Contested urban visions in the Global South

Conveners: Ilda Lindell, Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University; Onyanta Adama, Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University and Andrew Byerley, Unit for Human Geography, Department of Economy and Society, University of Gothenburg

Contact: ilda.lindell@humangeo.su.se

Cities in the Global South are often represented as sites of disorder, of spreading “slums” and of decay. Against this background, one can discern the emergence of certain urban imaginaries that envisage the reversal of this state of affairs. These imaginaries tend to be informed by Western planning ideals and to emphasize economic growth and competitiveness. Internationally circulating ideas articulate with state actors' rationalities and set into motion interventions aimed at modernizing and ordering the city. Ultra-modern and mega infrastructure projects seek to attract investors and to reinvent the image of cities. Southern cities increasingly endeavor to host international events, which are often preceded by projects of urban renewal and are seen as an instrument for materializing 'world-class city' aspirations. Frequently, such interventions necessitate the displacement of urban groups in an already precarious situation. For these imaginaries are associated with particular urban visions that define who has the right to inhabit the city and who does not belong in it. In the process, patterns of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion in the city are transformed. The panel examines how dominant city visions and related interventions impact on the lives of various urban groups. It explores how urban residents experience such interventions and how they contest, subvert or embrace dominant city visions.

Session A: 23 Aug., 11:00–12:30, Högbom Lecture Hall

• Colliding aspirations of a “colonial” town. Heidi Mosknes, Stockholm University.
• Contesting the formalization of urban livelihoods. Ana Maria Vargas Falla, Lund University / University of Milan.
• Small enterprises in urban areas between formalization policies and social protection needs. A discussion on the Ethiopian case. Davide Chinigò, Stellenbosch University and Cecilia Navarra, University of Torino.
• Translating urban visions into informal settlements’ practices: Reframing, anchoring and muddling through. Jaan-Henrik Kain, Chalmers University of Technology; Belinda Nyakinya, Kisumu City; Nicholas Odhiambo, JaramogiOgingaOdinga University of Science & Technology; Michael Oloko, JaramogiOgingaOdinga University of Science & Technology; John Omolo, Maseno University; Silas Otieno, Kisumu Waste Management Services; Patrik Zapata, University of Gothenburg and María José Zapata Campos, University of Gothenburg. 

Session B: 23 Aug., 14:00–15:30, Högbom Lecture Hall

• Who can claim the city? ‘Beirutis’ as a form of urban identity politics. Leila Kabalan, American University of Beirut.
• Strategy of informal housing development in Setif, Algeria. Abderrahmane Diafat and Said Madani, Université F. A. Sétif 1, Algeria.
• Housing markets dynamics in metropolitan Cochabamba: An apparently not too big, not too fragile, bubble. Jorge M. Veizaga R., Universidad Mayor de San Simón.
• The co-constitution of inequality in a fragile global city. The case of Jakarta. Marie Thynell, University of Gothenburg. 

Abstracts

Colliding aspirations of a “colonial” town. Heidi Mosknes, Stockholm University.

The Mexican town of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas has the last few decades been the arena for colliding urban imaginaries. The town has become involved in the new aspirations of federal and regional authorities to change the economic role of the region. While Chiapas earlier played a central part of an export oriented economy of agricultural products, its indigenous highland communities feeding the lowland plantations with seasonal labor, the region is today part of the multinational Mesoamerica Project, intended to develop infrastructure, communication, trade and tourism. Thus, San Cristóbal, with its colonial center and picturesque indigenous surroundings, has become the site for a booming tourism industry, keen to maintain this character. However, San Cristóbal has also become the destiny for a rapidly escalating migration by Maya men and women from surrounding rural communities, searching livelihoods when the seasonal plantation work declined. While most of the indigenous inhabitants struggle with precarious living conditions and political and social marginalization, they also make stern claims on the urban space. In this, many of the new shanty neighborhoods have employed a deliberate informality, using and even expanding what Yiftachel calls the “gray spaces” of the city in order not to be subsumed to what the inhabitants define as paternalist municipal politics. Together with masses of indigenous vendors, taxi drivers and street children, they upset the tranquil and ordered image of the city. In my paper, I explore these different urban imaginaries and their potential impacts.

Contesting the formalization of urban livelihoods. Ana Maria Vargas Falla, Lund University / University of Milan.

