INHABITING OCULAR GROUND: Kinshasa's Future in the Light of Congo's Spectral Urban Politics

Abstract

This article addresses the tensions that exist between the lives of city dwellers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and those official attempts currently being launched by the Congolese government to create a new, albeit exclusionist, urban environment. During the campaign leading up to the 2006 presidential elections, President Kabila launched his “Cinq Chantiers” program, arguably the most ambitious project since the end of colonization in 1960 to overhaul the country and respond to its most pressing and urgent needs—or at least that of its elites—with regard to its urbanization. The article first situates the main phases of Kinshasa's expansion from the colonial era to the present day. It then turns to an analysis of the impact of the “Cinq Chantiers” program by examining two concrete cases: the expansion of fields in the Malebo Pool (looking at current modes of “informal” expansion of the urban space) and the development of a new urban project, the Cité du Fleuve (whose progressive uplift leaves out a large swath of the population). Are these examples of an African futurity, and for whom do they envision a new kind of urban life?

The urban now: Theorising cities beyond the new

“…Ong (2011) studiously views Simone and de Boeck as focusing only on a 'subaltern' subject in their writing, in order to displace their contribution as based on a now-dated, postcolonial analytic. However, this belies these authors' consistently close attention to actors and institutions which stretch across power hierarchies and wealth distributions, as the dynamic, provisional urban worlds they describe attend to the initiatives of transnational capital, donors, traders and governments, as much as they do to the energies required to survive in some of the poorest urban settlements (de Boeck, 2011;Simone, 2011). Thus, and despite the sophisticated ontology of disparate circulations and fragmentation put to work by Roy and Ong (2011), the hubris of the new and the ambition to stake a wider purchase for analytical claims derived from specific contexts, end up reproducing some now rather familiar (and territorialising) tactics, building hegemonising theoretical assertions from localised 'invention'.…”

“…The surge of state geopolitical ambition in the styling of cities across Asia (Ong, 2011) has accompanied intense privatism and state withdrawal from shaping cities in many former authoritarian contexts (Hirt, 2011). The informal expansion of rapidly growing cities sits (sometimes literally) side-by-side with the explosion of concrete and glass in the emptied public spaces of corporate urban landscapes, and the resultant elite capture of the intrinsic capacities of many cities to engender vitality and centrality (de Boeck, 2011;Schmid, 2012). We could rehearse many more distinctive varieties of urbanism; indeed, a multiplicity of forms, trends and interpretations of the urban condition can be identified around the world.…”

Uncertainty and Urban Life

“…Local residents must then put off their electricity credit purchase or travel to the next payment office twenty minutes away. These patterns may be similar the next day, but the dialectical urbanism will be in flux again (Simone 2004a) as residents incrementally find new ways to inhabit the city (De Boeck 2011).…”

“…Studies of financial markets present us with a domain beyond the state in which uncertainty is productive and can be capitalized upon, through speculation and hedging (Zaloom 2004;LiPuma and Lee 2004). Urban studies draw our attention to how city dwellers in much of the world experience uncertainty as both an obstacle and an opportunity (Simone 2010;De Boeck 2011). Recognizing the pitfalls of shifting between these diverse perspectives on uncertainty-that it may be too much for one term to bear-we seek not to bring them together in a unified theory.…”

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?

“…In recent years, the social study of urban Africa has gained a new breath. Authors like De Boeck (2011, Simone (2004), and Pieterse (2008) have drawn attention to the ways in which social infrastructures (kinship, religious associations, etc.) provide important safety nets for African urbanites to survive.…”