ECAS 2013

Amid widespread perceptions of African cities as dangerous mega-slums characterised by chaos, over-urbanisation and under-employment, the government of Rwanda has sought to invert the stereotype and recreate its capital city as a 'model city' for Africa. Since 2007, it has been working to a highly ambitious Master Plan drawn up by American and Singaporean experts, which envisions Kigali as a services and logistics hub as well as symbolic site of security and order in the midst of a troubled region. This paper explores the tensions, contradictions and paradoxes of the Rwandan government's vision of an urban future, exploring the political underpinnings of its drive to transform the city as well as the socioeconomic and political impacts of efforts to implement the plan. Rwanda is one of the least urbanized countries in Africa yet is urbanizing fast, and unlike many African governments its leadership has, in theory, embraced urbanization. Yet some of its policies and practices pull in the opposite direction, subjecting many urban-dwellers to multiple and often contradictory pressures. The Master Plan has come at the same time as new strategies towards formalizing urban employment, efforts to attract investment, a constantly-shifting legal framework pertaining to land, and the progressive alienation of a number of donors. The interaction of these factors seriously affects the livelihood and tenure security of those living in the city, rendering the sustainability of its contemporary urban reality questionable and undermining its vision of a secure, prosperous urban future.

Emanating from the 'double existence' of every city as a built and as an 'imagined environment' (Donald 1999) our research is directed at the symbolic universe of a city, to its overall cultural code including the multiple cultures within the city, in short, the urban imaginaries of Accra and Mombasa. In a nutshell, the urban imaginary of every city comes with a particular symbolic surplus, is much more than the sum of its cultural representations. With reference to the tradition of 'Gestalttheory' the notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, will be used as a heuristical device for conceptualising "the whole of the city". The making and becoming of a city can be approached through the notion of "cumulative texture" (Suttles 1984; Lindner 2008, the canvas where conceptions of the 'whole of the city' is being produced, consolidated and represented over time. In our paper we present how we intend to approach this subject, namely through the reconstruction of crisis related historical snapshots of the cities to identify central motives and classifications within the cumulative texture so as to arrive at first inroads into a comparison of Accra and Mombasa with respect to analyse the local modes of cityness. The project keeps with the theoretical framework of our ongoing studies on the intrinsic logic of cities in Europe (Germany and Great Britain) aiming to discover differences and/or similarities in the constitution of African and European cities.

Images of cities in African cultural expressions have long served to contest notions of power and dominance in African socio-political discourse. Indeed, a chronological review of the representation of African cities in the continent's literatures from the colonial or early post-colonial era to the present would reveal a parallel movement of expressions of anti-colonial sentiments, disillusion with post-independence governance and resistance to economic and socio-political disenfranchisement. Today, African fictional narratives are replete with dystopian images of cities, often juxtaposed with real or imagined "good cities". The contrasting representations, however, do not suggest longings for utopias. Rather, they echo the dissonance between the latter, often imagined by the wielders of political and/or economic power, and what is actually longed for. This paper will therefore address the central theme of this panel from a literary perspective. It will focus on inscriptions of the city -fictional narratives- and inscriptions on the city - varied urban signage- to elucidate the tensions and the contradictions in projections of urban experience in African cities. The study will be based primarily on novels by Nigerian, Sefi Atta (Everything Good Will Come), Kenyan, Meja Mwangi (Going Down River Road), Cameroonian, Calixthe Beyala (C'est le Soleil qui m'a brulée) and Equatorial Guinean, Maximiliano Nkogo (Ecos de Malabo). It will also draw on popular writings on streets in cities, such as Accra, to underline the resistance to normative versions of urban experience in the literary representations of Lagos, Nairobi, Malabo and a slum in Africa.

Johannesburg inner city has undergone major changes in the last 20 years, a process keenly observed, commented and negotiated by many local artists. There were major discourses of urban "decay" in the first years of transition as well as discourses of "urban regeneration" when the city authorities intervened rigorously through private public partnerships around 2000. These interventions promise a better city but also appear to reinforce social injustice and spatial control. Furthermore, they - often strategically as a means of gentrification - involve artists and the art market, offering new opportunities and spaces for studios, galleries, or art commissions. The reaction of artists in Johannesburg is accordingly ambivalent if not contradictory. In both phases of "decay" and "regeneration" artists have conducted a socially sensitive art practice, but it varied significantly from one artist to the other. While some were fascinated by the visual changes in their physical and social environment, others tried to understand the newly emerging social networks and include them in their art practice. This often involved opposing the increasing regulations by the city authorities and police. Others discovered business opportunities by offering their creative, administrative and collaborative competences to the city and engaging in public art projects. Artistic and social practices often converge but also interfere with each other. This paper presents some of these social and artistic practices and discusses the observed ambiguities not as something particular to the situation in Johannesburg but in many cities that undergo major transformation in contemporary Africa.

