Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Jon Schubert
(University of Basel)
Constance Smith (University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Infrastructure (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S55
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
In the context of enduring ecological and imperial injustices, what might sustainable urban assemblages look like? How do techniques of planning, expertise, finance and services intersect with material landscapes and everyday practices of city-making to shape ideas about desirable urban futures?
Long Abstract:
(sponsored by Africa: Journal of the International African Institute)
From collapsing buildings to climate risk, Africa’s growing urban populations face situations of material, existential and environmental precariousness. Yet cities are also spaces of aspiration and possibility. This raises urgent questions of what desirable urban futures might look like.
Discussions of, and strategies for, sustainable urban futures are still dominated by developmentalist growth paradigms and reductionist, apolitical conceptions of vulnerability and resilience. Such approaches overlook the injustices that are sedimented into the fabric of the city, from the material traces of colonial violence to class struggle, to the social and ecological devastations wrought by Africa’s asymmetrical insertion into global economic flows. In a time when imperial, extractive and environmental injustices are still to be reckoned with, and facing the the double impasses of universalist policy prescriptions and reductionist celebrations of ‘informality as opportunity’, this panel explores questions of urban sustainability, justice and solidarity.
Thinking about good urbanism requires reconciling (analytically and practically) everyday practices of producing the city (socially, spatially, and economically), with grand designs and systems (urban planning and regeneration, infrastructures and services, modes of financing). This gathers diverse actors, from planners, administrators and engineers to funders and ‘ordinary citizens’, into a common field of action that must also negotiate contingent assemblages of bodies, infrastructures, climates, and challenging historical endurances. We invite contributions that explore how techniques and practices of urban future-making (e.g. planning, expertise, risk analysis) intersect with enduring injustices, landscapes and everyday practices of making cities work.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Smith Ouma (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
In Nairobi, inhabitants of informal settlements deploy their democratic imaginations to test their understandings of urban citizenship and expand its realms. In doing this, they reimagine urban planning to a form that is more inclusive and that attends to the realities within their spaces.
Paper long abstract:
Spatial governance in Kenyan cities has been practiced in a manner that is exclusionary and that denies certain groups access to resources and opportunities. In Nairobi, land tenure has been used to craft an exclusionary idea of urban citizenship. Eligibility to participate in spatial governance has been made conditional on having formally recognized interests in land. Marginalised groups have in turn deployed a range of measures to contest power and counter exclusion. They have resisted persistent attempts at their erasure from the cityscape by carrying out formidable acts of transgression within a context now underwritten by a transformative constitutional framework. Within the Mukuru informal settlements, transgressive and legal strategies are toolboxes from which inhabitants draw a plethora of tools to confront exclusionary spatial governance practices. This chapter examines how, in using these strategies, the inhabitants deploy their democratic imaginations to test their understandings of urban citizenship and expand its realms. In doing this, the inhabitants reimagine urban planning to a form that is more inclusive and that attends to the realities within their spaces.
Nikolai Brandes (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) Jason Sumich (University of Essex)
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, we explore the ways in which city-building is shaped by “south/south” collaborations through the example of members of the Turkish Gülenist movement in Mozambique. We argue that their involvement in architectural production reconfigures social relationships in the city.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, we explore the ways in which city-building is shaped by “south/south” collaborations through the example of exiled members of the Turkish Gülenist religious movement in Mozambique. Following its persecution in Turkey, the Gülen movement has recently gained prominence in many countries in Africa in a number of economic and cultural areas such as trade, schooling, and housing. In Maputo, Gülenist firms specialise in building “middle class” housing and gated communities, forward looking symbols of a supposedly more prosperous future. We argue that their involvement in architectural production embodies a field of action through which the social relationships in the city (and beyond) play out. Many companies and academics alike tend to frame "South-South" collaborations as warrantors of a brave new urban future without imperial hegemony. However, we claim that these projects both shape and are shaped by a social field which recreates many aspects of power relations, inclusion and exclusion that resemble previous eras, such as those from the colonial period.
Lalli Metsola (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Residents of the fringes of Windhoek rely on improvisational skills, co-presence, and social relationships to provide for their daily needs and future aspirations. The social, transactional and political patterns involved lead to relational, co-constructed infrastructures and everyday governance.