Street vending is one of the most accessible occupations for many individuals living in poverty in today’s world. However, local governments argue about the need to formalize street vending in designated markets in order to control disorder and invasion of public space. This paper explores street vendors’ ideas and practices of resistance to local regulations that make illegal street vending. Drawing on field data from Bogotá (2012-2014), this research illustrates that street vendors regard livelihoods as ‘honest living’ and a way to survive. They rejected formalization and state control and claim their right to earn a livelihood in the streets. While they worked outside the formal regulations of the state, they organized their work based on a social practice they called “acreditar”. This practice translated into the social norm of “first come, first served with rights” and signals that people tend to respect the spots where vendors have displayed acts of ownership of on a regular basis. Contrary to urban development approaches that argue about state regulation and formalization of rights for the poor, this paper illustrates an alternative view about the use of public space based on self-regulation.

Small enterprises in urban areas between formalization policies and social protection needs. A discussion on the Ethiopian case. Davide Chinigò, Stellenbosch University and Cecilia Navarra, University of Torino.

Two elements are strongly present in urban poverty reduction policies, both promoted by governments and by donors: access to microfinance and promotion of small entrepreneurial activities. These are mainly directed to women, youths and other “vulnerable groups”. These small firms suffer nevertheless of the risk of being locked into a “small scale trap” or into low-value-added positions. This questions the idea of “poor as natural entrepreneurs”, that has fuelled the microfinance boom. We address these issues in the case of Ethiopia, in a context characterized by booming industrialization, with a highly vulnerable labour force. Micro and small enterprises (MSEs) are promoted as a policy to fight urban unemployment and to formalize informal businesses. Often they are used to push away people from “socially undesirable” activities. From the point of view of “beneficiaries”, we observe that both small businesses and credit serve multiple functions, and that some of these functions are related to social protection needs, rather than to business development. Moreover, we try to identify the “entrepreneurs by necessity” (UNCTAD, 2015), and to discuss their relationship with formal employment. Are these businesses substitutes for social protection tools? Which are the implications of policies delegating social protection to credit and small business promotion? We use a mixed methods approach, drawing, first, on interviews with women working both in the informal and in the formal sector, beneficiaries of MSE promotion projects, and trade unionists. Our second source of data is an original dataset of individual observations on women small entrepreneurs in the urban and peri-urban areas of three Ethiopian cities (Addis Ababa, Jimma and Hawassa). 

Translating urban visions into informal settlements’ practices: Reframing, anchoring and muddling through. Jaan-Henrik Kain, Chalmers University of Technology; Belinda Nyakinya, Kisumu City; Nicholas Odhiambo, JaramogiOgingaOdinga University of Science & Technology; Michael Oloko, JaramogiOgingaOdinga University of Science & Technology; John Omolo, Maseno University; Silas Otieno, Kisumu Waste Management Services; Patrik Zapata, University of Gothenburg and María José Zapata Campos, University of Gothenburg.

This paper examines how policies, plans and visions are translated into informal settlements’ practice. It builds on literature on policy implementation practice and organization studies and more particularly it applies the concepts of reframing, anchoring and muddling through. The paper is informed by the case of Kisumu city in Kenya and its Kisumu Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan (KISWAMP) and its implementation on Kisumu’s informal settlements. The plan was funded by the Swedish International Development Agency through the United Nations Human Settlement Programme and implemented from 2007 to 2009. The study is based on action-research carried out by a multidisciplinary and trans disciplinary group of researchers, through focus groups, participatory workshops, collaborative action, in-depth interviews, document analysis and observations.  The paper examines what original aspects of KISWAMP were translated, i.e. which ones faded out, were resisted and twisted, and which ones became stabilized into and travel as ‘best practices’ to other locations. The paper shows how the generation of ‘best practices’ can be loosely coupled with the practices that policy seeks to change. It concludes, in line with previous research in the field, how successful policy implementation is based on cultural and political interpretations, rather that on evidence of improved practices.

Who can claim the city? ‘Beirutis’ as a form of urban identity politics. Leila Kabalan, American University of Beirut.

