Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, 'the everyday' has become a fo... more Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, 'the everyday' has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity which operates at the street level. However, a fuller understanding of informality's (re)production requires drawing together particu-larist accounts with wider and more structural tracings. These tracings offer insights into the ways in which state and financial processes influence and interface with the everyday. In this article, we use the case of housing in Delft, a township in Cape Town, to demonstrate this approach and argue for a multi-scalar and relational reading of the production of informality.
Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, comm... more Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, community groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and how they should be addressed. Technology and design discourses, institutional discourses, rights-based discourses and structural discourses all come to bear on the framing of the debate and the propositions for change. Within the sector, the various actors and stakeholders continually struggle to acknowledge the contributions of other discourses. This paper unpacks these discourses and identifies the possible contributions and limitations each has to offer. The paper draws on empirical evidence from South Africa, providing insights relevant both to and beyond this context. In conclusion, it is argued that a generous, multi-scale, interdisciplinary discourse is needed in South Africa and beyond.
Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban author... more Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several African cities. Drawing on three case studies (Addis Ababa, Harare and Nairobi) and a high-level scan of 29 developments in various African cities, we show how land-based finance is being implemented in practice and discuss the potential for wider uptake. We conclude that African city governments are using land-based financing, albeit in inconsistent ways. We argue that urban authorities should consider the more extensive and progressive use of land-based financing instruments, despite the constraints imposed by both technical and political conditions. A progressive agenda for local government finance in African cities should take land-based finance seriously, as well as the local practices and institutional arrangements through which it operates.
Cet article est une analyse comparative du prélèvement de l’impôt
foncier à M’Bour (Sénégal) et à... more Cet article est une analyse comparative du prélèvement de l’impôt foncier à M’Bour (Sénégal) et à Kisumu (Kenya.) Il part du constat que les autorités fiscales s’abstiennent parfois de prélever cet impôt, alors qu’elles ont l’obligation légale et l’autorisation de le faire. Dans cet article, nous questionnerons deux pratiques d’exceptions informelles à la loi, ainsi que la manière dont elles sont justifiées. À M’Bour, les administrateurs fiscaux s’abstiennent de prélever l’impôt chez les propriétaires terriens qu’ils perçoivent comme pauvres. À Kisumu, les autorités municipales ne prélèvent pas l’impôt foncier dans les zones de la ville qui ne leur paraissent pas suffisamment bien équipées en routes, en électricité et en marchés urbains. Ces exceptions sont des formes de contournement, pratiques par le biais desquelles des agents de l’État évitent à dessein d’accomplir leurs tâches officielles de service public dans des endroits spécifiques du paysage urbain. Nous défendons l’idée que ce contournement constitue en fait une reconfiguration de l’autorité fiscale de l’État, tant dans sa forme que dans son inscription spatiale, et que cette reconfiguration concourt parfois, de manière inattendue, à rendre la fiscalité plus progressive.
This chapter identifies and describes the planning frameworks and patterns of urban real-estate d... more This chapter identifies and describes the planning frameworks and patterns of urban real-estate development at the city-scale in two cities, Cape Town, South Africa and Nairobi, Kenya. This chapter shows that, in contrast to narratives of chaos and despair, there are clear patterns shaping the development of both cities. However, none of these development trends can be easily classified as ‘ideal development typologies’ in line with internationally recognised planning principles or even local plans. In both cases, these emerging patterns represent tense negotiations between various implicated development actors, challenging planning and infrastructure conventions and local policies.
Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, comm... more Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, community groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and how they should be addressed. Technology and design discourses, institutional discourses, rights-based discourses and structural discourses all come to bear on the framing of the debate and the propositions for change. Within the sector, the various actors and stakeholders continually struggle to acknowledge the contributions of other discourses. This paper unpacks these discourses and identifies the possible contributions and limitations each has to offer. The paper draws on empirical evidence from South Africa, providing insights relevant both to and beyond this context. In conclusion, it is argued that a generous, multi-scale, interdisciplinary discourse is needed in South Africa and beyond.