Paper long abstract:
Sustaining lives in urban environments depends on various kinds of infrastructure – buildings, roads, water, sanitation, and energy, among others. The availability of formal networks is particularly uneven in African cities due to the combination of world’s fastest urbanization, entrenched patterns of inequality, and persistent resource constraints. The paper discusses the ways in which the necessity to satisfy basic needs, as well as aspirations for better life, lead the residents at the fringes of Windhoek, Namibia's capital, to rely on improvisational skills, co-presence, and social relationships to innovate do-it-yourself solutions as well as to appropriate, bypass and complement formal infrastructures. While the immediate purpose of these activities is to solve practical problems, the social, transactional and political patterns that they entail lead to profoundly relational, co-constructed infrastructural assemblages and everyday governance. The paper utilizes these findings to address gaps in the literature on infrastructures in anthropology and related social sciences. It proposes analyzing situations of infrastructuring holistically from the perspective of urbanites’ needs and aspirations, instead of a given infrastructural assemblage; decentering the state-citizen relation in favour of relations of authority and subjectivation as a heterogeneous field; studying the various co-productive political moments and orientations involved; and an analytical perspective of processual flux that explores both how participating entities – people, things, ideas, and organizations – generate infrastructural effects and how such entities emerge through infrastructural entanglements over time.
Amarilli Varesio (University of Milan-Bicocca)
Paper short abstract:
The study explores the tensions that have occurred in the execution of the IPILC, a program that aims to modernize the waste management in Northern Uganda. The conflict regards different visions of the urban future and interrogates the notion of sustainability and its exclusive forms of inclusion.
Paper long abstract:
The study focuses the attention on the “social life” of plastic, a common thread in the mosaic of informal actors working in the sector.
Plastic is traded around, articulating relationships among participants driven by motivations beyond subsistence. In Gulu's Pece and Laroo neighborhoods, at the center of an insurgency and a refuge for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, plastic is a “social currency” that ensures access to sources of income and citizenship for self-employed workers with little formal education and no capital to invest.
In the post-conflict urban context of Gulu, through the circulation of this material, new social networks are created that enable people to cope with everyday material and existential precarity and rebuild their lives in a condition of prolonged displacement, where the lack of basic social ties, broken by war, has generated a process of forced migration and marginalization to the city.
When, however, plastic is appropriated from above, by the anonymous machine set in motion by sustainability programs promoted by international actors, although driven by ideas of efficiency, the poor’s expectations of participation and aspirations in a better future risk to be expropriated from projects that make sustainability look neutral and unchallenged.
Therefore, as spaces are transformed in the name of the environment and of infrastructural resilience, practices are depoliticized and disinvested of their social connotations, continuing to reproduce unequal urban landscapes that dispossess long-term IDPs of informal pathways to citizenship.
Cristiana Strava (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the case of Morocco's planned new town of Zenata, “the first African city to be awarded an Eco-City Label (ECL)”, this paper explores the analytical and practical valences of 'speculative' approaches as part of current struggles for social and climate justice in North Africa and beyond.
Paper long abstract:
In the summer of 2022, Morocco announced the Phase 2 completion of Zenata, a so-called ‘New Green City’ occupying 5 km of polluted coast north of Casablanca. Created in 2006 at the initiative of the Moroccan State, Zenata has been celebrated as “the first African city to be awarded an Eco-City Label (ECL)”, a certification granted in 2016 during the COP 22 conference, before any ground had been broken on the site. One of several dozen ‘green’ megaprojects currently being built across the Kingdom, Zenata is a 1,9-billion-euro investment partly financed through EU loans, responsible for the forced-displacement of local informal communities on the periphery of Casablanca.
Based on research that combines participant-observation, online ethnography, and conversations with local activists and urban planners, this paper takes a three-fold approach:
I first place recent developments like Zenata in the longer timeline of engagements with environmental discourses and agendas as part of Morocco’s colonial and post-colonial efforts to fight environmental degradation – efforts only recently refocused on coastal cities and anchored in the financialization of urban spaces.
Secondly, I highlight several imaginative responses from ordinary Moroccans to both envisioned and already-existing ‘green’ projects. In this way, I foreground the profound and profoundly alternative ways in which ordinary inhabitants try to reclaim narratives about aspirational futures, and critique current planning regimes' orthodoxies.
Finally, I aim to theorise the analytical and practical valences of 'speculative' approaches when taken outside the realm of finance capitalism and deployed as part of current struggles for social justice.
Miguel Isaac (University of the Western Cape)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how moving away from the electric grid relates to sedimented injustices by arguing that the solar practices of the wealthy transform the service provision and distribution of energy services in cities, with potential risks of perpetuating issues of inequality and marginalization.
