International workshop Venice - March 11-12 1999 Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management in the Context of Developing Countries
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AbdouMaliq Simone (Graduate School of Public and Development Management, University of Witwatersrand)

"Where is that we find ourselves: re-problematising the urban in Africa"

Accelerated urbanisation in Africa has produced cities whose formal physical, political and social infrastructures are largely unable to absorb, apprehend or utilise the needs, aspirations and resourcefulness of those who live within them. As a result, the efforts to secure livelihood depend upon largely informalised processes and a wide range of provisional and ephemeral institutions which cultivate specific orientations toward, knowledge of, and practices for dealing with urban life. Soon, the majority of Africans will live in peri-urban and informal settlements, often at the physical and social margins of the city. Yet, marginalisation from security of tenure, formal livelihood, and, frequently, participation in viable urban political institutions converges with new modalities of urban social production which frequently confound clear readings of the motivations and effects of various forms of collective action undertaken in the public sphere.

At the same time, African cities are sites for multifaceted development and governance interventions which make largely uninspired efforts to engage such practices and institutions. Even the efforts of civil society organisations operating under the umbrella of their promotion of "active citizenship" tend to impose an ineffectual normative. The proposed paper reviews a wide range of conceptualisations concerning the so-called, "informal city" in order to generate more incisive ways of theorising and talking about African urban citizenship as a product of often highly contested knowledge about how to function in largely informal urban environments. For the search for effective means to generate collaborative social action, enforce collective responsibility, and deploy effective and legitimate instruments of power in fluid urban environments configures an uneasy tension between the adoption of normative discourses of urban management and governance and the proliferation of more provisional, yet embedded, modalities of association. The focus of this paper is how diverse urban knowledge operates at these interstices.

The paper also examines the ways in which largely ephemeral institutional formations within peri-urban and informal urban spaces elaborate new engagements with both local and more globalised urban transformations. A preliminary review of this body of work indicates that informal quarters and quarters experiencing accelerated degrees of informalisation draw upon a wide range of occupational and survival strategies, types of social networks and cultural influence.

While urban analysts have tended to focus on how such quarters are marginal within urban systems, the primary focus in this research is to identify ways of life, institutions, associations, cultural practices, strategic operations, sensibilities, technologies, pastimes, lifestyles, and media being put together to help African urban residents "navigate" disparate positionalities within both local and global networks of power. These efforts at navigation give rise to particular notions of citizenship and collective responsibility whose "containment" within clearly demarcated urban identities, municipal domains, and practices of urban politics becomes increasingly problematic.

Rather than seeing the apparent absence of "good" institutions as the clearest sign of state weakness or political or economic immaturity, strong institutional forms may in fact be consolidated in between what may appear as distinct domains-between government, civil institutions, communities, the private sector. Those lines that formally define the outlines of "weak" administrative functions and civil society organisations may instead act as "internal" markers of rather solid arrangements that take place over a broad set of diverse actors, territories and identities. Even if such institutional structures are too informal or provisional to actually qualify as "institutions," they reflect a specific way of practising politics not easily changed by the present orientation of the international community to develop enabling environments and appropriate institutions of urban management.

Such institutions facilitate an incessant exchange of information, impressions, experiences and phantasms about what city life is, what is happening within it, how one can survive, and maximise access to opportunities. Talk has become a vital resource in securing and multiplying modes of urban occupation and settlement. African city life absorbs its residents in a seemingly endless process of observing what is going on and of identifying ways to intervene, to be a part of strings of seemingly disconnected initiatives and networks. While such practices promote a sense of inexhaustible opportunism, where there something that can always be done to solve a problem or to facilitate new actions, it also can promote a preoccupation with often narrow communal or familial interests given the scope of factors to be considered in managing urban survival in cities without strongly demarcated sectors and specialisation. Given the intricate spaces of manoeuvrability in-between urban diversity as opportunity and diversity as the locus of new enclosures and parochialism, what must African cities do to manage, if not necessarily reconcile these divergent trajectories?