Power and Informality in Urban Africa

Ethnographic Perspectives

Laura Stark, Annika Björnsdotter Teppo

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786993472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie urbaine

Urban Africa is undergoing a transformation unlike anywhere else in the world, as unprecedented numbers of people migrate to rapidly expanding cities. But despite the growing body of work on urban Africa, the lives of these new city dwellers have received relatively little attention, particularly when it comes to crucial issues of power and inequality. This interdisciplinary collection brings together contributions from urban studies, geography, and anthropology to provide new insights into the social and political dynamics of African cities, as well as uncovering the causes and consequences of urban inequality. Featuring rich new ethnographic research data and case studies drawn from across the continent, the collection shows that Africa's new urbanites have adapted to their environs in ways which often defy the assumptions of urban planners. By examining the experiences of these urban residents in confronting issues of power and agency, the contributors consider how such insights can inform more effective approaches to research, city planning and development both in Africa and beyond.

1

Examining Power and Inequality through Informality in Urban Africa

Laura Stark and Annika Teppo

As increasing numbers of Africans live in cities, their strategies for living and surviving challenge prevailing theories and models of urban development. Scholars of poverty and development have given more attention to rural areas than to urban ones, yet urban lifeways need more study because people’s material lives in the city differ significantly from those in rural areas. Urban residents are exposed to more ethnic, religious, and socio-economic diversity than rural residents (Jha et al. 2005). Urban areas are also highly monetized, and the lives of especially the poorest residents are determined almost entirely by market forces. Money thus becomes the focus of city dwellers’ attention: the means by which relationships are negotiated, the measure of success, and a necessary condition for well-being. This volume defines ‘urban’ as residential aggregations in which the majority of residents work in non-agricultural activities, which generally means they are also settled more densely. Not all urban spaces are large cities; they can be small shantytowns appearing in otherwise rural areas. What is important in our definition of ‘urban’ is not its size or infrastructure but the resource base (predominantly non-agricultural) and dynamics of human interaction based on the range of interlocking occupations and levels of activity.

In the context of today’s geopolitical environment, societies and economies in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to be positioned peripherally in international affairs and have apparently little bargaining power. Regardless of the measures used, the continent has by far the fewest number of cities that could be called ‘global cities’ or ‘world cities’ (Beaverstock, Taylor, and Smith 2002; van der Merwe 2004). Economic restructuring, beginning with the Structural Adjustment Programs¹ in the 1980s, has weakened the economic role of cities. It has continued as foreign-based resource extraction industries contribute to the ‘hollowing out’ of many African states – institutions that resemble states in structure and form, but that have turned away from the work of governance. Instead, these neoliberal states engage in profit-seeking ventures, reinforcing the hegemonic ambitions of more powerful groups (Ferguson 2006; Bayart 2009). In the meantime, the informal economy has grown so pervasive that it now constitutes most of the economy in the Global South (Hart 2006; Meagher 2010; Schoofs 2015).

With urbanization outpacing formal planning and regulation, it is increasingly acknowledged that informality defines both economic frameworks and norms for interaction among the majority of urban residents. Or, as Iida Lindell and Mats Utas (2012: 409) explain, ‘What appears to outsiders as chaotic informal activity is usually structured by webs of relationships that lend life in highly uncertain settings a degree of predictability.’ Informality runs through all aspects of African urban life: housing, markets, income-earning, relationships to technology, infrastructure, and governance. Since the state has the prerogative to define what is ‘formal’ through institutional rules, laws, and protection, we define informality as those activities that fall outside government regulation, control, support, and taxation.

It is important to note that informality is produced by the exclusivity of the formal sector. The notion of a formal sector, and indeed the process of division into more and less privileged sectors, functions to delimit boundaries and preserve power and privilege within elite circles. In return for access to basic services and comforts, the formal sector requires connections and/or education that are costly for the poor (Portes and Haller 2005: 404; Hart 2006; Feige 1990: 990; Andreas 2004: 642, in Schoofs). This means that a globally Northern vantage point in which informality appears ‘deficient’, or African cities as dystopic, is a problematic approach to analysis (Robinson 2010). With the informal economy as the real economy in Sub-Saharan Africa, the role or function of the smaller ‘formal’ economy is no longer self-evident as the normative or the ideal but raises genuine questions about governance, privilege, and exclusion.

