Paper short abstract:

Along with such related terms as “rogue urbanism,” “opportunistic urbanism,” and “everyday urbanism,” DIY urbanism has entered the vocabulary of contemporary urban studies. “Doing-it-yourself” can reflect self-help improvisation, or, conversely, justify state withdrawal under the mantle of neoliberalism.

Paper long abstract:

Along with such related terms as "rogue urbanism," "opportunistic urbanism," and "everyday urbanism," DIY urbanism has entered the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary urban studies. By supplementing notions of "informal urbanism," these ideas seem to capture the widespread realities of improvisational (and largely spontaneous) activities which ordinary urban residents undertake in distressed cities when state regulatory regimes are virtually non-existent and when formal housing and income-generating options are highly circumscribed. DIY urbanism conjures up a new urban imaginary where ordinary residents take matters into their own hands, engaging in self-built housing without official authorization and undertake all sorts of self-help activities outside existing regulatory frameworks. Many scholars hail these efforts as expressions of popular resistance and celebrate them as exemplars of "bottom-up" initiative in the face of repressive state authorities.

A more sanguine assessment suggests that DIY urbanism pulls in two directions. On the one hand, it suggests the possibility of an embryonic kind of grassroots communitarianism, grounded in local participation, mutual aid, and decommodified exchange. On the other hand, DIY urbanism can easily play into a variant of neoliberalism by stealth. By taking a "hands-off" (laissez-faire) approach, municipal authorities relieve themselves of the responsibility for overseeing the necessities of everyday urban life: decent housing, functional infrastructure, and public services. If ordinary residents take the lead in self-help innovation, then public authorities can justify their withdrawal by putting the onus on self-mobilized, localized, grassroots efforts alone to provide for themselves without public involvement.

Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper speculates about the political possibilities of DIY urbanism. The paper thus advances some tentative theoretical reflections on the connections between democratic politics, civil society, public space, and urban marginality in contemporary African cities.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper speculates about the political possibilities of DIY urbanism. I depart from classic works by thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Lewis Mumford who considered the dynamic relationships between space, cities and politics. These arguments often hinged on idealizations about durable built environments - Mumford himself invoked the image of the city-as-container - that sheltered norms and publics forming the basis for political action and democratic politics. However, the accelerated development of African cities amidst conditions of pervasive instability, both challenges these assumptions and suggests a need to reconsider possible spaces and practices of political action at a time in which most residents of urban Africa live in and with extreme precarity. I thus seek to identify the emancipatory potentialities of DIY urbanism. Key questions include: are practices of DIY urbanism democratic? Does the persistent absence or dysfunction of state institutions promote alternative forms of civic engagement, political action or public life? If so, what form might these practices take? Under conditions in which long-term survivability is not guaranteed how are networks of citizenship and social capital created, nurtured, and enforced? These immense challenges need not portend the end of the democratic project, but instead offer both creative and regressive opportunities. Though as yet uncertain, answers to the above questions will likely require us to rethink the relationships between accepted notions of democratic politics, civil society, public space, and urban marginality. The proposed paper offers a tentative salvo in an increasingly urgent conceptual and policy dialogue.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the way that young Ghanaians are interpreting and taking advantage of seemingly global discourses of "new urbanism”, tracing the influence of longer histories of precarity on the newest forms of urban development and urban culture in Ghana's capital, Accra.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the way that young Ghanaians are interpreting and taking advantage of "new urbanism". The city of Accra has grown rapidly in recent years through processes embraced by a wide range of actors, including the Accra municipal government, NGOs, and international actors. While Accra's urban development has attracted the attention of international media like the New York Times, which has anointed Accra one of the most exciting cities in the world, this development is experienced much more unevenly among the city's residents. Luxury apartment buildings, fast food restaurants, coffee shops, shopping malls, gyms, clubs, and bistros define a new form of urban culture in Accra, alongside a group of new art galleries and artistic movements that incorporate both visual and performing arts. While this new form of urban culture appeals to a growing group of young, cosmopolitan (or Afropolitan) returnees, depicted most clearly in the YouTube show "An African City" and displayed on Instagram and Facebook, it is also inaccessible for many of the city's residents who survive on meager incomes. This paper focuses its attention on people who exist in between these large income inequalities - highly educated young people who do not have the same access to wealth but who are nonetheless connected to these communities of cosmopolitan discourse and practice. In particular, it interrogates the way that personal and social histories of precarity influence the way this group of young people engages with and creates opportunities for themselves within a vision of the "new Accra"

Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine how informal construction practices and neighbourhood management are producing new urban landscapes as well as new political identities among social housing residents in Nairobi.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will examine how practices of household maintenance and repair are producing a new urban landscape in Nairobi. Deep institutional neglect of Nairobi's public housing projects has led to neighbourhoods of severe infrastructural and material breakdown; places where tarmacked roads have crumbled to dust, water no longer runs in the pipes and streetlights are long gone. In such contexts, residents are increasingly compelled to take on responsibilities for home maintenance and estate management.