Through the lens of South Africa's informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections be... more Through the lens of South Africa's informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agen-tic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not as adjunct or background, but as a critical technology of government and/in place, this work contributes to a growing debate within the (emerging) urban socio-technical systems literature.
This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and H... more This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare. Three planning implementation instruments form the basis of the comparison across cities. These instruments aim to give effect to plans and include development regulation, infrastructure investment, and land allocation. In contrast to reading African planning efforts as a catalogue of failures, this analysis allows us to see the many actors and complex alliances and dissonances which play out through implementation. Here we propose the concept of 'negotiated planning' as a useful conceptual tool. We argue that the concept is useful for: its departure from normative assumptions about good or proper planning; unpacking the everyday nature of implementation; grounding and contextualising practices; and depathologizing the African city.
The Emergency Housing Programme (EHP) is an important subsidy tool in South Africa. The EHP was d... more The Emergency Housing Programme (EHP) is an important subsidy tool in South Africa. The EHP was designed to realise the right to housing and ensure that municipalities rapidly respond to emergency housing situations. However, the programme's implementation has been harshly critiqued by activists, academics, and even other state departments, for a range of valid reasons. This paper explores the findings of a year-long research project consisting mainly of case studies, interviews, workshops and policy review aimed at understanding these criticisms. The research found that the EHP implementers are constrained by conflicted urban development imperatives that include: systemic housing demand, building investment-friendly and efficient cities, and other developmental programmes. This paper argues for a reading of the implementation of EHP as problematic prioritisation, rather than simply one of poor provision. In this way, EHP serves as a prism for urban contest and advocate for more strategic, holistic, and progressive urban decision-making.
Theoretically, the evident demand for housing in growing cities, particularly in the Global South... more Theoretically, the evident demand for housing in growing cities, particularly in the Global South would result in vertical consolidation of properties. However, unlike places in Latin America, where market and state responses to urbanisation are pushing cities higher and higher, in South Africa, the densification and land use intensity has, generally, remained horizontal, rather than vertical in nature. Du Noon offers an interesting counter position to this narrative. Unlike other Reconstruction and Development Housing Programme settlements, many property owners are demolishing the state-delivered units and erecting double-storey rental accommodation. Drawing from interviews conducted with 21 of these structure owners, this paper explores the drivers of this 'vertical consolidation' in Du Noon drawing lessons for housing policy and practice in South Africa.
Much of the current planning discourse has come to reject master planned 'new cities’ as both un... more Much of the current planning discourse has come to reject master planned 'new cities’ as both unrealistic and undesirable. However, with growing urbanisation challenges in the Global South, master planned cities, suburbs and communities have come back on the agenda driven by both public and private interests. This paper explores the WesCape Development (WD), a proposed satellite suburb to be located north-west of Cape Town, South Africa. Situating the WD in a longer lineage of utopian and new city planning approaches, I argue that the proposal is deeply flawed. Rather than being the solution to the urban ills facing Cape Town, it is an ‘anti-urban’ strategy which supports suburbanisation and assumes a particular and problematic urban growth scenario. It relies on ‘environmentally deterministic’ assumptions and depoliticised and deinstitutionalised designs. Ultimately, it tries to escape, rather than confront, the operational, political and social challenges of the city leading to the devaluation of planning instruments and citizenship engagement. The WD highlights the importance and power of radical and utopian thinking as well as the necessity of grounding and situating these impulses in the specificities and complexities of the city.
In South Africa, households which earn too much to qualify for South Africa’s impressive capital ... more In South Africa, households which earn too much to qualify for South Africa’s impressive capital subsidy programme and too little to access mortgage finance are referred to as the gap market. As the gap continues to grow, address is of increasing policy priority, a focus of local and national efforts. However, this paper argues that the gap market has been misunderstood and inappropriately framed in South African housing policy discourse. The case study of the City of Cape Town’s ‘Sale of Serviced Erven for GAP Market Purposes’ demonstrates the assumption that the gap market is a functional housing submarket which can be targeted uniformly. This paper argues that the gap market is instead a derivative of South Africa’s housing policy history and premised on the problematic ‘ownership imperative’. While the gap market is a useful conceptual tool to be understood within its historic trajectory, it should be discarded from policy design processes and replaced with more useful categories driven by analysis of the households and dynamics which comprise the market. This argument is relevant for all countries which seek to address gaps in their housing markets.
