Suburbanisms in Africa? Spatial Growth and Social Transformation in New Urban Peripheries: Introduction to the Cluster

Key words:

• suburbanism
• Africa

¹At a time when more people live in African cities than in European cities, cities like Lagos, Luanda, Dar-es-Salam, or Durban appear as potential scenarios for the future of city life globally. By producing new research on the ‘peripheries’ of cities in Africa, this collection of articles brings a different – African – perspective to global discussions about suburbanisation (the physical expansion of the city) and suburbanisms (the socio-political meaning of this expansion and the ways of life within suburbs). Following Richard Harris' analysis of the ‘challenge[s] that a worldwide perspective offers to modern Western assumptions about suburbs’ (2010:19), we argue that what is currently happening at the periphery of African cities sheds a new light on an urban process that is observed all around the world. We also begin to ask a series of questions around the nature of African suburbanism and suburbanisation: is it enough to identify suburbs with ‘the combination of non-central population and economic growth with urban spatial expansion’, as defined by Ekers, Hamers and Keil (2012)? What can we learn from the specificities of the most recent forms of urbanisation in Africa?

A preliminary review by Mabin, Butcher and Bloch (2013) shows that suburbs in Africa have not been problematised as a meaningful field of investigation in themselves. Research looking at the urban periphery remains largely scattered between themes ranging from cultural studies that focus on suburban identities to government analysis that looks more technically at the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of decentralisation. Urban peripheries generally appear in works questioning the old debates around the urban-rural interface or the meanings of informality. Non-central spaces can figure as the new gateway spaces in studies linking Africa to the global economy, or as the place where the state experiments with new forms of low-income housing. Urban peripheries are present in the literature on African cities but the very notions of suburbs and suburbanism are rarely taken as the core of the discussion or as a lens through which these spaces are analysed. As a consequence, the periphery remains a location more than a ‘conceptual device to decenter urban analysis’ (Roy 2011:232). As Mabin, Bloch and Butcher conclude, ‘our African location … demands that we approach the city from inside and out, work with a more fluid notion of the relationship between formal and informal habitats – and at the same time refuse African cities any exceptional status’ (2013:182). The present collection is a first response to this statement. It constitutes an attempt to reconcile two objectives. On the one hand, we intend to ‘provincialize the western understanding of suburbs’, as Harris suggested, in order to contribute to a global debate on the future of cities. On the other hand, we transfer Roy's reflection into the African context: we are aiming at ‘decentering urban analysis’ of African cities through the specificities of urban peripheries. The Global Suburbanisms project invites us to answer a question that is rarely asked on the continent: is there anything that we can call ‘suburbs’ in African cities? And if so, what might they look like and what do they mean for urbanism in Africa?

If the word might sound familiar to urbanites in South Africa or in some big cities in English-speaking countries, the very concept of ‘suburbia’ challenges the classic readings of African cities through dual typologies opposing colonial centre to indigenous quarters, planned areas to spontaneous developments, urbanised core to non-serviced peripheries. Nevertheless, the last decade of accelerated urbanisation in Africa has led to an unprecedented variety of urban forms that reach beyond and reconfigure these centre-periphery dualities (Mabin, Butcher & Bloch 2013; Bekker & Therborn 2012; Freund 2007). From extreme wealth, barricaded in gated communities, to extreme poverty in ever-expanding slums; from regional infrastructures built by private developers, to intra-municipal disputes about local governance; from political discourses calling for nationalism and unity, to divided communities facing conflicts and fragmentation, this thematic Cluster intends to provide a view from inside the continent, able to seize the nuances and contradictions of the new urban expansion, may they be instantly recognisable as ‘suburbs’ or not.

In order to foster an original conversation across the continent, the authors present detailed case studies from three sub-Saharan countries characterised by their economic dynamism in the last decade. Angola, with its 11 per cent annual growth in the decade 2001–2011 might be the more spectacular example of radical urban rescaling; but well-known giants like Nigeria and South Africa also show rapid reconfigurations of their local and regional urban patterns. As a matter of fact, the description and analysis of suburbanisms in Africa requires not only a multi-site but also a multi-scale approach. If some developments reveal an unquestionable projection of the American Dream of suburban life onto African urbanism, other examples on the contrary question the relevance and transferability of the very idea of suburbs.

Questioning the relevance of the macro-scale to understand local dynamics, Alison Todes' article unravels the creation of a regional urban entity in the case of eThekwini/KwaDukusa. The article offers an overview of the complex combination of public and private actors that generate – and are generated by – unprecedented forms of urban expansion. Zooming into the urban fabric of Lagos, the article by Lindsay Sawyer shows that suburbanisation is never singular or uniform. Chloé Buire in Luanda completes these approaches with an ethnographic exploration of a city largely overlooked on the African continent, contributing to reducing the gap in Anglophone literature about Lusophone Africa.

Through these examples, we seek to understand what is specific to African suburbs and what, on the contrary, is similar to other suburban developments in the world. Without pretending to exhaustiveness, we explore how the delicate relationship between the city and its margins is being played in its various dimensions.

Spatially, we want to understand not only where the cities are growing, but also which forms do they take. Are the suburbs a mere expansion of the city? Or are they constitutive of a radical break in terms of urban pattern? This cautious measurement of spatial growth is an essential step towards a better understanding of what is new and what is not for our cities.

In terms of governance, we show that the peripheral extension of the city is not synonymous with a one-way decentralisation of power towards the new units that are being created. All our examples reveal the complex game of conflicts and alliances between a growing variety of actors. Planning regulation competes with economic interests, public authorities merge with private developers, local contestations become international alliances. What are those (re)configurations telling us about the making of the city? Who initiates, encourages or regulates the urban expansion? If we observed new ‘classes’ of winners and losers particular to each case and to each site, why have these interests succeeded where others have failed?

Suburban development means that new assets are being created and spent at the margin of the economic core of the city. But suburbanisation also means that people, goods and ideas are being redistributed within the city itself. Are the suburbs the result of unprecedented socio-economic networks? How can they be related to older forms of accumulation in the city?

Last but not least, the practices and discourses of those who inhabit these new urban spaces on a daily basis are essential to understand the socio-cultural dimension of the suburbs. How does an anonymous piece of land promised to ‘development’ become the basis of new individual and collective identities? What are the aspirations of African urban residents towards the suburbs? Between deception and achievement, how does the suburban dream translate on the ground? Do more traditional notions of the ‘middle-class’ or home-ownership map onto these spaces in new ways or are we facing unprecedented socio-spatial configurations?

We hope that these three papers will be the beginning of a conversation that could, if continued, help deprovincialise African urban studies and bridge the gap between theories of cities and suburbs on the one hand, and the infinite richness of urban life in Africa on the other.

Note on Contributor

Chloé Buire was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Urbanism & Built Environment Studies (CUBES) based at the University of the Witwatersrand at the time of this research. She is now a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University.

Notes

1. This thematic cluster stems from the project Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada. Various workshops were held in Germany, South Africa and Canada in 2012 and 2013 to gather original research approaching the new urban peripheries in Africa. The present cluster represents the first results of a research agenda that remains open to further investigation.