Routledge Handbook of Urban Planning in Africa 9781138575431, 9781351271844

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Tables
Contributors
Chapter 1 Ancient, colonial, and post-colonial urban planning in Africa: An introduction
References
Part I Colonial urban planning and pre-colonial urban heritage in Africa
Chapter 2 The birth of a town: Indigenous planning and colonial intervention in Bolgatanga, Northern Territories of the Gold Coast
2.1 Introduction
2.2 The domestic unit and its cycle of development
2.3 From the first explorers to the birth of the ‘town’
2.4 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 3 History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder in the Niger Republic
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Contextual background and methodology
3.2.1 Background
3.2.2 Issues
3.2.3 Methodology
3.3 Results
3.3.1 Institutional and regulatory framework and urban planning actors in Zinder
3.3.2 Spatial dynamics in Zinder
3.3.3 The organization of the ancient city of Birni
3.3.4 First sketch of planning of colonial period
3.3.5 The first serviced plots of the city of Zinder of the 1970s
3.3.6 Urban development plan (UDP) of 1980
3.3.7 Parcelling out without urban services from 2000 to 2017
3.4 Discussion
3.4.1 Zinder, fortified town with traditional architecture
3.4.2 Juxtaposition of the colonial city with ancient fabrics
3.4.3 Lack of synergy between urban planning actors in Zinder
3.4.4 Planning objectives partially achieved in Zinder
3.5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 4 Mise en valeur and repopulation in colonial rural development in French Morocco
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Centre, periphery, and resource extraction
4.3 The colonization corridor in the Gharb
4.4 Water, technology, and rural modernity
4.5 Housing the workforce: The Service de l’Urbanisme in the countryside
4.6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 5 Infrastructure and urban planning: The port and city of Algiers under French colonial rule, 19th–20th century
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Ports as strategic areas for the colonial conquest of Algeria
5.2.1 The development of the port of Algiers: A modernizing benefit to the city
5.2.2 Maritime docks: A new façade for Algiers
5.3 The Chamber of Commerce of Algiers and the port-city governance: Power issues and territorial struggles
5.4 The city authority in port planning: A restricted intervention
5.5 The port in urban planning projects: The marginal area
5.6 The city of Algiers today, towardsa marketization of port area?
5.7 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 6 Living in Lourenço Marques in the early 20th century: Urban planning, development, and well-being
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Gardening the city: Creating beautiful, pledging for health, promoting public spaces, and leisure areas
6.3 Urbanization, sanitation, and health measures: Finding a common path for a social segregation politics
6.4 Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Notes
References
Chapter 7 Colonizing and infrastructuring the Angolan territory through colonial settlements: The case of the Cela settlement
7.1 Introduction
7.2 On Angola’s colonization
7.3 The Cela settlement
7.4 Neo-colonialism?
7.5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 8 Diamang’s urban project: Between the Peace of  Versailles and the Colonial Act
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Filling the void: Diamang’s arrival in Lunda
8.3 Occupation strategy: A pioneer in the edge of Angola
8.4 An absence of Africa in Africa: Settlements for European employees
8.5 Stabilizing workforce: Settlements for African workers
8.6 A sovereignty concern: Transcolonial networks
8.7 Conclusion
Notes
References
Part II Post-colonial urban planning in Africa
Chapter 9 Local governance and urban planning: Centralization, de-concentration, and decentralization in Africa
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Lusophone African countries
9.3 Analytical framework
9.4 Centralized, de-concentrated, and decentralized local governance: Results, analysis, and discussion
9.5 The spatial planning system: Centralized, de-concentrated, and decentralized
9.6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 10 The resilience, adaptability, and transformation of the South African planning profession
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Resilience and the adaptive cycle
10.3 History of the South African planning profession
10.4 Resilience of the planning profession
10.5 Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Chapter 11 Setting standards and competencies for planners
11.1 Introduction
11.2 Reasons for change
11.3 The planning competencies literature
11.4 Some history
11.5 The Bloemfontein competencies
11.6 SACPLAN’s competencies
11.7 Changes in the implementation environment
11.8 Competencies needed in South Africa
11.9 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 12 African design and CIAM expansion after the Charter of Athens
12.1 Introduction
12.2 CIAMs and the Charter of Athens
12.3 Post-war designers and CIAM geographic expansion
12.4 CIAM 9 on the African “habitat” and its design
12.5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 13 To survey, control, and design: Doxiadis and Fathy on Africa’s future and identity (1959–1963)
13.1 Introduction
13.2 The developmental approach of Constantinos Doxiadis1
13.3 The city of the future and the African turn
13.4 Hassan Fathy and the role of the African continent
13.5 Dynapolis in Africa
13.6 From infrastructure to Ecumenopolis
13.7 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 14 New towns in Algeria: Planned process to control the accelerated urbanization, case of Sidi Abdellah and Ali Mendjeli
14.1 Introduction
14.2 Urbanization in Algeria
14.3 New towns policy in Algeria
14.4 New town created according to the descending procedure: The case of Sidi Abdellah
14.4.1 Presentation and situation of the new city Sidi Abdellah
14.4.2 Creation conditions of the new city Sidi Abdellah
14.4.3 Planning and implementation process of the new city Sidi Abdellah
14.4.4 Execution process of the new city Sidi Abdellah
14.5 New town created according to the ascending procedure: Case of Ali Mendjeli
14.5.1 Reasons for the creation of the new city Ali Mendjeli
14.5.2 Evolution of the population of Constantine
14.5.3 Presentation and situation of the new city Ali Mendjeli
14.5.4 Population of the new town Ali Mendjeli: Between prevision and reality
14.5.5 Planning and implementation process of the new city Ali Mendjeli
14.5.6 Execution process of the new city of Ali Mendjeli
14.6 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 15 Emergent urbanism in Angola and Mozambique: Management of the unknown
15.1 Introduction
15.2 Notable urbanization and new dynamics taking place
15.3 New emergent towns: Locating and reflecting
15.3.1 Towns accelerated by increased circulation: Ressano Garcia and Santa Clara borders
15.3.2 Towns accelerated by new opportunities: ‘Natural gas cities’ Pemba and Soyo
15.4 Urban dwellers: Expectations and realities in new towns
15.5 Conclusions
References
Chapter 16 The Africanization of public space in South Africa: A moment
16.1 Introduction
16.2 Changing cities
16.3 Changing public spaces
16.3.1 Degradation
16.3.2 Mitigation
16.3.3 Adaptation
16.4 Changing paradigms
16.5 Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Chapter 17 Missed the stop? Incremental upgrading or waiting for housing in Buffalo City
17.1 Introduction
17.2 The significance of informal settlement upgrading in South African housing policy
17.3 Buffalo City: A low-growth, high-inequality environment
17.4 Municipal planning and interventions for the improvement of precarious housing conditions
17.4.1 Buffalo City’s housing policy under the paradigm of de-densification
17.4.2 The provision of interim services
17.4.3 Coming to grips with the persistence of shacks
17.4.4 Winning laurels for rollover upgrading
17.5 Formalization of informal settlements in all sorts of troubles
17.5.1 Insufficient project preparation or unsatisfiable requirements?
17.5.2 Incompetent contractors or mission impossible?
17.5.3 Opportunistic behaviour by shack dwellers or a race that can’t be won?
17.6 Regularization: Ambition and reality of an alternative approach towards informal settlements upgrading
17.6.1 Basic tenets of the BCMM Informal Settlement Upgrading Policy and Strategy
17.6.2 The participatory elaboration of upgrading plans
17.6.3 Results of the planning exercise: Investment plans and long-term perspectives
17.6.4 Stuck in the starting block: The meagre outcomes of the upgrading policy
17.7 Reasons for the failed introduction of incremental upgrading policy
17.7.1 Inappropriateness of the institutional architecture
17.7.2 Lack of a political champion for incremental upgrading
17.7.3 Destabilizing effects of the public housing complex
17.7.4 Lack of support for incremental upgrading from national and provincial government
17.7.5 Limited buy-in and insufficient mobilization of shack dweller communities
17.8 Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 18 Framing power in co-production engagements in Kampala City, Uganda
18.1 Introduction
18.2 The unfinished business of power in planning
18.3 Nature of co-production
18.4 Power relations in co-production processes
18.5 Strategies of organizing influence in communities
18.6 Methodological approach and materials
18.7 Co-production processes and relations in Kampala
18.8 Analysis of the manifestations and framings of power in co-production processes
18.9 Configuring power in co-production tools and processes
18.10 The utopia of consensualism and the destabilizing role of co-production tools
18.11 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 19 Power-shifts in the organizational landscapes of transport provision: The introduction of BRT in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam
19.1 Introduction
19.2 Organizational landscapes of transport provision in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam before MRT
19.2.1 The organizational landscape of transport provision in Nairobi
19.2.2 The organizational landscape of transport provision in Dar es Salaam
19.3 Transport provision in heterarchic institutional constellations
19.4 BRT: Power-shifts through transformative transport technology
19.4.1 Authority in transport provision in Nairobi with BRT: Outlook
19.4.2 Authority in transport provision in Dar es Salaam with BRT
19.5 Field configurations through BRT
19.6 Conclusion
Acknowledgement
References
Chapter 20 Informality, urban transport infrastructure, and the lessons of history in Accra, Ghana
20.1 Introduction
20.2 Visions of “Modernity”: Mobility and Infrastructure in contemporary Accra
20.3 Planning a “modern” city: Infrastructural imaginations and the model city
20.4 The Limits of “complete systems”: Popular logics and spatial realities
20.5 History lessons: Development failures and the limits of modernist visions
20.6 Southern urbanisms: Towards a critical urban planning practice
20.7 Conclusion: “Looking from” the lorry park to craft grassroots planning visions
Notes
References
Chapter 21 Moroccan towns: Nourishing urban spaces
21.1 Introduction
21.2 The two towns
21.2.1 Kasba Tadla4
21.2.2 Tinghir5
21.3 Transformations of food production in the urban context
21.3.1 Fields of change
21.3.2 Controversial practices
21.3.3 Various players
21.4 Sources of frictions and opportunities
21.4.1 Questions of hygiene and land
21.4.2 New customers and tasks
21.5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 22 Planning for less planning: Supporting informal food systems in Nairobi
22.1 Introduction
22.2 Urbanization and food security
22.3 Global framing and urban food security governance
22.4 Nairobi’s urban food security governance and policy
22.4.1 Social protection: Cash transfers
22.4.2 Urban agriculture
22.4.3 Nairobi’s informal food economy
22.5 Recommendations
22.6 Conclusion
Acknowledgement
References
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Handbook of Urban Planning in Africa

This handbook contributes with new evidence and new insights to the on-going debate on the de-colonization of knowledge on urban planning in Africa. African cities grew rapidly since the mid-20th century, in part due to rising rural migration and rapid internal demographic growth that followed the independence in most African countries. This rapid urbanization is commonly seen as a primary cause of the current urban management challenges with which African cities are confronted. This importance given to rapid urbanization prevented the due consideration of other dimensions of the current urban problems, challenges, and changes in African cities. The contributions to this handbook explore these other dimensions, looking in particular to the nature and capacity of local self-government and to the role of urban governance and urban planning in the poor urban conditions found in most African cities. It deals with current and contemporary urban challenges and urban policy responses, but also offers an historical overview of local governance and urban policies during the colonial period in the late 19th and 20th centuries, offering ample evidence of common features, and divergent features as well, on a number of facets, from intra-urban racial segregation solutions to the relationships between the colonial power and the natives, to the assimilation policy, as practised by the French and Portuguese and the Indirect Rule put in place by Britain in some or in part of its colonies. Using innovative approaches to the challenges confronting the governance of African cities, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of Urban Africa, urban planning in Africa, and African Development. Carlos Nunes Silva, Geographer, PhD, is Professor Auxiliar at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is the Chair of the IGU Commission on Geography of Governance and the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of E-Planning Research.

Routledge Handbook of Urban Planning in Africa

Edited by Carlos Nunes Silva

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Carlos Nunes Silva; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Carlos Nunes Silva to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-57543-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-27184-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Figures viii Tables xi Contributors xii 1 Ancient, colonial, and post-colonial urban planning in Africa: An introduction 1 Carlos Nunes Silva PART I

Colonial urban planning and pre-colonial urban heritage in Africa 2 The birth of a town: Indigenous planning and colonial intervention in Bolgatanga, Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Domenico Cristofaro 3 History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder in the Niger Republic Abdou Kailou Djibo

13 15 30

4 Mise en valeur and repopulation in colonial rural development in French Morocco 44 Michele Tenzon 5 Infrastructure and urban planning: The port and city of Algiers under French colonial rule, 19th–20th century Souha Salhi

61

6 Living in Lourenço Marques in the early 20th century: Urban planning, development, and well-being Ana Cristina Roque

76

7 Colonizing and infrastructuring the Angolan territory through colonial settlements: The case of the Cela settlement Filipa Fiúza and Ana Vaz Milheiro

90

v

Contents

8 Diamang’s urban project: Between the Peace of V   ersailles and the Colonial Act Ana Vaz Milheiro and Beatriz Serrazina

107

PART II

Post-colonial urban planning in Africa 9 Local governance and urban planning: Centralization, de-concentration, and decentralization in Africa Carlos Nunes Silva 10 The resilience, adaptability, and transformation of the South African planning profession Verna Nel and Martin Lewis

123 125

149

11 Setting standards and competencies for planners Martin Lewis and Verna Nel

162

12 African design and CIAM expansion after the Charter of Athens Elisa Dainese

177

13 To survey, control, and design: Doxiadis and Fathy on Africa’s future and identity (1959–1963) Filippo De Dominicis

193

14 New towns in Algeria: Planned process to control the accelerated urbanization, case of Sidi Abdellah and Ali Mendjeli Nadia Chabi and Khalil Bouhadjar

211

15 Emergent urbanism in Angola and Mozambique: Management of the unknown 233 Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues 16 The Africanization of public space in South Africa: A moment of opportunity Karina Landman

248

17 Missed the stop? Incremental upgrading or waiting for housing in Buffalo City Gerhard Kienast

263

18 Framing power in co-production engagements in Kampala City, Uganda Gilbert Siame and Wilma S. Nchito vi

291

Contents

19 Power-shifts in the organizational landscapes of transport provision: The introduction of BRT in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam Nadine Appelhans and Sabine Baumgart

308

20 Informality, urban transport infrastructure, and the lessons of history in Accra, Ghana Jennifer Hart

320

21 Moroccan towns: Nourishing urban spaces Heide Studer

341

22 Planning for less planning: Supporting informal food systems in Nairobi Andrea M. Brown

354

Index 367

vii

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 viii

Bolgatanga settlements map The old colonial road that connected Bolgatanga to Zuarungu Bolgatanga. Les P.P. Leclerq, Balch et Bracoud devant la maison des Péres Location of Zinder Demographic evolution of Zinder city Spatial evolution of Zinder city Rest of the wall of Birni Zinder The city of Zinder in 2017 A decorated house in Birni The Official Colonisation in the Gharb valley Irrigation and drainage perimeters in the Gharb valley Location of the proposed cités ouvrières in the Beht irrigation perimeter Central place model Conglomeration of settlements near Temara The network of settlement proposed by the Service de l’Urbanisme in the Gharb Valley Map of the railways of department of Algiers in the early 1900s Port-city of Algiers in the 1930s System of artificial concrete blocks designed by the engineer Victor Poirel, 1838 System of harbour’s refit designed in 1869 Docks designed by the French architect Henri Petit in 1894 The port of Algiers in 1950s The Rotival plan for Algiers, 1931 The container park of the port of Algiers Major António Araújo. Projecto de ampliação da cidade de Lourenço Marques, Moçambique.1887. PT/AHU/CARTI/064/00539 The British Ultimatum of 1890, cartoon by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro Salazar’s Lesson: God, Fatherland and Family: The National Indoctrination Trilogy, design by Martins Barata Aerial view of Cela (Waku Kungo), 1960s, photo by Luís Possolo “On the way to the fountain”, 1954, colonists settle in the new villages of the Cela Colonato: S. Tiago de Adeganha, Freixo and Vimieiro The Cela Colonato: “The meal” The Cela Colonato: “Preparing the land” The Cela Colonato: “Aviary”

23 24 25 32 33 33 37 40 41 49 52 53 55 56 57 63 64 65 66 66 67 71 72 78 93 95 96 98 99 100 101

Figures

7.8 7.9 8.1 8.2

Houses built by the Israeli cooperation One of the original houses of Cela Diamang’s settlement in Lunda allowed occupation of the hinterland The company’s villages were based along river lines, in a close relationship with the Belgian Congo 8.3 Dundo’s pharmacy in 1927 8.4 Dundo and Vila Paiva de Andrada plans (around 1930) 8.5 Perspective of “Type of Indigenous Village Diamang” (as a side note: Voluntários’ villages in Dundo should be built according to this plan) 8.6 “Village built for African workers near Luaco mine in 1927” 8.7 Soba Baraca’s village, near Camabouco’s mine, winner of the Best Village Contest in 1957 8.8 Diamang’s houses were seen as a “role model”. Houses in Andrada 9.1 Analytical framework: The context of local government action 9.2 Analytical Framework: Local self-government autonomy 10.1 The growth in registration of planners 12.1 Volta River project 12.2 CIAM-9, Mahieddine Bidonville, Section of the CIAM-Alger grid, 1953 12.3 Vertical housing units designed by Candilis and Woods among the houses of the Carrières Centrales, Casablanca, 1952 13.1 Greater Khartoum Masterplan 13.2 The African survey of Hassan Fathy 13.3 Plan of the Greater Kano (Dynapolis) 13.4 Ecumenopolis in West Africa, D-COF 1115, Constantinos A 14.1 Spatial structure of the Algerian national territory 14.2 Situation of the new town Sidi Abdellah in relation to Algiers 14.3 Territorial extent of the new city Sidi Abdellah 14.4 Creation conditions of the new city of Ali Mendjeli 14.5 Situation of the new town of Ali Mendjeli in relation to Constantine city 14.6 The new town of Ali Mendjeli by Districts 14.7 Population’s repartition percentages in the new town Ali Mendjeli 14.8 Assets of the new town Ali Mendjeli 14.9 New town Ali Mendjeli by Neighbourhood Unit 14.10 Execution process of the new city Ali Mendjeli 16.1 Polluted stream in Springbok Park 16.2 Broken infrastructure and play equipment in the Pienaarspoort Park 16.3 People enjoying various activities in Burgers Park 16.4 Beautiful landscaping in Jan Cilliers Park 16.5 Landscaped common open space in Silver Lakes Estate with paved walkway, golf course and waterbody 16.6 Lilian Ngoyi Square with the new Woman’s Museum in the background 16.7 Pedestrianized walkway in Helen Joseph Street with informal traders 16.8 Kalafong Fitness Park in Attridgeville 17.1 Buffalo City Population Density 17.2 Duncan Village: The largest and most dense cluster of informal settlements in Buffalo City, with approximately 15,000 shacks close to the city centre

