Finance, infrastructure and urban capital: the political economy of African ‘gap-filling’

ABSTRACT

Financial flows into Africa are being reoriented through the pervasive discourse of the ‘infrastructure gap’. The article argues that the generation of new infrastructures identified as ‘alternative assets’ by global finance is also creating landscapes of opportunity for urban capital accumulation by more locally embedded actors. Thus, as international financial flows are becoming ‘infrastructuralised’, domestic capital is increasingly ‘real-estatised’. The conceptualisation of African urban economies in terms of deficits has obscured the extent to which they are also characterised by surfeits, including of certain kinds of property development and speculation, with important implications for the politics of urban accumulation, dispossession and violence.

RÉSUMÉ

Les flux financiers vers l’Afrique sont réorientés par le discours omniprésent du « déficit infrastructurel ». L’article soutient que la génération de nouvelles infrastructures identifiées comme « actifs alternatifs » par la finance mondiale crée également des contextes propices à l’accumulation de capital urbain par des acteurs plus intégrés localement. Ainsi, à mesure que les flux financiers internationaux deviennent « infrastructurels », le capital national est progressivement conçu en tant que « capital immobilier ». La conceptualisation des économies urbaines africaines en termes de déficits a obscurci dans quelle mesure elles sont également caractérisées par plusieurs excès, y compris en termes de certains types de développement immobilier et de spéculation, avec des implications importantes pour les politiques d’accumulation urbaine, de dépossession et de violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• urban development
• real estate
• capitalism
• finance
• political settlements

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Infrastructure
• développement urbain
• immobilier
• capitalisme
• finance
• règlements politiques

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank three Editorial Board members, an anonymous peer reviewer and Jörg Wiegratz for their extremely helpful comments on this article at various stages of its development. All errors are of course my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Tom Goodfellow is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. His research concerns the political economy of urban development, infrastructure, housing and land value capture in Africa.

Notes

1 In order to expand on this focus, and given space limitations, this article therefore does not discuss issues of labour relations or social class in detail.

2 This project, titled ‘Urban Development and the New “Scramble for Africa”: Trajectories of Late Urbanisation in a Multi-Polar World’, was funded through the ESRC Future Research Leaders scheme and ran from 2017 to 2019.

3 There are important exceptions to lack of government interest in housing provision – notably South Africa and Ethiopia.

4 For a relatively recent continent-wide analysis, see Brautigam and Hwang 2016.

5 For example, in Ethiopia between 1992 and 2017, over 72% of investment in real estate and related sectors was from domestic and diaspora investment. Moreover, while a massive 75% of all diaspora investment was in real-estate-related sectors, only 5% of FDI was (figures acquired from the Ethiopian Investment Authority, November 2017).

6 Various interviews with property developers in Dar es Salaam, June 2016.

7 Interview with Chinese property developer, Addis Ababa, 29 November 2017.

8 This was borne out in interviews with lawyers, landowners and public officials in Kampala in 2018.

Additional information

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges funding received under Economic and Research Council [grant no. ES/N018095/1].