Urbanization, Urbanism, and Urbanity in an African City

Home Spaces and House Cultures

P. Jenkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137380173
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa has historic roots, and though it has accelerated in recent decades, it retains distinctive forms. This book explores sub-Saharan urbanism through a detailed and wide-ranging study of Maputo, Mozambique, covering physical and socio-economic factors as well as an ethnographic inquiry into cultural attitudes.

Part I

Introductory Material

1

The Aims and Objectives of the Book

The overall aim in producing this book is to extend recent writing on African cities,¹ with a focus on physical urban development issues, and in so doing, to critique key concepts used in contemporary analysis (and subsequent policy and practice). As noted in the acknowledgments, the book draws from four decades of a wide range of urban experience as well as specific recent empirical research in Mozambique. It is the author’s intention that the book is intellectually situated between human geography or cultural studies of African urban areas (which often critique contemporary concepts) and typically more normative work in these urban areas (often short-term, highly local, and instrumental in nature) undertaken under the rubric of “development.” As such the book seeks to contribute to a new critical empirical approach to African urban studies, as advocated by a number of researchers, such as Harrison et al. (forthcoming), Myers (2011), Murray and Myers (2006), and Robinson (2006).

The key theme embedded throughout the book is that African cities are much misunderstood in current writing, especially concerning physical urban development, as many texts start from a normative perspective, which is based on premises that are derived from idealized perceptions of the city and the role of the state. The book turns this approach around to focus on African city dwellers’ actions and perceptions concerning the built environment, contrasting these with the “received wisdom” concerning what the city and its physical manifestation should be. In so doing the book aims to contribute to filling a knowledge gap between historic North-centered attempts to empirically understand the African city (such as that of the so-called Manchester School of the 1940s and 1950s, based at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Lusaka); the fragmented aid-funded normative research from the 1970s onwards (which tends to be self-reinforcing and not query concepts); and more recent work (mostly after 2000) within a postcolonial tradition of urban studies (which queries concepts but often with a limited empirical basis).

Over two decades ago, Catharine Coquery-Vidrovitch wrote the following. Arguably, over two decades later, we still have limited empirical understanding of Sub-Saharan African cities and how they function, let alone adequate analytical concepts and frameworks.

As long as we lack a theoretical and historical account of the forces that underpin global differentiations, we remain unable to account for processes that lie at the heart of African urban underdevelopment: the integration of the household into new networks of capitalist production; the invention of a new web of concepts and practice on land and land laws, on housing and rental; new patterns of foodstuff consumption; new regulations governing social and political life; all of these processes involving new relationships to the broader political economy which is definitely neither Western nor native behavior. (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1991).

This is partly due to the “peripherality” of Africa in urban theory, as argued by a number of researchers (e.g., Ferguson, 2006; Myers, 2011; Robinson, 2006), but probably as much, if not more, due to the practical difficulties of undertaking empirical urban research in the region. The nascent postindependence “intellectual infrastructure” in Sub-Saharan Africa (in terms of research capacity through—e.g., universities) was definitively undermined by structural adjustment and the withdrawal of the state across the region in the 1980s and 1990s (as it is governments that fund most such research worldwide, directly or indirectly). This has been particularly the case for urban issues, as the funding for research from international development agency sources, which continued after this period, has generally focused on the “rural” and ignored the “urban.” The research that has been possible in the above circumstances has thus tended to be either highly instrumental and normative, or very local and focused (for instance through academic research such as doctoral studies, more often than not by international students and academics). This, at least, has been the author’s experience over the past three decades.

The outcome of the above situation is a dearth of empirical material of reasonable depth (in methodological coherence) and sufficient width (for more general analysis). More so, the inherent “silo-mentality” of many institutions (academic, international agency, government) has led to limited “breadth” of research across institutional boundaries, which often bear close relation to disciplines. Hence what research has been undertaken in urban areas in the region has often had a fairly strong mono-disciplinary approach, and probably no more so than in studies of the physicality of the “urban.” That more recent trends in postcolonial studies have broadened the range of acceptable focus for urban studies is to be welcomed, but this has not translated into more empirically grounded work except in quite localized studies. As such, writing on African urban areas tends to be either wide-ranging but less deeply engaged with empirical analysis (more width but less depth); empirically grounded but quite localized (more depth but less width); and both forms of outputs are often limited in disciplinary breadth.

