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Abstract
Jinja Town in Uganda, selected as one of five centres of growth in the post-Second World War era of colonial developmentism, is perennially represented in the Ugandan media as the quintessential industrial town gone off track. This is particularly evident for the case of the African housing estates built in Jinja in the 1950s where the dominant everyday rhythm is no longer dictated by the factory siren or the monthly wage but is instead a landscape scored by multiple rhythms. By conceptualising these estates as inherited machines – still loaded with a profusion of signs and objects from the era of the modern industrial “refrain” – this paper seeks both to illustrate the colonial planning rationality and to examine contemporary processes of vernacular urbanism and contestations surrounding “re-occupations” of the postcolonial city. It is argued that we need to seriously question any a priori invocation of a generic form of vernacular urbanism that is (or is not) to be prioritised over or “mixed” with a Western planning cycle. Instead, the case study shows how historically mediated place specificities complicate the notion that the logics of place making can be unproblematically abstracted from.
Notes
1. Place, “A Laboratory of Uncertainty.”
2. Place, “A Laboratory of Uncertainty.”, 536.
3. Simone, “A Town on its Knees,” 131.
4. Rose-Redwood, “Governmentality, Geography, and the Geo-Coded World”; Dean, Governmentality.
5. Simone “Spectral Selves,” 3. See also Place “A Laboratory of Uncertainty,” 535.
6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.
7. Perera, “People's Spaces”; Miraftab, “Insurgent Planning.”
8. Davis, “Planet of Slums.”
9. Robinson, Ordinary Cities; Legg and McFarlane, “Ordinary Urban Spaces.”
10. Harrison, “On the Edge of Reason”; Myers, “Social Construction of Peri-Urban Places.”
11. Brand, “How Slums Can Save the Planet.”
12. Watson, “The Usefulness of Normative Planning Theories”; Njoh, “Europeans, Modern Urban Planning.”
13. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.
14. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Simone, “Spectral Selves,” 2.
15. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 221.
16. The Kilembe Copper Smelter resumed operations in 2009.
17. Own observations and interviews at Jinja abattoir, February 1999.
18. Interview, July 28, 1999.
19. This expression was widely used by industrial workers during interviews and large surveys conducted. at the four largest industries in Jinja in 1999/2000.
20. These terms derive from the words “Queen” and “Chloroquin”.
21. New Vision, February 28, 2009.
22. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.
23. New Vision, April 3, 2010.
24. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 44.
25. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 413–15.
26. Hainge, “Is Pop Music?,” 47.
27. Harrison, “On the Edge of Reason,” 323. For similar commentaries see Robinson, Ordinary Cities; Harris, “Development and Hybridity.”
28. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs.
29. In Harrison “On the Edge of Reason,” 325.
30. Simone, “The Last Shall Be First,” 102.
31. See for example Choay, The Rule and the Model; Rabinow, French Modern.
32. Miraftab, “Insurgent Planning,” 45. See also Demissie, Postcolonial African Cities.
33. Roy, “Strangely Familiar.”
34. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 125.
35. Debord, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude”; Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life; Augoyard, Step by Step; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Sandercock, Towards Cosmopolis.
36. Also important was the resuscitation of a humanistic conception of place in human geography from the late-1960s. See Tuan, Topophilia. On spatial play, see Augoyard, Step by Step, 29–33.
37. Robinson, Ordinary Cities; Miraftab, “Insurgent Planning”; Holsten, “Dangerous Spaces of Citizenship.”
38. Rose-Redwood, “Governmentality, Geography, and the Geo-Coded World.”
39. Important work in this field includes: Wright, The Politics of Design; Rabinow, “Governing Morocco”; Cohen, “Architectural History and the Colonial Question”; Fuller, Moderns Abroad; Bissell, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power. For work with an important gendered focus see Vaughan, Curing their Ills; Wallace, Health, Power and Politics.
40. Simone, “The Last Shall Be First,” 137.
41. Byerley, Becoming Jinja; Legg and McFarlane, “Ordinary Urban Spaces”; Myers, “Social Construction of Peri-Urban Places.” See also research conducted from the 1940s to 1960s focusing on the social construction of places in African urban areas, including Hellman, Rooiyard; Parkin, Neighbours and Nationals.
42. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 2–3; Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance.”
43. Casey, The Fate of Place, 303. See also Augoyard, Step by Step.
44. See also De Boeck and Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City.
45. Simone, “Spectral Selves,” 2.
46. See, for example, Planning Theory, vol. 8, 2009.
47. Watson, “The Usefulness of Normative Planning Theories.”
48. Sandercock, Towards Cosmopolis.
49. Myers, “Social Construction of Peri-Urban Places”; Watson, “The Usefulness of Normative Planning Theories.”
50. Simone, “Spectral Selves,” 2. See also Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Nielsen, “Filling in the Blanks.”