Governments in Sub-Saharan Africa seek to limit the informal sector’s growth despite the fact that it offers livelihoods for those struggling with unemployment and poverty. Informality is routinely presented by governments as a state of exception in public discourse (regardless of its infinite duration) in order to delegitimize and stigmatize certain actors, systems, and spaces. This continues even while state employees, elites, and public figures benefit from the existence of informality or actively ignore it (Schoofs 2015: 7; Banks et. al. 2020). Approaching the question of the state’s relationship to the informal sector thus requires bypassing reified accounts of the state as a ‘thing’ or actor and asking who and what the state actually is. To understand the motives behind state-sanctioned practices that enable and promote the informal economy, who the ‘state’ consists of must be defined in terms of beneficiaries and the real sources of their revenue (Schoofs 2015). The political and economic interests of the powerful can be enhanced through rent-seeking, bribery, and patronage in spaces where formal rules and regulations are not enforced, or enforced arbitrarily (Banks et al. 2020). Brokers and intermediaries with formal power in global value chains benefit by circumventing labour regulations and utilizing labour in ways that drain value from families and communities (Meagher et al. 2016: 475; Barrientos, Gereffi, and Rossi, 2011; Lerche, 2011; Meagher and Lindell 2013). These vested interests may be an important reason why the state is unable or unwilling to extend its regulatory regimes to all parts of the informal economy, and instead engages in ‘supportive neglect’ (Banks et al. 2020: 231).

Non-verbalized (or at least non-codified) protections, negotiations, legitimacies, and penalties often differ from those written or publicly proclaimed by authorities (e.g. Bromley 2000). For this reason, the official stances taken in legal and policy documents may not reveal much about how actors in the city actually operate or how urban residents experience life. Multiple co-existing and interlocking levels of responses are needed by actors to meet demands from both ‘above’ and ‘below’: from international organizations, global capital, middle-class citizens, informal labourers, and the jobless poor. Thus much of the ‘real’ socio-economic and political organization in the city occurs through power wielded invisibly and through informal strategies employed by urban residents, unwritten decisions and negotiations made by local leaders; and predatory practices such as bribes, extortion, fraud, or theft.

Our volume focuses on practices as mediating mechanisms in the ‘organizing logic’ of urban informality (Roy 2005: 148). Informality comprises systems of its own, with actors strategizing for power, benefit, and accumulation. We approach urban informality on the African continent by seeing poverty and inequality as reproduced through particular economic structuring practices rather than as failures of markets or governance, or as a lack of ‘development’ to be corrected through education or micro-finance (Meagher 2005; Hickey and Du Toit 2007; Mosse 2007; Sanyal 2007). Our interdisciplinary collection of empirically grounded chapters focuses on the causes and consequences of power inequalities in urban transformation in the cities of Sub-Saharan Africa. It asks the question: How do socially negotiated power relations produce informal and semi-formal dynamics of inequality? The book’s authors approach these questions from the fields of urban planning, architecture, geography, ethnology, and anthropology. They use in-depth ethnographic research from Angola, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, and Uganda – ‘research that accentuates the voices and practices of urban residents’ (Bjarnesen et al. 2018: 2). In addition, this volume draws extensively on African authors’ own research and perspectives.

Studying the grassroots level of cities in Africa can help us understand how excluded and marginalized residents use informal, experimental tactics to create and recreate ‘a new urban sociality, even under dire conditions’ (Simone 2008: 81). These tactics include negotiations with local officials in the absence of pragmatic public policy; constant (physical, mental, and affective) work to maintain social ties and make claims on the resources of others such as relatives and patrons (Ferguson 2015); time invested in making ‘friends’ in the city who can help one obtain irregular work; and constant observation and listening in order to find unexploited niches of income generation that exist only in the city. What determines whether the tactics at each level of activity can be used by individuals for survival or accumulation depends in part on how public authorities classify them as legal versus illegal, and how these public authorities act (with what level of violence) in response to different kinds of ‘illegality’ (Banks et al. 2020).

Current theory on cities and globalization emphasizes that it is difficult to understand cities in the Global South from the perspective of dominant Northern urban theory, and that precisely this makes cities in the South sources of alternate urban visions or ‘key sites for theory making’ (Ernstson et al. 2014). The African city does not merely foreshadow an emergent way of life on the African continent. As the target of stringent economic restructuring in a neoliberal global order, it carries important implications for the future dynamics of cities around the globe (Myers 2011; Davis 2006). In part, the challenges faced by urban African residents are due to the direct legacies of colonialization as a total social project. These legacies impact how power is accessed and channelled on the continent. Colonial imports, such as the urban ideal as planned, standardized, and aesthetically appealing still influence urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa (Freund 2007). Such ideals exclude vast areas of informal housing in city centres and on their peripheries. These are routinely pronounced in public discourse to be chaotic, dirty, unsightly, and detracting from the image of a ‘world-class city’ that could bolster political legitimacy and attract foreign investment (Transberg Hansen 2004; Potts 2007: 17).