Added to all of this is the even more difficult fourth dimension of time, in other words, longitudinal studies that permit understanding of change. These are quite rare for African urban areas in general, and those that exist have tended to “geographically” congregate, partially for reasons of historical continuity, partially happenstance. In terms of widely published material (more on this below), the author is only aware of a handful of such longitudinal studies of urban issues in the region: the work of Ann Schlyter, Karen Transberg Hansen, and James Ferguson in Zambia, and that of Debbie Potts and Miriam Grant in Zimbabwe. These are not only geographically quite bounded in Central Africa (despite their authors’ ability to place their work in a wider African context), but also quite bounded in disciplinary terms (again despite determined attempts to cross disciplinary boundaries).²

This book is located within this relatively rare longitudinal tradition of African urban research, and with a strong urban physical focus (that is environmental planning, housing and architecture), but with a social studies emphasis.³ In this, it attempts to place the physical focus in both a political economic perspective (and thus “structure”) as well as draw on sociocultural understandings (and thus “agency”). The author has for some time worked within two main intellectual paradigms: postdevelopment international political economy studies, which attempts to balance structure with agency (for more, see Jenkins, Smith, and Wang, 2006, Chapter 1); and new institutionalist analysis (from a sociological rather than economic point of view), which relates organizational forms to mental models in mutual ways (for more, see Carley, Jenkins, and Smith, 2000, Chapter 2). However, most recently the author’s research, in the global North as well as the South, has increasingly focused on the cultural basis for agency in the built environment, as outlined below. In this, ethnographic approaches have become more important.

The interdisciplinary research which the book draws on includes:

• Architectural studies of house form and cultural use, including change over two decades (1990–2010);

• Planning studies on the way urban space is planned, provided with infrastructure and settled (often not in that order), including issues of power and land rights (again over two decades);

• Links between the above two (mainly physical) urban datasets with socioeconomic data through qualitative analysis, including attitudinal surveys and histories of urban land development and access (the longitudinal socioeconomic dataset being mainly over the past decade 2000–10);

• Ethnographic enquiry into perceptions and values of current urban residents, including construction of life histories, with a focus on what constitutes “home” vis-à-vis urban land and housing (2010);

• Contextualization of the empirical data both quantitatively (at macro-regional and national levels) as well as qualitatively (at national and urban levels), including assessing caveats to its representative nature for wider extrapolation to national (Mozambique) and macro-regional (Sub-Saharan Africa) levels;

• Integration of the empirical findings and confronting these with key contemporary analytical concepts concerning the “urban” in Africa.

The two main disciplinary areas of knowledge embedded in the book are those of architecture/urbanism and anthropological/sociological enquiry. The impetus to undertake such research came from the author’s growing engagement with the social and cultural basis for producing the majority of architecture and urbanism. This derives most directly from his professional work over the past four decades in cities, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, in architecture, construction, housing and planning (1973–96) and the subsequent transfer into academia with its more critical research focus (1996–2013). However it also, importantly, derives from the social and cultural life, which the author’s personal and family involvement through this period has permitted (and indeed required), leading to a related engagement with wider urban studies, especially anthropological literature, but also that of human geography. The need to relate forms of professional and academic knowledge to what can be seen as “popular” knowledge and ways of understanding in and of the predominant peri-urban areas of African cities have profoundly shaped this pathway and the basis for the research that underpins this book, as discussed below.

The book is geographically focused on one African city but creates the contextual basis for relating the findings in a wider geographic sense for the region (and indeed for emerging urbanism worldwide—in other words to the structural context). However, above all else, it stresses the agency of African urban dwellers, and focuses its empirical analysis at the level of the household in physical, socioeconomic and cultural terms. The unit of analysis is the “home space,” a concept developed by the author to both denote the physical space within which peri-urban households dwell (including built and natural components of the environment of a case study “site”: i.e., houses, annexes, trees, gardens, etc.), as well the way people live in this space, engaging thus with social and cultural concepts of home. The objective in defining this term was to find a unit of analysis that permitted study of the sociocultural acts of dwelling as well as the physical space of the dwelling, and extrapolate from this to wider forms of urban development. The vast majority of Sub-Saharan African cities are made up of multiples of such “home spaces.” In this way the study cuts across micro-level understanding of housing as a verb and as a noun, and relates this to macro-level understanding of urban development.

As an essentially academic output the book’s broader sociocultural reach will be limited to some extent, but the importance of wider media in creating imaginaries of what is and can be “urban” led the author and his colleagues to promote the production of a documentary based on the research, this being distributed around the time of the book’s publication (see below). Above all the author hopes the book will contribute to the better empirical understanding of what exists, how this changes and why, and avoid / contest the typical doomsday analyses of what is urban in Africa.