Beirut has a peculiar municipality and mayor. It is governed within the grander sectarian landscape of Lebanon’s political system. The majority of the residents of Beirut –some of who resided in the city for several generations – do not have the right to vote in its municipal elections. Thus, although Beirut currently houses around half of the Lebanese population, the number of voters have not changed significantly since the late 1970s. In Lebanon, being Beiruti is synonymous to belonging to historical landowning families of the late 1800s (namely Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslim Sunnis). By promoting that vision of the ‘native’ Beiruti, the municipality of Beirut has continuously been able to shun demands in preserving the cities heritage, promote visions of privatizing the beachfronts, and evict squatters. By the same token, the municipality paints those demands as pestering the progress and image of Beirut as a modern, investor-friendly city. In this paper, we wish to deconstruct how identity politics - that are prevalent in the Global South- among peculiar local experiences are used by Beirut’s municipality to deny the ‘right to the city’ to its residents whilst promoting a vision that remains accountability-free. This paper offers insights from three case studies to deconstruct how urban identities are formulated and reformulated by residents and governors alike to contest differing visions of the built environment.

Strategy of informal housing development in Setif, Algeria. Abderrahmane Diafat and Said Madani, Université F. A. Sétif 1, Algeria.

This contribution intends to present a case of an extensive informal housing development in the city of Setif. Speculation inflamed the real estates’ market and private developers are on the front line of this situation embracing the dominant city visions and making various urban groups, particularly those in a precarious situation, under pressure to leave their quarters and inhabit other old or new ghettoes. The developers strategy is to obtain the old houses in the city, usually from the heirs in conflict, then transform them into multi-storey buildings for “high standard” collective housing. First the house is demolished whatever is its architectural or patrimonial value, then the new owner rebuild a private individual house with the maximum of apartments. He starts selling informally these housing units “on the plan” and once the project is achieved, and the conformity certificate obtained from the city hall, he asks an estates expert to divide the house into separate apartments for sale. Herein appears the complicity of the local Authorities into this process of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion in the city. Some old quarters in Setif have not only lost their population and identity, but also the heritage and collective memory they represent for the city. Such a drastic transformation has been taking a high proportion during the last decade under the unofficial interventions aimed at modernizing and ordering the city.

Housing markets dynamics in metropolitan Cochabamba: An apparently not too big, not too fragile, bubble. Jorge M. Veizaga R., Universidad Mayor de San Simón.

As many authors explain, the major global crisis that begun in 2008 was mainly induced by a crisis of the housing market in the United States. Of course, the economic crises spread worldwide. In that context, although there have been many perspectives explaining the diffusion and the impacts of the crisis, less efforts have been made to understand the means by which the housing markets crisis relate to each other; and if so, how and to what extent does their impacts develop, across regions, considering the existence of a global urban system in which functions and hierarchies imply the exclusion and/or marginalization of local urban systems most of them located in the “Global South”. This paper explores the evolution of the housing supply and the main features of the housing market in what has been labeled as the “Metropolitan Area of Cochabamba”, one of the three main urban agglomerations of the bolivian urban system. Data analysis cannot provide evidence on the existence of direct linkages between local and global housing markets crisis. However, the evolution of the housing supply allows identifying the existence of a bubble like market that can eventually be characterized as not too big not too fragile. Considering the orientations of a major research initiative in the context of which this paper is written, it emphasizes in the need to integrate some sort of information systems so that it could be possible to anticipate changes in trends and make more effective efforts in many senses.

The co-constitution of inequality in a fragile global city. The case of Jakarta. Marie Thynell, University of Gothenburg.

The city of Jakarta is an old trade centre that has developed into a thriving global city. In many ways development has been successful and, perhaps, Jakarta will become a prime centre in the twenty-first Asian Century. The insertion of Jakarta into the global flows of the economic world order strengthens linkages between the various levels (global, regional, national, local) and contribute to a unique mix of stakeholders and relations, also called ‘global cityness’. With the insertion into economic relations deepens inequality grows. The question is what motivates production of inequality in Jakarta? This paper explores how various traditional practices in policy and planning interact with social structures and contribute to inequality. Inequality has developed over the centuries and heterogeneous paths. Perhaps the least studied components having an impact on inequality are the environmental disasters. Another, newer aspect is the magnitude of the urban problems associated uneven global city development. The lack of local surveys and statistical information impede on a detailed study but current and general issues are presented. A ‘glocal window’ and assemblage approach is applied in this paper. It draws on development, globalization and city development research to explore the co-production of inequality. Urban modernization, governance practices, planning and policy, environmental disasters have an impact on access to resources in Jakarta. They are part of the assemblage that highlights urban inequality and the fragile character of the global city. Finally, through the ‘glocal window’ a brutal urban reality stands.