Ethnography as urban research method

Methodically, all the contributors of this volume lean – in varying degrees and ways – towards an ethnographic approach. The authors have carried out in-depth interviews, (participant) observation, and some have employed visual methods. They possess a deep familiarity and understanding of the urban contexts and locations under study. Their positions vary from those of a well-informed outsider (Lappi, Lanzano, Myllylä, Stark) to virtual insiders (Bagayoko, Segen, Wamala-Larsson, Udelsmann Rodrigues). Many of them have worked in the same field for years, or have live(d) in the country of their study.

Ethnography is dual in nature: the term refers both to method and a written text. Ethnography also implies more than just a form of data collection. It involves a deep commitment to the field, and a particular way of seeing how people experience their daily lives and represent their everyday experiences to themselves. The writers take a critical stance that examines these representations within their historical, political, socio-economic, cultural, and spatial contexts. Ethnography as a method uses empathy to focus on the motives, values, beliefs, and attitudes of the people studied in order to learn not just what people do but why they do it. Ethnography can thus reach to areas of life that remain uncharted, out of reach, and sometimes also misunderstood in numerical understandings of the city. Large-scale surveys are still the method favoured by development researchers and economists for studying urban poverty, but they cannot – nor are they meant to – capture the motivations and strategies in the lives of urban residents. Ethnography is more adept at this, although surveys and ethnography are not mutually exclusive methodologies.

As a textual exercise, ethnography tends toward holism. By tracing the causal connections between multiple dimensions of poverty and inequality, ethnography achieves a broader perspective. Through ethnography, we ideally enter into a dialogue with those social worlds and individual persons we study. In the chapters of this volume, we pay attention to their understandings and explanations of the cause-and-effect relations of poverty and inequality that impact their lives.

Scholars have argued that the poor are often not able to behave in the ways that city planners expect them to, and that urban planning in so-called developing countries is ill-suited to socio-economic realities (Fox 2014 8; also Hardoy and Satterthwaite 1989; Hansen and Vaa 2004; Jenkins 2013). Due to their mobility and relative invisibility, the urban poor in Sub-Saharan Africa can elude attempts to measure and study them through large-scale surveys or through methods that take the city as the primary unit of analysis (Jha et al. 2005). Urban planners, policymakers and decision-makers require a fuller understanding of how people struggle and strategize within urban agglomerations, and how urban informality operates.

Ethnographic fieldwork and the ways it has been reflected in the texts of our authors brings to light hidden aspects of micro-power. This, in turn, reveals new links between macro- and micro-levels of analysis. Ethnography recognizes tensions and conflicts as well as the opportunities for social mediation that the informal sector holds. By going beyond familiar concepts and assumptions grounded in Western forms of knowledge, our book situates itself within broader critical discussions on Southern urbanism.

Beyond ‘rights to the city’

For many decades, the single most important determinant of urban poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa has been lack of formal employment. High unemployment has been accompanied by falling wages: between the early 1970s and the early 1990s real wages fell by over 90 per cent in much of the continent (Meagher, Mann, and Bolt 2016: 474; also Ferguson 1999; ILO 2002; Jamal and Weeks 1993; Mkandawire and Soludo 1999; Vandemoortele 1991). As a result of decreased formal employment opportunities, the urban informal sector expanded rapidly (Rakodi 1997; Hansen and Vaa 2004: 12; UN-Habitat 2010). This has meant that whole sections of the population now have incomes that are ‘unbelievably precarious and insecure’, requiring ‘a continual process of flexible improvisation’ in order to survive (Ferguson 2015: 92).

The lives of these precarious workers in cities of Sub-Saharan Africa still receive relatively little attention despite their vital role in maintaining urban economies. In many cities of the Global South, the cheap labour and goods provided by micro-traders are vital for the continued functioning of the neoliberal city (de Oliveira 1985; Roever and Skinner 2016). Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, urban residents depend on day labourers and irregular workers to obtain goods and services not distributed through formal channels, and to keep down the costs of living in the city. Micro-traders generate demand for services provided by other informal workers, and help the poor by providing goods and services at more affordable prices closer to home. Informal producers and vendors are particularly vital for the food security of the poor, as the majority of food insecure households in Sub-Saharan Africa obtain their food from informal food outlets (Roever and Skinner 2016).

To earn livelihoods, the poor must have access to high-traffic city areas where monetary flows are busiest. There is an increasing push within many cities to recognize that residents have a socially legitimized right to access urban public spaces due to their key role in livelihood generation (Chen et al. 2018; Lindell and Adama 2020). Yet governments aiming to curb growth in the informal sector have restricted the rights of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• 1 Examining Power and Inequality through Informality in Urban Africa
• Part 1 Gold fever
• Part 2 Goods, services, needs: actors in the market
• Part 3 Urban renewal: planning versus implementation
• Index
• Imprint