103 104 109 111 112 113 114 116 117 119 129 130 158 184 185 187 196 199 202 206 215 215 216 224 225 226 228 228 229 230 251 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 266

267 ix

Figures

17.3 Mdantsane buffer strip: Shacks on the fringe of the apartheid era township Mdantsane, at approximately 20 km distance from East London 17.4 Nompumelelo: Clusters of shacks attached to a post-apartheid low-income housing development near the affluent suburb of Beacon Bay 17.5 Reeston Phase 3 (“New Life”): State-subsidized housing sprawl 17.6 Duncan Village (2013): Persistence of shacks despite twenty years of post-apartheid housing policy 17.7 Second Creek: Award-winning redevelopment project in walking distance from the East London CBD 17.8 Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality: Informal settlements under redevelopment 17.9 Ndancama: Low-income housing development for shack dwellers after temporary relocation 17.10 Redevelopment of the Mdantsane bufferstrip 17.11 Promotional video for Buffalo City upgrading strategy 17.12 Trenches as self-organized infrastructure for storm-water management in Phola Park (Scenery Park/East London) 17.13 Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality: Informal settlements earmarked for incremental upgrading 17.14 Example of an intervention map produced in result of participatory planning workshops 17.15 Electrification of informal settlements in Slovo Park/Mdantsane 19.1 NaMATA as an umbrella organization for integrated transport planning in Nairobi 19.2 DART Agency as a coordinating body to further the interests of rapid transit in Dar es Salaam 20.1 “Only Your Tithes Can Help You”, Accra Tema Station 20.2 “Life Without Jesus is Useless”, Accra 20.3 Accra Traffic 20.4 Aayalolo Bus Stop, Pokuase, Accra 20.5 An Aayalolo Bus Runs Empty 20.6 Mammy Trucks 21.1 A view of fields in the Todgha oasis in the vicinity of new concrete houses 21.2 A zrib at the edge of a town quarter in Kasba Tadla

x

267

268 269 271 272 273 275 277 279 280 281 283 284 314 315 322 323 325 328 330 333 345 347

Tables

3.1 3.2 9.1 10.1 10.2 11.1 11.2 11.3 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 17.1

Land cover in the city of Zinder in 2017 Demographic and spatial evolution of the city of Zinder in Niger The Lusophone African countries Estimates of number of qualified urban and regional planners 2007 Changes in composition of planning profession Generic competencies with underlying competencies Core competencies with underlying competencies Functional competencies with underlying competencies Territorial extent of the new city Sidi Abdellah Basic functions, objective and general programme of the new city Sidi Abdellah Establishment’s theoretical process of the first phase “approval of the development plan of the new city Sidi Abdellah” Theoretical process of the second phase “realization of the new town Sidi Abdellah” Significant dates marking the process of the implementation of the new city Sidi Abdellah Population of the city of Constantine from 2000 to 2030 – Including previsions Population of the new town Ali Mendjeli Household access to basic services

36 39 128 154 157 171 172 173 216 217 219 220 222 224 227 270

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Contributors

Nadine Appelhans (TU Dortmund University, Germany) is a post-doctoral researcher at TU

Dortmund University. She completed her PhD in Urban Planning at HafenCity University, Hamburg in 2016. Her research focuses on the link between socio-economic urban studies and infrastructure provision. She has worked for the German Institute of Urban Affairs in Berlin. She is the author and co-author of various articles on urban mobility, while her book Urban Planning and Everyday Urbanisation – A Case Study on Bahir Dar, Ethiopia (2016) deals with the relation of statutory planning and informal urbanisation. Sabine Baumgart (TU Dortmund University, Germany) is president of the Academy for

Spatial Research and Planning (ARL) and is a partner in the BPW urban planning consultancy in Bremen. She holds a Dipl.-Ing. in Architecture, University of Hannover. She did her doctorate in Urban Planning at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and has worked as a research assistant at the University of Hannover and Hamburg-Harburg. She was trained for an administrative leadership position and passed the state exam and then headed an urban and regional planning consultancy for many years. She took over the Chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the School of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund until her retirement in 2018. Khalil Bouhadjar (Salah Boubnider Constantine 3 University, Algeria) is a PhD student in sustainable urban project management. He got a Masters in Architecture and Urban Planning in 2012 at Mentouri Constantine University as a project manager. His PhD paper research focuses on a managerial approach for the reconquest of public spaces of the new town Ali Mendjeli. He has published an extensive list of works on urban planning and on urban governance issues in Algeria. He also works for an Algerian-Saoudi real-estate company as a Project Manager Assistant & Technical Sales Engineer. Andrea M. Brown (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada) is Associate Professor in Political

Science and Associate Director of the Tshepo Institute for the Study of Contemporary Africa at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research centres on urban food security and sustainability in East Africa, exploring how rapid urbanization is transforming food systems and livelihoods and how multilevel policy is responding in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Her current research is in collaboration with the SSHRCC-IDRC funded Hungry Cities Partnership, which is researching urban hunger in 8 cities of the Global South. Her recent publications can be found in Urban Forum, the International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability, and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

xii

Contributors

Nadia Chabi (Salah Boubnider Constantine 3 University, Algeria) is an Assistant Professor at

the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, town and country planning, Salah Boubnider Constantine 3 University. She graduated from the Constantine’s university as an architect, where she obtained her Master’s of philosophy in 1986 at New Castle Upon Tyne University, England, then her PhD in 2007 at the University of Constantine, Algeria. As a member of the post-doctoral committees, she supervises postgraduate students. Her research interests focus on the notion of territory, urban and rural environments and their relationship with town planning taken as a tool for the creation of territories and environments. Her research fields concern the making of the city: the study of cities, their architecture, their formation and transformation, based on the knowledge of history. She has published an extensive list of works in French and English on patrimony, urban planning and on urban governance issues in Algeria. Domenico Cristofaro (Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna, Italy) is

a PhD student at the University of Bologna. He graduated in 2015 with a Master’s Degree in African History and Cultural Anthropology. He is currently working on the urban and economic history of Ghana. His PhD thesis focuses on the urban transformations occurred in the early 20th century in Bolgatanga, the capital of the Upper East Region in Ghana. Between 2013 and 2018, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork and carried out research in the Ghana Public Records and Archives Administration (PRAAD), the White Fathers Archive in Rome and the National Archives in London. Elisa Dainese (Dalhousie University, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Canada) is an architect and historian and she is currently Assistant Professor for Architecture at Dalhousie University. She works on issues of post-colonial history and theory, globalization, modernism, architectural design, and urbanization with a focus on the transoceanic exchanges among Africa, Europe, and North-America. In 2012, she obtained a PhD in Architectural Composition from the IUAV University of Venice. Her research has received grants and fellowships from Columbia University (Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), and the Mellon Foundation funded Global History of Architecture Teaching Collaborative of MIT (School of Architecture and Planning). From 2013–2016, she was the recipient of a three-year Marie Curie International fellowship developed in connection with the University of Pennsylvania (History of Art Department), Harvard University (Department of African and African American Studies), and the University of Venice (IUAV, Faculty of Architecture). She is currently working on the development of a manuscript with the results of the research where she will explore the key role that sub-Saharan traditions played in the historical and conceptual refashioning of modern European and North American architecture from the 1940s to the 1970s. Elisa Dainese is the author of articles and essays in Time Frames (2017), the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (Dec 2015), New Urban Configurations (2014), Nuove qualità del vivere in periferia (2013), EAEA11 2013: Envisioning Architecture (2013), Landscape and Imagination (2013), and Catalogo della Mostra Internazionale Triennale d’Architettura Milano (2012). Abdou Kailou Djibo (Faculté d’Architecture la Cambre Horta, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) Is a Lecturer at the University Institute of Technology of Université de Zinder (Niger), where he has worked since 2008. He has a background in architecture. He is a PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture of the Université libre de Bruxelles. His topic is urban sprawl, drinking water, and sanitation services in the city Zinder’s in Niger. His research interests include

xiii

Contributors

basic urban services, urban planning, and the environment. He has worked as an independent architect in several design offices. He is currently responsible for the general resources of the University of Zinder. Filippo De Dominicis (PhD in Architecture and Urban Design) is an Architect and Researcher

in Italy. He (Rome, 1982) studied Architecture in Brussels and Rome. He holds a MArch in Architecture (2008) and a PhD in Architectural Design and Theory (2012) from Sapienza University in Rome. After a two-year research fellowship at IUAV University of Venice (2013– 2014), he has been post-doctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in spring 2016. He is currently research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome. Amongst his main research topics, the relationship between the discourse on architecture and planning and the issues of modernization and development after the Second World War, with a special focus on large-scale environmental and planning strategies set by international institutions in North and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as their interaction with world-scale politics and economics. Filipa Fiúza (ISCTE-IUL, Portugal) is an Architect (Master’s Degree in Architecture from ISCTEIUL, 2010). Currently, she is a PhD Student at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, and researcher in the projects “Coast to Coast – Late Portuguese Infrastructural Development in Continental Africa (Angola and Mozambique): Critical and Historical Analysis and Postcolonial Assessment”, and “Middle Class Mass Housing in Europe, Africa and Asia”, both funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and coordinated by Ana Vaz Milheiro. Her current research focuses on the role of colonist agricultural settlements in shaping the Angolan territory between the late nineteenth century and 1975. Since 2012, she has worked as a fellow researcher in several academic projects funded by FCT, such as “The Colonial Urbanization Offices: Architectural Culture and Practice” and “Homes for the biggest number: Lisbon, Luanda and Macao”. She was a visiting researcher at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Ghent University (2015–2016). Jennifer Hart (Wayne State University, USA) is an Associate Professor of History at Wayne State

University and the author of Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 2016. Jennifer Hart received her PhD from Indiana University in 2011. Her work can be found in International Journal of African Historical Studies, International Review of Social History, and African Economic History. She directs the digital humanities project, “Accra Wala”, and writes regularly on the blog www.ghanaonthego.com. Gerhard Kienast (University of Kassel, Germany) is an urban and regional planner, and alumni of TU Berlin (Dipl.-Ing. 2001), Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico-City, and the Centre for Rural Development (Humboldt-Universität; certificate 2002). His research areas are urban development grants and local government finance, urban governance, planning performance, and housing policy. He is currently working as researcher in the project “Spatial planning and locational decision-making for public housing interventions in South Africa” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Department for Urban Regeneration and Planning Theory, University of Kassel. His recent publications include: “Die geplante Wohnungsversorgung der städtischen Armen. 15 Jahre Aufwertung informeller Siedlungen in Südafrika” [“Housing the urban poor. 15 years of upgrading informal settlements in South Africa”]. In: Altrock et al, eds. Quartiersentwicklung im globalen Süden. Jahrbuch Stadterneuerung (2018). Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 123–163; with Altrock, U. (2018). “Bürgerbeteiligung in der Stadtentwicklung xiv

Contributors

und im Wohnungsbau” [“Citizen participation in urban development and planning for housing”]. Berlin: vhw; with Gotsch, P. “Neighbourhood Development”. Trialog 126/127 (3–4/2016). He worked as an advisor for organizational development for the German Development Service and is a board member of Trialog, Association for Scientific Research into Planning and Building in the Developing World. Karina Landman (University of Pretoria, South Africa) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Pretoria. She has a background in Architecture, Urban Design and City Planning and a PhD from Newcastle University in England (2006). Her current research interests relate to public space, nodal development, and urban resilience and regeneration. Other research areas include gated communities and crime prevention in the built environment. She also coordinated an NRF (National Research Foundation) project on the Transformation of Public Space in South Africa which culminated in the publication of the book “Evolving Public Space in South Africa: towards regenerative space in the post-apartheid city”. Martin Lewis (South African Council for Planners, South Africa) is currently the Chief

Executive Officer of the South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN). He holds a Bachelor and Master’s degree in Town and Regional Planning from the University of Pretoria. In this capacity, he has managed the standards and competencies project of SACPLAN. He was also chairperson of the Local Organising Committee of the very successful 2016 ISOCARP conference held in Durban, South Africa. He is registered as Professional Planner with SACPLAN, and a Chartered Planner with the RTPI. He has more than 30 years’ experience in planning which includes local government and the Academia. He served as Head of Department, Town and Regional Planning, at the University of Johannesburg. He was part of an international team that developed the “Quinary Career Development Model”. His main research interest is in Planning Education and Transformation of the planning profession. Other areas of research include Land Use Management, Spatial Planning, and Property Development. Ana Vaz Milheiro (Faculty of Architecture at University of Lisbon) is Assistant Professor with Aggregation at the Faculty of Architecture at University of Lisbon. She is a Researcher at DINÂMIA’CET-IUL and African Studies Center at University of Porto. She earned a PhD (2004) in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of “Coast to Coast ‒ Late Portuguese Infrastructural Development in Continental Africa (Angola and Mozambique): Critical and Historical Analysis and Postcolonial Assessment”, a research project funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Since 2010, she has been PI of three other research projects related to colonial studies. She is the author of the book “In the Tropics without Le Corbusier – Luso-African architecture during the Estado Novo regime” (2012) among others. She was a Visiting Researcher at Ghent University (2015–2016) and University of São Paulo (2018). She received a grant for research by the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2019). She is the Chair of the COST Action CA 18137 “European Middle-Class Mass Housing” (2019–2023). Wilma S. Nchito (University of Zambia, Zambia) is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Zambia. She is an urban geographer, specialised in planning in transition regions. Her research interests are urban housing, water and waste management, and urban informality in Zambia. She is also interested in transdisciplinary research methods. xv

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Verna Nel (University of the Free State, South Africa) is currently a Professor in the Urban and Regional Planning Department at the University of the Free State. She qualified with a bachelor’s degree in Town and Regional Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. She later completed a master’s degree and a doctorate. She is also a Councillor on SACPLAN and chair of its Education and Training Committee. She has nearly 40 years’ experience in planning, mostly in local government. Prior to joining the University of the Free State, she was Chief Town Planner of Centurion and later managed the planning function in the City of Tshwane. Her primary research interests are land use management in a South African context, and urban spatial resilience. She has published several articles on land use management and the application of complexity and resilience in various contexts. Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues (Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden) is a Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden. She has a Doctorate in African Studies (2004) from the University Institute of Lisbon. Her main research areas include urban anthropology and sociology, poverty and development, borders, and mining urbanism. Her research is mostly conducted in Angola and Mozambique but she has also been working in all other Portuguese speaking African countries. She has participated as a researcher and Principal Researcher in several collaborative projects. Currently, her projects are titled “Changing Urban to Rural movements in Angola and Mozambique” (2015–2019) and “The Practice and Politics of Urban Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Efforts at the Margins” (2018–2020). Most recent publications include “Climate change and DIY urbanism in Luanda and Maputo” (2019), “Private condominiums in Luanda” (2018), “Precarity in Angolan diamond mining towns, 1920–2014” (2018), “Changes to Urban Society in Angola” (2017), and “Angola’s Urban Mining Settlements in the Aftermath of War” (2017). Ana Roque (University of Lisbon, Portugal) is a Researcher at the School of Arts and Humanities

of the University of Lisboa, Assistant Director of Center for History (CH-ULisboa), and ViceCoordinator of the Research Group Building and Connecting Empires. She worked at the University Eduardo Mondlane and at the Tropical Research Institute (Lisbon) in projects concerning the CPLP countries. She regularly organizes national and international meetings and has authored and edited more than 50 publications on the History of Mozambique. She currently leads the project Empires: Nature, Science, and Environment. Recent publications include “From local herbal medicines to western drugs: implementing health services in colonial Mozambique”, In Bala, P. Learning from Empire: Medical Knowledge and transfers under Portuguese Rule. CSP, 2018:217–229 and “The Sofala Coast in the 16th Century: between the African trade routes and Indian Ocean trade”. In Walker, I. et al., Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean, Lisbon, 2017: 19–36. Souha Salhi (University of Lorraine, France) is an architectwho graduated from the institute of architecture of Mouloud Mammeri Univesity in Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria (2002–2007) gained a postgraduate degree from ENSA-Paris Belleville, France -“Diplôme de Spécialisation et d’approfondissement en architecture et patrimoine” (2009–2011). Salhi is currently a PhD student fellow at the University of Lorraine, France, Ecole doctorale Fernand Braudel, Laboratoire d’histoire de l’architecture contemporaine (LHAC). Salhi’s thesis is entitled “Alger: Quand le port fait la ville? Mutations urbaines aux XIXe-XXe siècle” directed by Professor Hélène Vacher. Beatriz Serrazina (CES-UC, Portugal) is a PhD student at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. Her research addresses the role played by Diamang, a private mining xvi

Contributors

company, in the design of the Angolan territory, covering transnational connections and practices of colonization. She holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon (2016). Her current research interests focus on colonial architecture, planning history, colonial and post-colonial heritage. She works as a research fellow in the project “Coast to Coast – Late Portuguese Infrastructural Development in Continental Africa: Historical-Critical Analysis and Postcolonial Assessment”, coordinated by Ana Vaz Milheiro. She was recently part of the curatorial team of the exhibition “Colonizing Africa: Reports on Colonial Public Works in Angola and Mozambique (1875‒1975)” (AHU, 2019). Gilbert Siame (University of Zambia, Zambia) is part of the core teaching staff in the Association of African Planning Schools Model curriculum (Masters Programme) in Spatial Planning at the University of Zambia. He holds both master and doctoral degrees in city planning from University of Cape Town in South Africa. He also directs the Centre for Urban Research and Planning, University of Zambia. Dr. Siame’s research interests and recent publications include urban informality, urban sustainability, climate change and cities, urban governance, transdisciplinary research methods, and the interface of planning theory and practice in the global South. Carlos Nunes Silva (University of Lisbon, Portugal), PhD, is a Geographer and Professor

Auxiliar at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, Portugal. His research interests focus mainly on urban and metropolitan governance, the history and theory of urban planning, urban planning in Africa, urban e-planning, urban planning ethics, local government policies, local e-government, and research methods. His publications include the books ‘New Approaches, Methods, and Tools in Urban e-Planning’; ‘Governing Urban Africa’; ‘Local Government and Urban Governance in Europe’ (co-edited); ‘Urban Planning in North Africa’; ‘Urban Planning in Lusophone African Countries’; ‘Emerging Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities in Urban E-Planning’; ‘Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial and Postcolonial Planning Cultures’; ‘Fiscal Austerity and Innovation in Local Governance in Europe’ (co-edited); ‘Citizen e-Participation in Urban Governance: Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity’; ‘Online Research Methods in Urban and Planning Studies: Design and Outcomes’; ‘Handbook of Research on E-Planning: ICT for Urban Development and Monitoring’; ‘Portugal: Sistema de Govern Local’; and ‘Política Urbana em Lisboa, 1926‒1974’. He is the Chair of the International Geographical Union Commission on ‘Geography of Governance’ and the founding editor-in-chief of the ‘International Journal of E-Planning Research’ (IJEPR). Heide Studer (tilia studio for landscape planning & University of Vienna, Austria) is a partner of tilia, a studio for landscape planning and applied research in Austria. She lectures at the University of Vienna at the Departments of Geography and of Cultural and Social Anthropology, which includes fieldwork in cooperation with the Université Sultan Moulay Slimane Beni Mellal, Morocco/Geography und ISAP/Cultural Heritage, Morocco. She studied landscape planning at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna/Austria and at Norges Landbrukshögskole in Aas/Norway. She received a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Vienna in 2012. Her work focuses on urban open space, various target groups, participation projects, urban gardening, planning projects, and on gender issues and (urban) space in Central Europe and Morocco. Her selected publications include: (2015) “Constituting Urban Space in the Moroccan Context”. Urban Studies, Vol. 52 (6),1005–1019; (2016) “Urban Practices and Planning. A Moroccan Case Study”. In: Silva, C. N. (Ed.) Governing Urban Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. 333–347. xvii

Contributors

Michele Tenzon (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) is currently a PhD candidate at the Université libre de Bruxelles and part of the Modscapes (Modernist Reinventions of the Rural Landscapes) collaborative research project. He graduated in architecture from the University of Ferrara and in architectural history from the Bartlett School, University College of London. His recent research focuses on the modernization of the rural landscape in post-war Italy and in colonial and post-colonial Morocco.