The ‘challenge of slums’ is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa wher... more The ‘challenge of slums’ is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where in 2001 71.9% of the urban population lived in slums. This article reviews the housing programmes of a selected number of African countries (Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa) to argue that while until recently African shelter policies at least in name continued to be mostly in line with international enabling and participatory approaches to dealing with the challenge of slums, in practice mass scaled supply-driven approaches to housing provision are on the rise. The article situates this practice historically and seeks to provide insight into some of the perceptions and factors that have underpinned and enabled its emergence. While noting a number of shortcomings of this supply-driven approach, it concludes that with Habitat III on the horizon it is important to confront the disjuncture between global policy and local practice in African cities.
Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban author... more Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several African cities. Drawing on three case studies (Addis Ababa, Harare and Nairobi) and a high-level scan of 29 developments in various African cities, we show how land-based finance is being implemented in practice and discuss the potential for wider uptake. We conclude that African city governments are using land-based financing, albeit in inconsistent ways. We argue that urban authorities should consider the more extensive and progressive use of land-based financing instruments, despite the constraints imposed by both technical and political condi...
This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and H... more This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare. Three planning implementation instruments form the basis of the comparison across cities. These instruments aim to give effect to plans and include development regulation, infrastructure investment, and land allocation. In contrast to reading African planning efforts as a catalogue of failures, this analysis allows us to see the many actors and complex alliances and dissonances which play out through implementation. Here we propose the concept of 'negotiated planning' as a useful conceptual tool. We argue that the concept is useful for: its departure from normative assumptions about good or proper planning; unpacking the everyday nature of implementation; grounding and contextualising practices; and depathologizing the African city.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers ... more This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers with temporary permits, navigate Cape Town's informal urban economy. We argue that the intersections of temporary permit status and gender, as well as the particularities of diaspora flows and settlements, compound the precarity of everyday life. We engage with how precarity shapes and is shaped by what we define as “working practices.” These practices include the everyday livelihood tactics sustained on shoestring budgets and transnational networks. We also show how, in moments of compounded crises – including the COVID-19 pandemic – marginal gains and transnational networks are rendered more fragile. In these traumatic moments, working practices extend to include the practices of hope and reliance on prayer as social ways of contending with exacerbated precarity.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the proc... more This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town’s segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps...
The 'challenge of slums' is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa wher... more The 'challenge of slums' is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where in 2001 71.9% of the urban population lived in slums. This article reviews the housing programmes of a selected number of African countries (Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa) to argue that while until recently African shelter policies at least in name continued to be mostly in line with international enabling and participatory approaches to dealing with the challenge of slums, in practice mass scaled supply-driven approaches to housing provision are on the rise. The article situates this practice historically and seeks to provide insight into some of the perceptions and factors that have underpinned and enabled its emergence. While noting a number of shortcomings of this supply-driven approach, it concludes that with Habitat III on the horizon it is important to confront the disjuncture between global policy and local practice in African cities.
Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, 'the everyday' has become a fo... more Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, 'the everyday' has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity which operates at the street level. However, a fuller understanding of informality's (re)production requires drawing together particu-larist accounts with wider and more structural tracings. These tracings offer insights into the ways in which state and financial processes influence and interface with the everyday. In this article, we use the case of housing in Delft, a township in Cape Town, to demonstrate this approach and argue for a multi-scalar and relational reading of the production of informality.
Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, comm... more Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, community groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and how they should be addressed. Technology and design discourses, institutional discourses, rights-based discourses and structural discourses all come to bear on the framing of the debate and the propositions for change. Within the sector, the various actors and stakeholders continually struggle to acknowledge the contributions of other discourses. This paper unpacks these discourses and identifies the possible contributions and limitations each has to offer. The paper draws on empirical evidence from South Africa, providing insights relevant both to and beyond this context. In conclusion, it is argued that a generous, multi-scale, interdisciplinary discourse is needed in South Africa and beyond.
Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban author... more Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several African cities. Drawing on three case studies (Addis Ababa, Harare and Nairobi) and a high-level scan of 29 developments in various African cities, we show how land-based finance is being implemented in practice and discuss the potential for wider uptake. We conclude that African city governments are using land-based financing, albeit in inconsistent ways. We argue that urban authorities should consider the more extensive and progressive use of land-based financing instruments, despite the constraints imposed by both technical and political conditions. A progressive agenda for local government finance in African cities should take land-based finance seriously, as well as the local practices and institutional arrangements through which it operates.
Cet article est une analyse comparative du prélèvement de l’impôt
foncier à M’Bour (Sénégal) et à... more Cet article est une analyse comparative du prélèvement de l’impôt foncier à M’Bour (Sénégal) et à Kisumu (Kenya.) Il part du constat que les autorités fiscales s’abstiennent parfois de prélever cet impôt, alors qu’elles ont l’obligation légale et l’autorisation de le faire. Dans cet article, nous questionnerons deux pratiques d’exceptions informelles à la loi, ainsi que la manière dont elles sont justifiées. À M’Bour, les administrateurs fiscaux s’abstiennent de prélever l’impôt chez les propriétaires terriens qu’ils perçoivent comme pauvres. À Kisumu, les autorités municipales ne prélèvent pas l’impôt foncier dans les zones de la ville qui ne leur paraissent pas suffisamment bien équipées en routes, en électricité et en marchés urbains. Ces exceptions sont des formes de contournement, pratiques par le biais desquelles des agents de l’État évitent à dessein d’accomplir leurs tâches officielles de service public dans des endroits spécifiques du paysage urbain. Nous défendons l’idée que ce contournement constitue en fait une reconfiguration de l’autorité fiscale de l’État, tant dans sa forme que dans son inscription spatiale, et que cette reconfiguration concourt parfois, de manière inattendue, à rendre la fiscalité plus progressive.
This chapter identifies and describes the planning frameworks and patterns of urban real-estate d... more This chapter identifies and describes the planning frameworks and patterns of urban real-estate development at the city-scale in two cities, Cape Town, South Africa and Nairobi, Kenya. This chapter shows that, in contrast to narratives of chaos and despair, there are clear patterns shaping the development of both cities. However, none of these development trends can be easily classified as ‘ideal development typologies’ in line with internationally recognised planning principles or even local plans. In both cases, these emerging patterns represent tense negotiations between various implicated development actors, challenging planning and infrastructure conventions and local policies.
Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, comm... more Informal settlements are an undeniable feature of developing cities. Activists, governments, community groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and how they should be addressed. Technology and design discourses, institutional discourses, rights-based discourses and structural discourses all come to bear on the framing of the debate and the propositions for change. Within the sector, the various actors and stakeholders continually struggle to acknowledge the contributions of other discourses. This paper unpacks these discourses and identifies the possible contributions and limitations each has to offer. The paper draws on empirical evidence from South Africa, providing insights relevant both to and beyond this context. In conclusion, it is argued that a generous, multi-scale, interdisciplinary discourse is needed in South Africa and beyond.
Through the lens of South Africa's informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections be... more Through the lens of South Africa's informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agen-tic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not as adjunct or background, but as a critical technology of government and/in place, this work contributes to a growing debate within the (emerging) urban socio-technical systems literature.
This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and H... more This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare. Three planning implementation instruments form the basis of the comparison across cities. These instruments aim to give effect to plans and include development regulation, infrastructure investment, and land allocation. In contrast to reading African planning efforts as a catalogue of failures, this analysis allows us to see the many actors and complex alliances and dissonances which play out through implementation. Here we propose the concept of 'negotiated planning' as a useful conceptual tool. We argue that the concept is useful for: its departure from normative assumptions about good or proper planning; unpacking the everyday nature of implementation; grounding and contextualising practices; and depathologizing the African city.
