Peripheries, suburbanisms and change in sub-Saharan African cities

Mabin, Alan; Butcher, Siân; Bloch, Robert

doi:10.1080/02533952.2013.796124

Cited by 79 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…These veritable 'spaces of exception' in the Agambian sense, are in effect privatising urban space and infrastructure in the name of security and quality of life for their residents, while reducing the remaining urban 'commons' and, in effect if not design, increasing the risks to health and safety of those living beyond the walls. In this sense, this worldwide phenomenon is redefining the nature and function of suburbs (Lemanski and Oldfield 2009;Chipkin 2013;Mabin, Butcher, and Bloch 2013).…”

Section: Colliding Consciousnesses Conflicting Claims (De)coding Thementioning

confidence: 97%

Uncertain times, contested resources: Discursive practices and lived realities in African urban environments

Simon¹

2015

City

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Amid the diversity of African urbanism, most cities retain strong vestiges of inherited urban planning systems largely inappropriate to prevailing local conditions. Even where largely ignored in practice, they can be suddenly redeployed in the interests of elite projectseither specific construction sites and inappropriate new 'international' or 'world class' enclaves, or broader repressive political agendas. Such episodes, but also less dramatic daily practices, highlight the gulfs between elite perceptions and priorities and the needs of often impoverished 'ordinary' citizens whose grip on urban environmental resources and services is frequently precarious, but essential. The implications of environmental/ climate changes, which are becoming increasingly real in many urban areas, are also examined in this light. Drawing on both political economy and post-structural/postcolonial approaches in search of hybridised theoretical progress, the paper explores how elite preoccupations and interests confront the diverse and often culturally rich lived realities of the urban majorities and their respective contingent senses of identity and belonging. The former remain framed by discourses of modernity expressed in terms of segregated land uses, aesthetics and 'order', whereas the latter generally relate to more mundane instrumentalities of shelter, basic services and survival/livelihood strategies in complex social realities, sometimes giving rise to syncretic or novel alternative cultures.

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Section: Colliding Consciousnesses Conflicting Claims (De)coding Thementioning

confidence: 97%

Uncertain times, contested resources: Discursive practices and lived realities in African urban environments

Simon¹

2015

City

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“…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

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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.

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“…While some scholars have objected to the use of the term ‘suburb’ to describe the expansion of African cities (Jenkins ), others with whom I side argue for the term to be extended to ‘the shifting urban edge’ in Africa (Mabin, Butcher & Bloch : 172) . The specificities of Inhapossa certainly warrant such a choice.…”

Section: The Suburbanization Of Inhapossa: a Space Of Aspirational Comentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Archambault

2018

Royal Anthropological Inst

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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.

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Peripheries, suburbanisms and change in sub-Saharan African cities

Cited by 79 publications

References 90 publications

Uncertain times, contested resources: Discursive practices and lived realities in African urban environments

Uncertain times, contested resources: Discursive practices and lived realities in African urban environments

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

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

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