Infra-spacing is a form of space production at the edge of infrastructure networks constructed to facilitate traffic flow. The networks are often the causes of eviction of people, while their use, improved flow of people and goods, encourages marginalised residents to re-appropriate urban space.
Long Abstract:
Urban infrastructure networks are ambivalent. They allow for the flow of people and goods - they enable movement, access and connection. Simultaneously, they may also disconnect and isolate - African urban dwellers who are displaced or evicted for the construction of large infrastructures admit the ongoing rush to build and experience this reality every day. In this panel, we approach this ambivalence of urban infrastructures from the perspective of people, places and economies that may be marginalised and at the same time at a central position through contesting spaces produced by urban infrastructures. Planning visions and ongoing infrastructure projects are often fixated on an idea of infrastructure as made of concrete and steel, the very hardware of orderly urbanism while disregarding marginalised and seemingly disorderly people, trades and places. However, such infrastructures produce a variety of spaces beyond such "concrete visions" that people may appropriate beyond the scope of formal planning and design. We focus at such spaces produced at the interface of intended and unintended uses along large infrastructure networks. Such spaces emerge, for instance, along road corridors, where dynamic service points emerge that target pedestrian and passengers of motorised vehicles in the congested peakhours' traffic and at the nodes of traffic lights.The panel discusses the different possibilities in which urban dwellers may engage with the ambivalence of infrastructures and the prospects of emerging dynamics of infra-spacing as forces shaping urban Africa. It also discusses the implication of such spaces for future planning endeavours and urban citizenship.
New large transport infrastructures materialize visions of urban modernity and set into motion a re-spatialization of informality in the city. These speculative infrastructures interact with informal practices in highly diverse ways, ranging from displacement to appropriation.
Paper long abstract:
Large-scale transport infrastructures emerging in many African cities represent attempts to materialize particular visions of urban modernity. Such projects tend to induce significant socio-spatial transformations in the city, such as the emergence of real estate developments along their paths. Less understood are the ways in which these new infrastructures set into motion a re-spatialization of informality in the city. This paper examines this encounter between speculative infrastructure and informality, to explore the complex and diverse ways in which they interact. In Maputo, Mozambique, the construction of a ring road gave rise to highly diverse dynamics in different parts of the city. In some densely informally occupied areas, it caused the displacement of vendors and residents, not only to create space for the new infrastructure but also to replace such informal spaces with new ’modern’ urban forms. Such displacements have not been uncontested and have in some cases significantly delayed the mega-project. In the periphery of the city, vendors have appropriated and re-shaped spaces on or close to the new road infrastructure. Their emerging gatherings at roundabouts, bus terminals and circulation nodes instantiate an urban development that undermines dominant visions. The paper draws upon theorizations of infrastructure as a medium and outcome of social, political and economic processes and as a mediator of everyday life, to examine how the materialities and fates of speculative transport infrastructures are shaped by the practices of highly diverse actors including citizens’ everyday informal practices, and to explore their experiences and interactions with such infrastructures.
This paper demonstrates the importance of the spontaneous city, which is produced in a short time by the citizens alongside the large urban infrastructures programmed over a long time horizon, in the production of new towns on the African continent.
Paper long abstract:
In a context of strong urbanization without economic development, African cities are facing the challenges of high demand for housing, structural infrastructure and the difficulty of financing them. In this context, several African states are initiating large infrastructure projects in new towns on the outskirts of major capitals, such as Diamniadio in the Dakar metropolitan region, in partnership with international developers. However, this formal and technical approach to infrastructure production is marked by a deep ambivalence. In fact, while the planned infrastructure allows the movement of certain urban dwellers and their goods and the improvement of their living conditions, it also favors the disconnection and isolation of other urban dwellers, particularly the poorest, who are evicted or displaced against their will. Thus, the formal infrastructures programmed over the long-term are accompanied by a spontaneous production of "third places" in the urban space over the short-term by the urban dwellers, which are based on vernacular practices that are both formal and informal.
The city of Kigali aspires to be an African centre of urban excellence. The infra-space production is contested due to the shortage of land which in most cases requires the relocation of urban dwellers in favour of urban infrastructure development.
Paper long abstract:
The unprecedented urbanization in the city of Kigali involves the production of urban infrastructure to unlock the city’s inaccessibility and (re)order the city’s planning through its mammoth plan and zoning regulations. Despite the necessity of these urban infrastructures, their production has merely been based on the availability of land which involves expropriation as a result of the public land shortage. The acquired land is solely reserved for urban infrastructure which then inhibits the production of spaces all along infrastructures. This study assesses the connection between urban infrastructure development and space production within the city of Kigali in the newly developed road network and drainage system under the informal settlement upgrading project in the former unplanned neighbourhood close to the Central Business District ( CBD). Through field observation and interviews, the study concentrates on the people’s perspectives, the existing situation and the future of city planning to harness urban spaces’ role in city development.
This paper examines the Zanzibar Urban Services Project and associated infrastructure and urban planning. The paper questions whether the new era of inclusive planning and infrastructure investment strengthened the urban poor majority’s citizenship or continued a long run of state planning failures.
Paper long abstract:
Drainage has been a central discursive arena of urban planning for Zanzibar for 150 years. From the mid-19th century until the recent Zanzibar Urban Services Project (ZUSP), elite outside voices have alternately fixated on or ignored the city’s perpetual drainage crisis and absence of sanitation infrastructure. While colonialism’s links of drainage infrastructures with racial hierarchy have faded, elements of urban planning remain tethered to colonial state tactics, particularly for Ng’ambo, the city’s historic African-Swahili “Other Side”. This paper interrogates ZUSP’s 189 million-dollar (US) World Bank-funded infrastructure programs on the Other Side in the context of 2015’s Local Area Plan for Ng’ambo and National Spatial Development Strategy. A critical content analysis of these and related planning documents produced in 2014-2021 is paired with deep reading of implementation reports and field analysis from 2018, 2019 and 2023. I am examining what happened to space production in poor neighborhoods heavily impacted by ZUSP, but also the even more marginalized settlements beyond the range of its planning map. The central research question is this: has the new era of seemingly inclusive planning and the most substantial investment in infrastructure for Ng’ambo in history strengthened the urban poor majority’s citizenship, or has it continued the long run of state planning failures for Ng’ambo’s residents? My answer is ambivalent, with notable positive transformations alongside the endurance of exclusionary legacies. This case study is placed in conversation with other critical studies of large 21st-century infrastructure projects for Africa’s cities, where a similar ambivalence is apparent.
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