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Paper short abstract:

How do the loose ends of colonialism intervene to shape privatization of rental housing on Uganda's urban peripheries? The study examines how potentialities from privatization are experimented with and given socio-material expression in house-plot transformation and new ways of imagining older age

Paper long abstract:

Neoliberal-like processes, including public housing privatisation, are shaping new geographies of cities in the South. Through a case-study of housing estate privatization in Jinja, Uganda, this study probes the neglected question of whether urban housing privatization provokes new geographies of ageing in contexts characterized by translocal idioms of relatedness cojoining ‘town’ and ‘home-village’ (translocal-assemblages). Conceiving translocal-assemblages to be stabilized by normed social and spatial transitions and markers around life-course stages (assemblage-script) raises the question of whether gaining urban property-title alters orthodox expectations of rural routedness in older age towards urban rootedness? Alternatively, do rights and securities conferred by conforming to orthodox assemblage-scripts limit freedom for novel age-inscription? Using qualitative methods to prioritise the often-neglected voices of older-adults, and building on two decades of research on these estates, the paper identifies how potentialities emergent from the novel addition of urban house-title to older-adult’s translocal-assemblages, are imagined, negotiated and actualized in housing and house-plot transformations and novel ways of living and spatializing older age. The translocal-assemblage lens, informed with insights from Bourdieu’s social ontology, problematizes ‘methodological cityism’ and ‘methodological individualism’ evident in Northern theorisation (e.g. planetary urbanization, ageing-in-place) by showing urban housing privatization to be neither a discretely urban affair nor chiefly enacted through possessive individualism. However, divergent reserves of historically accrued forms of assemblage-capital are shown to significantly influence strategies and capacities to act on housing potentialities. Indeed, the final ‘dis-inheritance’ of these colonial ‘African’ housing estates is, for many older adults, fractured with ambivalences and possible eventual displacement.