Refractions of the National, the Popular and the Global in African Cities

Description

Case studies of metropolitan cities in nine African countries - from Egypt in the north to three in West and Central Africa, two in East Africa and three in Southern Africa - make up the empirical foundation of this publication. The interrelated themes addressed in these chapters - the national influence on urban development, the popular dynamics that shape urban development and the global currents on urban development - make up its framework. All authors and editors are African, as is the publisher. The only exception is Göran Therborn whose recent book, Cities of Power, served as motivation for this volume. Accordingly, the issue common to all case studies is the often conflictual powers that are exercised by national, global and popular forces in the development of these African cities.
Rather than locating the case studies in an exclusively African historical context, the focus is on the trajectories of the postcolonial city (with the important exception of Addis Ababa with a non-colonial history that has granted it a special place in African consciousness). These trajectories enable comparisons with those of postcolonial cities on other continents. This, in turn, highlights the fact that Africa - today, the least urbanised continent on an increasingly urbanised globe - is in the thick of processes of large-scale urban transformation, illustrated in diverse ways by the case studies that make up the foundation of this publication.

Informations

• Publié par: African Minds
• Date de parution: 26 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928502173
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Refractions of the National, the Popular and the Global in African Cities
Edited by Simon Bekker, Sylvia Croese and Edgar Pieterse
Published in 2021 by African Minds
4 Eccleston Place, Somerset West, 7130, Cape Town, South Africa
[e-mail]
www.africanminds.org.za
2021 African Minds