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1 Ancient, colonial, and postcolonial urban planning in Africa An introduction Carlos Nunes Silva

The rate of urban population growth in Africa has been consistently high since the 1950s, according to UN demographic statistics (UN, 2018; ECA et al., 2018). Even so, the continent continues to be the least urbanized with just 43% of its population living in urban areas in 2018, the majority of which are still living in poverty and with insufficient urban services. This population increase is the result of a rapid natural demographic growth and a continued high rural migration in the post-independence period. It is expected to continue to be high, at least until 2050, since almost 90% of the total world urban population growth, estimated to be 2.5 billion new inhabitants in 2050, is expected to occur in Africa and Asia. In most of these countries, the urban expansion was not followed by an equal economic growth in the first decades post-independence (Fay & Opal, 2000) and even less by the necessary investment in infrastructures. Even if recent studies suggest a more complex population dynamic in some countries or cities than that portrayed in the description of a continent that experienced a rapid population growth (Potts, 2012; UN-Habitat, 2014; 2018; Crankshaw & Borel-Saladin, 2018), the rapid urbanization and the lack of economic and financial capacity are generally seen as primary causes of the current urban governance challenges with which cities in Africa are confronted, namely those associated with social exclusion, poverty, slums, sanitation deficiencies, urban transport insufficiency, environmental degradation, and food insecurity.The overemphasis given by policy-makers, researchers, and public opinion to rapid urbanization as the main cause of the social, economic, and environmental problems in Africa, and the overemphasis given in the post-independence period to rural development policies, prevented for a long time the due consideration of other dimensions, namely issues of local and urban governance. This book explores some of these other dimensions, looking in particular at the nature and capacity of local self-government and the role of urban governance in Africa, expanding the evidence and insights provided in recent research on urban planning in Africa (Silva, 2012; 2014; 2015; 2016; 2016a). Thus, the aim of the book is to understand how local political, social, and economic contexts and external forces interacted, in colonial and post-colonial periods, to produce the kind of urban planning that Africa experienced in the last century. In doing this, this book analytically examines different planning cultures and spatial planning systems, in particular the institutional arrangements that have been put in place, the transnational flow of planning ideas, or the role of key planners, in colonial and post-colonial periods. The book also deals 1

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with the decentralization trends and the gradual shift from traditional modes of governing cities, towns, and other human settlements to forms of networked urban governance, an expanding mode of local governance also in some countries and cities in Africa since the early 1990s, as in the case examined in Tomlinson and Harrison (2018). This is done through single-country case studies or through the comparison of several countries. It is based on original research and follows a pluralist methodological approach. It is structured into two main parts. The first part, “Colonial urban planning and pre-colonial urban heritage in Africa” – has 7 chapters focused on ancient or pre-colonial and colonial urban planning. The second – “Post-colonial urban planning in Africa”, has 14 chapters focused on the role of local government in urban planning, the nature of the planning profession, the transnational flow of planning ideas, different planning approaches, informal housing, urban transport, and urban food systems. The first part of the book starts with two chapters that challenge the long-held view that urban planning was introduced in Africa during the colonial period. As Domenico Cristofaro and Abdou Kailou Djibo show, this is not the case. On the contrary, the evidence provided confirms the existence of pre-colonial indigenous local planning practices responsible for the spatial configuration of different types of human settlements, as well as ancient indigenous architectural principles and practices. The following chapters also show how those ancient indigenous principles continue to be present in contemporary practices and how they should be considered in the planning of cities in Africa, now and in the future, providing lessons and policy guidance for other cities in the continent. In Chapter 2, “The birth of a town: Indigenous planning and colonial intervention in Bolgatanga, northern territories of the Gold Coast”, Domenico Cristofaro explores the development of the city of Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region of Ghana, from its first contacts with European explorers to the implementation of British colonial rule in the region. Domenico Cristofaro shows how the development and planning of this town in the first decades of the 20th century were not entirely the product of colonial rule, but rather the result of several other factors, namely the pre-colonial indigenous planning and socio-political organization, the centralization of local political power, and the local response to British urban policies. In doing this, the author argues that neither a village nor even the concept of it existed in the area at the beginning of the 20th century. The development of these new forms of human settlements was, as the evidence provided suggests, the product of local and foreign influences. This confront with long-held views on urban planning in Africa continues in Chapter 3, “History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder in the Niger Republic”, in which Abdou Kailou Djibo also challenges the widely expressed view that urban planning dates only from the colonial period, arguing that before that cities had always played an important political and economic role, as is confirmed by the urban morphological characteristics of cities such as Agadez and Zinder in Niger. This is further corroborated, as the author shows, through the comparison of the constructive models of the old or pre-colonial city and the colonial city, and by the analysis of how the new urban structure superimposed on the old urban form. The next five chapters deal more specifically with urban planning in the colonial period in Africa. The first of these five chapters highlights or exemplifies the importance some key planners and architects had in the colonial period, namely the role they played in the transnational transfer and the dissemination of planning cultures from Europe to Africa and between colonies. The following two chapters examine and discuss the urban development associated with colonial infrastructural planning, specifically harbours and the role they played in the respective colonial spatial strategies, through one example in North Africa, in Algeria, and another in subSaharan Africa, in Mozambique, in this case highlighting the sanitation and health issues associated with the rapid urban expansion allowed and stimulated by the new harbour infrastructure. 2

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The remaining two chapters of this first part also deal with spatial planning in the colonial period: one focused on the planning process of a colonial rural settlement and the other focused on the planning of an industrial area associated with the mining industry in an area not occupied before by the colonizer, both cases in Angola. Michele Tenzon, in Chapter 4, “Mise en valeur and repopulation in colonial rural development in French Morocco”, deals with the role played by the colonial planning department in the French Protectorate in Morocco just after the end of the Second World War and the kind of planning developed in the late years of the colonial period. This is a good example of similar structures created in other parts of the continent by France, Britain, and Portugal. Besides the extensive planning work developed in Casablanca, Rabat, and other cities in Morocco, the Service de l’Urbanisme prepared, as Michele Tenzon shows, a series of ambitious rural resettlement schemes in the fertile Gharb Valley.The plan comprised a network of rural and industrial villages whose aim was not only to control the rural migration, but also to establish a frontier settlement. The chapter, through the analysis of these plans, which have been responsible for the development of one of Morocco’s main agricultural areas, shows how a modernist large-scale planning scheme has been implemented in Africa and how it increased social inequality by promoting the separation between the modern city sectors, occupied by the colonial and local elites, and the areas occupied by the local members of the lower social classes. The evidence provided also shows how these rural plans in Morocco represented to some extent an experimental field for subsequent planning works in other part of Francophone Africa. In Chapter 5, “Infrastructure and urban planning: The port and city of Algiers under French colonial rule, 19th–20th century”, Souha Salhi explores the strategic role played by harbours in the European colonial expansion in the 19th century by analyzing the port of Algiers, which was the main economic centre of French colonization in Algeria. As Souha Salhi shows, the colonial harbour led to significant urban reorganization in Algiers through the multiple interactions between port infrastructure and urban planning.This case illustrates well the influence that planning experiments in the colonies had in the colonial metropole, as was the case with the innovative port technology developed in Algeria and later used in France, in other European ports, and in other colonial territories too. Sanitation and water supply, and sanitation-related health risks, were major issues with which urban governance in Africa was confronted at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century.Thus, the preparation of sanitation plans marked urban planning in that period, in most, if not in all, colonies in Africa, in association with the alleged medical and scientific justification for racial segregation. In Chapter 6, “Living in Lourenço Marques in the early 20th century: Urban planning, development, and well-being”, Ana Cristina Roque addresses the planning and development of Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, namely the articulation between local conditions and the basic sanitation and health needs of the inhabitants of the new capital of this Portuguese colony. At the end of the 19th century, the new harbour became essential for trade in the region, which led to a rapid increase of its population whose living and working conditions were, in general, inadequate. As a result of this, and beyond numerous other problems, sanitation and health were among the major challenges confronting urban planning in the city. The chapter addresses the different ways of designing and organizing the city space at the turn of the 19th–20th century, a city that grew based on social and economic inequalities, and on racial segregation, in this case following the already-mentioned medical and scientific recommendations, reproducing to a large extent the relationship between colonizer and colonized found also in the other African colonies at that time. The intricacy of these processes leads Ana Roque to emphasize, as other chapters in the book also do, the need for an interdisciplinary approach, if the complexity of the colonial urban past is to be understood. 3

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The last two chapters in this first part of the book offer new empirical evidence and new insights on two kinds of challenges with which the colonial powers were confronted with in the decades that followed the Conference of Berlin. One of these challenges was the need for an effective physical occupation of the colonial territory and the other was the need to find appropriate conditions for a white colonization of the vast rural areas. In the first of these two chapters, Chapter 7, “Colonizing and infrastructuring the Angolan territory through colonist settlements: The case of the Cela settlement”, Filipa Fiúza and Ana Vaz Milheiro address the theme of colonial settlements, seen as part of the territorial infrastructuring of Angola, which took place between 1875 and 1975, the year in which Angola became independent. The chapter deals in particular with the Cela agricultural settlement, one of the largest of its kind in the Portuguese colonial empire. This policy of colonization through planned agricultural settlements had, to some extent, some similar or convergent aspects with attempts made by other colonial powers in the respective colonies, as Michele Tenzon shows in Chapter 4. In the case of the Portuguese African colonies, this concept can be found in policy documents since the early 1900s. In the 1950s, the Portuguese authoritarian political regime, in power since 1926, initiated a new colonization policy, and the Cela settlement was set up in the then district, now province, of Cuanza Sul, starting its activity in 1952. As with other spatial plans prepared in the Portuguese colonies, the plan of Cela was elaborated by the Colonial Public Works Agency.The Cela settlement declined when the white colons abandoned the area due to the independence of Angola in November 1975, a process made worse by the civil war that hit the area after the independence. In the early 2000s, after the end of the civil war in 2002, the settlement was somehow reconstructed and reequipped; this time with international aid, namely through the Israeli cooperation. With this case study, the book offers new insights on the reuse of past colonial infrastructures by the newly independent countries and shows how a colonial collective rural experiment, intended for white colonization, has been reworked with the aid of international cooperation and presented in the post-independence official discourse as a progressive experience, as a rural settlement and as model for community organization. With this case, the book also offers additional empirical evidence on the enduring persistence of colonial spatial infrastructures built with a different political rationale. More or less in the same period, the Portuguese colonial project also included plans for industrial settlements, namely associated with major mining projects. This feature of the Portuguese colonial planning culture is well illustrated by the case of the mining cities in the North of Angola, namely the case of Diamang, the company responsible for the exploration of diamonds in Angola. In Chapter 8, “Diamang’s urban project: Between the Peace of Versailles and the Colonial Act”, Ana Vaz Milheiro and Beatriz Serrazina explore the early stages of urban development in the Lunda region, in North-East Angola, as a result of the settlement network implemented by Diamang–Angola Diamond Company since 1917. The Portuguese colonial presence in the area was still very limited at that time and for that reason the planning and implementation of new urban settlements was critical for the survival and for the success of the mining company. As the authors show, the housing typologies and the collective programmes in the new settlements built in the region reveal a rigid hierarchical social system that replicated to some extent what existed in the colonial homeland, although with the incorporation of elements of the pre-existing indigenous culture. The case of Diamang illustrates well the role private companies played in the effective occupation of the colonial territories. The evidence also raises the issue of the transnational flow of planning ideas in the colonial period, in particular among colonies of different countries, as seems to have been the case between Angola and Congo, and between large mining companies on both sides of the border.The persistence of colonial aesthetics in the 4

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rural settlement and the assimilation or incorporation of native pre-existences in the mining settlement are findings that add new insights on the complex history of urban planning in Africa. The second part of the book, “Post-colonial urban planning in Africa”, comprises 14 chapters that deal with the role of local government in urban planning, the nature of the planning profession in Africa, the influence of planning schools of thought, planning strategies, informal housing, urban transport, and urban food systems. Chapter 9,“Local governance and urban planning: Centralization, de-concentration and decentralization in Africa”, the first in this second part of the book, examines and compares the level of local government autonomy in five African countries – Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe, and explores the current formal institutional model of local government in each of these five countries. Focused on central–local relations in the spatial planning system, the chapter shows how the low degree of autonomy of local government, namely financial autonomy, can only produce fragile urban governance systems. Thus, the decentralization of planning competences, political discretion in the local tiers of government, and the corresponding resources, human and financial, is mandatory for a proper reform of urban planning systems in Africa. This is followed by two chapters that deal with the planning profession in Africa, focused on the South African case. In Chapter 10, “The resilience, adaptability and transformation of the South African Planning Profession”,Verna Nel and Martin Lewis examine the changes experienced by the South African planning profession in recent years, a profession that was rooted in the British planning tradition but which was largely undermined in order to serve the aims of the segregationist apartheid regime in South Africa.The authors provide new evidence and new insights on the process developed since the mid-1990s to restore the planning profession in the post-apartheid South Africa, namely the new institutions and principles that were put in place. Verna Nel and Martin Lewis show that while the institutions, legislation, and curricula have indeed changed, the transformation of professional practice is not so clear. In fact, the evidence provided suggests that a large number of planners continue to be focused on a control-oriented approach instead of adopting a developmental perspective. In the second of these two chapters on the planning profession, Chapter 11, “Setting standards and competencies for planners”, Martin Lewis and Verna Nel examine and discuss the South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN) educational and ethical standards for the planning profession, as part of the transformation process examined in the previous chapter. As the authors show, confronted with only a broad definition in the legislation of what the planning profession is, it was necessary to define which skills and competences should the professionals in the planning field possess to fulfil their role in the post-apartheid South Africa. It is this process of formulating a set of standards and competencies for the profession by SACPLAN over the past years that Martin Lewis and Verna Nell examine in this chapter. If experience and practice are indeed important in the planning profession, the transformation of the segregationist planning tradition of apartheid must start in the curricula of planning schools, as the authors argue, a process whose results will certainly take some time to be visible and effective in the planning practice. With this chapter, the book contributes to the definition and clarification of the basic competences of planners, which if implemented as in the case described and examined by Martin Lewis and Verna Nell, will certainly raise the image of the planning profession in Africa. The next two chapters deal with the transnational flow of planning ideas in Africa, in the late colonial period and in the first years post-independence. In the first of these two chapters, Chapter 12, “African design and CIAM expansion after the Charter of Athens”, Elisa Dainese examines the post-war questioning of modern culture and the simultaneous growing interest in African architecture and planning within the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) movement. The chapter is thus focused on the African examples discussed in the 5

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CIAM 9, held in Aix-en-Provence, in 1953, namely the plans presented by the groups GAMMA and ATBAT-Afrique for Casablanca, Morocco; the research on the bidonville Mahiedinne in Algiers, Algeria; and the Volta River Project in the British Gold Coast, now Ghana. Through the analysis of these projects, Elisa Dainese uncovers the complex and contradictory relationship between post-war reconstruction in Europe and housing design in the African colonies in the same period, in the sense that old colonial frameworks tended to persist in the CIAM design methodologies applied in Africa, even in the shift from colonial to post-colonial societies, when CIAM members became experts in international development in Africa. These studies on the African habitat, at CIAM 9, as Elisa Dainese shows, questioned the modern search for universality and rationalism, and through that questioning had a significant influence on contemporary architecture and urban planning worldwide, a facet not yet properly considered in mainstream discourses on the history of urban planning. This is followed by Chapter 13, “To survey, control, and design: Doxiadis and Fathy on Africa’s future and identity, 1959–1963”, by Filippo De Dominicis, in which the author examines the years that followed the independence of most African countries; a period in which the continent became an arena for the test of new planning ideas. The analysis is focused on the plans drafted by the Athens-based firm, Doxiadis Associates, at the beginning of the 1960s. As the author shows, this case is an interesting example of the contradictions that crossed the debates on the identity and on the future of the newly independent countries, as well as the divergences about the future of post-colonial Africa. Part of the evidence and proposals examined resulted from a three-month continental survey, carried out under the consultancy of the Egyptian architect and planner Hassan Fathy. Filippo De Dominicis dissects the official planning strategy, offering new insights on the ideas that crossed this entire planning process, namely the different views of Doxiadis and Fathy on the future of a decolonized Africa. Not less important are the insights provided by Filippo De Dominicis on the role played by the African continent in shaping the global discourses on architecture and planning, another facet largely ignored by mainstream views on the history of urban planning in Africa and in particular on the role played by the continent in the global history of urban planning. With the following three chapters, the book offers new perspectives and recent evidence on some of the new trends in urban planning, as part of the much-needed debate on the new forms of urbanism in Africa. The first of these chapters deals with the planning and development of new towns, the second addresses the challenges associated with the emergence and rapid growth of new towns and cities without the appropriate governance capacity, and the third discusses the Africanization of urban public spaces. The construction of new towns and cities in Africa is re-emerging after an initial experience in the first years post-independence when the post-colonial new capital cities were built in some of the new independent states in Africa (Abubakar et al., 2017). In Chapter 14,“New towns in Algeria: Planned process to control the accelerated urbanization, case of Sidi Abdellah and Ali Mendjeli”, Nadia Chabi and Khalil Bouhadjar deal with the creation of new towns, seen as a way of addressing the huge challenges associated with the rapid urban growth, which in most cases exceeded the policies adopted and the resources and means made available for that purpose. The chapter deals with the case of the new towns of Ali Mendjeli and Sidi Abdellah, identifies the problems and weaknesses of these post-colonial planning experiences, and argues that these large urban projects, in order to be successful, require a more democratic process, engaging the local citizens in all stages of the process, an experience and lesson for other countries in Africa, embarking on similar new town policies, ought to consider. The adoption and emulation of best practices and models of urban policy and development is also becoming common practice in some of these countries – a process that requires new 6