51. See, for example, Pieterse, “Cityness and African Urban Development.”
52. Myers, “Social Construction of Peri-Urban Places,” 577, 581.
53. Burroughs, The Job.
54. Lydenberg, Word Cultures, 44.
55. Burroughs, “The Art of Fiction.” It should be noted, however, that the cut-up technique was not entirely new. Lyndeberg, Word Cultures, for example cites the examples of writers such as Tristan Tzara and T.S. Eliot.
56. Lydenberg, Word Cultures, 45.
57. Simone, “The Last Shall Be First.” See also Perera, “People's Spaces,” on the provincialisation/familiarisation of Colombo.
58. Byerley, Becoming Jinja.
59. Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy, 60; Larimore, The Alien Town.
60. Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome.”
61. Mirams, Jinja; Byerley, Becoming Jinja; Omolo-Okalebo et al., “Planning of Kampala City.”
62. Byerley, “Mind the Gap!”; Foucault, “Governmentality;” Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended;” and Foucault, “The Subject and Power.”
63. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 385–6.
64. Orde-Browne, Labour Conditions in East Africa, 49.
65. Pearce, The Turning Point in Africa; Lewis, “The Ruling Compassions of the Late Colonial State.”
66. Thornton-White, Silberman, and Anderson, Nairobi: Master Plan, 7.
67. Cmd. 9475, para. 8. For commentary on this perceived causality see Burton, African Underclass; Kelemen, “Planning for Africa.”
68. Ministry of Housing, The Management of Municipal Housing Estates, 20.
69. Rabinow, French Modern, 82.
70. Thornton-White, Silberman, and Anderson, Nairobi: Master Plan; Atkinson, “African Housing”; Atkinson, “Housing in British Africa.”
71. Asplund et al., Acceptera, 15–18.
72. Rabinow, French Modern, 357. For a similar formulation see Madnaipour, “Connectivity and Contingency in Planning.”
73. Rabinow, French Modern, 9.
74. Thornton-White Papers, UCT Library, Manuscripts and Archives. “Personal Narrative: An Account of the Incidents on a Five Weeks Advisory Journey. By T.W. March 1947,” p. 2.
75. Gutschow, “Das Neue Afrika.”
76. Gutschow, “Das Neue Afrika.”, 254.
77. Thornton-White, Silberman, and Anderson, Nairobi: Master Plan, 45–8.
78. Thornton-White, Silberman, and Anderson, Nairobi: Master Plan, 46.
79. Larimore, The Alien Town, 125.
80. Byerley, Becoming Jinja.
81. See, for example, PRO CO536/221/5, Letter from Office of the Hereditary Abataka of Busoga, June 20, 1950, to the Prime Minister, Mr C. Atlee. London.
82. Interview, Jinja, 1999.
83. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 4.
84. Molohan, Detribalisation, 39–40.
85. Oxford English Dictionary.
86. PRO CAB/129/20, September 5, 1947, Cabinet, Direction of Labour, Memorandum by the Minister of Labour and National Service. See especially “Annex. Report of the ‘Spivs’ and ‘Drones’ working party.”
87. See for example PRO CAB/129/65 on “Kikuyu Loafers and Spivs in Nairobi.”
88. This “cut-up” is based on interviews conducted from 1998 to 2001 with Opolot, with Umoja members and Uganda Railways workers (Junior and Lower Quarters) and a Permanent Way worker survey in 1999. Also, interviews with Welfare Officer, Railway Quarters, September 1999.
89. Brett, “Structural Adjustment”; Byerley, Becoming Jinja.
90. Simone, “The Last Shall Be First,” 105.
91. Interview with Assistant Town Clerk, Walukuba-Masese Division, September 29, 1999.
92. Yiftachel, “Theoretical Notes on ‘Gray’ Cities.”
93. On uglification, see New Vision, November 3, 1998. For analogous commentary see Maxwell, Labor, Land, Food and Farming, 161; Cooper, Struggle for the City, 32.
94. Interview with Mr Moses Wanume, Director of the Uganda National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Jinja, September 22, 1999. For a discussion of social and economic exclusion as pertaining to entrepreneurial urban governance regimes, see Crossa, “Resisting the Entrepreneurial City.”
95. Interview with Chief Town Clerk, Jinja Municipality, July 13, 1999.
96. Simone, “A Town on its Knees?,” 151.
97. Myers, “Social Construction of Peri-Urban Places,” 578–9.
98. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 2–3.