The Emergency Housing Programme (EHP) is an important subsidy tool in South Africa. The EHP was d... more The Emergency Housing Programme (EHP) is an important subsidy tool in South Africa. The EHP was designed to realise the right to housing and ensure that municipalities rapidly respond to emergency housing situations. However, the programme's implementation has been harshly critiqued by activists, academics, and even other state departments, for a range of valid reasons. This paper explores the findings of a year-long research project consisting mainly of case studies, interviews, workshops and policy review aimed at understanding these criticisms. The research found that the EHP implementers are constrained by conflicted urban development imperatives that include: systemic housing demand, building investment-friendly and efficient cities, and other developmental programmes. This paper argues for a reading of the implementation of EHP as problematic prioritisation, rather than simply one of poor provision. In this way, EHP serves as a prism for urban contest and advocate for more strategic, holistic, and progressive urban decision-making.
Theoretically, the evident demand for housing in growing cities, particularly in the Global South... more Theoretically, the evident demand for housing in growing cities, particularly in the Global South would result in vertical consolidation of properties. However, unlike places in Latin America, where market and state responses to urbanisation are pushing cities higher and higher, in South Africa, the densification and land use intensity has, generally, remained horizontal, rather than vertical in nature. Du Noon offers an interesting counter position to this narrative. Unlike other Reconstruction and Development Housing Programme settlements, many property owners are demolishing the state-delivered units and erecting double-storey rental accommodation. Drawing from interviews conducted with 21 of these structure owners, this paper explores the drivers of this 'vertical consolidation' in Du Noon drawing lessons for housing policy and practice in South Africa.
Much of the current planning discourse has come to reject master planned 'new cities’ as both un... more Much of the current planning discourse has come to reject master planned 'new cities’ as both unrealistic and undesirable. However, with growing urbanisation challenges in the Global South, master planned cities, suburbs and communities have come back on the agenda driven by both public and private interests. This paper explores the WesCape Development (WD), a proposed satellite suburb to be located north-west of Cape Town, South Africa. Situating the WD in a longer lineage of utopian and new city planning approaches, I argue that the proposal is deeply flawed. Rather than being the solution to the urban ills facing Cape Town, it is an ‘anti-urban’ strategy which supports suburbanisation and assumes a particular and problematic urban growth scenario. It relies on ‘environmentally deterministic’ assumptions and depoliticised and deinstitutionalised designs. Ultimately, it tries to escape, rather than confront, the operational, political and social challenges of the city leading to the devaluation of planning instruments and citizenship engagement. The WD highlights the importance and power of radical and utopian thinking as well as the necessity of grounding and situating these impulses in the specificities and complexities of the city.
In South Africa, households which earn too much to qualify for South Africa’s impressive capital ... more In South Africa, households which earn too much to qualify for South Africa’s impressive capital subsidy programme and too little to access mortgage finance are referred to as the gap market. As the gap continues to grow, address is of increasing policy priority, a focus of local and national efforts. However, this paper argues that the gap market has been misunderstood and inappropriately framed in South African housing policy discourse. The case study of the City of Cape Town’s ‘Sale of Serviced Erven for GAP Market Purposes’ demonstrates the assumption that the gap market is a functional housing submarket which can be targeted uniformly. This paper argues that the gap market is instead a derivative of South Africa’s housing policy history and premised on the problematic ‘ownership imperative’. While the gap market is a useful conceptual tool to be understood within its historic trajectory, it should be discarded from policy design processes and replaced with more useful categories driven by analysis of the households and dynamics which comprise the market. This argument is relevant for all countries which seek to address gaps in their housing markets.
