Short Abstract

How are the material, financial, and symbolic aspects of speculation enmeshed to produce African urban futures?

Long Abstract

This panel explores the intertwinement of the symbolic, financial and political relationships of speculation to better understand the urban worlds that speculative practices are engendering. In the last two decades, grandiose new city schemes and prestige construction projects have transformed African cities. Their making has brought to light how the complex negotiations between finance, popular imaginaries and the governance systems they encounter and produce are shaping circuitries of speculation. These projects, for instance, have been heavily reliant on state guarantees, investments, and/or releases of land. Investors have also contended with African financial systems in which the typical tools enabling speculative finance, such as credit ratings, regular salary payments, and deal flow data are not readily available. If speculation hinges off projecting imagined, complete urban futures, then understanding the contestations over the constraints and possibilities of speculation is central to contending with the future of African cities. These contestations manifest not just in financial flows but in the material products and symbolic worlds they presume and produce.

This panel is interested in papers that study the political, material and cultural worlds in which urban speculation is steeped. This could include (but is not limited to) papers that investigate how governance relations and political imaginations are renegotiated through speculative work, the role of speculation in state-driven projects, conflicts over future-making, popular cultures of financial speculation, and publics brought forth by urban speculation.

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