Urban space in Bamako is in a constant state of change, through which new urban spaces, forms, and lifestyles are continuously being produced. This paper, based on my master's thesis, aims to describe and understand the process through which the transformation of urban space in Bamako has occurred in the decade before the country's coup d'état on 21 March 2012.

Drawing on the experience of a field research from January to March 2012, the dominant logic of the production of space in Bamako will be analysed empirically and in relation to two of its dimensions: "fixed spaces" and "fluid spaces". "Fixed spaces" refer to the structural-material dimension of the built environment, especially housing, whereas "fluid spaces" are discussed from a perspective focusing on the phenomenological-bodily experience of urban spaces in the context of the everyday mobility of the city's inhabitants.

These analyses lead to a discussion of "Entraeumlichung" (de-spatialization), a concept which signifies an ever-increasing detachment of subjects from their immediate surroundings. This process of disintegration includes bodily-physical displacements like air-condition, social displacements such as those which occur through spatially more distanced and more contingent social network, and structural displacements such as investments into two-room apartment blocks designed for singles. By combining Lefebvre's conceptual paradigm with the empirical results of my fieldwork, I argue that the concept of "Entraeumlichung" offers a means to better understand the transformation of urban spaces in contemporary Bamako.

Ghana's urban bus stations have a reputation to be deficient, dangerous and chaotic sites. Spurred by this perception and framed within an agenda for the modernization and (re)ordering of the country's transport infrastructure, over the past decade Ghana's administrations implemented numerous constructions of top-down planned and centrally-regulated 'transport terminals' in order to supplant the old-established, self-regulated and, in the city planners' conception, untoward stations. Designed for the resolute enforcement of laws and regulations, these newly built stations integrate globally circulating technologies of control, engendering spaces inaccessible for 'unwanted elements' of the old station communities (e.g. hawkers, itinerants, day labourers). While some station dwellers contest the new stations via non-use, others adopted creative practices for circumventing the imposed restrictions and for evading socio-spatial exclusion and therewith connected economic deprivation.

Drawing on ethnographic research on a newly built transport terminal in Accra, this paper examines the social ramifications of the reconfiguration of urban space as they become manifest in the station denizens' everyday practices and struggles. It looks at Ghana's new transport terminals as arenas for the negotiation of rights over the city, in which struggles over agency for urban spatial production and for its (re)imagination are fought out. Local and national policy-makers, backed up by urban planners, civil engineers and international agencies, strive for reconfiguring the urban landscape according to their visions of modernity and 'orderliness'. Quotidian users, in turn, strive for appropriating these reconfigured spaces and thereby partake in the formation of new urban imaginaries through their everyday practices.

In Praia, capital city of Cape Verde, the city administration is carrying new urban policies that are transforming the whole city, but specially the central area. These transformations aim to rebuild urban landscape to attract visitors, and with it, economic growth. These policies are promoting a significant change in both landscape and social life of the urban life. One of these changes affects traditional activities of female street vendors in the area. These women have been intimidated, chased, and removed by a special police force, created with the purpose of keeping the city's space "ordered". This paper departs from an ethnographic account of the women's daily experiences, and looks at the ways that these transformations affect these women's lives, as well as at their strategies to keep working in the same activity and places.

In post-apartheid Cape Town, in the early 2000s, an ambitious urban regeneration project based on an entrepreneurial agenda was launched by a coalition of public and private actors in the city centre. It has led to the eviction of the poor from the streets of the CBD and to the containment of street trade to restricted spaces. Despite the South African tradition of political struggle, continued against the neoliberalisation of urban policies, and despite the democratisation and enhancement of participation processes, this trend is not encountering much resistance on the ground. I argue that this lack of resistance is partly linked to the capacity of the Capetonian growth coalition to shape, delimitate and control the space of the traders' political mobilisation through the strategic steering of an ad hoc consultation process. Drawing from a Foucauldian perspective on neoliberalism and power as a relational exercise, I investigate this hypothesis by unpacking the consultation process that surrounded the revamping of a major Capetonian public square in 2009, the Green Market Square, and the concurrent displacement of street traders that took place in preparation of a major international sport event (the FIFA World Cup). I use this case study (and a qualitative survey based on interviews with key actors of this process) to unpack the capacity of the growth coalition to craft innovative "technologies of control" in order to foster the sense of territorial competition among street traders and to frame their relationship to the local state in terms of entrepreneurial citizenship.

