poverty. Other scholars scrutinize the inequality and social controls imposed by prepayment on low-income citizens whose social life rests on a sense of provisionality and uncertainty.

This paper uses the case study of prepaid electricity in Maputo, Mozambique to investigate the dynamics of access to electricity by urban dwellers and how their practices hinge upon not only their challenging livelihood conditions but also upon business practices, infrastructure planning and land regularization policies. The paper provides insights into how prepayment, as a technology for rolling-out and accessing urban infrastructures, is invested with a specific sociality and politics about who its users are, what kinds of lives they lead, and their political subjectivity. The paper thus makes a contribution to reframe mainstream theories and policies regarding utility service delivery in poorly resourced and highly informalized urban areas of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Paper short abstract:

Building upon findings of the recent completed project "Home Space in the African City" this paper focuses on the creative solutions that the inhabitants of Maputo find to solve the challenges they face in the process of acquisition, construction and transformation of their home spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Building upon findings of the recent completed project "Home Space in the African City" (www.homespace/.dk) this paper focuses on the creative solutions that the inhabitants of Maputo (Mozambique) find to solve the challenges they face in the process of acquisition, construction and transformation of their home spaces. The analyses is centered in the daily processes whereby the inhabitants gain access to, produce and reproduce space, giving it social and cultural value which gives meaning to their lives. Practices whereby the possession of land is secured and legitimized in a context where individuals are seeking to exploit the opportunities emerging in the urban property market will be analyzed. This paper also questions the dynamics underlying the construction and transformation of the home space, and discusses the processes activated by individuals and families in their endeavors to use and transform land according to the plans and purposes they have conceived for it. The author concludes that the house embodies the desires and ideals of the family and the process of building a house - a drawn-out process that takes place over a medium or long term and is not always guaranteed to reach completion - represents the successful collective trajectory of the family in a context marked by social and economic adversity.

Paper short abstract:

Studying local building practices in the southern part of Ilha de Moçambique highlights the dynamics of the different ways of accessing building materials and their importance for changing dwelling construction practices in the historic and rapidly changing city.

Paper long abstract:

Ilha de Moçambique is an urban UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Mozambique. Currently urbanization is taking place, like in other smaller urban centres all over Africa, in a situation with limited economic and urban management resources. Industrially processed materials have replaced the local construction materials of coconut palm fronds and mangrove wood. As local natural materials are becoming scarce, traditional construction and building materials take on new meanings and values in a context of slowly developing international and national tourism. Materials are mixed and experimented with to halt a general decay of the built environment and the dwelling space. Access to finance and hence to building materials, is a slow process often with an unknown outcome, at times based on small businesses like making cookies or linked to wide webs of highly mobile family networks.

Due to its status as World Heritage, the question is posed, whether detailed study of current building culture can inform new concepts of urban heritage management on the island, and whether the concept of heritage may be a resource for sustainable urban development. The transformation practices related to dwellings form part of an urban culture expressed in may different ways, emphasizing that it is impossible to isolate the built environment from the social and cultural practices which shape the city. This leads us to question anew and in a broader sense what the relation may be between everyday lived urbanism and building practice, heritage as a resource and planning for urban development.

Paper short abstract:

Property developers have recently embarked on a strategy designed to reshape the existing spatial configuration of cities in Africa. What makes these efforts different is that they involve constructing new cities out of whole cloth rather than rehabilitating the existing built environment.

Paper long abstract:

Large-scale property developers have recently embarked on a far-reaching strategy designed to reshape the existing spatial configuration of many cities in Africa. If these strategies are successfully implemented, major metropolitan areas in Africa will be fundamentally restructured to more explicitly serve the interests of property-holding elites and satisfy the desires of the leisure-consuming classes. What makes these recent city-building efforts different from previous attempts is that they involve constructing entirely new cities out of whole cloth rather than rehabilitating the existing built environment. Unwilling to take up the challenge of refurbishing existing large metropolises, private real estate developers have begun to construct entirely new cities that are built entirely from scratch. In the fantasy-projection of city builders, these privatized urban spaces are "city doubles," that is, they are the mirror opposites of existing cities in Africa. While many of these urban redevelopment schemes amount to no more than the fantasy-projections of over-enthusiastic property speculators, a number of large-scale real estate companies have already launched prototype mixed-use mega-projects on the outskirts of existing cities in Africa. Exemplars of the re-urbanizing trend in urban Africa include the Tatu City mixed-use development outside Nairobi; Malabo II in Equatorial Guinea; the massive shoreline reclamation project called Eko-Atlantic in Lagos; Luanda Sul in Angola; New Cairo City outside Cairo; La Cité du Fleuve, an exclusive mixed-use development situated on two islands reclaimed from sandbanks and swamp in the Congo River, adjacent to Kinshasa; and Waterfall City, a self-contained satellite city situated between Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork carried in Pikine, in Senegal, this paper shows how women owners and their families are transforming housing practices and developing innovative economic and building strategies to sustain their livelihoods and aspirations.

Paper long abstract:

Recent literature on African cities calls for a better understanding of how urban dwellers contribute to creating particular urban forms in order to grasp their complexity and devise more appropriate means to improve their conditions. This paper discusses how housing practices and built forms are transformed by women owners in the context of rapid urbanization in Senegal.

In Dakar, women's participation regarding the built environment is changing, notably as they become increasingly important actors of housing production. Women deal simultaneously with the opportunities and challenges of social expectations, but also with a complex urban situation allowing and sometimes even requiring innovative economic and building strategies.

Fieldwork was carried between 2009 and 2012 in Pikine, the largest city in Dakar's periphery. In-depth interviews with families were conducted in combination with architectural surveys of houses in order to uncover the practices, norms and relationships involved in the actual construction of a house. Although the underlying logics may not comply with formal visions of the city, they sustain these women's personal and family livelihoods.

The flexible nature of the built environment and its incremental construction, deeply rooted in housing traditions, are now reinterpreted by women to facilitate their access to resources and secure their assets. Furthermore, the networks women develop through this process might help them to gradually transform gender relations in their households and in everyday life. This examination opens up avenues for more equitable forms of planning and housing, avenues that draw upon the daily realities and adaptations of urban dwellers.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation the transformation of urban space used for business and its link with the modification of the Kenyan trading sector by Somali migrants, opening up business opportunities for a broader range of people than before, will be explored.

Paper long abstract:

In the last two decades a tremendous change took place in the Kenyan retail business, which allowed more people to participate in the economy as traders. This development was linked to a transformation of the notion and usage of space. Three parallel processes led to this change: the liberalization of the business sector, urbanization processes and the migration of business people from Somalia to Kenyan cities as refugees. Coming mainly from Moqadishu with hardly more than their knowledge on how to do business, they transformed the trading sector by a reconfiguration of the way space is used for business. Hotel rooms became shops during day time, bigger shops were subdivided into smaller stalls and later on shopping complexes were built, where every inch is made use of. The best example for this reconfiguration of space is the now famous "Somali" neighbourhood Eastleigh (Nairobi), but similar developments took place in other urban centers. These transformations of the notion and usage of space were not so much a development following a vision than rather a necessity, but they were taken up as a role model quickly. While the notion of a "democratization" of business is too optimistic, an opening up of the option of doing business for a broader range of people can be observed. This presentation is based on anthropological research with Somali migrants in Kenya and will deal with the modified way business is done and how these changes are shaped and reflected by a transformation of urban space.