In this paper I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realised. Using illustrative cases of top-down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the 'disorder' and spatial 'unruliness' of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be 'converted', dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio-economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible.

The paper debates the role of planning in `Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order', Zimbabwe's 2005 controversial urban clean-up campaign. The discussion critically assesses two perspectives regarding the purported contribution and complicity of planning in what critics perceive to be the machinations of a regime that is internationally viewed as nefarious. This is done, first, by interrogating the role and contribution of planners and planning to the instigation and design of the operation before it was launched and, secondly, by determining the extent to which planners and planning served as the handmaiden of state repression during the operation. After weighing relevant empirical evidence on the culpability of planning, the discussion concludes that, while planning may escape the first charge, it certainly has a case to answer on the second.

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In this paper I consider ‘normalisation’ as a response to urban informal livelihoods in urban southern Africa. I demonstrate that urban planning systems have been mobilised to correct or eliminate ‘spatial pathologies’. Using illustrative cases from southern Africa, I argue that the authorities’ obsession with ‘normalising’ urban spaces they have designated as ‘pathologies’ is misplaced because it glaringly defies the reality on the ground. Interrogated in the paper is the reasoning behind, and effectiveness of, ‘corrective’ measures that exclude and marginalise informality through technicalisation, ‘expertisation’ and depoliticisation. I evaluate the basis, workings and deleterious outcomes of normalising technologies and question the relevance and efficacy of normalisation at a time when it is increasingly becoming clear that African urbanisation is – and will possibly continue to be – simultaneously driven and cushioned by informalisation.

Urban planning bases its interventionist strategies on the reasoning that change has to be rationally managed and that control is necessary in the 'public interest'. In Africa, for various bureaucratic and political reasons, urban planning has often been notoriously lax. In the face of uncontrolled urban development, many urban governments have abandoned comprehensive planning and increasingly resort to ad-hoc 'sanitising' measures of various kinds. This paper explores the forces and rationales that lie behind the intensified use of such 'non-planning' strategies. It draws on examples from Harare and Maputo, where urban authorities applied forceful measures to remove unplanned settlements and market places. In these cases the forces at work behind the scenes included the political strategies of elites seeking to maintain and strengthen political control over urban areas, rationalising and legitimising such unpopular interventions by appealing to ongoing efforts at 'city marketing' through international events, and referring to the imperative of upholding a modern city image. We discuss the tensions that arose from these decisions and the subsequent political processes among the intended 'victims', and between them and the authorities. In comparing and contrasting the cases of Harare and Maputo, we bring out the dilemmas of planning resorting to 'non-planning' and the complex politics triggered by such interventions.