Whilst the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable urban development has been increasingly recognised in policy frameworks at multiple levels, there remains a lack of understanding about how global and international goals land in different places. This paper specifically addresses this question through a study of 18 festivals across the Global North and South. We argue that festivals are integrative sites in which tangible and intangible heritage properties are entangled: bidirectional, co-dependent and non-linear. Given the critical role in linking urban contexts and histories with immaterial experience and meaning in the city, we argue that festivals can illuminate wider concerns. Specifically, this means seeing festivals as part of the 'new heritage paradigm' and assessing their contribution to processes of just urban transformations.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Creative cities and culture‐led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite‐centric economic development agendas tend to trump ‘civic creativity’ ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture‐led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus on decorative projects as part of urban upgrading, which are often associated with ensuing gentrification and displacement of the urban poor. In contrast to focusing on these kinds of regeneration strategies, this article investigates Dlala Indima, a hip‐hop‐led graffiti project in a rural township in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This article situates graffiti as a critical social and spatial practice to argue that this case challenges normative cultural planning paradigms. Dlala Indima's work is an alternative approach to cultural development by and for young people who are usually marginalized by the mainstream practice of culture‐led economic development. The project challenges dominant creative cities and culture‐led development discourses in three ways: first, it challenges the normative processes of regeneration; secondly, it grounds participatory practice; and finally, it shifts participation from ‘tyranny to transformation’ through the ubuntu of hip‐hop, the notion of ubuntu being based on the communitarian notion of ‘ubuntu, ngubuntu ngabantu’—‘I am because you are’.
The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infrastructures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called “platform urbanism” leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a mere site of accumulation and exploitation. In this article, in contrast, we offer a more ambivalent analysis of a compelling trend in several African cities: the platformization of motorcycle taxis. Our focus is on Kigali and Nairobi two cities that have been celebrated as “Silicon Savannahs” for their commitment to digital innovation, and where motorcycle taxis have long contributed to the regular movement of people and goods. Deploying a Southern urban perspective on the digitization of these mobility systems, we make two contributions to platform urbanism debates. First, we show that this phenomenon dovetails two decades of supply-side, developmental investments in the connectivity infrastructure upon which platforms rely and are predicated. Second, we show that platform urbanism is not simply a case of global technologies landing in Africa. It is characterized by a proliferation of experiments in which domestic and international capital coalesce, platforms intersect in dynamic ways with informal economies, and local adaptations are necessary for survival. Overall, we argue that the platformization of motorcycles in these cities (and arguably others) constitutes a dynamic and evolving landscape that requires more careful conceptual and empirical attention.
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re-signifying both subjects and spaces.
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