Paper short abstract:

This paper is a historical ethnography of colonial urbanism in the city of Luanda during the last decades of the Portuguese Empire. It looks at how the competing projects of cultural integration and legal differentiation were performed in space, and how urban policies acted upon the colonized body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a historical ethnography of colonial urbanism in the city of Luanda during the last decades of the Portuguese Empire (i.e., from the mid-1940s to mid-1970s). I will explore how colonial urbanism is articulated with culture, social relations, images of order, systems of meaning, fields of knowledge and, finally, bodies and bodily experiences. In this endeavor, I suggest colonial urbanism was deeply embedded on the biopower of colonialism, tout court: it performed, simultaneously, the colonization of space and the intervention over the colonial body. In thus paper, thus, I will re-situate urbanism in the historical trajectory of Portuguese colonial situation and its modalities of discourse on race, law, culture, and citizenship. From this historical contextualization I draw what I consider as the central contradiction in colonial urbanism: the competing projects of cultural integration and legal differentiation. I will be particularly interested in analyzing how this contradiction is played in two moments of colonial urbanism. First, I will look at the idea of segregated planning and especially at practices of spatial segregation of African populations into "indigenous neighborhoods", during the 1940s and 1950s. Secondly, I will look at a second phase (from the 1960s onwards) in which this first ambivalence was "resolved" in name of multi-racial conviviality. I will thus examine the central premises of what I call a Portuguese "Creole urbanism". In this study urbanization as a historical teleology is dislodged and presented instead as a "spatial drama", as an ongoing, unsolved, struggle over space.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the mutually constituting nature of urban spaces and sexual relations in Senegal. We examine transformations in the socio-economic and built environment and how they have influenced gender relations and facilitated new forms of clandestine prostitution and transactional sex.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the mutually constituting nature of spaces and sexual relations in urban Senegal. We examine recent social, economic, and physical transformations in three distinctive urban settings in the region of Saint Louis—Saint Louis (regional capital with a university), Richard Toll (industrial city) and Rosso (border town)—and how their respective urban spaces have facilitated the rise of new forms of clandestine prostitution and transactional sex. The changing social, economic, and physical landscapes of these cities and the constant circulation of people and goods between these urban centers and the rural hinterland offer new possibilities for sexual and romantic liaisons, particularly for young women. The research team interviewed 456 people in the region (of whom 165 were women) about their sexual practices and changing gender norms. We found that many women are experiencing increasing autonomy in their sexual lives and in their choice of sexual partners. Nonetheless, they remain enmeshed in gender relations in which they have limited ability to negotiate the terms of heterosexual relationships. Educated young women with multiple sexual partners reported high rates of unprotected sex while married men reported higher rates of condom use, largely as a means of contraception in extra-marital relationships.

Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic and interview data from two slum communities in Nairobi, Kenya, I explore configurations of manliness in contexts of poverty. The paradoxical relationships between hegemonic and other masculinities assume interesting dynamics in poor urban spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Using ethnographic and interview data from two slum communities in Nairobi, Kenya, I explore configurations of manliness in contexts of poverty as well as men's responses to the threat of poverty to their masculine subjectivity. Proper manliness in the slums I studied was primarily constituted in terms of the tenacious pursuit of breadwinnerhood in the face of its unfeasibility. This construction, I argue, represents an adaptation to the challenges of material survival under situations of severe poverty. In their quest for breadwinnerhood, slum men marshaled a curious miscellany of both un-masculine and hyper-masculine practices. Paradoxically, they sometimes fulfilled an aspect of a masculine subjectivity through one utterly antagonistic to it. And at other times, they satisfied it through actions that disproportionately supported the same subjectivity. Newer ways of envisioning the relationships between hegemonic and other masculinities are urgently required.

Paper short abstract:

This co-authored paper explores this historiographies of sexuality and urban history and uses an unlikely comparison between eighteenth-century Gorée, Senegal and mid-twentieth-century Libreville, Gabon to examine the themes of sexual and spatial geography of the colonial city.

Paper long abstract:

The latest scholarship on gender and cities seeks to integrate gender to examine the built environment and social relationships, but the focus in Africa is on postcolonial megacities. African sexuality is often presented as dangerous and illicit and interracial relationships as exoticized. But African women and men inhabited cities as political actors and affective beings, actively conceptualizing ideas about pleasure, desire, and aesthetics. This co-authored paper explores this historiography and an unlikely comparison between eighteenth-century Gorée and mid-twentieth-century Libreville to examine the themes of sexual and spatial geography of the colonial city.

