‘The City of Our Dream’: Owambe Urbanism and Low‐income Women's Resistance in Ibadan, Nigeria

Abstract

Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world‐class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world‐class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio‐temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place‐making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low‐income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.

Global retail capital and urban futures: Feminist postcolonial perspectives

“…Feminist postcolonial urban geographer Adeniyi‐Ogunyankin argues,

Urban development and planning… is incompatible with [women's] needs, priorities and concerns…Valuing low‐income women's experiences and knowledge…lead[s] to their inclusion, and via this inclusion, more insight…on how to make the urban more liveable. (2019a, p. 439).

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“…They strategically deploy a politics of care to reassert their right to the city. She writes, “in their visions for the future, the women justify their inclusion in governance because of their gendered urban experience and gendered claims…and its [urban] inhabitants are lauded as the key to Africa's sustained growth.” (Adeniyi‐Ogunyankin, 2019a, p. 426).…”

“…Utu‐feminism refuses masculinist knowledge formation: “cia riiko ti cio cia thingira (knowledge or information passed at the kitchen fireside is different from that conveyed in a man's hut) (2019, p. 1), espousing women's “survival, self‐reliance, resilience and solidarity…” (2). Adeniyi‐Ogunyankin makes related epistemological calls for “Afro‐futurist imaginings'' and place‐making practices (2018, p. 1161; 2019a). For Adeniyi‐Ogunyankin, “Afrofuturism not only reclaims the history of the future but also of the past” (2018, p. 1161).…”

Culture, Rights, and African Women’s Futures

“…1997;Aniekwu 2006;Mekgwe 2008;Bawa 2016). They challenge the taken-for-granted nature of local patriarchal customs that oppress and marginalize women (Obiora 1997;Ahmadu 2000;Tamale 2008;Bawa 2012;Ogunyankin 2019). Furthermore, African feminist scholars constructively engage Western feminist universalizing discourses on women by pointing out the need for context-specificity in analyzing oppression and empowerment.…”

Original dataset on urban infrastructure related displacements in Nigeria: Insights from national and sub-national levels

“…Dearth of official records on displacement cases, detailing project affected persons and impacts, has been linked to the prevalence of ‘culture of silence’, erosion of public confidence in the justice system, lack of public rights awareness, as well as to the persistence of the phenomena per se [6] . Consequently, the need for more accurate data on such displacements has become paramount in order to better understand the nature and dynamics of the phenomena [7 , 8 , 9] . Hopefully, this new information regime can mitigate their diverse negative consequences and bring about people-centred approaches to development.…”