New private property investments in Africa’s cities are on the rise, and they often take the form of entirely new cities built up from scratch as comprehensively planned self-contained enclaves. As these new city-making trajectories are expanding and empirical research is emerging, there is a need to provide more conceptual clarity. We systematically examine the diversity of new cities in Africa; elicit their financial trajectories; and set an agenda for critically examining their actual and expected implications, by learning transnational lessons from debates on gated communities, peri-urban land governance and displacement, and older waves of new city building. Although most new cities are private-led projects, they are inserted into diverse and dynamic political economies with states ranging from developmentalist to neoliberal to absent. The consumptive and supply-driven character of many projects so far (resembling gated communities for middle and higher classes), their insertion into ‘rurban’ spaces with complex land governance arrangements, and their tendency to implement post-democratic private-sector-driven governance will make them at best unsuitable for solving Africa’s urban problems, and at worst they will increase expulsions and enclosures of the poor, public funding injustice and socio-spatial segregation and fragmentation.

No abstract

The global 'land grab' debate is going urban and needs a specific conceptual framework to analyze the diverse modalities through which land commodification and speculation are transforming cities across the globe. This article identifies new avenues for research on urban land issues by drawing on an extensive body of academic literature and concrete cases of urban land transformations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These transformations are analyzed by focusing on three types of urban investments-investments in property, investments in public space and public services, and investments in speculation, image building and 'worlding'-and the way these investments are intermingled with and enhanced by processes of gentrification and speculative urbanism. Addressing real estate and infrastructure investments, speculation and gentrification through a land-based lens allows us to deepen the discussion on urban land governance in the global South. We argue that urban land acquisition cannot be thoroughly understood in isolation from the workings of urban real estate markets, public policies, and displacement processes. The urban land grab debate needs to consider the dialectic interplay between land use change and general socio-spatial transformations both in central-or recentralized-and peripheral areas. This is why we plea for a kaleidoscopic perspective on urban land governance by uncovering the complex patchwork of urban land acquisitions and their diverse temporalities and spatialities, their hybrid character in terms of actors involved, and the multiple and often unpredicted ways in which urban dwellers try to gain control over and access to urban land.

The past two decades have seen the steady emergence of various bilateral and multilateral migration agreements between Europe and migrantsending countries in the global South.

Current patterns of -move-in move-out‖ hypermobility are perfectly exemplified by residential tourism: the temporary or permanent mobility of relatively well-to-do citizens from mostly western countries to a variety of tourist destinations, where they buy property. The mobility of residential tourists does not stand alone, but has broader chain effects: it converts local destinations into transnational spaces, leading to a highly differentiated and segmented population landscape. In this article, residential tourism's implications in terms of local society in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, are examined, starting from the idea that these implications should be viewed as complex and traveling in time and space. Mobile groups, such as residential tourists, can have an important local participation and involvement (independently of national citizenship), although recent flows of migrants settle more into compatriot social networks. The fact that various migrant populations continually travel back and forth and do not envision a future in the area may restrict their opportunities and willingness for local involvement. Transnational involvement in itself is not a problem and can be successfully combined with high local involvement; however, the great level of fragmentation, mobility, temporariness and absenteeism in Guanacaste circumscribes successful community organizing. Still, the social system has not completely dissolved.