Middle class construction: domestic architecture, aesthetics and anxieties in Tanzania

Mercer, Claire

doi:10.1017/s0022278x14000068

Cited by 67 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Further attention should of course be paid to the emergence of what commentators term Ôthe rising Africa middle classÕ (Melber, 2013;Ravallion, 2010;Visagie and Posel, 2013). Whilst this is a contested term the growth of suburban developments (Mabin et al, 2013) and new housing geographies (Grant, 2009;Mercer, 2014) together with new consumption habits and technology usage predicate a series of niches from which innovations are being generated and reshaping the socio-technical landscapes of energy across these towns and cities. Our brief outlining of these actors offers some important intermediaries beyond the focus on the elite within urban transi-tions analysis.…”

Section: Constituting Urban Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach

Silver

Marvin

2016

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper develops a geographic understanding of urban energy transitions in subSaharan African towns and cities. In doing so this paper seeks to critically reßect on the value and limits of urban transitions analysis as a framework for understanding energy networks beyond the largely integrated systems across the Global North. We explore how these potentials and deÞcits can be addressed by examining promising developments across a series of debates in urban studies that can help sensitise this approach to energyscapes in the African context. By reviewing urban transi-tions analysis through these debates the paper offers four important contributions to expand existing ways of understanding energy transition. These include the particular urbanisation dynamics of African towns ands cities, the need to locate the urban across energy regimes, the agencies of various intermediaries and urban actors and the contested politics inherent in the governing of energy networks. In the conclusion we reßect on the speciÞc directions that have emerged from the paper in relation to our contributions, offering a geographically informed framework that allows us to better examine the challenges and speciÞcities of transition across these rapidly growing urban regions.

show abstract

Section: Constituting Urban Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach

Silver

Marvin

2016

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…authorities and poor land-use management capacity mean that, even while there are examples of extreme density in 'slums' and informal settlements, the overall African urban form is low density [13]. In particular, unregulated peri-urban construction, often by the urban middle classes or expatriates, has spawned lowrise sprawl or the suburbanization of the countryside, cf [14]. The increase in urban population in Africa will be accompanied with an expansion in urban land.…”

Section: Introduction: Urbanization Trends In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Urbanization in Africa: challenges and opportunities for conservation

Güneralp

Lwasa

Masundire

et al. 2017

Environ. Res. Lett.

277

148

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Africa, a continent exceptionally rich in biodiversity, is rapidly urbanizing. Africa's urbanization is manifest in the growth of its megacities as well as that of its smaller towns and cities. The conservation planning and practice will increasingly need to account for direct and indirect impacts of the continent's urbanization. The objective of our study is to pinpoint the outstanding challenges and opportunities afforded by the growing cities on the continent to the conservation goals and practices. While there have been many studies on the impacts of urbanization and development on conservation in Africa these studies tended to focus on specific issues. Here, we provide a synthesis of this body of work supported by new analysis. Urban areas, growing both in population and in land cover, pose threats to the integrity of the continent's ecosystems and biodiversity but their growth also create opportunities for conservation. The burgeoning urban populations, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, increase the strain on already insufficient infrastructure and bring new governance challenges. Yet, Africa's ecosystems can serve as foundations for green infrastructure to serve the needs of its urban populations while safeguarding fragile biodiversity. Overall, while worsening social problems overshadow the concerns for biodiversity there are also promising initiatives to bring these concerns into the fold to address social, institutional, and ecological challenges that emerge with the continued urbanization of the continent.

show abstract

“…Most of the newly built reed houses do in fact have a concrete base with a foundation/skirting ( rodapé ) that rises up to a metre from the ground. And the concrete houses, for their part, are not quite dream houses; more like reed houses made of concrete that bear little resemblance to the inside‐out, not‐yet houses cropping up in other parts of the continent (see Melly ; Mercer ). Reed houses are also understood as a necessary building step that normally precedes the construction of a concrete house.…”

Section: The Political Economy Of Concretementioning

confidence: 99%

‘One beer, one block’: concrete aspiration and the stuff of transformation in a Mozambican suburb

Archambault

2018

Royal Anthropological Inst

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As the world's most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as I show below, it may also be good to ‘become with’, especially across the Global South, where demand is soaring. In Africa, the continent with the fastest‐growing cement consumption at the moment, demand is expected to rise by 50 per cent over the next couple of years. The cement industry even refers to sub‐Saharan Africa as ‘the last cement frontier’, and speaks of cement as the continent's ‘new oil’. Fueling this consumption, alongside the spectacular projects of futuristic satellite cities, shopping malls, tower blocks, and ring roads, are the millions of small domestic construction projects increasingly visible on the landscape, especially the peri‐urban landscape. Although Mozambicans have long engaged with concrete as a politically and affectively charged material, this engagement now increasingly starts at the level of the bag of cement, as young people acquire cement to make their own concrete blocks, and eventually to build their own houses. Inspired by this ethnographic observation, this article is analytically driven by a wider interest in transformation. Based on research in a Mozambican suburb under expansion, it examines, through an analysis of changing domestic building practices, how the hope of achieving something – in a word, aspiration – congeals and materializes. Drawing on the literature on affect and materiality, I show how cement and concrete – as materials that young Mozambicans dream about, invest in, and play with – participate in shaping aspiration. In the end, I argue that the transformative outcome is very much the contingent result of an encounter, at a specific historical moment, between particular subjectivities and the materiality of cement and concrete.

show abstract

Middle class construction: domestic architecture, aesthetics and anxieties in Tanzania

Cited by 67 publications

References 34 publications

Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach

Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach

Urbanization in Africa: challenges and opportunities for conservation

‘One beer, one block’: concrete aspiration and the stuff of transformation in a Mozambican suburb

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About