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interrogations and theorization, as Croese (2018) suggests, leading in some cases to fantasists proposals, as Watson (2014) points out, while at the same time the development of new towns is not always well understood or addressed by the planning system. In Chapter 15, “Emergent urbanism in Angola and Mozambique: Management of the unknown”, Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues explores the main features of urban transformation in emergent towns and cities in Angola and Mozambique and examines how these settlements are becoming new key urban places. Among other factors, the author examines and discusses the role of migration and mobility in the urbanization of new urban areas, in particular in emergent towns which, in general, are even less prepared than larger cities from the point of view of urban management and governance capacity. Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues also draws attention to the fact that these changes configure new forms of urbanism, not yet well understood and addressed in urban planning instruments – a process that may require reforms in the current spatial planning systems in these countries and in other African countries with similar emergent urban dynamics as well. In the third of these chapters, Chapter 16, “The Africanization of public space in South Africa: A moment of opportunity”, Karina Landman deals with a specific facet of the current debates on public spaces in Africa, namely the question of whether public space in urban areas may or not be adapted by local users to suit their particular needs. Based on multiple case studies carried out across South Africa and on interviews of urban designers, the chapter adds new evidence and perspectives on why and how citizen inputs should be considered in the planning and design of urban public space in Africa, seen as an opportunity for co-creation and collaboration and for more context-specific urban development. The next two chapters deal with the issues related to housing and informal housing in urban areas in Africa, one of the most pressing challenges confronting cities in the continent. The history of housing policies in Africa and the current debates around the use of European housing policy models versus alternatives and innovative housing tenure systems are the issues raised in these chapters. The debate around the impact of neo-liberal principles in housing policy in Africa, the development of innovative typologies of housing policies, and the option for coproduction in upgrading informal settlements are also addressed in the discussion that follows. In Chapter 17, “Missed the stop? Incremental upgrading or waiting for housing in Buffalo city”, Gerhard Kienast explores housing policies in South Africa, which have failed so far to overcome the informal settlement issue. As the author shows, upgrading interventions resulted frequently in redevelopment, de-densification, and the disruption of shack dweller communities. This policy pattern, to some extent, the representative of what happens in many other African countries, confronted as they are with similar problems, is examined through the case study of Buffalo city, South Africa. As Gerhard Kienast shows, the non-implementation of these housing programmes have been in part due to insufficient national support or lack of local government capacity which, as the literature shows, are common determinants of similar failures in the field of informal housing policy in other cities in Africa. In Chapter 18, “Framing power in co-production engagements in Kampala city, Uganda”, Gilbert Siame and Wilma S. Nchito examine the experience of community-led settlement upgrading in the case of Kampala, Uganda – a policy also applied in other cities and towns. As the authors show, despite the fact that the state has usually a dominant role in shaping all co-production engagements in many cities of the South, the relationship between the state and society is not pre-determined as it depends on formal and informal power relations. Therefore, Siame and Nchito argue that inclusive and participatory governance in Africa, and more generally in the global South, need to take into account power relations within and between formal and informal state and society systems, a perspective that, to some extent, is different from the long-held view on the roles of the state, on one side, and of civil society, on the other, in urban policy in Africa. 7

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Transport and mobility in urban areas is another major challenge, together with informal housing, confronting urban planning in Africa. Frequently described as inefficient and unsafe in Africa, and one of the reasons for citizen discontent in the city, urban transport is another critical issue examined in two chapters of the book. In the first of these chapters, Chapter 19, “Powershifts in the organizational landscapes of transport provision:The introduction of BRT in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam”, Nadine Appelhans and Sabine Baumgart explore the introduction of the mass rapid transit in these two cities and address the traditional poor transport provision undertaken by a multiplicity of formal and informal organizations. The authors offer new and critical insights on the past history on urban transport planning in these cities and highlight aspects that other cities in Africa ought to consider in their respective planning processes. Above all, the conclusion and recommendation that state institutions and local government need to resist and negotiate in better conditions, the offers of transport packages provided by donor institutions which, as Nadine Appelhans and Sabine Baumgart show, usually link the financial support to the choice of a specific technology. In these two cities, but also in other cities in Africa, a coherent transport planning in the urban areas must take into account all transport modes, which must be articulated and integrated with other sectors, in the different stages of the respective urban planning process. Jennifer Hart, in the second chapter on urban transport in Africa, Chapter 20, “Informality, urban transport infrastructure, and the lessons of history in Accra, Ghana”, examines contemporary debates about the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit, based on examples of infrastructure planning in Accra, Ghana. The author situates the development of Bus Rapid Transit within a much longer history of urban transport planning, suggesting that, while these global transport models, such as the Bus Rapid Transit, seem attractive to funders, planners, and government officials, they do not account for local perspectives of space and cultures of mobility. As Jennifer Hart argues, it is important to comprehend how these local understandings shape the way that transit systems are used by the local population. And as a consequence of that, local transport systems, such as the TROTRO, similar to those that exist in many other cities in Africa, must be taken seriously rather than being dismissed as unsuccessful or informal. Also in the case of urban transport, modernist conceptions of planning must be questioned and openly debated, if urban planning in Africa is to be decolonized and re-imagined. The governance of urban food systems in Africa is a relatively recent issue in the research agenda focused on urban Africa. Urban food systems are increasingly seen as an issue that needs to be better understood, particularly in Africa, due to the high rates of urban population growth and high levels of urban food insecurity (Smit, 2016; Korbéogo, 2017; Battersby & Watson, 2018). The last two chapters of the book address the critical issue of urban food systems in Africa. They explore and discuss the governance of urban food systems, its actors and agendas, the role of local government, and the respective impacts on food production, distribution, and food safety, in two African countries – one in North Africa and the other in sub-Saharan Africa. In Chapter 21, “Moroccan towns: Nourishing urban Spaces”, Heide Studer examines the question of urban food, in particular for the poorer parts of the population, in Morocco, and discusses how urban planning should incorporate urban agriculture in contemporary urban planning discourses and practices in Africa. The findings reveal the lack of serious support to urban agriculture in the case examined, a pattern also found in numerous other cities and towns in Africa, which requires a change in the attitude towards food production inside the city, not only by state institutions and local government departments but also by citizens, in general, and by the younger generations, in particular.These new attitudes ought to be reflected also in urban planning, which must incorporate these contemporary forms of urban agriculture and animal husbandry as formal land uses, for food security reasons but also for the promotion of healthy environments and for the preservation of natural resources within the cities and towns in Africa. 8

Urban planning in Africa

Andrea M. Brown, in the last chapter, Chapter 22, “Planning for less planning: Supporting informal food systems in Nairobi”, discusses the division between the global focus on rural food security on one side and the increasing crisis of urban hunger on the other, which in this case is linked more to access than to food availability. Based on the case of Nairobi, Kenya, Andrea M. Brown shows that the excessive and often contradictory planning legislation issued by different state institutions and local government departments limits the ability to use spaces inside the city, which is forcing inhabitants of this city, as in numerous other cases in Africa described in the literature, to rely on informal strategies to react to uncertain food access in the city. The chapter includes also recommendations on how diverse types of informal strategies could be supported by municipal governments or integrated into other policies at the national level. The argument, in essence, suggests that such shift in the approach to urban food requires a far-reaching change in planning perspectives, from the still prevailing modernist assumptions to an approach that starts with the recognition of the roots of urban hunger, seen as the proper approach to achieve sustainable food security, as stated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In sum, the research strategies, diverse and mixed, applied in the following chapters, illustrate well what needs to be done to avoid superficial approaches of complex processes when doing research on urban planning in Africa, as indicated in the brief reference to each chapter in the previous paragraphs. Archival and fieldwork are combined in different ways in the chapters that follow. Ethnographic fieldwork, observations, participative observation, interviews, and other forms of direct data collection are some of the methods and research tools applied. Unpublished archival material, retrieved in local archives and in archives located in the former colonial country, in both cases public archives or private institutions archives, such as those of religious orders, is another example of the kind of sources on which the book is based. Records from colonial and post-colonial local and national press, or specialized journals, and the correspondence between key actors in the history of planning in Africa are also examples of sources on which the book is based. Comparative analysis of plans and photographs has also been employed. Qualitative and quantitative approaches have been combined in different ways in the various chapters, and some of the chapters explore methods crossing the boundaries between different disciplines. The formulation of appropriate urban policies and urban planning require accurate, updated, and comparable urban data. Statistics, in particular small-scale and subject-specific urban data are not always available in many African countries, tend to be imprecise on too many issues, and irregular in the coverage of geographic areas or time periods (Borel-Saladin, 2017; Satterthwaite, 2017), thus making it difficult to conduct quantitative research at the level of the city in Africa. The statistics during the long colonial period were discriminatory and had, in general, only a partial coverage of the African population. They tended to ignore, by lack of proper access, the rural areas, being in urban areas mainly a census of the colonial population of European origin. And as the Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank Group and the African Union Commission, among other institutions, recognize there is still a persistent data gap in national statistical systems in Africa (ECA; ADB & AUC, 2018).The first national population census in Angola after independence, for instance, was carried out in 2014, nearly four decades after the end of the colonial period (INE, 2014). And, this is far from being the exception in the continent. There is, thus, an urgent need of further investment in the national statistical systems, in the building of statistical capacity at national and local levels, and on the production of disaggregated and accurate urban information in particular. The following chapters provide guidance on how to fill some of the information gaps that still exist. Besides the insufficient data on urban Africa, much still needs to be done too on the decolonization of knowledge on urban planning in Africa. Despite the new sources and the new ways of looking at them, we still know less than we need to about urban planning in Africa. 9

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Long-held views on urbanization and urban planning in Africa before the European colonization are challenged by new empirical evidence and new insights provided in the chapters that follow. The book is thus a contribution to fill this gap by offering a broad perspective of the current debates on urban planning in Africa before, during, and after the colonial period. This new knowledge is even more necessary now when new perspectives on urban development in Africa, namely the aims defined in the African Union 2063 Agenda (African Union, 2015) and in the New Urban Agenda adopted by the United Nations in the Habitat III conference in 2016 (UN-HABITAT, 2015; 2016), offer the opportunity for the development of more ambitious urban policies and new planning laws, which may lead to the structural transformation of the challenges currently confronting cities in Africa (OECD, 2016; UNDP, 2016; Africa Progress Panel, 2017). The assessment of policy tools must be introduced and applied systematically in these countries, as suggested by UN-HABITAT (2018a), namely in the case of planning laws (Berrisford, 2017). Integration of sector policies, a better connection between urban and rural areas, clarification and security in land and property rights (Choplin & Dessie, 2017; Bertrand, 2019), more attention to the growth of intermediate- or middle-sized cities and towns, huge investment to improve the urban infrastructure and social services coverage, with a special focus on the poor and other vulnerable social groups, offering access for all, new financial instruments, participatory planning approaches, decentralization, and more efficient multi-level governance system are some of the dimensions that must structure the next generation of urban planning in Africa, which is expected to prepare the urban transition in the continent, seen no longer as a problem but as an opportunity for sustainable development in Africa. For urban development to lift millions out of poverty, cities and towns in Africa need to change. For this to occur, as a recent report on the state of the African cities suggests, urban settlements in Africa need to enhance their accessibility, connectivity, and attractiveness (UN-HABITAT, 2018). This requires debate about the way urban planning in Africa has been perceived and reforms on how it has been practiced, which may in some cases require ‘less’ planning in order to incorporate what now is still perceived as informal or even as disastrous. A debate that will determine how well the emerging forces of urban change, in different levels, are understood and taken up by the various stakeholders in cities and towns in Africa. For that debate, the book offers empirical evidence and insights that reposition urban planning in Africa and make the continent look not-so exceptional as it is still usually seen. On the contrary, the evidence provided reveals numerous possibilities for urban planning in the continent, in all its diversity and different dynamics, to act as a tool for governing human populations as in other regions of the world. These facts and the new ways of looking at them, presented by 25 authors, all members of the African Urban Planning Research Network (AUPRN), make up the contribution of the Routledge Handbook of Urban Planning in Africa, to the on-going debate on the decolonization of knowledge on urban planning in Africa.

References Abubakar, Ismaila Rimi & Petra Leisenring Doan (2017). Building new capital cities in Africa: Lessons for new satellite towns in developing countries. African Studies, 76 (4): 546–565. Africa Progress Panel (2017). Making Progress Towards Attaining the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa. Geneva: Africa Progress Panel. African Union (2015). Agenda 2063. The Africa We Want. Addis Ababa: African Union Commission. Battersby, Jane & Vanessa Watson (eds) (2018). Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities. London: Routledge. Berrisford, Stephen (2017). Reforming Urban Laws in Africa: A Practical Guide. Cape Town: African Centre for Cities. 10

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Bertrand, Monique (2019). “A cadastre for Mali?” The production of land titles and the challenge of property data on the periphery of Bamako. Land Use Policy, 81, 371–381. Borel-Saladin, J. (2017). Data Dilemmas: Availability, Access and Applicability for Analysis in Sub-Saharan African Cities. Urban Forum, 28 (4): 333–343. Choplin, Armelle & Elizabeth Dessie (2017). Titling the desert: Land formalization and tenure (in)security in Nouakchott (Mauritania). Habitat International, 64 (June): 49–58. Crankshaw, Owen & Jacqueline Borel-Saladin (2018). Causes of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation in Zambia: Natural population increase or migration?. Urban Studies, 56 (10): 2005–2020. Croese, Sylvia (2018). Global urban policymaking in Africa: a view from Angola through the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42 (2): 198–209. ECA; ADB & AUC (2018). African Statistical Yearbook 2018. Abidjan: Economic Commission for Africa; African Development Bank Group; African Union Commission. Fay, Marianne & Opal, Charlotte (2000). Urbanization without Growth. A Not-So-uncommon Phenomenon. Washington: The World Bank. INE (2014). Resultados preliminares do Recenseamento Geral da População e da Habitação de Angola 2014. Luanda: Instituto Nacional de Estatística. Korbéogo, Gabin (2017). Ordering urban agriculture: Farmers, experts, the state and the collective management of resources in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Environment and Urbanization, 30 (1): 283–300. OECD (2016). Perspectivas económicas em África 2016. Paris: OECD. Potts, Deborah (2012). Whatever Happened to Africa’s Rapid Urbanization? London: Africa Research Institute. Satterthwaite, David (2017). Will Africa have most of the world’s largest cities in 2100?Environment and Urbanization, 29 (1): 217–220. Silva, Carlos Nunes (2012). Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: a new role in the urban transition. Cities – The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning (Special Issue on ‘Urban Planning in Africa’), 19 (3): 155–157. Silva, Carlos Nunes (ed.) (2014). Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial and Postcolonial Planning Cultures. New York/London: Routledge. Silva, Carlos Nunes (ed.) (2015). Urban Planning in Lusophone African Countries. Farnham: Ashgate. Silva, Carlos Nunes (ed.) (2016). Urban Planning in North Africa. London/New York: Routledge. Silva, Carlos Nunes (ed.) (2016a). Governing Urban Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smit, Warren (2016). Urban governance and urban food systems in Africa: Examining the linkages. Cities, 58: 80–86. Tomlinson, R. & Harrison, P. (2018). Knowledge of Metropolitan Governance in the South. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42: 1127–1139. UN (2018). World Urbanization Prospects. The 2018 Revision. New York: United Nations. UNDP (2016). Human Development Report 2016. New York: United Nations. UN-HABITAT (2014). State of African Cities 2014 − Re-imagining Sustainable Urban Transitions. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. UN-HABITAT (2015). Towards an Africa Urban Agenda. Nairobi & Addis Ababa: United Nations Human Settlements Programme and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. UN-HABITAT (2016). New Urban Agenda. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. UN-HABITAT (2018). The State of the African Cities 2018. The Geography of African Investment. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. UN-HABITAT (2018a). Planning Law Assessment Framework. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Watson, Vanessa (2014). African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares? Environment and Urbanization, 26 (1): 215–231.