The ‘challenge of slums’ is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa wher... more The ‘challenge of slums’ is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where in 2001 71.9% of the urban population lived in slums. This article reviews the housing programmes of a selected number of African countries (Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa) to argue that while until recently African shelter policies at least in name continued to be mostly in line with international enabling and participatory approaches to dealing with the challenge of slums, in practice mass scaled supply-driven approaches to housing provision are on the rise. The article situates this practice historically and seeks to provide insight into some of the perceptions and factors that have underpinned and enabled its emergence. While noting a number of shortcomings of this supply-driven approach, it concludes that with Habitat III on the horizon it is important to confront the disjuncture between global policy and local practice in African cities.
Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban author... more Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several African cities. Drawing on three case studies (Addis Ababa, Harare and Nairobi) and a high-level scan of 29 developments in various African cities, we show how land-based finance is being implemented in practice and discuss the potential for wider uptake. We conclude that African city governments are using land-based financing, albeit in inconsistent ways. We argue that urban authorities should consider the more extensive and progressive use of land-based financing instruments, despite the constraints imposed by both technical and political condi...
This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and H... more This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare. Three planning implementation instruments form the basis of the comparison across cities. These instruments aim to give effect to plans and include development regulation, infrastructure investment, and land allocation. In contrast to reading African planning efforts as a catalogue of failures, this analysis allows us to see the many actors and complex alliances and dissonances which play out through implementation. Here we propose the concept of 'negotiated planning' as a useful conceptual tool. We argue that the concept is useful for: its departure from normative assumptions about good or proper planning; unpacking the everyday nature of implementation; grounding and contextualising practices; and depathologizing the African city.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers ... more This paper provides an ethnographic reading of how Congolese women, in particular aslyum seekers with temporary permits, navigate Cape Town's informal urban economy. We argue that the intersections of temporary permit status and gender, as well as the particularities of diaspora flows and settlements, compound the precarity of everyday life. We engage with how precarity shapes and is shaped by what we define as “working practices.” These practices include the everyday livelihood tactics sustained on shoestring budgets and transnational networks. We also show how, in moments of compounded crises – including the COVID-19 pandemic – marginal gains and transnational networks are rendered more fragile. In these traumatic moments, working practices extend to include the practices of hope and reliance on prayer as social ways of contending with exacerbated precarity.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the proc... more This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town’s segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps...
The 'challenge of slums' is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa wher... more The 'challenge of slums' is a global challenge, but particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where in 2001 71.9% of the urban population lived in slums. This article reviews the housing programmes of a selected number of African countries (Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa) to argue that while until recently African shelter policies at least in name continued to be mostly in line with international enabling and participatory approaches to dealing with the challenge of slums, in practice mass scaled supply-driven approaches to housing provision are on the rise. The article situates this practice historically and seeks to provide insight into some of the perceptions and factors that have underpinned and enabled its emergence. While noting a number of shortcomings of this supply-driven approach, it concludes that with Habitat III on the horizon it is important to confront the disjuncture between global policy and local practice in African cities.
This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the proc... more This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town's segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps onto urban apportionment we reveal how an ecology of violence-of spatialised segregation, xenophobia and sexual violence-establishes a corporeal power that constrains access to the city. Crucially, these women deploy counter practices of apportionment and their precisely attuned navigations add to our understanding of the agile repertoires of working the city.
Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a fo... more Informality is a critical theme in urban studies. In recent years, ‘the everyday’ has become a focus of studies on informality in African cities. These studies focus on particularity and place. They offer a useful corrective to top-down and universalising readings which exclude the daily experiences and practices of people from analysis. As we show in this article, everyday studies surface valuable insights, highlighting the agency and precarity which operates at the street level. However, a fuller understanding of informality’s (re)production requires drawing together particularist accounts with wider and more structural tracings. These tracings offer insights into the ways in which state and financial processes influence and interface with the everyday. In this article, we use the case of housing in Delft, a township in Cape Town, to demonstrate this approach and argue for a multi-scalar and relational reading of the production of informality.