With Gorée, Semley uses letters, colonial records, and images, to demonstrate how the political, economic, and cultural activities of influential women known as signares in the proved integral to nineteenth-century ideas about citizenship. On a small island where the signares' stone and thatched-roof houses encompassed French government buildings and homes, living and working spaces overlapped as they were marked by family networks, sexual liaisons, religious practices, economic production, cultural performance, and political intrigue. With Libreville, Jean-Baptiste uses oral histories and court records to map varied sexual encounters between 1929 and 1960 to reveal how historical actors tendered sex to negotiate emotional and physical fulfillment, social status, material wealth, and political power. Libreville provided new built environments in which men and women encountered each other in heterosexual space: the timber camp, the café, the market, the street, as well as farms in forested suburbs.

The authors seek to historicize and theorize sexuality in colonial urban Africa.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to provide evidence that behind the altercations surrounding the introduction of public cemeteries in colonial Angola was a clash between a novel, Romantic inspired mode of urban spatial production and an irreconcilable creole heritage – one of the legacies from the late Enlightenment.

Paper long abstract:

The beginning of the nineteenth century heralded a huge Romantic shift in the conceptual and architectonic design of graveyards throughout Europe - redesigned then as a bourgeois lieux de mémoire. This rupture, smoothed in Europe by a stable Judeo-Christian background, was differently enacted in colonial Angola. To the local and metropolitan elites, the creole compromise achieved during the late Enlightenment became impossible to sustain - during the Liberal and Romantic period that ensued - because it became unfeasible to imagine a "proper" city without its silent, hygienic and tightly regulated double: a modern public cemetery. This paradigm shift meant that an ongoing religious truce (during which the few Roman Catholic priests present at the colony didn't interfere with the local "gentile" funerary rites - such as "itamas" or "mutambe") was ultimately broken by Liberal public works reformers, in the name of progress and sanitation (Malaria was still attributed to miasmas). Public cemeteries thus became disputed memory sites, where two different groups worshiped the remembrance of their dead in wildly different ways, while projecting their values into the future via the design of their urban environment.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation is about the spaces of leisure in Lourenço Marques with the object to discuss their social meanings and the fluid everyday reality in a colonial city.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation will try to reconstruct the leisure spaces in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, as bars, kiosks, theaters, "touradas" and cinematographers, during the period that the city became the most important to the Portugal colonial system in the region because there strategic location. Meeting spaces with plural meanings, the study of these places bring light to the reality of colonialism in urban spaces as a complex relationship between multiples actors. It was at kiosks, for example, that the European white elite gathering to talk, discussing the most important political and cultural/social events, what turned into a major polo of sociability and disseminator of practices and customs. The presentation will also discuss how the contemporary of that pass, especially through the press, discuss projects of society from his views of leisure and the places dedicates to the leisure. However, between these debates of modernization, we can find the everyday life of the social classes that lives in the city.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines urban sites of memory associated with slavery in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how South Africans and tourists grapple with a long slave past at several prominent heritage sites that reflect the heavy memories of slavery within the city.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines urban sites of memory associated with slavery in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how South Africans and tourists grapple with a long slave past at several prominent heritage sites that reflect the heavy memories of slavery within the city. I investigate the narratives, texts, and spaces of tours, museums, and memorials as they situate slavery in an urban context. Both tourist and resident encounters with the history of slavery are analyzed to inform our understanding of the construction of heritage for local and global consumption. The city of Cape Town is a site of memory steeped in the history of slavery, notably in the spaces of the former Slave Lodge, now a museum, and the old fort known as the Castle of Good Hope. Both structures are powerful spaces drawing visitors from around the world. The Dutch East India Company used slave labor to construct them in the seventeenth century, and the city has recently acknowledged the contribution of slaves to the building of Cape Town and the shaping of the wider community. For example, those interested today in Cape Town's past can follow a city trail map of slave heritage walks that trace the history of urban slavery at over 60 sites. Featured locations include spaces where slaves lived, worked, prayed, endured suffering, and buried their dead. This paper considers how locals and tourists are involved in acts of remembering this heritage of slavery and how that spatial positioning in turn influences local, national, and transnational histories and memories.