11

Part I

Colonial urban planning and pre-colonial urban heritage in Africa

2 The birth of a town Indigenous planning and colonial intervention in Bolgatanga, Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Domenico Cristofaro

2.1 Introduction Bolgatanga is today the capital of the Ghanaian Upper East Region with a population of approximately 130,000 people1. Its central market grows faster every year, attracting more people from neighbouring countries. The landscape of this Savanna town has gradually changed over the years: almost every family has been working to build a new house using bricks and cement for the structure and zinc for roofing. Although the ‘traditional way’2 of building is still widely in use, very few people these days decide to build their new houses this way. The ‘traditional way’ requires less time and effort than bricks, but the latter provides more lasting results. However, as some scholars highlight3, there is still something to learn from the past indigenous criteria of building and planning. This chapter focuses on the historical development and the planning of Bolgatanga’s urban setting. The chosen timeframe starts from the moment the first Europeans passed through the region, and follows the process of colonization. Even if some sources indicate the existence of ‘towns’ and ‘villages’ in the region between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, this was probably hardly the case. The chapter will argue that neither a village nor the very concept of it existed in the area during this time. Rather, there was a very peculiar way of structuring the settlements and building the compounds. Moreover, the landscape endured in its features throughout the following years. There was in fact continuity in the patterns of building and planning the ‘towns’ before and after the process of colonization. This, of course, is not to be taken as a rule for northern Ghana. In certain cases, colonialism was one of the essential factors in the growth of the urban landscape, as it was for Tamale (MacGaffey, 2006; Soeters 2012). But as for Bolgatanga and the Upper East Region, colonialism did not affect its urban development in a substantial way. Besides, as suggested by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, using words such as ‘precolonial’, or in this case ‘colonial’, will not be useful for the analysis, “car il est paradoxal de définir une société par ce qu’il en advint ultérieurement” (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1993, p. 9). In fact, the planning pattern in place in the region continued to be largely used even after the advent of colonial rule. As will be clear, even if colonialism is part of the analysis, it will not be the main feature. 15

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To describe the peculiarity of this urban setting, the analysis will show the linkages between the urban and the social patterns of the town. Again, according to Coquery-Vidrovitch, every social and political formation develops its own urban features. She wrote that: “from every society, from every system of power and of thought, specific models of cities develop. This process of urbanization reflects and reveals the global organization of the whole group” (CoqueryVidrovitch, 1991, p. 2). Anthropologists have also highlighted that the built environment is the material expression of social and political structures4. As already pointed out by Meyer Fortes, this was exactly the case for the Talensi5, living not too far from Bolgatanga. He noted that a Tale settlement is a miniature of the whole society and reveals all the basic principles of the social structure. No two settlements are identical in topography, shape, size, or social composition; but all have the same social form, based on the same principles. (Fortes, 1969, p. 154) The chapter will thus analyze these principles and the “fascinating interrelationship […] between the built and the people: people build as they think, but they also think as they build” (CoqueryVidrovitch, 2005, p. xxiv), and how this intertwinement applies to the Gurensi people6. This chapter is intended to provide an interdisciplinary analysis starting from the historical growth of an urban entity that was later to be called ‘town’. Trying to provide a strict definition of such urban entities could be a hard and futile effort. But historical analysis can help. As stated in seminal works on urbanity in Africa, there is no single paradigm that can be used to illustrate the growth and decline of towns (Anderson and Rathbone, 2000, p. 9; Mabogunje, 1990). Focusing instead on each peculiar history, on the other hand, will better highlight the different processes and features that distinguish every urban entity. However, using urban history alone, as a “contained subdiscipline”, could be self-defeating, as suggested by Peel (1980). Therefore, to enrich the analysis, this chapter uses an interdisciplinary approach. Many scholars have stressed the need for interdisciplinarity in the study of the urban phenomenon7. In this case, interdisciplinarity, in fact, gives us more instruments to understand in which way urban entities in the northern territories of the Gold Coast were thought and planned. Colonial anthropology could offer a first insight into the topic. This analysis relies in part on a methodology to study settlement patterns in the Gurensi region already stressed by Robert Sutherland Rattray, the first colonial ethnographer that worked in the northern territories. In his book, he used a methodology not developed by him directly, but by his local collaborator,Victor Aboya (Rattray, 1932, pp. 232–236). Indeed, even if the colonial ethnographer did not clearly state this, it could be inferred from the history of Winkongo, written by Aboya but published under Rattray’s name. His history contained topics such as who was the ritual owner of the land; how many clans were there in the settlement; who was the founding ancestor of the settlement; which taboos were practiced in that locality and where the founding ancestors migrated from. Some of these issues will be discussed and clarified later in the chapter using different perspectives offered by disciplines such as architecture, ethnography, history, and geography.The methodology of the chapter relies on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the region between 2015 and 2018 and on archival research done in the Ghana Public Records and Archive Administration in Accra and Tamale, in the White Fathers’ Archive in Rome, and in the National Archives in London. The analysis, in fact, uses a variety of sources and disciplinary contributions, from archival sources to academic works. The architectural contributions, following Ingold, will be considered as they share the “concern to explore the creative processes that give rise to the environments we inhabit, and the ways we perceive them” (Ingold, 2013, p. 10). As for the ethnographical, missionary, and colonial sources, they will be contextualized and historicized. 16

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The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. The first part gives a brief and general historical contextualization. A general layout of a Gurensi house follows. A brief analysis of the material and social features of the compound is also necessary to understand the processes that shaped the planning within the district.This is achieved with the help of ethnographical sources collected in the various publications by the colonial ethnographers that worked in the region. Then the connection between the Gurensi compound and the settlement pattern is analysed. In this way, the chapter shows not only how the built environment was the physical expression of the spatial organization of a certain human group (Rapoport, 2002), but also its linkages and mutual influences with the social and political features of the people who built and inhabited it. In fact, two analogies will emerge. The first regards the inextricable link between the settlement pattern and the sociopolitical organization. The second one is between the architecture of the compound and the kinship system. This landscape is then compared to the first European perceptions. The analysis considers what the first explorers, colonial officials, and missionaries saw when they passed through this territory. The third and last part assesses how the settlement pattern shaped the very idea of Bolgatanga, making it not a village or, as the first British officers called it, a town, in the sense of a spatially composite and centralized group of dwellings, but something quite different.

2.2 The domestic unit and its cycle of development At the end of the 19th century, the Gurensi country was not yet part of the Gold Coast Colony, but it was in the middle of a disputed region. The French army in the North, the kingdoms of Mamprusi and Dagomba and the British army in the South, together with the Zabarima raiding mercenaries, made the region very insecure (Allman and Parker, 2005, pp. 34–37; Der, 1998; Holden, 1965). The state of war and the slave raiding gradually ceased at the end of the century with the military conquest by the British army. The people that inhabited the region were mostly subsistence farmers, meaning that ninety per cent of the population was engaged primarily in a farming activity (Garrard, 1992; Hart, 1978). They had a very peculiar social and political organization, a kind of organization that the literature has labelled ‘acephalous’, ‘decentralized’, ‘stateless’, and so on (for example Fortes, Evans-Pritchard 1940; Lentz 2000). The political organization, the chieftaincy and its historical development in the region is still a complex and much-debated issue8. It could mislead the analysis and take too much space. What we need to know in order to understand the following essay is that there were (and still are) two different kinds of legitimized authorities: the tindaana who managed the ritual jurisdiction of the land, and the naaba or chief, a reference point for the human community that lived on the land. At a smaller level, there was the yzukeema, head of a section of a clan or yidana, the owner of the house and head of the family. To understand the ‘traditional’ compound anatomy, it is better to widen the vocabulary related to it. This allows for a more apt nomenclature of the elements of the settlement and for an enrichment of the analysis. Apart from the colonial officials and the missionaries, one of the first works to give a detailed description of a Gurensi settlement and compound was the one by Rattray, who worked on the so-called ‘Hinterland’ between 1928 and 1929 (Rattray, 1932, pp. 243–254). In his book, with the help of Victor Aboya, he wrote a useful description of a settlement not too far from Bolgatanga, Winkogo. Thanks to this contribution, it is possible for us to figuratively enter a Gurensi compound. The Gurensi names referring to the different spaces of the house (yiri) have remained mostly the same in the last century. Obviously, over the years, there have been changes in the composition of the materials used for building and in certain other domestic features (e.g., electricity, water pipes, plastic, zinc, and cement). However, when 17

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referring to a ‘traditional’ compound, the layout of the building and the names of the spaces have remained mostly the same9. A basic layout can be sketched as follows. This can be applied to the entire Gurensi country and in part even to the neighbouring people such as the Talensi, the Nabdam, and the Kassena (Archer, 1971; Cassiman, 2006; Gabrilopoulos et al., 2002; Hunter, 1967; Mangiameli, 2017). Every domestic unit was surrounded by a circular field (samane) interrupted only by radial paths (sadoo) that led to the entrances of the compound. Of course, this feature was not appreciated by the first Europeans: “crops are grown right up to the walls of the houses, and give cover for every kind of insanitary abuse” (Northcott, 1899, p. 27). This probably echoed the sanitation syndrome that was spreading within colonial institutions of that time (Swanson, 1977). But the Gurensi were not only farmers. Trading, forging, pottery, brass-casting were some of the other activities they were engaged in (Garrard, 1992). There were no different classes and no specialized clergy. Even though the farming activity was a consistent part of the life of these people, it did not impede the development of different occupational roles. It was common at the entrance of the house to find a shrine (bagere). One of the first military reports states: “As far as it was possible to see they appear to have a religion of their own, as there are, in cases, altars, or what look as if meant for that purpose, in front of the compounds”10. Though ritual aspect was crucial in the establishment and development of a compound, this analysis focuses more on the material aspects of the built environment with only few details about the ritual life. The yiri was entirely walled for defensive purposes. The main gate (yaŋa) usually pointed West in the opposite direction of the winds that blow in the rainy season. In front of the yaŋa stood the zanɔre, a typical male space, where the shrines of the male ancestors were kept. It was followed by a courtyard used as a cattle-pen (nagedene), a space for the animals. This contained the main wealth of the family: the cattle and the barn (baarɛ). As for the Talensi, the barn tended to be built at the centre of the compound (Fortes, 1949, p. 56; Northcott, 1899, p. 29) with a small wall (bɛsega) that connected the animal space with the rest of the house, the human space. This was a common courtyard (zinzaka), linked with the kitchen (daaŋa) and the main rooms (bɔ’ɔrɔ), a space dominated by women, where the female ancestors’ shrines were kept. George Ekem Ferguson, a civil servant sent by the British Government to convince people to sign treaties of free commerce north of Asante, described the rooms as “low circular mud walls with conical grass roofs”11 with no windows or any sort of ventilation. This had two main impressions on the colonial eyes. The first one was that these buildings were “easily convertible into strong blockhouses” (Northcott, 1899, p. 28). Later this was stressed again by Allan Wolsey Cardinall, a colonial commissioner writing in the 1920s. According to him the houses “resemble forts or miniature castles, consisting of a series of round huts connected with walls” (Cardinall, 1920, pp. 98–99). His description was later discredited by Meyer Fortes as a “romantic explanation” without foundation of any sort. If the traditional home was a castle, it was believed to be a “psychological” rather than a material one. According to the ethnographer, in fact, the house should be regarded more as “the stage of his [the Talən’s] life’s drama”, “the centre and fount of his major interests, his dominant purposes, his deepest emotional attachments, and his whole scheme of values” (Fortes, 1949, pp. 45–46). The second impression was that “the absence of ventilation renders occupation of a native hut by Europeans almost insupportable, but the owners do not appear to suffer any inconvenience from it even when the vitiated air is thickened with the smoke of a wood fire” (Northcott, 1899, p. 28). But no better room could have been constructed in a place like that in those years. The kind of building described here, one of the different type of compounds of the savanna grassland of the Volta Basin, is, in fact, one of the most suitable for human living considering the environment, the climate, and the availability of

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building materials. First, the round building with one small entrance offers protection against the cold winds, insulation from the temperature leap, an enhanced structural strength, and the best exploitation of the thermal properties given by the earthen walls. Also “the softly rounded, curvilinear surfaces and rough textures of earthen walls typical of savannah architecture eliminate the harsh, irritating contrast between light and dark created by perpendicular intersecting planes, and convert it to softly graded shade and shadow” (Prussin, 1974, p. 187). In the end, the choice of materials was the best considering the clay soils of the savanna and the scarcity of wood. According to Labelle Prussin, a scholar that worked on African architecture, this kind of building represents an architectural quintessence: Perfect balance is achieved between the spaces enclosed and the walls that enclose them. Curvilinear surfaces direct the flow of spaces into one another so that solids and voids merge. Each wall surface, each depression, each space, whether a moulded seat, a bathing enclosure, a conical pillar for nestling fowl, or an ancestral shrine integral with the surface from which it projects, has a raison d’être. (Prussin, 1969, p. 61) It is now possible to deal with the second aspect of the analysis, that is the linkage between the domestic unit and the settlement pattern. In the Gurensi country, there were neither villages nor towns, but dispersed settlements with the family compound (yiri) as a unit. To understand the processes that were shaping the planning of the settlements in this region, it is necessary to turn to the history of the development of domestic units and their spreading in the landscape. There was not a word in Gurune (nor is there one now) to indicate an urban entity such as a town or a village. Rattray already noted it (Rattray, 1932, p. 235), and even Fortes wrote that: “Tɛŋ (pl. tɛs) is the native concept denoting a settlement; but no English translation can convey its exact sense” (Fortes, 1969, p. 164). The nearest Gurensi word to it is teŋa (pl. tiinsi). Its meaning is not only settlement but the earth and the land in their material and ritual aspects. The settlements are therefore appendices and outgrowths of the earth itself. From now on when referring to the settlement, we will use the appropriate Gurensi word, teŋa. As noted before, one essential aspect of the teŋa is its kinship-based structure. Every teŋa is indeed composed of different yizuto (sing. yizuo) that live in an area. The yizuo is a big section of a family directly related to one or more ancestors. A smaller section of the yizuo is the compound or family unit, the yiri. In fact, this word indicates the compound and the family that lives in it.There is no distinction between the two in Gurene, as noted also by Fortes and later by Prussin for the Talensi (Fortes, 1949, p. 44; Prussin, 1969, p. 60). This is revealing about the importance of having a house: house means family, and family means sons, “the vehicles of […] immortality” (Fortes, 1949, p. 46; see also Bourdier, Minh-Ha, 1985, p. 174). The planning of the teŋa was in part the outcome of the conceptual development of the yiri. The Gurensi people were (and still are) patrilineal and patrilocal. Therefore, the yiri tended to expand as a direct consequence of the development of the lineage elder. As many scholars have already stressed, the domestic unit was the concrete expression of the kinship relations and the patrilineal descent system, a unit in constant motion over the years (Cassiman 2006; Fortes, 1969; Gabrilopoulos et al., 2002; Hunter, 1967; Prussin, 1974). The aim of the following section is to better analyze these processes. The basic unit would have been the family of the elder male. His first wife was in the room next to his (deya-aŋa). This is one of the most important rooms in the house, the one belonging to the first wife of the family head. In this flat-roofed room, a series of ritual services were carried out, as for example keeping the corpse of a dead

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relative before the funeral or protecting new-borns in their first days against evil spirits. When subsequent wives eventually arrived, more rooms were built to accommodate them and their children, but only one deya-aŋa could be in the house. The sons, once they got married, would either build other rooms as a compound expansion or leave and establish compounds elsewhere. Division was also the result of the death of the yidana. In the case of Bolgatanga, many divisions in those years were caused by internal disputes, lack of arable land, and the families’ excessive growth in size. In his ethnographic survey among the Talensi, Meyer Fortes stressed the dynamism of the compound layout as one of its basic features. Even in a single year one can see how processes of expansion and contraction, of segmentation and incorporation, are at work all the time. Whenever land changes hands by inheritance, or an office passes by succession, or a man achieves economic independence, a minor reshuffle in the collocation of homesteads takes places. The cumulative effects of these processes of slow but progressive readjustment are clearly exhibited in the contemporary structure of a settlement. They are documented in its constitution and layout, in the location of ancestral graves, the ownership of farm plots, and in ceremonial and political relations. (Fortes, 1969, p. 157) The sizes of compounds had a very wide range. As stated once by a colonial official, “each compound has about fifteen to twenty inhabitants, but there are some very large ones which hold over one hundred and fifty, and are almost villages in themselves” (Cardinall, 1920, pp. 99–100). Actually, even if a single yiri could virtually expand very much, only those of the wealthiest people and those of the chiefs grew.These families’ separations and expansions have been one of the main driving forces behind the establishment of the Gurensi compounds, and thus behind the planning of the teŋa. The choice of the place and the permission to use the land fell in the jurisdiction of and was settled by the ritual authorities, the tindaana and the soothsayer (bakologo). As for the choice of the right place for a teŋa, it should be taken into consideration that the proximity to water was mostly avoided. The vicinity of a river could have caused serious problems such as flooding in the rainy season and the spreading of waterrelated diseases such as onchocerciasis (Fortes, 1969, p. 156; Hunter, 1966). The hill-shaped and rocky landscapes were preferred for defensive purposes and for their natural help against soil erosion. To better understand the development, the choice of the place, and the growth of the yiri, some further details on the processes of building, splitting, and architecture will be added. Only a man, a head of a family, could decide to start the process of building a house. It usually remained a secret decision until the beginning of the actual building.Various factors drove the choice of the proper place for a future compound, as the thermal properties and the fertility of the soil and the presence of wild animals or water. Every action was conceived with and authorized by the soothsayer. After a place was chosen, the man needed the authorization of the tindaana, the ritual owner of the land. Only then one could lay the foundation and start the building process. As written by Fortes about the Talensi, this was not a task entrusted to specialists, but a collective effort carried by the family and other relatives (Fortes, 1949, pp. 47–48). The materials used for a compound needed cyclic maintenance, carried out usually between February and April, a season when the wind stops, and it doesn’t rain yet. When someone happened to leave his or her room permanently, the inhabitants of the compound just stopped the maintenance work for that room. In this way, the structure eventually would collapse freeing its space for future use.

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As Prussin noted, “the personal spaces will realign themselves to accommodate the changing human relationships” (Prussin, 1974, p. 191).