Collection of articles and fact sheets about informal activity in African cities. These different... more Collection of articles and fact sheets about informal activity in African cities. These different points of view and positions are delivered to us by students and young professionals, mostly Africans. This work was presented at the 4th Africities summit held in Dakar in December 2012
Chapter 10, From Local Action to Global Networks: Housing the Urban Poor, Eds. Peter Herrle, Astr... more Chapter 10, From Local Action to Global Networks: Housing the Urban Poor, Eds. Peter Herrle, Astrid Ley and Josefine Fokdal.
Across Africa, the urban poor forge and secure access to urban land and housing through distorted... more Across Africa, the urban poor forge and secure access to urban land and housing through distorted, “extralegal,” and complex property markets. In the case of Nairobi, this process manifests as sprawling slums and overcrowded illegal tenement buildings where the urban poor experience insecurity and substandard shelter. The workings of these markets are poorly understood by policymakers, often leading to ill-fitting interventions and the devalorization of the urban practices of the poor. This paper explores the complexity of extralegal practices and actors in the urban political economy of housing in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest informal settlements. This research on Kibera and Nairobi is based on the existing literature, a policy review, and interviews with relevant stakeholders undertaken in Nairobi in 2011. Drawing upon the emerging “Southern perspective” on African urbanism, this paper argues that, in the absence of sufficient financial capital, the urban poor rely on the politics of informality and identity to forge access to land and housing markets. Thus, it is precisely the flexibility and insecurity that interventions based on Western logics of the law and markets attempt to eliminate that enable the urban poor to be role players in extralegal markets. Rather than streamlining and universalizing the way claims are
made, interventions to improve the functioning of land markets and address urban poverty should recast the politics of informality and identity as an opportunity for the urban poor to use various forms of capital and association to incrementally and progressively build pathways to urban citizenship. In this process, one should seek to develop tools that support locally contingent negotiation processes and diverse modalities of rights-claiming as a means by which to build more inclusive markets.
The announcement was unexpected. In January 2011, with the country facing an unprecedented increa... more The announcement was unexpected. In January 2011, with the country facing an unprecedented increase in food prices, the Sri Lankan Army, referred to in press material as “the pride of Sri Lanka”, declared that it was to become a vegetable vendor. Soon it was supplying food to residents in Colombo and other cities at a cost lower than traditional retailers.
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Articles by Liza Cirolia
groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all
find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual
intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and
how they should be addressed. Technology and design discourses, institutional discourses, rights-based
discourses and structural discourses all come to bear on the framing of the debate and the propositions
for change. Within the sector, the various actors and stakeholders continually struggle to acknowledge
the contributions of other discourses. This paper unpacks these discourses and identifies the possible
contributions and limitations each has to offer. The paper draws on empirical evidence from South Africa,
providing insights relevant both to and beyond this context. In conclusion, it is argued that a generous,
multi-scale, interdisciplinary discourse is needed in South Africa and beyond.
foncier à M’Bour (Sénégal) et à Kisumu (Kenya.) Il part du constat que
les autorités fiscales s’abstiennent parfois de prélever cet impôt, alors
qu’elles ont l’obligation légale et l’autorisation de le faire. Dans cet
article, nous questionnerons deux pratiques d’exceptions informelles
à la loi, ainsi que la manière dont elles sont justifiées. À M’Bour,
les administrateurs fiscaux s’abstiennent de prélever l’impôt chez les
propriétaires terriens qu’ils perçoivent comme pauvres. À Kisumu,
les autorités municipales ne prélèvent pas l’impôt foncier dans les zones
de la ville qui ne leur paraissent pas suffisamment bien équipées en
routes, en électricité et en marchés urbains. Ces exceptions sont des
formes de contournement, pratiques par le biais desquelles des agents
de l’État évitent à dessein d’accomplir leurs tâches officielles de service
public dans des endroits spécifiques du paysage urbain. Nous
défendons l’idée que ce contournement constitue en fait une
reconfiguration de l’autorité fiscale de l’État, tant dans sa forme que
dans son inscription spatiale, et que cette reconfiguration concourt
parfois, de manière inattendue, à rendre la fiscalité plus progressive.