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ISBN (paper): 978-1-928502-15-9
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ePub edition: 978-1-928502-17-3
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Contents
Preface – Göran Therborn
1 Introduction – Simon Bekker, Sylvia Croese and Edgar Pieterse
Part I The national in urban Africa
Introduction to Part I – Simon Bekker
2 National projects in a postcolonial capital city: The example of Yaoundé – Jean-Pierre Togolo
3 Lip service: How voices from informal settlements were sidelined during the first decade of local democracy in South Africa – Liela Groenewald
4 Centralised urban governance in the Greater Cairo City Region: A critical understanding of key challenges and responses – Amr Abdelaal, Hajer Awatta, Omar Nagati, Salwa Salman and Marwa Shykhon
5 Traditional chiefs and traditional authority in Kinshasa – Philippe Ibaka Sangu
Part II The popular in urban Africa
Introduction to Part II – Sylvia Croese
6 Local government as the stage for resistance: Strategies and tactics of opposing mega projects in Gauteng – Margot Rubin
7 Popular protests and the limits of civil society in the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe, 2011 to 2016 – Ngonidzashe Marongwe
8 ‘We will be back to the street!’: Protest and the ‘empires’ of water in Nairobi – Wangui Kimari
Part III The global in urban Africa 111
Introduction to Part III – Edgar Pieterse
9 Africa’s new Dubai? Intersections between the global and the local in the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda, Angola – Sylvia Croese
10 Urban governance and smart future cities in Nigeria: Lagos flagship projects as springboard? – Muyiwa Elijah Agunbiade, Oluwafemi Olajide and Hakeem Bishi
11 The governance of Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit – Meseret Kassahun
12 Conclusion: African cities in the world of today and tomorrow – Göran Therborn and Alan Mabin
List of contributors
Index
Preface
Urban scholarship is a forte of social science in Africa and a proper response to urban change and innovation. Africa south of the Sahara has been very under-urbanised for a long time but currently is undergoing rapid urbanisation, sometimes, as in Congolese Kinshasa, with a problematic originality of massive urbanisation without any substantial industrialisation or other economic development. Recent years have witnessed an urban building boom from Dakar to Dar es Salaam. Lagos, Luanda, Nairobi and others have set out the goal to become ‘world-class cities.’
This volume arises from a conference hosted by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2017, with the kind and decisive support of its then director Hendrik Geyer, and the African Centre for Cities (ACC) of the University of Cape Town. The conference brought together over 30 scholars representing a range of different disciplines from across the African continent and beyond, including a number of young talented African scholars. It was a conference on African cities which looked at the refractions of the national, the popular and the global, analysed in my global study, Cities of Power , of which the conference was also an African launch.
The national refers to the constitution of nation-states, of states representing the nation, and not a colonial empire or a local king. It meant a nationalisation of cities, in their layout, organisation, architecture and symbolism. In Africa, and in the whole vast ex-colonial zone, the nation-state was established through independence from the colonial power. In most of Europe, it meant a peoples constituting itself as a nation independent of the king. South Africa was set up as a settler state, like the Americas and Australia, as a nation of European settlers making themselves independent of their motherland. The country became an African nation-state only in the 1990s, with the fall of racist settler rule.
Popular moments have occurred when popular forces challenge the rule of the national elite, demanding cities built for and serving the mass of ordinary people. ‘Popular forces’ are non-ruling nonelites whose ranks may comprise different characteristics, of class, caste, ethnicity, gender, occasionally religion, as in the ongoing conflict in Bahrein between the Sunni dynasty and the Shia majority of the people. From an urban studies perspective, a popular moment is not quite the same as the rise of a protest movement. The former refers to successful challenges and protests which have an effect on the city.
Global moments happen when global status and attraction become predominant city aspirations. Historically there have so far been two such moments in modern times. The first had its zenith in the decades around 1900 and was a globalisation of nationalism. Cities ‘worthy of the nation’ had to be built, all over Europe, the Americas, and a few Asian cities, like Tokyo. Paris of the second empire was then the main urban model, with London offering the best infrastructural example, of sanitation, sewage, clean water and electricity. In most of Asia and in the whole of Africa there were then no nations with states, so here the first global moment passed by. The second urban global moment arrived in the late 20th century in the wake of industrial outsourcing, de-industrialisation, footloose financial capital, globalised real estate markets and mass tourism, as the global moment of capital. Attracting foreign investment, foreign business headquarters and solvent tourists became primary big city goals. Becoming a ‘global city’ or a ‘world-class city’ has replaced the previous moment’s ‘city worthy of the nation.’
Both global moments have meant importing global influences and aspiring to global recognition and fame, by national and local politicians and capital. They are not actively imposed from the outside by global forces. The editors have then done a tremendous job turning the conference into a publication. In its geographical scope, from Cairo to Johannesburg, and in its thematic range, from efforts at national city impregnation in Yaoundé, national-local government relations in Cairo, Addis, Kinshasa, Tshwane and Johannesburg, to popular rebellions in Nairobi and Harare, and further to top-down globalist planning in the local contexts of Lagos and Luanda, this is a major example of the vigour of African urban scholarship.
Thanks go out to STIAS, to its then Director Hendrik Geyer, to Christoff Pauw, Programme Manager, and Nel-Mari Loock, Programme Administrator, for making the conference happen. Thanks also to those who presented and participated in the conference but could not participate in the publication, especially Eduardo Moreno, Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, Philip Harrison, Susan Parnell, Sophie Oldfield, Ntombini Marrengane, Glen Robbins, Lindsay Sawyer and Ngaka Mosiane. Thanks go out to NRF funding for the South African Research Chair in Urban Policy, held by Edgar Pieterse, which allowed for the translation into English of two chapters originally written in French. Thanks for funding of this publication go out to STIAS, the NRF South African Research Chair in Urban Policy at the University of Cape Town, and Stellenbosch University. Appreciation is extended to the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR) that enabled the research for chapters 9 to 11. A special thanks to Sylvia Croese and Simon Bekker for pulling everything together.
Göran Therborn, University of Cambridge
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Simon Bekker, Sylvia Croese & Edgar Pieterse

The urban is old: cities have existed for thousands of years, but they have been transformed by the arrival of nation-states over two centuries ago …
The future of globalism looks pretty sure and well laid out …
The main difficult question is the future of the people.
– Göran Therborn, Cities of Power (2017: 1, 356)
Scholarship on African cities has been proliferating over the past two decades. This is testament to the growing acknowledgement of the importance of cities in an increasingly urban age. This Introduction commences with an outline of Africa’s urban reality today. Subsequently, an overview of contemporary urban scholarship calling for Global South and African approaches to this reality is offered before turning to that proposed by Therborn’s Cities of Power . The principal framework to structure this volume and its various case study chapters is based upon his publication. Its primary theme of seeking relationships between the national, the popular and the global in capital cities today is outlined and the notion of refractions of these forces i