2.3 From the first explorers to the birth of the ‘town’ The communities that inhabited the region thus followed a kinship-based pattern of residence. Family relations were indeed crucial in establishing the place of residence. Even if not completely understood, this was a characteristic that was clear very soon to the Europeans that passed through the Gurensi country. At the end of the 19th century, the region was visited by European explorers such as Adolf Krause, Louis Binger,Von Francois, to acquire knowledge about the people who inhabited it and to assess its economic potential. Louis Binger gives some introductory impressions on the settlement pattern. He entered Pakhé (what is today Paga in the Upper East Region) on 1 August 1888. He followed a trade route through Midegou (Mirigu), Sidegou (Sirigu), and reached Belounga (today Balungu), all places which shared the same settlement pattern as Bolgatanga. His description of Belounga is particularly interesting. He noted that this village “s’allonge par groupes isolés sur une étendue de plus de 2 Kilomètres” (Binger, 1892, p. 22). What he saw was basically a scattered group of compounds. Moreover, it can be observed that almost all the mentioned settlements still exist today, which is evidence of their longevity12. In 1894, the British explored the region they will later call Northern Territories. Ferguson13 saw a similar landscape, reporting: “Their towns are composed of compounds scattered over wide area with farms between”14. After Ferguson, the Colonial government of the Gold Coast sent military expeditions to impose British jurisdiction on the ‘Hinterland’. One of the first reports of these expeditions in the Gurensi region described Bolgatanga (‘Boliga’) as one of ‘the principal towns’. The settlements were so described: All through the part of Mamprusi north of river Volta the towns are differently built. Instead of all the compounds joining each other, as is the case at Gambaga and south of it, each compound is separate, sometimes being two or three hundred yards from another15. This different kind of settlement was later linked to the sociopolitical organization and the kinship system. The first British Commissioner of what would become the Protectorate of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast noted that while in other places “the population is collected in town and villages […] bound together in administrative districts”, “to the north the family is the unit, and the compounds are scattered at distances of from a hundred yards to half a mile. The farm surrounds the compound, and each head of family is a law unto himself ” (Northcott, 1899, p. 27). It can be noted that these first perceptions give just an external view of the compound, a basic description of the outside of the house. Like a photograph taken from outside, it is not possible to enter the compounds and to describe the life of their inhabitants. Some years later, the White Fathers came to establish their Catholic mission in Navrongo, and later in Bolgatanga. They were the first (and for many years the only) missionaries to settle in the region. Their first reports on the settlement pattern did not differ from what has been noted above: toutes ces peuplades [Kusasi, Gurensi, Builsa, Kasena] sont du genre ‘disperse’; elle ne sont pas groupées en villages proprement dits; toutes les ‘sokalas’ (fermes, groupements familiaux

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dans une même et vaste enceinte) sont isolées, et les familles sont assez indépendantes les unes des autres16. The way in which the sociopolitical organization and the built environment were intimately connected is thus immediately apparent. At first glance, the landscape of this region mixed urban (given the presence and the density of the compounds) and rural (due to the presence of the farms) features. This kind of settlement is defined in literature as “dispersed settlement” (Hunter, 1967; Prussin, 1969). The dispersed settlement mirrored a dispersed authority among these people: power was not static but resulted from the fluid and situational relationships between different clans and families that inhabited the region. And in turn, these relations affected the settlement planning. In fact, as suggested by Paul Ladouceur, “each compound was not ‘a law unto itself ’, but a constituent unit of a patrilineage under the leadership of a lineage head who was socially and ritually responsible for the behaviour of all members of the lineage” (Ladouceur, 1979, p. 42). The material landscape is strictly related to and intertwined with the social one, as many scholars have highlighted. Another example of this is the link between the processes of memory shaping and history-telling and the geographical map of the urban settlement. In the Gurensi country, the narratives and the preservation of the past are fractured and scattered through the landscape as for the compounds. The history of a place is the product of different histories preserved by different clan sections that inhabit it; no ‘official’ version predominates (Ignatov, 2017; Lund, 2013). Rattray defined it as a “composite record” (Rattray, 1932, p. 233). This is a common feature in the whole region (Allman and Parker, 2005; Mangiameli, 2017). As for the Kassena of Paga, the settlement map of the Gurensi is strictly related to the genealogical trends of the clans that lived in the area.The landscape is “powerfully mnemonic” in its entirety, with its human and non-human features, as Jean Allman and John Parker wrote for the Talensi (Allman and Parker, 2005, p. 20). Even if the urban entities in the Gurensi country were not centralized, this fact did not prevent the people to lay the foundations for the development of more centralized ones. Bolgatanga is a landmark case. This teŋa is the result of the sum of smaller tiinsi such as Dapore-Tindongo, Bukere, Soe, Kalbɛo,Tindonsoblego,Tindonmɔlego, Sorkabisi to name but a few (see Figure 2.1). The foundation myth recounts that each of these tiinsi was founded by the sons of two remote ancestors, Abolga and Anabila17. The first one is the common ancestor of the families believed to be related to the pioneer settlers. These families, the Tindaambisi, possess the ritual office of the tindaanaship. Anabila, on the other side, is the founding ancestors of the Nabisi, the families who possess the chieftainship, the right to be a chief18. As is still narrated by some elders19, in a remote past these founding ancestors migrated from Yua to come and settle in Yikene, not far from Bolgatanga.Their sons, in turn, started migrating and founded the tiinsi that today compose the town. According to them, the name Bolgatanga has two possible meanings. It might have been given by one of the first white men who visited the region. Approaching some women in the old market in Dapore-Tindongo, he asked the name of the place. Since these women were standing on a rock (tanga) near a place where it was possible to extract soft soil (boleŋa) to plaster the walls of the compounds, they answered boleŋa-tanga, later corrupted into Bolgatanga. The second meaning is directly related to the first ancestor, Abolga. Since it was believed the founder of the teŋa and its shrine was kept under some rocks, the original name would have been Abolga-tanga or Abolga’s rock/Abolga under a rock. Both these names could have historical consistency. Following Fortes and Azaare, it was in fact not uncommon to give a name to a place or to identify it from its topographical or geographical features (as the soft soil), or from a shrine (Azaare, 2017, p. 135; Fortes, 1969, pp. 157–158). For example, this is the case for Kalbɛo, that takes its name from a tingane (sacred grove) located there. 22

The birth of a town

Figure 2.1 Bolgatanga settlements map. Source: Courtesy of Town and Country Planning Department Ghana.

After the colonial military conquest of the area at the beginning of the 20th century, the caravan network that passed through the region began to expand, fostering the marketplaces on the main routes. Bolgatanga’s market was one of these. The Gurensi settlements close to it started to grow, or as Rattray puts it, “become more and more cosmopolitan” (Rattray, 1932, p. 236). They grew, also thanks to the communities of foreigners (called zongos) that began to settle in Bolgatanga for commercial purposes.This was a common thing for many African towns that grew along trade routes, such as Tabora or Mbanza Kongo (Pallaver, 2010;Thornton, 2000). These communities introduced new modes of building. But the appeal for a different way of building spread through the Northern Territories also from another source. As one missionary wrote with great surprise in his diary on 10 February 1913, the chief of Navrongo asked the Christians to build for him a house à l’européenne20. It seems that chiefs and wealthy men preferred this type of buildings. Some years later, Fortes stated that “the Gɔlibdaana of Tɛnzugu and the Yikpɛmdaana of Gorogo each have a large rectangular room of sun-dried bricks, built for them by boys trained at the White Fathers’ Mission at Boləga, and used a sanctum, private storeroom, and personal sleeping-quarters” (Fortes, 1949, p. 49). The choice of the first colonial station was driven by strategic considerations, as the region was still to be settled. So Zuarungu, another teŋa few kilometres from Bolgatanga, was selected as the district capital in 1910 (Bening, 1975). Its proximity resulted in increased prosperity even without direct colonial control. The advent of colonization brought with it new infrastructures, intended to replace the old ones. In fact, the numerous little paths that passed through the region used by the locals and the caravans were gradually replaced by paved roads (see Figure 2.2). The labour for this infrastructure was gathered with the use of force (Allman and Parker, 2005; Thomas, 1973). In 1924, the missionaries recorded their car passing through Bolgatanga21: “Mgr accompagne des PP. Morin et François se rend avec sa ‘Ford’ a Bongo, via Bolaga-Tenga. Ce voyage à travers un pays de plus accidentes est un record. C’est la 1° auto qui passe par là. Partis à 5h 1/2 nous arrivons à 11h”22. The next year, they decided to build a mission in Bolgatanga, 23

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Figure 2.2 The old colonial road that connected Bolgatanga to Zuarungu. Source: Author.

having discovered that “tous les alentours sont couverts de cases”23. The establishment of the mission, of course, gave more impetus to urbanization. The missionaries in the following years built the first Catholic Church in the district and the first school.Within a few years, Bolgatanga would become an important commercial, educational, and Catholic centre (see Figure 2.3). In 1931, it was the biggest ‘village’ in the district, and in the same year a telegraphic network was established24. Its market continued to grow. In the early thirties it was a normal sized market with a few compounds around it. The opening of Pwalagu ferry on the White Volta in 1937 made it possible to reach Bolgatanga most of the year, and it became ‘road-head’ for the kola trade, at the junction of three trade routes into French territory beyond, via Navrongo, Bongo and Bawku. Numbers of traders from Ashanti, Dagomba and Nigeria came to settle, and it became more and more the market centre for all Frafra.There are several minor industries, the chief being the production of hoes from railway sleepers from Kumasi. It has a hospital, electricity, and a piped water supply. (Hilton, 1960, p. 431) With the growth of centralization, cultivable land in the proximity of the compounds became scarce. This led to the development of different kinds of farms. In addition to the compound farm, the most fertile and intensively cultivated land, new farms were established, distant from the houses, sometimes in the bush zones (Hilton, 1960).

2.4 Conclusion The last and conclusive passage of the analysis should be by now much clearer. Bolgatanga was not a village nor a town but was part of an extended landscape at the crossroads of urbanity 24

The birth of a town

Figure 2.3 Bolgatanga. Les P.P. Leclerq, Balch et Bracoud devant la maison des Péres. Source: Archives Générales des Missionaires d’Afrique (A.G.M.Afr.), Rome, Photothèque, 511-22, Masson I-129.2.

and rurality. A peculiar settlement pattern has therefore been pictured. There was not an urban centralized entity, but many decentralized compounds/yiri in connection with each other that in sum formed the teŋa. The map and the life of these scattered compounds resulted in part from their kinship dynamics.The architecture mirrored these dynamics in the same way the teŋa pattern mirrored the political organization of the people that inhabited the built environment. The chapter has shown how the peculiar kind of settlement pattern of Bolgatanga and its environs was an enduring feature of the landscape. Even when colonial rule eventually came to an end, it was difficult for a Westerner to ascertain where an urban settlement ended and where the next one began. In 1956, a missionary stated in his report that Bolgatanga was the biggest and one of the few recognizable towns in a landscape of “nombreuses habitations séparées”25. Similarly, in 1965, it was written that “au-delà de Bolgatanga, la population est totalement dispersée, les localités recensées comprennent des communautés agricoles vivant en groupes disséminés, rarement avec des limites identifiables” (Hilton, 1965, p. 684). However, this analysis has shown how in the Gurensi country there were no ‘villages’ or ‘towns’ (in the sense of a centralized urban entity) before the advent of colonization, not even the very concept of it. The chapter has thus been an attempt to shed some light in a unique way of thinking about urbanity and human settlements. At the border between urbanity and rurality, Bolgatanga defies many definitions of what constitutes the ‘urban’. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, for example, provides a classic example of such definitions (1993, p. 29). She states that to talk of cities or urbanity, three conditions are needed. First, a food surplus needed to feed people involved in specialized activities. Second, the presence of commerce and merchants with expanded trade networks that gather and redistribute foodstuffs.Third, a political power (manifested in a certain degree of monumentality in the city) that manages the distribution of surplus.Yet in Bolgatanga, there was no centralized political nor ritual power that managed the surplus. In some years, there 25

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was not even a surplus. Even if the density of population was the highest one in the Northern Territories, it was essentially a population of farmers, without a specialized group detached from agriculture. The scattered feature was (and in many cases still is) common in the neighbouring regions, as for the Kasena, the Talensi, the Nabdam, and in the southern part of what is today Burkina Faso (Archer, 1971; Bourdier, Minh-Ha, 1985; Fortes, 1969; Hunter, 1967; Mangiameli, 2017; Prussin, 1969). The ‘urban’ entity was called teŋa, and it was a spatial result of the sociopolitical organization of the people that inhabited it. The compound was the concrete expression of the size of the family, and the settlement was the direct outcome of larger kinship relations. Rather than relying on external concepts to understand the urban entities of Bolgatanga, we would do best to depart from the concepts used by the inhabitants themselves. Defining it as a town or even a village oversimplifies and misleads any analysis regarding these entities and brings up more theoretical problems than it can solve.

Notes 1 Ghana Statistical Service, 2010 Population & Housing Census, District Analytical Report: Bolgatanga Municipality. 2 In this chapter, I will refer to the term ‘traditional’ with the meaning attributed to it locally, that is the local way of building. With this I am not suggesting that this way has been the same and without external influences along the years. On the contrary, part of this chapter engages with its historical dynamism. 3 See Asomani-Boateng, 2011; Bourdier, Minh-ha, 1985. 4 Drucker-Brown 2001 provides an example from Northern Ghana; for a general overview, see Rapoport, 2002. 5 In this chapter, many similarities between the Gurensi and Talensi will be highlighted. Sometimes it could be difficult to discern between the two groups.This is because in fact there are many more commonalities than differences. 6 The ethnonym of the people living in the Bolgatanga district is highly problematic. Even if many of these people today recognise themselves as Frafras, this can be understood as a colonial imposition.The correct one should be Gurensi. Considering this ambiguity in the analysis, I will use the latter to indicate the people that inhabit and inhabited the Bolgatanga district and recognized themselves as Frafra/ Gurensi. 7 To cite two seminal studies, see Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1991 and King, 1984. 8 Many scholars whose work focused on Northern Ghana have dealt with these topics in detail. For some recent works on the Upper East Region, see: Awedoba, 2009; Azaare, 2017; Ignatov, 2017; Lund, 2013, 2008, 2003. 9 A comparison can be made between the names used in Rattray, those used by Bourdier, Minh-Ha 1985 and the ones I use in the chapter keeping in mind the dialects variations of the area. 10 The National Archives (TNA), London, CO 879/54, Further Correspondence relating to the Northern Territories, July-December 1898, Director of Military Intelligence to Colonial Office, 28 July 1898, enclosure 1, Report on Mamprusi by Cap. W.G. Murray. 11 TNA CO 96/277, Ferguson’s Mission to the Hinterland, 1894. 12 Fortes assumed that the settlements he studied, even if not territorially static, dated back no less than eight to ten generations (Fortes, 1949, p. 5). 13 Ferguson was not British, even though he received a European education (Arhin, 1974;Thomas, 1972). I decided nonetheless to insert his perceptions here because they do not differ from the European ones. 14 TNA CO 96/277, Ferguson’s Mission to the Hinterland, 1894. 15 TNA, CO 879/54, Report on Mamprusi by Cap. W.G. Murray 16 Rapport du P. Hirgair, 04/04/1913, in Dossier Livinhac 1892-1922,Archives Générales des Missionaires d’Afrique (A.G.M.Afr.), Rome. 17 For the genealogical trees, see Azaare, Bolgatanga Clan and Skin History, unpublished manuscript, forthcoming. 18 This narration pattern of social division between first settlers and invaders is widespread in the entire northern Ghana. 26

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19 The following information have been recorded by Christopher Anabila Azaare in his unpublished manuscript. 20 “Le chef de Navaro ayant reproché aux chrétiens de ne rien faire pour lui, ceux-ci lui proposent de lui bâtir une case rectangulaire, à l’européenne ; et ce vieux Kora d’accepter avec enthousiasme, qui aurait cru que ce vieux fétichiste, défenseur-né de toutes les vieilles routines, allait se civiliser sur ses vieux jours! Après cela, de quoi pourra-t-on désespérer”?, Journal de la mission, Navarro, 10.02.1913, A.G.M.Afr. 21 According to Heap, before 1919 no motor vehicle entered the Northern Territories. Only in 1921 the road that connected the Northern Territories with the Ashanti Region was open, and this was celebrated by the meeting of the Gold Coast Governor with the Haute-Volta Lieutant-Governor in Navrongo (Heap, 1990). The new road network opened sensibly the economy of the region. 22 Journal de la Mission, Navrongo, 24.04.1924, A.G.M.Afr. 23 Journal de la mission, Bolgatanga, 02.02.1925, A.G.M.Afr. 24 Northern Territories Census Report 1931, NRG 8/3/43, National Archives of Ghana, Tamale (NAG-T); Annual report for the Zuarungu District, 1930-1931, NRG 8/3/37, NAG-T. 25 Gerard Lapointe,Table d’enquete sur les moeurs et coutumes indigenes, Diocese de Navrongo (Mission de Bolgatanga) Tribus de Gurusi – Frafra, A.G.M.Afr.