The Nature of Knowledge

None of us can ever fully “know” a city (Çinar and Bender, 2007). Knowing the city in an abstracted professional knowledge set and knowing the city as a resident, in other words as one of an interconnected social and cultural group, are both involved in the process of perceiving the “urban” (which in the case of the author’s engagement with Maputo has been fundamentally transcultural). Whereas abstracted knowledge is the territory of academics and is extremely influential in public policy formulation, popular knowledge is that which is most obviously embedded in, and in turn embeds, the social and cultural values of urban majorities. Where these two get “out of synch” there can be real confrontations between the two power bases that each represents. Although the state and its influence over (and reciprocal influence by) the regulated private sector has a significant concentration of power, this is always diluted by the power to resist or nonconform through everyday social and cultural action, even in contexts of extreme political imposition and/or economic hardship.

This dichotomy is reflected in the contemporary analytical definitions of “formal” and “informal,” which essentially are based on the state’s definition of norms and standards and the aspiration to regulate according to these (that is impose forcefully if need be), but also invest and redistribute, (at least in the Weberian concept of the state). That these two ways of knowing the city in Sub-Saharan Africa are out of synch is definitely the author’s view, and it is argued here that this leads to a confrontation of values, in which the urban majority are well ahead by default in actual city-building given state weakness and limitations.

This study is predicated on the understanding that valid knowledge is not something that is only produced by research, but that research can assist in structuring such knowledge, its analysis and abstraction (to some degree), and its subsequent proactive use, for instance in structuring activity by governments and other actors. In the case of the research focus here—on fast expanding African cities—every urban resident has valid knowledge of relevance to urban expansion, as in fact individual action at household and family level is arguably the dominant force in shaping city expansion. However, state-based urban development strategies tend to translate forms of abstracted knowledge (for instance on what is considered appropriate in urban space and form) from other places and times. This book argues that such an approach has not been effective in Africa, as the basis for analysis that led to such abstractions (even prior to the application in policy and practice) has had limited relevance.

The key ideas that underpin the normal operations of what are conceived as urban development planning and control (as well as housing strategies and even building control), are largely inherited from the North. As such they are generally based on the initial responses to rapid urbanization in very different contexts, and are not part of the wider context in Africa (e.g., the necessary basis of widespread state competence in administrative, technical and financial terms). To avoid continued ineffective urban development action by the state thus entails “going back” to conceptual basics, through examining the realities of rapid urbanization in the present and engaging in new analysis for future prognoses. This analysis does not have to ignore the century or so of advances in the field, which can be tracked and thus contextualized in the North and South, but arguably any “solution” needs a different form of understanding of the “problem.” In effect it argues that what can be seen as the problem by an exogenous analysis deductively applied, can in fact be the solution, or part of this, through application of more inductive and endogenous analysis.

Policy-makers and urban development practitioners with extensive experience of the urban physical and social fabric of Sub-Saharan African cities such as Maputo may claim that the knowledge produced by such an approach is to a greater or lesser extent already known, however, this knowledge generally only exists on an anecdotal level. What this study brings to the fore is a structured, rigorous, empirically based enquiry that lifts such knowledge into an intellectual arena, where it is hoped it can be used to influence policy and practice and the concepts on which these are based. This, of course, entails analysis and some abstraction, which was the function of the various reports of the research program underpinning the book. It was, however, never the deliberative objective of the program to produce definitive recommendations of a normative nature based on such abstraction. The objective, rather, has been to produce forms of knowledge validated through sound social scientific methods, which can help query and perhaps suggest alternative ways of thinking as the basis for different ways of acting—and this book is one of the ways this is made available.

Exchanging Knowledge

A key focus of such a research approach is the exchange of knowledge. The researchers in the Home Space program saw their role in this respect as one of helping to collect the knowledge that many residents of peri-urban areas have, and ascertain how this is legitimated/validated socially and culturally “on the ground.” The researchers abstracted from this using analytical methods from relevant social science disciplines, and compared the findings with the commonly accepted policy and practice approaches to physical urban development, especially those that are applied primarily to the South (albeit largely predicated on Northern experience). The role of the research was thus to assist in knowledge exchange from the residents to the policy-makers of the state as well as international agency actors and other practitioners, rather than transfer concepts from the latter to former. Importantly the research team also communicated the acquired knowledge within the academic domain to other researchers and educators. The research team was thus something like a knowledge broker in such exchanges.

The mechanisms used in these latter knowledge exchange processes (as opposed to the former knowledge development and analysis process) included:

• a series of workshops with key actors in government (at various levels), as well as international agency representatives, in Mozambique;

• several academic presentations in Maputo at the Faculty of Architecture & Physical Planning (open to a wide range of academics and others interested), as well as at least one presentation of the ongoing research at the other partner academic institutions involved in the research team (Lisbon, Edinburgh, and Copenhagen);

• the publication of the reports and other relevant material online at a dedicated website: www.homespace.dk;

• th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Introductory Material
• Part II   Contextual Material
• Part III   Empirical Material
• Part IV   Concluding Material
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index