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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.