References Allman J.M., Parker J., 2005, Tongnaab: The History of a West African God, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Anderson D., Rathbone R. (eds), 2000, Africa’s Urban Past, Oxford, James Currey. Archer I., 1971, Nabdam Compounds, Northern Ghana, in Oliver P. (ed.), Shelter in Africa, New York, Praeger. Arhin, K. (Ed.), 1974, The Papers of George Ekem Ferguson, Leiden, African Social Research Documents, Afrika-Studiecentrum; Cambridge, African Studies Center. Asomani-Boateng R., 2011, Borrowing from the Past to Sustain the Present and the Future: Indigenous African Urban Forms, Architecture, and Sustainable Urban Development in Contemporary Africa, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 4, 239–262. Awedoba A.K., 2009, An Ethnographic Study of Northern Ghanaian Conflicts: Towards a Sustainable Peace: Key Aspects of Past, Present and Impending Conflicts in Northern Ghana and the Mechanisms for Their Address, Accra, Sub-Saharan Publishers. Azaare C.A., 2017, Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900–1956, in Malik S.S. el-, Kamola I.A. (eds), Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield International. Bening R.B., 1975, Location of District Administrative Capitals in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (1897–1951), Bulletin de l’Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire, 37, 646–666. Binger L.G., 1892, Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée, vol. 2, 2 vols., Paris, Libr. Hachette. Bourdier J.P., Minh-ha T.T., 1985, African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta, New York, Africana Publishing Company. Cardinall A.W., 1920, The Natives of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. Their Customs, Religion and Folklore, London, George Routledge and sons. Cassiman A., 2006, Stirring Life:Women’s Paths and Places among the Kasena of Northern Ghana, Uppsala, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 39. Coquery-Vidrovitch C., 2005, Introduction. African Urban Spaces. History and Culture, in Salm S. J., Falola T. (eds), African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, Rochester, University of Rochester Press. Coquery-Vidrovitch C., 1993, Histoire des villes d’Afrique noire: des origines à la colonisation, Paris, Albin Michel. Coquery-Vidrovitch C., 1991, The Process of Urbanization in Africa (From the Origins to the Beginning of Independence), African Studies Review, 34, 1. Der B.G., 1998, The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana, Accra, Woeli Publishing Services. Drucker-Brown S., 2001, House and hierarchy: Politics and domestic space in Northern Ghana, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7, 4, 669–685. Fortes M., 1969 [1945], The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi: Being the First Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe, Oosterhout N.B., Anthropological Publications, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 27

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Fortes M., 1949, The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi, Oxford, Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Fortes M., Evans-Pritchard E.E., 1940, African Political Systems, Oxford, Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Gabrilopoulos N., Mather C., Apentiik C.R., 2002, Lineage organisation of the Tallensi compound: The social logic of domestic space in Northern Ghana, Africa, 72, 221–244. Garrard T.F., 1992, Brass-casting among the Frafra of Northern Ghana, PhD Thesis, Los Angeles, University of California. Hart K., 1978, The Economic Basis of Tallensi Social History in the Early Twentieth Century, in Dalton G. (ed.), Research in Economic Anthropology. An Annual Compilation of Research, Greenwich, Jai Press Inc. Heap S., 1990, The Development of Motor Transport in the Gold Coast, 1900–39, Journal of Transport History, 11, 19–37. Hilton T.E., 1965, Le peuplement de Frafra, district du Nord-Ghana, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, Série B: Sciences Humaines, 27, 678–700. Hilton T.E., 1960, Frafa Resettlement and the Population Problem in Zuarungu, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, Série B: Sciences Humaines, 22, 426–442. Holden J.J., 1965, The Zabarima conquest of North-West Ghana. Part I, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 8, 60–86. Hunter J.M., 1967, The Social Roots of Dispersed Settlement in Northern Ghana, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 57, 338–349. Hunter J.M., 1966, River Blindness in Nangodi, Northern Ghana: A Hypothesis of Cyclical Advance and Retreat, Geographical Review, 56, 398. Ignatov A., 2017, The Skin and the Stool: Re-Crafting Histories of Belonging in Northern Ghana, in Malik S.S. el-, Kamola I.A. (eds), Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield International. Ingold T., 2013, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, New York, Routledge. King A.D., 1984,The Social Production of Building Form:Theory and Research, Environment and Planning. D. Society and Space, 2, 429–446. Ladouceur P.A., 1979, Chiefs and Politicians: The Politics of Regionalism in Northern Ghana, Longman, New York. Lentz C., 2000, Chieftaincy Has Come to Stay: la chefferie dans les sociétés acéphales du Nord-Ouest Ghana, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 40, 159, 593–614. Lund C., 2013, The Past and Space: On Arguments in African Land Control, Africa, 83, 14–35. Lund C., 2008, Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lund C., 2003, ‘Bawku Is Still Volatile’: Ethno-political Conflict and State Recognition in Northern Ghana, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 41, 587–610. Mabogunje, A.L., 1990, Urban Planning and the Post-colonial State in Africa: A Research Overview, African Studies Review, 33, 121–203. MacGaffey W., 2006, A History of Tamale, 1907–1957 and Beyond, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, 109–124. Mangiameli G., 2017, L’origine plurale. Miti di fondazione kassena, Milano, Raffaello Cortina Editore. Northcott H.P., 1899, Report on the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, London, Harrison and sons. Pallaver K., 2010, Un’altra Zanzibar: schiavitù, colonialismo e urbanizzazione a Tabora (1840–1916), Milano, Franco Angeli. Peel J.D., 1980, Urbanization and Urban History in West Africa, The Journal of African History, 21, 269–277. Prussin L., 1974, An Introduction to Indigenous African Architecture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 33, 183–205. Prussin L., 1969, Architecture in Northern Ghana: A Study of Forms and Functions, Berkeley, University of California Press. Rapoport A., 2002, Spatial Organization and the Built Environment, in Ingold T. (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, London, Taylor & Francis. Rattray R.S., 1932, The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Soeters S.R., 2012, Tamale 1907–1957: Between Colonial Trade and Colonial Chieftainship, PhD Thesis, Leiden University. Swanson M.W., 1977, The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1901, The Journal of African History, 18, 387–410.

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Thomas R., 1973, Forced Labour in British West Africa: The Case of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast 1906–1927, The Journal of African History, XIV, 79–103. Thomas R.G., 1972, George Ekem Ferguson: Civil Servant Extraordinary, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 13, 181–215. Thornton J.K., 2000, Mbanza Kongo/Sao Salvador, Kongo’s Holy City, in Anderson, Rathbone, Africa’s Urban Past, Oxford, James Currey.

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3 History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder in the Niger Republic Abdou Kailou Djibo

3.1 Introduction In Niger, like many colonized countries, city planning is relatively new. The first urban plans of the cities date from the 1930s right in the middle of the colonial period. Indeed, most cities are relatively young, since they emerged during the colonial period (1914–1960) and developed after independence (Alpha Gado, 1993). However, some cities such as Zinder, Konni, and Agadez have existed since the 11th century, even if they were few in number and little known in terms of planning. During this pre-colonial period, these cities had always played an important political, religious, and exchange role among civilizations. The city of Zinder, known as the first capital city of Niger Republic, is important for its urban morphology and for its remarkable historical and cultural facts. This city, which was the capital of the French colony of Niger from 1911 to 1926, constituted a place of exchange for the caravan trade because of its position at the crossroads of the communication channels between the Sahara and Nigeria in the context of the trans-Saharan trade, and between Dakar and N’djamena for the trans-Sahelian trade, in the 17th century. The first nucleus of the town of Zinder, Birni, built around huge granite massifs since the 11th century, characterizes its historical importance for the sultanate1 of the Damagaram region and its population. However, the very first planning of the city dates from 1851 under the reign of Sultan2 Tanimun (Sultanat de Zinder, 2009).The colonial period from 1900 to 1960 also brought logic of urban planning different from that which existed before.Today, despite the demographic and spatial growth of the city, Zinder lamentably lacks any serious urban planning. In the past Zinder, like most Nigerien cities, was laid out without planning. Nevertheless, from the 1900s to this day, schemes and plans have been designed to guide and control the spatial development of these cities. But obviously, one realizes that these cities, including Zinder, were urbanized without a real implementation of the plans established by the municipal authorities and technical services. Several reasons could explain this state of affairs. The most important one is the phenomenon of increasing urbanization in a context marked by chronic drought and rural-urban migration. Indeed, demography and the rapid urbanization have resulted in the development of the city without respect for urban plans. For the City of Zinder, the spatial limits set in the master plan, which served as a planning tool for the development of the city until 2000, have been all filled in. In addition, within the 30

History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder

urban fabric of the 24 main districts, there is a lack of land for the construction of infrastructure to cope with the many needs of a growing population. Today, the city of Zinder faces a serious problem related to urban growth management and the lack of land within the city for the construction of infrastructures to meet the many needs of an ever-increasing population and the new economic context with the creation of the Zinder refinery and university. To respond to this gigantic urban development challenge, the city of Zinder has put at the centre of its concerns, the organization and management of urban space through the elaboration of an urban reference plan to improve the current urban functioning, to correct the shortage in terms of infrastructures and equipment and to reorient the development of the city. So, the purpose of this chapter is to make a diachronic analysis of the urban planning of the city of Zinder in the Niger Republic. The objective is to show that there have been several urban planning policies and efforts with different objectives for the city of Zinder over time. The chapter addresses the following research questions: •• ••

what explains the differences between the urban plans adopted over the years and the spatial evolution and the current spatial structure of the city of Zinder? what is the purpose of the planning process in the city of Zinder?

To answer these questions, a diachronic analysis of the urban planning process in the city of Zinder is presented in the following sections. In addition, the archive documents of the Sultanate of Zinder and the various planning documents of the city of Zinder have been explored.We also conducted interviews with key informants in the city of Zinder. This study has been carried out through a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology. It is based on archival documents of the Sultanate of Zinder, on the various town planning documents of the town of Zinder and on interviews with the custodians of the tradition. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section presents the geographical and historical context of the city and the methodology adopted in this study.This is followed by two other sections, one focusing on the results and the other discussing the findings, before it ends with a conclusion.

3.2 Contextual background and methodology 3.2.1 Background The city of Zinder is located about 900 km east of Niamey, the capital of Niger, on the national road no1, and 700 km West of Lake Chad at the crossroads of two major international axes: the trans-Sahelian, oriented from west to east, and the Trans-Saharan, from south to north. The city is located between 13°36′ and 13°60′ north latitude and 8°00′ and 9°50′ east longitude. It covers an area of about 570 Km², or 0.37% of the total area of the region which is estimated at 155,778 Km². Its population is estimated at 392,835 inhabitants out of which 162,705 are males and 160,230 are females. The population of the urban part was estimated at 235,600 inhabitants, that is about 8.5% of the urban population of Niger which was of 2,778,337, that is an average density of 567 persons/Km2 (Institut National de la Statistique, 2012). The city has areas of high altitude and low altitude. It rests on a thick granite block base, impervious and outcropping flush all over the place.The slightly uneven gently undulating terrain is scattered in places with ponds.We also note the presence of some hills consisting of balls, granite rock slide scree, quartzite and gravel in the southeast and west.There is a slight slope from north to south, the highest point is at an altitude of more than 450 m in the Birni neighbourhood in its urban part. 31

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There is also another slope from west to east. According to Mamadou Ibrahim et al. (2016), the urban morphology of Zinder is characterized by basement outcrop areas and mounds in the form of chaos, slabs, or isolated generate heavy runoff that crosses the city and invade storm water ponds. Administratively, the city of Zinder has become a commune of its own since 1962. It was erected to urban community status by the law n° 2002-06 of 11 June 2002. It is currently a town with special status since 2010 by the order N° 2010-56 17 September 2010. It is divided into 5 municipal districts, the 1st 4 of which are composed of a number of peri-urban villages and 36 urban districts, while the 5th district is essentially rural. As shown in Figure 3.1, the city territory is limited in the East by the rural communes of Gafati and Koleram; in the West by the rural communes of Droum and Tirmini; in the north by the rural communes of Tirmini and Dakoussa; and in the South by the rural communes of Dogo and Gouna. The first demographic surveys carried out in 1956 and 1964 estimated the population, respectively, at 14,295 and 22,900 inhabitants. At the first General Population Census of 1977, the population was 53,714. In the second census, in 1988, with the attachment of 28 outlying villages to the municipality of Zinder, the population increased to 122,100 inhabitants. At the first General Population and Housing Census in 2001, it was estimated that there were 206,260 inhabitants (104,671 males and 101,589 females). Finally, in 2012, the population increased to 322,935 inhabitants (Institut National de la Statistique, 2012). In 2017, it is estimated at 392,835 inhabitants (see Figure 3.2). This demographic growth has resulted in a spread of the city (Noufou, 2010). As a result, the built area of the city has increased from 1300 ha in 1980 to 3888 ha in 2017 as shown in Figure 3.3. The first neighbourhoods of the city (Birni and Zongo), founded in the 18th century, constituted a relay for a flourishing caravan trade between North Africa and the West. The city of Zinder was also the seat of the government of the French military territory, then of the French colony between 1911 and 1926, before Niamey replaced it as the capital city of the colony.

Figure 3.1 Location of Zinder. Source: Data Shapfiles IGNN, 2012.

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Figure 3.2 Demographic evolution of Zinder city. Source: City of Zinder, 2012.

Figure 3.3 Spatial evolution of Zinder city. Source: City of Zinder, 2012.

Abdou Kailou Djibo

3.2.2 Issues According to several UN Habitat reports, the cities of the global south, especially those in subSaharan Africa, are urbanizing in an uncontrolled and disordered manner. This situation gives rise to multiple problems in the urban planning of agglomerations (Chenal, 2009). Demography and uncontrolled urbanization in this part of the world where the economy does not follow the urban dynamics is likely to worsen the humanitarian situation in these cities. Zinder, the secondlargest city in Niger, is not on the side-lines fringe of this situation. Indeed, in Zinder, the problem of land management and urban planning arises first in terms of contradictions contained in the texts relating to the rural code, urban planning, and decentralization. Then, it arises in terms of lack of articulation between land development and urban planning, but also, in terms of lack of clarity in the responsibility of the various stakeholders (State, local authorities, other actors). However, cities have existed in Africa since the 13th century, even if they were few and not dense, contrary to an idea that the cities of Africa date from the colonial period of the early 20th century (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1988, 2006). Zinder, the second largest city of Niger in terms of population, is among these pre-colonial African cities. Indeed, the city was founded, according to one legend version, by a hunter named Zindirma who came from Bornou3 around the 11th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, the city of Zinder became the capital of the sultanate of Damagaram during the reign of Suleymane Dan Tanimoune. The very first planning of the city took place in 1852, with the construction of a palace for the Sultan and a wall to protect the city during the reign of Tanimoune (République du Niger, 2006), the most famous sultan and founder of the Damagaram empire. However, the colonial city from 1914 to 1960 that was built according to the model of town planning of the modern movement had turned its back on the old city to create another city centre at the intersection of the national roads N°1 and N°11. Today, the city of Zinder faces a major problem that relates to the management of urban growth without real planning despite the new economic and social context with the creation of the refinery and the university.

3.2.3 Methodology To conduct this study, the methodological approach lies on direct field observation, the exploration of urban plans and archived documents of the Sultanate of the city of Zinder. The direct observation consisted at the very beginning in walking around all the districts of the city to see the urban morphology. This phase, which is a preliminary observation of the reading of urban space and urban planning practices, allowed us to make observations on infrastructures, urban roads, land use, the structuring of space, and the shape of the habitat in the city. We also analyzed the various master plans of town planning and urban planning and the plans of subdivisions of the city of Zinder.We then analyzed aerial photographs and shapefiles of Zinder and its urban area.This analysis allowed us to produce maps and city plans. The interviews focused on urban planning actors of the state service of urbanism, those of the city of Zinder and a lord at the Sultanate of Zinder with whom we talked about the history of the wall of the Birni district and its organization.

3.3 Results 3.3.1 Institutional and regulatory framework and urban planning actors in Zinder Niger, right after the independence in 1960, took steps to ensure the management of local affairs, through the structures of the decentralized and de-concentrated administration. The first 34

History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder

measures defining the institutional framework for the operation of local authorities (arrondissements and communes) was taken in 1964 (Law 64-023 dated 17 July 1964 in particular). These measures remain without fundamental changes in concrete terms. However, since the introduction of multiparty politics and the rule of law in Niger on the basis of the political events of the 1990s (National Sovereign Conference), all successive constitutions (1992, 1996, 1999, and 2010) have reaffirmed the principle that the administration of the national territory would be based on decentralization and de-concentration (République du Niger, 2004). In this respect, in the field of the production of legislative and regulatory texts in urban planning, several laws were adopted at that time. But, the adoption of Ordinance No. 97-005 of 17 January 1997 is undoubtedly the starting point for a real coherent urban policy in Niger (République du Niger, 1997). Indeed, the main orientations in terms of urban development have been governed by the latter. It institutes and specifies the main projection and operational documents. Thus, the master urban development plans (UDP), the sector district plans (DP), the urban reference plan (URP), and the land use plan (LUP) have been defined as town planning tools on one hand, and on the other hand, the parcelling out, rehabilitation, renovation, and restructuring have been officially presented as the main operational town planning tools. Local authorities (Municipalities) have been given general as well as specific prerogatives by the law on the free administration of communities and the law on the transfer of powers. As regards remit transfer, most of the sectors concerned have a direct or indirect link with urban development.These include the property of local authorities, regional (spatial) planning, (urban) town planning, the environment, education, health, and economic and social development. In terms of urban management, which concerns municipalities in particular, the interventions are generally the result of a multiplicity of actors or operators (Town Councils , Ministry of the State Property domains, urban town planning and housing, Ministry of the interior and religious affairs, the Ministry of land register, customary owners, users, real estate developers, research consultancy, notary offices, external sponsors and projects, dealers, and private companies). All these stakeholders generally come under a variety of statutes: public, semi-public or private, legal entities or natural persons. This multiplicity of urban actors, the diversity of their own logic, and the often contradictory nature of their interests (opposition between public and private interests) are sometimes unfavourable factors to spatial production, and coherent and rational management of urban space.

3.3.2 Spatial dynamics in Zinder The city of Zinder has developed on both sides of the national road N°1 which crosses it from west to east. Its spatial evolution has gone through several stages.The first urban nuclei are Birni district, Garin Malam, and Zongo, which date back before colonization.The spatial evolution of the city is limited in its south-western, western, and north-eastern part due to the presence of the airport, Kagna pond, and rocky hills. On the other hand, the areas located in the east, south and south-east, north-west of the city have significant land potential.They are therefore very favourable areas for town planning. Since the advent of the decentralization process and the installation of municipal councils in 2004, financial and land management have been exercised by the municipality in urban areas. It was the municipality that carried out the parcelling and sold the plots. However, some aspects of state property management were under the responsibility of the central council of the city of Zinder, which chairs the local town planning and housing commission. It approves the parcelling out 35

Abdou Kailou Djibo

projects.To that end, several extension projects were approved in the different districts of Zinder between 2004 and 2010 as follows: •• •• •• •• ••

district 1: 312,04 ha district 2: 187,12 ha district 3: 195,64 ha district 4: 289,54 ha district 5 (rural): a parcelling out.

The spatial dynamics in Zinder is characterized by two types of zone: the urban zone with 3,888 hectares and the rural agricultural zone with more than 48,850 hectares. The occupation of urban space is structured in several components: housing, roads, equipment (schools, health centres, markets), and major activities (military barracks, administrations, universities, airports, and industrial zones). Large activities take up a lot of space and create an imbalance in spatial distribution. Few subdivisions comply with the subdivision legislation in relation to space allocation. This regulation stipulates that the habitat must have 50–60%, the public road network 20–25%, and the equipment 10–15%. Table 3.1 shows that the urbanized territory of the city of Zinder represents only an area of 13%, or 7,045 ha. More than half of this 4,830 ha area is not yet serviced and therefore unoccupied. In urbanized areas, the residential function and major activities make up the largest part. Table 3.1 also shows that the non-urbanized areas of the city occupy 87% of the territory and are composed of previously undeveloped extension areas and largely rural unstructured village habitat areas

3.3.3 The organization of the ancient city of Birni The first nucleus of the city of Zinder was created in the 11th century, but its apogee was the second part of the 19th century under the reign of Sultan Tanimoune (1851–1884). It was in Table 3.1 Land cover in the city of Zinder in 2017 District

Urban Rural Area of Area of Area of Anothers Non Area non population population habitat (ha) equipement roads parcelings aedificandie occuped (ha) not area approved

Zinder I 69558 Pourcentage 29% Zinder II 68147 Pourcentage 28% Zinder III 58611 Pourcentage 24% Zinder IV 45503 Pourcentage 19% Zinder V 0 Pourcentage  0% Total ville 241 819 Pourcentage 62%

33366 22% 15768 10% 9504 6% 52935 35% 39441 26% 151014 38%

362,08 5% 140,48 2% 142,74 2% 309,38 3% 0 0% 954,68 2%

829,94 12% 34,68 0,5% 32,56 1% 43,16 0% 0 0% 940,34 2%

164,27 2% 70,57 1% 65,66 1% 19,97 0% 0 0% 320,47 1%

Source: City of Zinder, 2017 and National Institute of Statistics (INS) 2017.