come back on the agenda driven by both public and private interests. This paper explores the WesCape Development (WD), a proposed satellite suburb to be located north-west of Cape Town, South Africa. Situating the WD in a longer lineage of utopian and new city planning approaches, I argue that the proposal is deeply flawed. Rather than being the solution to the urban ills facing Cape Town, it is an ‘anti-urban’ strategy which supports suburbanisation and assumes a particular and problematic urban growth scenario. It relies on ‘environmentally deterministic’ assumptions and depoliticised and deinstitutionalised designs. Ultimately, it tries to escape, rather than confront, the operational, political and social challenges of the city leading to the devaluation of planning instruments and citizenship engagement. The WD highlights the importance and power of radical and utopian thinking as well as the necessity of grounding and situating these impulses in the specificities and complexities of the city.
Papers by Liza Cirolia
groups, academics, artists, international funders, built-environment professionals and entrepreneurs all
find the challenge of informality an important project and intriguing frontier for practical and conceptual
intervention. This paper unpacks four discourses which frame understandings of informal settlements and
how they should be addressed. Technology and design discourses, institutional discourses, rights-based
discourses and structural discourses all come to bear on the framing of the debate and the propositions
for change. Within the sector, the various actors and stakeholders continually struggle to acknowledge
the contributions of other discourses. This paper unpacks these discourses and identifies the possible
contributions and limitations each has to offer. The paper draws on empirical evidence from South Africa,
providing insights relevant both to and beyond this context. In conclusion, it is argued that a generous,
multi-scale, interdisciplinary discourse is needed in South Africa and beyond.
foncier à M’Bour (Sénégal) et à Kisumu (Kenya.) Il part du constat que
les autorités fiscales s’abstiennent parfois de prélever cet impôt, alors
qu’elles ont l’obligation légale et l’autorisation de le faire. Dans cet
article, nous questionnerons deux pratiques d’exceptions informelles
à la loi, ainsi que la manière dont elles sont justifiées. À M’Bour,
les administrateurs fiscaux s’abstiennent de prélever l’impôt chez les
propriétaires terriens qu’ils perçoivent comme pauvres. À Kisumu,
les autorités municipales ne prélèvent pas l’impôt foncier dans les zones
de la ville qui ne leur paraissent pas suffisamment bien équipées en
routes, en électricité et en marchés urbains. Ces exceptions sont des
formes de contournement, pratiques par le biais desquelles des agents
de l’État évitent à dessein d’accomplir leurs tâches officielles de service
public dans des endroits spécifiques du paysage urbain. Nous
défendons l’idée que ce contournement constitue en fait une
reconfiguration de l’autorité fiscale de l’État, tant dans sa forme que
dans son inscription spatiale, et que cette reconfiguration concourt
parfois, de manière inattendue, à rendre la fiscalité plus progressive.
come back on the agenda driven by both public and private interests. This paper explores the WesCape Development (WD), a proposed satellite suburb to be located north-west of Cape Town, South Africa. Situating the WD in a longer lineage of utopian and new city planning approaches, I argue that the proposal is deeply flawed. Rather than being the solution to the urban ills facing Cape Town, it is an ‘anti-urban’ strategy which supports suburbanisation and assumes a particular and problematic urban growth scenario. It relies on ‘environmentally deterministic’ assumptions and depoliticised and deinstitutionalised designs. Ultimately, it tries to escape, rather than confront, the operational, political and social challenges of the city leading to the devaluation of planning instruments and citizenship engagement. The WD highlights the importance and power of radical and utopian thinking as well as the necessity of grounding and situating these impulses in the specificities and complexities of the city.
made, interventions to improve the functioning of land markets and address urban poverty should recast the politics of informality and identity as an opportunity for the urban poor to use various forms of capital and association to incrementally and progressively build pathways to urban citizenship. In this process, one should seek to develop tools that support locally contingent negotiation processes and diverse modalities of rights-claiming as a means by which to build more inclusive markets.