Paper short abstract:

In the final period of Portuguese colonization (1945-1975), architects faced a challenge: to build the city for the local populations. This paper intends to explain the process of discovery of the native settlements and how its study has contributed to develop a "black" city planned by architects.

Paper long abstract:

With the end of the Second World War the independentist movements rise. Portugal is internationally pressed to decolonize, but resists until the 1974 revolution. One of the arguments for keeping its colonial Empire, particularly the African territories, is the development rates that are provided to the native populations, namely in the education and health fields, equivalent or even superior to the UNO demands to African Habitats.

From the late fifties on, the urban space and housing for the African populations is one of the main architectural and urban programs carried by the Portuguese architects in Africa. Facing the fact of being economically impracticable and culturally undesirable to build neighborhoods for the "native" population in a European canon, architects start to study the African habitat in missions, like the one they perform in the former Portuguese Guinea. The African house is one of the most studied subjects. The architects analyze the plans, describe its functions and study the traditional constructive systems. They are mostly interested in designing a "new African house typology", that, as Moreira Veloso writes, has "the minimum hygiene and comfort conditions and that contributes to the social promotion of those populations". This house serves as a module to the new urban spatial organization, forming low density neighborhoods, equipped with healthcare, education and sports programs, that are installed in organic layouts. These neighborhoods are still found in the contemporary African city, although its less rigid structure has allowed its disappearance more easily than the traditional "white" city, European inspired.

Paper short abstract:

Using several novels from Africa, I re-read them in the light of questions which arise in debates in urban political ecology and environmental justice, particularly around waste and urban squalor.

Paper long abstract:

Urban Political Ecology (UPE) scholars generally argue that power relationships are inherently unequal in environmental change dynamics, and that this leads to environmental outcomes where marginalized communities experience greater negative consequences - thus nudging UPE scholarship directly into conversations about urban environmental justice. UPE still has work to do on African questions of urban environmental justice and urban violence, including what Nixon has termed "slow violence," outside of South Africa. African cases offer possibilities for opening up new ways of understanding intersections between urban political ecology, urban environmental justice, and violence. One hidden manner of highlighting the possibilities of this research frontier comes in an engagement with ecocriticism and African literary environmentalism, in the under-explored environmental analysis of African urban literature. Using several novels from Africa, I re-read them in the light of questions which arise in debates in urban political ecology and environmental justice, particularly around waste and urban squalor.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the joint impact of neoliberalization and post-apartheid revolutionary discourses on township spaces at the new Gugulethu mall in Cape Town.

Paper long abstract:

Since the end of apartheid, South African urban spaces have undergone considerable changes. The negotiated revolution of 1994 opened the country to the market forces of neoliberal globalization. While this has not contributed to the overall wealth being distributed more equally, the post-apartheid era has witnessed the rise of the black middle classes. Changes associated with increased wealth have been noted in the spaces of the townships like Gugulethu in Cape Town.

This paper analyzes the effect 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.

It studies 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. It argues that contemporary, ordinary townships such as Gugulethu tell a localized story of neoliberalization processes through which global capital is rooted within South African townships.

The fieldwork and interviews for this paper were carried out in 2009, 2010 and 2011 in Gugulethu, Cape Town with Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch.

Paper short abstract:

This paper compares the production of the mall as a social space across two case studies of shopping malls, one in Maputo, the other in Johannesburg.

Paper long abstract:

Maputo's growing middle and upper class is considered to be one of the most interesting markets for South African real estate investing in shopping malls. While in Johannesburg, even township dwellers do part of their shopping in malls (e.g. Pan Africa Mall in Alexandra), the mall as a specific type of urban space is a rather new phenomena in Maputo, with which many urban dwellers are not familiar with. A well-known Mozambican business man of dubious reputation opened in 2007 the first mall in Maputo, the Maputo Shopping Centre. This peculiar space unites aesthetic inspirations from Saudi-Arabian mall architecture with ideas of shopping and entertainment from Brazil and elsewhere. This paper wants to attempt a comparison between the Maputo Shopping Centre and a regional shopping mall in the north of Johannesburg. How the urban dwellers use, appropriate, and create the mall? What differences and similarities are there in how the mall is produced as a social space? The two case studies will be analysed within a single framework, namely Lefebvre's conceptual triad of the production of space (Lefebvre 1972). The paper forms part of an on-going PhD project on spaces of encounter between residents of wealthy and poor neighbourhoods in Johannesburg and Maputo.