Paper long abstract:
This research project asks, what is the relationship between the wealthy moving away from the electric grid and social justice in Cape Town, South Africa? Given that residents are never completely disconnected from the grid, the paper explores how moving away from the electric grid relates to sedimented injustices by arguing that the solar practices of the wealthy transform the service provision and distribution of energy services in cities, with potential risks of perpetuating issues of inequality and marginalization. The overarching goal of the study is to integrate the everyday solar practices of the wealthy into debates on infrastructure, urban sustainable city-making, and social justice. This is achieved through assemblages of hybrid energy technologies with a particular focus on solar power users, senior officials in the City of Cape Town municipality, and Independent Power Producers (IPPs). Using critical discourse analysis and interview data, the paper outlines the key impacts (past, current, projected) these solar practices may have on the grid, municipal finances, and social justice.
The new knowledge the paper generates indicates there is a semi-grid emerging for the wealthy, one where the state competes with neoliberal markets. The study found that wealthy residents are not installing solar panels to adhere to a coherent energy policy developed by the state to move Cape Town toward sustainability; they are taking the initiative in a situation of state failure by defecting the grid and escaping load shedding (scheduled power cutouts). With this being said, the imaginaries of the wealthy are not centered around the idea of social justice and collective equality, but self-interest. The findings demonstrate that wealthy residents associate solar panels with a sustainable future by choosing to only focus on environmental justice. In so doing, not realizing the social implications it may create as it is not in their interest to fight against this injustice, especially when it does not affect them. Therefore, the just transition to sustainable futures must embody a commitment to fairness, both in the sense of who will bear the burden of climate change mitigation policies and who will benefit from it. As it stands, the wealthy appear to be the winners in the just transition and the less fortunate are the losers.
The study uses an energy landscape approach to broaden the focus of infrastructure scholarship to include a) solar practices and b) the wealthy. In this way, the paper generates new insights into how the wealthy shape and auto-construct the unequal city which intersects with enduring injustices.
Keywords: the grid, solar practices, the wealthy, energy infrastructure, social justice.
Fanny Voélin (University of Bern)
Paper short abstract:
Antananarivo’s development appears out of hand. This paper uses a modified political settlement approach to analyse the micro-politics of urban planning and development in the city, focusing on the accumulation strategies of new elite assemblages and their human and environmental impact.
Paper long abstract:
Madagascar is one of the world's fastest urbanizing countries. Its capital, Antananarivo, is heavily polluted, poorly governed, and its development deemed ‘totally anarchical’. Several master plans have been initiated but they lack long-term joint vision, enforcement, and coordination. In parallel, the national government has made Antananarivo the flagship of Madagascar's development through mega-infrastructure projects conceived outside the formal policy sphere, monopolizing scarce state resources.
Drawing on a modified political settlement approach and 70 semi-structured interviews with urban planners and architects, state and city officials, chiefs, investors, consultants, and urban dwellers conducted over a 4-month field stay in Antananarivo, this paper analyses the micro-politics of urban planning and development in the Malagasy capital. It explores the way in which new assemblages of political and economic elites instrumentalize the city and its planning to further their projects of accumulation and dispossession, the neoliberal discourses of development and modernity that justify them, and the human and environmental impacts of such projects. While most explanations for poor state performance in implementing and enforcing urban plans and regulations focus on capacity, the paper argues that development outcomes in the city are best understood by looking at the strategies, interests and relative power of different groups competing over the material and ideological resources embedded in the city. It suggests that a sustainable future for Antananarivo starts by adopting planning practices that account for the disjuncture between formal and informal institutional processes and match the configuration of power in the capital.
Marco Di Nunzio (University of BIrmingham)
Paper short abstract:
By documenting the case of Addis Ababa’s construction boom, this paper invites a rethinking of how anthropologists have looked at the work of planners in urban Africa by exploring the relations between strategic and tactical planning-
Paper long abstract:
This paper invites a rethinking of how anthropologists have looked at the work of planners in urban Africa by exploring the relations between strategic and tactical planning. By documenting the case of Addis Ababa’s construction boom, I discuss how the overlapping between strategies and tactics in planners’ work both expresses the relative privilege of planners, as experts and agents of vested interests in the city, and the conditioned agency of planners, as themselves are acted upon by the courses of action of more powerful agents. In this context, strategic planning does not only fail. It is meant to fail, or at least implemented partially, because its purpose is to catalyse action, not direct it. Instead, tactical planning, while being situational and contingent, is not the realm of weak. Planners’ tactical agency contribute to further embed dominant orders of priority, and hierarchies of entitlement into the spatial fabric of the city.