South Africa's vast low-income housing programme manifests predominantly as new-built detached houses for individual ownership, in planned neighbourhoods funded by the state. The programme can be seen as a rational, orderly, improvement scheme, modernist in its orientation, which has a huge physical impact on urban areas, on city management and on intended beneficiaries. Some scholarly criticisms of the programme, and some unanticipated outcomes of it - such as beneficiaries selling or renting out their houses soon after receiving them - encourage an interpretation of the housing programme as an inappropriate intervention at odds with the lives of poor urban dwellers. However qualitative research from Johannesburg reveals a more complex situation. I discuss aspects of the housing benefit and peoples' attitudes to it that echo the expectations and desires of the state: for disciplined, rooted, conformist lives centred on the new house. But I also discuss how the similar aspirations of state and people play out in unexpected, complex and intriguing ways, which challenge and confound the state. South Africa's modernist improvement intervention is thus embraced, experienced, appropriated and transformed in multifaceted ways; partially and imperfectly understood by those in power. Reasons for these modifications relate to the wider context in which the programme unfolds, which is little understood and acknowledged. In this paper I argue for a closer and more nuanced examination of the interwoven relationship between the state's ambitions, peoples desires and practices, and the prevalent socio-economic context; and the ways in which these together co-constitute complex urban environments.

The Temporary Relocation Areas (TRA's), informally known as "blikkiesdorps" ("tin can towns" in Afrikaans) were firstly established in 2007 by the City of Cape Town as a temporary accommodation for the residents evicted from various informal settlements ahead of the soccer World Cup in 2010.

The urban phenomenon resembled the apartheid practices of forced removals and is criticized for its extremely poor housing and living conditions, as well as high crime rates despite the constant police presence. The domination of the right angle in the outline of these areas represents the orderly fashion the state aims at maintaining these spaces in, but the climate inside the settlements often proves otherwise.

In our analysis based on the field research conducted in the TRA in Delft, Cape Town in 2011 and 2013 we argue that this phenomenon of South African urban planning presents what James Scott rightly called an "inadequate simplification" which may turn to a state-maintained disaster.

Based on the methods of participant observation, interviews with the officials and in-depth interviews with the TRA's residents, we would like to analyze what lies behind the institutionalized vision of urban planning and how it is being contested from below by the poor urban communities that provide very heterogeneous views and ideas on how the desired city would look like. The special focus will be given to the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers community, which was forcibly removed into the TRA after two years of successful campaigning for the right to the city.

Liberia's capital Monrovia has been vastly affected by the violent conflict and is still undergoing a range of challenges such as overpopulation or scarcity of public goods and services. Since the present city mayor was appointed in 2009, a 'clean and green Monrovia' is envisaged, and realized with contested means: informal constructions are broken down, squatters and street sellers get removed. Multiple imaginaries of Monrovia compete with each other; some of its inhabitants dream of window shopping and sauntering downtown, while others need and appropriate the public space for a range of informal practices in order to make a living. The changing order increases the uncertainties of their everyday life, and their demand for urgently needed sanitary facilities, security and a range of other goods and services remain unaddressed.

This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork, looks at the multiple ways in which Monrovians use, live and imagine the city in the midst of transformation. How is the good use of the city imagined, and by whom? This paper focuses on post-conflict imaginaries of a better future, in which the capital city plays a central role: the urban space hosts a range of employment and educational opportunities, affordable living possibilities, and propels hopes for upward social mobility. Though the daily reality for a range of social actors is determined by informal economic activities, they nevertheless actively participate in shaping and shifting processes of the city in transformation.

Based on my own ethnographic fieldwork in Pikine, an urban area within the Dakar region of Senegal (Sept. 2011 - Mai 2012), I shall address issues related to discursive conceptions of urbanity and global citizenship among young male Pikinois.

'Licking at the shop-window', as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls it, many juveniles of Pikine are confined to a painful position between desired participation in urban life-worlds and its exclusion. In the premise that Dakar is like a visual day-to-day experience (luxurious hotels, large villas, expensive cars, chic restaurants, trendy nightclubs and casinos), young Pikinois have started to construct a counter-discourse to draw value on their marginalized urban quarter within Pikine.

When globalization is translated more or less in its absence, meaning a conversion into exclusion from participation in urban processes and if only a few opportunities remain for youth to shape modernity, how is "global citizenship" then negotiated? This presentation discusses the conception of "Pikinité" as a 'self-revaluation-standard' of male juveniles of their urban quarter, and "global citizenship", comprehending their unbending yearning to be part of a globalized consumer culture, while being trapped in a moral economy between individual aspirations and aspirations for the community.