These DIY interventions not only help to stem the tide of neglect, but also reconfigure these neighbourhoods, producing new urban landscapes. Official tenancy regulations are turned inside out as residents build extensions for rent to new urban migrants, reforming the urban fabric through their informal construction practices. This paper will highlight how such practices, taking place over several decades and across several generations, have produced new identities among residents. Their 'performance of ownership' also has important political implications. Alternative narratives are emerging, contesting official notions of property, land ownership and what it means to be a 'stakeholder' in urban planning and regeneration.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the kind of DIY urbanisms that emerge between the interaction of top down driven planning and settlement processes catalysed by mining activity in Africa's Copperbelt.

Paper long abstract:

Studies on urbanisation in Africa normally focus on the informal processes that make up much of its urban landscape, with the majority of its built infrastructure driven by do-it-yourself initiatives. Less examined though has been the practice of the planners, architects and engineers who attempt to impose their plans and visions of the urban. Focussing on the case of urbanisation driven by large-scale industrial mining in Africa's Copperbelt, the paper examines the interactions between top down driven planning and DIY settlement processes that are catalysed by mining activity.

Built environment professionals working in these settings have to not only plan and build the infrastructure for mining's core business, the extraction of mineral resources. They also need to consider how they will accommodate the various categories of workers and new migrants to the area, as well as integrate native populations who in most cases will have reluctantly given way to mining activity. This requires that built environment professionals engage with populaces of varying interests, and modes of life. These interactions can be conflictual in their visions of place, expectations and the tools of coercion and/or persuasion available to them. The paper shows how these contestations over place-making can influence the kind of DIY urbanisms that emerge in extractive locales, as well as the forms of urban management.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how beneficiaries of state-subsidised housing in South Africa have altered their house, via formal and informal extensions, and consequences for access to infrastructure and services in terms of citizenship identity and practice.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa's post-apartheid government has prioritised the provision of housing and services as a major part of its anti-poverty agenda and as the physical means to overcome past injustices. Over the past two decades, approximately 3 million fully-serviced brick-built houses have been constructed and their ownership awarded to low-income urban dwellers. Based on 15 years of longitudinal research in a single state-subsidised housing settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, this research highlights the ways in which citizens have implemented 'DIY urbanism' in the 15 years since occupation, ranging from grandiose two-storey extensions to the proliferation of informal 'shacks' as well as cases of severe neglect, and the implications for accessing services. This citizen-led infrastructural change is juxtaposed against the state's normative expectations of how 'good' citizens are expected to use the houses they receive from the state (ie. exclusively for residency with prescribed options for formal single-storey extensions), as well as media-driven accounts of the widespread informalisation of subsidised housing settlements. The paper develops the concept of infrastructural citizenship to highlight the physical and material role of infrastructure as a crucial mediator in state-citizen relations, as well as in citizens' perceptions of identity. While there has been renewed scholarly interest in both citizenship and infrastructure, particularly within political and urban geography respectively, the relationship between citizenship and infrastructure is under-theorised, particularly from the everyday perspective of citizens.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the development of spatial frameworks of Freetown, focusing on the actual role of the self-organization practices developed by several slum dwellers communities in town.

Paper long abstract:

Freetown, capital city of Sierra Leone, is unique among West African towns as it was founded by British philanthropists in 1789 to give an home to freed African slaves. Liberated slaves from different African cultures built a polycentric town, made by small ethnic villages with different languages, religious beliefs and traditions.

During the recent rebel war Freetown had to face widespread destruction and the invasion of a great number of refugees. In less than 10 years, the urban population doubled and it is now estimated to be around 2 million, many of them living in slums.

The urban shapes of contemporary Freetown are mainly influenced by self-organized spatial frameworks developed by slum dwellers communities. The peculiar polycentric origin of the town is bringed back by small informal settlements "encrusted" in official urban patterns.

Freetown's slums have been extensively mapped and analyzed in their main formal elements, giving rise to handbooks that describe all the different typologies of public spaces and housing frames found in the settlements and to collections of all the building technologies, materials and solutions commonly adopted by the dwellers.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a qualitative research the paper describes the self-reliant DIY eco-community Green Camp Gallery in Durban. At the same time the paper discusses if the community can be interpreted as a reaction to urban crises, as a form of resistance and/or symbolizes upcoming urban forms of utopian communities.

Paper long abstract:

Utopia is generally considered as a literary genre of fiction and has little place in the debate about African informal settlements. Rather citizens of informal settlements are commonly perceived as being focused on satisfying their daily needs or claiming for basic services and not dreaming and experimenting with alternative forms of living. In contrast to this wide spreading description of "poor" citizens the urban context of Durban shows that in informal settlements communities were created standing for an ecologically sustainable and collaborative lifestyles based on DIY urbanism. By this DIY urbanism citizens react to societal tensions and/or economic crisis create gardening projects, plan self-reliant communities or offer space for experimenting with alternative ways of living. Based in a demolished house in the industrial area of Durban the Green Camp Gallery is one of this communities based on DIY urbanism. But what can we lean form this example? Should we interpret the community as a strategical way to survive, as form of resistance or an idealistic utopian community?

Based on a qualitative research the paper describes and discusses the DIY eco-community Green Camp Gallery in Durban as a utopian community.