Paper short abstract:

Africa's urban margins are marked by lived experiences of recurrent displacement and resettlement, compelling many urban dwellers to be always "on the move". Focusing on housing pathways of people who left state housing, I explore people's ways of making a home at dynamic urban margins over time.

Paper long abstract:

While Africa’s cities are growing, physically and symbolically, land prices and speculation are growing, and housing affordability is shrinking. Today, urban margins around the continent are increasingly under pressure. With evictions, displacements, and resettlements as characterising features of urban (re-)production, lived experiences of inhabiting urban margins are increasingly marked by an overlapping and entanglement of spatio-temporal uncertainties (waiting, fearing, expecting, hoping) and recurrent ruptures (expulsions, evictions, relocations, occupations). In other words, many people are compelled to be always “on the move” – unable to settle at a particular place close to urban centralities. Approaching such time-sensitive and less place-centric notions of unstable urban marginality, this paper seeks to explore the ways urban dwellers in Salé, Morocco, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Gauteng, South Africa, seek to make a home at dynamic urban margins over time. Particularly, it looks at people who left state-subsidised housing units, which were initially intended to make an end to informality, uncertainty and permanent temporariness. Based on own narrative interviews in three countries, I compare and analyse housing pathways, stressing people’s residential strategies as well as lived experiences and meanings of housing – both before and after state housing provision. Why are people leaving “formal” housing provided by the state, where are they going and what are their future residential strategies? Such subjective long-term perspectives should help to grasp a more dynamic, future-oriented understanding of urban marginality, that acknowledges both residential constraints and aspiration as being shaped by societal and economic, hence, structural factors of marginality.