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1396 20% 395 6% 840 14% 842 8% 0 0% 3473 7%

779 11% 55 1% 73 1% 450 4% 0 0% 1357 3%

3542,7 50% 6443,56 90% 4908,68 81% 9200,84 85% 21654,97 100% 45750,75 87%

History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder

Figure 3.4 Rest of the wall of Birni Zinder. Source: KAILOU DJIBO A, April 2018.

1857 in the midst of a local tribal war that the great wall of Birni was built. Some remains of the wall, especially the south gate of Kankandi, are still visible as seen in Figure 3.4. According to Foureau (République du Niger, 2006), the French Captain of the colonial mission of 1899, the city wall in Birni, made of clay was 9–10 m high and 12–14 m thick at the base. The wall had 7 entrances that played a socio-economic, cultural, and/or religious role. In this pre-colonial era, the planning of the Zinder Birni city was like the ancient Greek and Roman cities where the royal palace exerted an influence on the other urban spaces. The city also served as a rallying point and sharing for trans-Saharan4 caravans that transported salt and merchandise from the Mediterranean coast to Hausa areas. In 1898, after the landing of the French colonial mission led by Captain Cazemajou in the region of Damagaram, France set up a military post in Zinder to better control the conquered territory. On this occasion, the wall of Birni was demolished. The Birni district which is the first core of Zinder has kept its ancient urban aspect and its tangible characteristics. It is in Birni that one finds the most decorated houses in Zinder. They testify to the splendour, the artistic and aesthetic interest of the Hausa architecture.

3.3.4 First sketch of planning of colonial period Until 1900 at the beginning of the French colonization, the city of Zinder consisted of two neighbouring small towns – Birni and Zengou – separated by a distance of 2–3 km. Birni, the first core is the district housing the sultanate and the Kanuri aristocracy that came from Damagaram Takaya. Around 1950, Zengou expanded and another core Garin Malam (district of the local Hausa marabouts) appeared in the north-east on a hill.The spatial evolution of the city has gone through several stages. Birni, Zengou, and Garin Malam were the first cores created in the 18th century and are therefore the old quarters of the city. After the demolition of the Birni Wall in 1898, the French set up a fort and some colonialstyle houses on the hill located at the North Gate near Zinder’s water tank 1. This period 37

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saw the production of the first sketch of town planning with the set-up of the business area, the current Zinder downtown, and the cathedral coupled with a Christian school between Birni and Zengou. Several business units have been established in its north-west part between Birni and Zengou neighbourhoods. So this first scheme modified in 1953 proposed a zoning system that divided the urban territory into four zones that are: the business area with the setup of the first colonial-style buildings in the downtown; the sports and leisure area with the creation of the racing field in the north-east of the Zengou district; the residential area with traditional housing; and the military and administrative zone on a high land between Birni and the business zone. The proposals made in this 1953 scheme were carried out as planned up to 1961. The analysis of this sketch shows that it was designed according to the double principle of colonial town planning (checkered plan and functional and social segregation) like several black African French-speaking cities (Vénard, 1986) and similar to the city of Niamey (Motcho, 2004).

3.3.5 The first serviced plots of the city of Zinder of the 1970s From the 1960s, built-up areas have been increasing and the three neighbourhoods tend to bind together while the creation of an airport terminal and a military camp is observed in the south. In 1961, when the first economic and social development plan (1961–1963) came into being, it was planned to strengthen the water and electricity networks of the city of Zinder. Thus, another urban plan was created in 1964 to complete the first plan of 1953 (République du Niger Ministère de l’Urbanisme, 2004). At the same time, some subdivisions were created by giving birth to new neighbourhoods, as is the case of Sabon Gari, Dispensaire, N’walla, and administrative district with equipment in the centre. From the 1970s up to now, the population of Zinder has significantly increased. This situation creates a need for plots, which consequently gives birth to new districts such as Awali, Charé Zamna, Kara Kara, Jaguindi, and Hypodrome. The city of Zinder has developed on both sides of the national roads No. 1 Niamey-Diffa and No. 11 Agadez-Magaria which cross the town from west to east and north to south, respectively.

3.3.6 Urban development plan (UDP) of 1980 The very strong urban growth of the 1980s, 5–6% per year on average, led Nigerien officials to favour an urban planning policy based among other things on setting a framework in which each city with more than 10,000 inhabitants, is expected to evolve in the medium and long term according to the UDP. Thus, the year 1980 was that of the design of the first UDP of the city of Zinder by the State of Niger with the technical and financial support of the German cooperation. Then, in 1988, there was a master plan of sanitation of the city, which not only took into account the orientations of the MPUP of the 1980s, but also made an update of the achievements of the various parcelling out operations. This scheme also took into account the errors observed in the implementation of the 1980 UDP and proposed new orientations for future developments. Extensive zones have been identified in the south-east, west, north-east, and north. The schemes of 1980 and 1988 served as a guiding framework for the management of the city for about twenty years. After ten years of implementation of the urban planning policy, the public authorities have agreed at national level to develop and implement a new urban planning reform, which was legalized by the adoption of the ordinance n°97-005 of 17 January 1997 instituting the documents of urban planning and operational urban planning in Niger as well as the tools of control of the use of the urban land and its decrees of application. 38

History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder

3.3.7 Parcelling out without urban services from 2000 to 2017 The beginning of the 2000s coincides with the decentralization in Niger and the expiry date of the MPUP for big cities. During this period, the state withdrew from the management of the municipalities in favour of local area councils. Consequently, urban planning became limited to parcelling out allotments without any servicing of the land, to the exchange of parcels by the city halls, and to excessive fragmentation of the land reserves.Thus, apart from the ordinary subdivisions operated by the different city halls of Niger, the first government of the Fifth Republic of Niger initiated in 2002, the operation “arrears of wages against parcels” following an agreement with the workers’ Unions who totalled several months of unpaid salary (Adamou, 2011).These inappropriate subdivisions that some analysts like (Moussa Kassey, 1995) describe as “real waste of land”, have led to an unprecedented sprawl of cities especially Niamey and Zinder. In the case of Zinder, the urbanized area increased from about 2,170 ha in 2000 with a density of 94 inhabitants per hectare to 6,146 ha in 2017 for a density of 63.91 inhabitants per hectare (see Table 3.2). Although there is a slight increase in density between 2000 and 2012, it should be noted that the subdivisions are not carried out to meet the need for housing as shown by the sudden drop in density in 2017. It is clear that there is a significant difference between the two main components of urbanization in Niger, namely demographic and spatial trends. Figure 3.5 shows us the synchronic situation of the town of Zinder in 2017 where it is clear that the subdivisions operated after the year 2000 are more important in terms of spatial occupation than all other developments made since the foundation of the city of Zinder. This shows that these operations are fanciful and therefore are not made to meet any need for housing offer as it should be.

3.4 Discussion 3.4.1 Zinder, fortified town with traditional architecture The wall of Birni Zinder before 1900 was used to protect the city against external aggressions. Birni, the historical centre of the city of Zinder grouped the essential customary functions (religious, legal, commercial, craft, and so on) of the city at the sultanate level. All spaces of the city (palace, mosque, market, leisure, and so on) were organized so as to ensure control over daily activities. Right next to the palace, is the mosque, considered as the mosque of the Sultan. Its construction dates back to the beginning of the reign of Tanimoune, between 1850 and 1855. It is Table 3.2 Demographic and spatial evolution of the city of Zinder in Niger Year

1960 1984 2000 2012 2017

Zinder Population

Area in ha

Density

14,570 60,000 206,000 322,935 392,835

512 1,300 2,170 2,700 7,049.49

28.45 46.15 94.93 119.60 63.91

Source: City of Zinder, 2017 and National Institute of Statistics (INS) 2017.

39

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Figure 3.5 The city of Zinder in 2017. Source: Regional Direction of Urbanism, 2017.

built in a neo-Sudanese style of a timbuktuan type. The construction has an overall square plan shape and a relatively massive exterior appearance. Birni is home to the most decorated houses in Zinder. They bear witness to the splendour and artistic and aesthetic interest of Hausa architecture (see Figure 3.6). Today, with the removal of the wall, Birni has lost its defensive system. The district remains the densest of the city so much that the influence of the old wall is despite the injunctions of the Ministry of Culture that wishes to restore the ancient wall in a symbolic way (Sultanat de Zinder, 2009).

3.4.2 Juxtaposition of the colonial city with ancient fabrics As in all colonized cities, the colonization had also a significant impact on the urban phenomenon in Zinder. Indeed, the colonizer had established a new city contiguous to the old with new principles. The city was partitioned and planned according to the principle of zoning, characteristic of the modern urbanism of CIAM5 that emerged during this period. The various functions (political, economic, social, ideological) of the city, which were formerly organized around the sultanate of Birni, have been moved to the north-west of the city and are articulated in dedicated spaces that obey planning with predefined rules. But in general, it must be said that almost all colonial cities such as Abidjan (Aloko-N’guessan and N’dahoule-yao, 2008), Niamey (Motcho, 2004), and others, are built based on this principle. In these, the implementation of the first urban plans from 1920 onwards was followed by a “segregationist planning policy qualified as a hygienist” (Aloko-N’guessan and N’dahoule-yao, 2008). In most cities, for example, the precarious settlements of the indigenous people on the high land and favourable areas were destroyed in order to build the first colonial houses. From the year 1945, there was the introduction of commercial zones in the urban space, and so were created department stores like the 40

History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder

Figure 3.6 A decorated house in Birni. Source: Kailou Djibo A., April 2018.

French Company of West Africa (FCWA), the Commercial Company of West Africa (CWA), among others, in virtually every major city. For some 40 years (1920–1960), urban planning was carried out according to the principles mentioned above.

3.4.3 Lack of synergy between urban planning actors in Zinder In Zinder, as in all Nigerien cities, there is a problem of land resources and urban planning management that presents itself in terms of contradictions to the rural code, urban planning, and decentralization policy. This situation has resulted in anarchic management of the city in particular and local communities in general. With regard to the contradictions, it is possible to raise as an example that the law n°61-37 of 24 November 1961 regulating the expropriation for public utility and the temporary occupation, provides that this expropriation is made for the benefit of the state. Local authorities cannot exercise the procedure of expropriation for reasons of public utility by themselves. However, Law 2002-13 of 11 June 2002 on the transfer of powers to local and regional authorities provides for the possibility of transferring competences in land, planning, spatial planning, and town planning to local and regional authorities. The problem does not only arise in terms of articulation between land development and urban planning, but also, in terms of lack of clarity in the responsibilities of different stakeholders according to the Ministry of Urban Planning. Thus, there is a lack of clarity in the roles of the actors. The general nature of texts and attributions, coupled with a lack of clarification of roles deviated to each, the multitude of often contradictory laws and regulations, similar or identical attributions to two separate public institutions, explains the conflicts of competence between actors. An example is Ordinance 59-113, which makes the Ministry of Finance of Niger the main subdivision actor, whereas such a prerogative has been devolved to the Ministry of Public Work (Planning) since the beginning of the 1960s. As for the lack of articulation between land development and urban planning, it lies in the fact that the city of Zinder has evolved between 2000 to the present day without a master plan for development that could have served as a coherent framework for the various subdivision 41

Abdou Kailou Djibo

operations. Planning and development considerations have thus been totally ignored, which has led to an excessive consumption of land assets, a shortage or lack of equipment and infrastructure and a low density of occupation leading to anarchy of land with a multitude of actors speculating in the sale of land in spite of Decree No. 97-305/PRN/ME/I of 8 August 1997 laying down the procedures for the elaboration, approval, and implementation of urban planning documents.

3.4.4 Planning objectives partially achieved in Zinder The planning of the pre-colonial city was centred on the “Guida”6 and allows user-friendliness, but unsuitable for the modern life dominated by the automobile whereas the colonial one puts emphasis on the sanitation. In this sense, the pre-colonial city was closed with an organic form without spatial continuity between the neighbourhoods while the adjacent colonial city next door was much more open, with spatial continuity but with a socio-spatial segregation. While the planning of the colonial city has focused on the establishment of industrial units (oil mill, sotramil, tannery) and business as CWA, the postcolonial city (1960–1980) has been in a lethargy due to the young independent state. Indeed, the period 1960–1980 can be considered as the period during which urban planning has only timidly progressed, even if paradoxically this moment has recorded an important urban growth of the city of Zinder. The plans of the pre-colonial and colonial cities were essentially executed, but that of the postcolonial city (1980–2000) did not achieve its objectives because of the international economic crisis of the 1980s. Indeed, the economic crisis in Niger which has started in the 1980s and continued until the eve of the 21st century has stroke a fatal blow on urban planning with the structural adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed by Breton Wood’s institutions in Niger. The state was obliged to reduce its social spending, including that on essential urban services, in order to pay its debt. The lack of resources has led to difficulties in controlling the extension of the city, the low level of achievement of the orientations of the UDP of 1980, and the lack of follow-up actions that are often off plan. With regard to the current city (2000–2017), it is spreading out and devouring agricultural lands while the old plans guaranteed security of tenure. Thus, the present city does not obey to a rational logic of human installation while the old plans were relatively serviced.

3.5 Conclusion The pre-colonial city of Zinder was a fortified city within which activities took place around the Sultanate Square. It still houses beautifully decorated buildings with impressive ancient architecture. The colonization of the 1900s did not only destroy the wall of the city, but also displaced the urban centre of Birni to the northwest of the city next to the Zengou district. During this period, the focus was on the production of houses and commercial equipment such as the French West African Company (CWA) following the style of the modern movement: wide communication routes, colonial building, and socio-spatial segregation. From 1960, after the decolonization of the country, urban planning was centralized and articulated around the urban plan in checkerboard inspired by the colonial one. There has been a re-appropriation of the white city by the populations as pointed out by Jean-Fabien (2005). It is in this context that the first subdivisions of the city of Zinder intervened in 1968 with the creation of districts such as Sabon Gari, Kara Kara 1, and N’walla. However, despite the favourable institutional and regulatory framework for urban planning in Zinder, there were financial and technical constraints. Indeed, the economic crisis of the years 1980–1990 that 42

History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder

Niger experienced did not allow the authorities and technicians to do all the physical monitoring in order to achieve the objectives assigned to the planning documents. Today, with the decentralization, despite the emergence of new urban actors, the lack of synergy between these actors of urban management and the confusion of the roles of the intervening actors in the city complicates the urban planning of the city of Zinder.

Notes 1 Sultanate is the seat of the Sultan and more widely, the territory governed by him. 2 Sultan is a title borne by Muslim monarchs since around the year 1000. 3 Bornou is the region of the current Maidougouri in Nigeria. 4 The penetration of Islam in this region was possible, thanks to Arab and Berber merchants from the North between the 13th and 14th century. 5 International Congresses of Modern Architecture CIAM were born from the need to promote functional architecture and urbanism. 6 Hausa word meaning  “house”.

References Adamou, A. (2011). L’étalement urbain dans la ville de Niamey. Thèse de doctorat inédit. Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey, Niger. Aloko-n’guessan, J. & N’dahoule-yao, R. (2008). La planification urbaine à l’épreuve des pratiques résidentielles dans la métropole ivoirienne. In Jérôme, A. et al. Villes et Organisation de l’Espace en Afrique. Paris: Editions Karthala.Volume 4. pp. 59–85. Alpha Gado, B. (1993). Une histoire des famines au Sahel: Étude des Grandes Crises Alimentaires (XIXe– XXe siècle)”, Paris, Editions L’Harmattan. p. 201. Chenal, J. (2009). Urbanisation, planification urbaine et modèles de ville en Afrique de l’Ouest: Jeux et Enjeux de l’Espace Public. Thèse de doctorat inédit. Revue Lausanne: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. (2006). De la ville en Afrique noire. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 5, pp. 1087–1119. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. (1988). Processus d’urbanisation en Afrique, Paris: Editions 1 ’Harmattan,Tome 1, p. 168. Institut National de la Statistique (2012). République du Niger, Ministère de l’Economie et des Finances, Analyse des Caractéristiques de l’habitat et cadre de vie des populations à partir du RGP/H 2012, p. 351. Jean-Fabien, S. (2005). Abidjan et le Plateau: quels modèles urbains pour la vitrine du “miracle” ivoirien? Géocarrefour, vol. 80(3), pp. 215–226. Mamadou, I et al. (2016). Difficultés d’accès à l’eau potable dans la ville de Zinder (Niger): causes, conséquences et perspectives. In Afrique Science-1247. pp. 1–18. Motcho, K.H. (2004). La réforme communale de la communauté urbaine de Niamey (Niger) / Community restructuring within the Niamey urban area. In Revue de géographie alpine, tome, 92(1), pp. 111–124. Moussa Kassey, S. (1995). Politique de Planification Urbaine au Niger: Le cas de la ville de Niamey. Cahier du Cidep N 22, p. 94. Nouhou, I. (2010). Les effets des marchés fonciers et expropriations des terres dans la ville de Zinder au Niger, Mémoire DEA, Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey, Niger. p. 87. République du Niger (1997). Décret N 97-304/PRN/ME/I du 08 Août 1997 portant création, attributions et organisation des organes consultatifs en matière d’Urbanisme et d’Habitat”. République du Niger Ministère de l’urbanisme, de l’habitat et du domaine foncier public (2004). Stratégie nationale de développement urbain. République du Niger, Ministère de la Culture, des Arts et de la Communication – Dir. du Patrimoine Culturel et des Musées (2006). La vieille ville de Zinder, quartier de Birni et le Sultanat. Rapport de travail https​://wh​c.une​sco.o​rg/fr​/list​esind​icati​ves/5​040/ Sultanat de Zinder (2009). La vieille ville de Zinder, quartier de Birni et le Sultanat. Rapport de travail sur l’organisation de Birni Zinder. Venard, J. L. (1986). Intervention française dans le secteur urbain en Afrique noire francophone. Paris: Economica. 43

4 Mise en valeur and repopulation in colonial rural development in French Morocco Michele Tenzon

4.1 Introduction In the French colonial context, rural modernization was intertwined with control and security strategies and with a programme of cultural and economic infiltration of the colonized societies by the dominant power. As prominent tools of the modernizing action, colonial urban and regional planning played a major role in giving physical form to the emergence of power structures aimed at reinforcing and stabilizing the French occupation of the country. This chapter explores the rural development and resettlement schemes within the evolving context of social, economic, and material conditions upon which the programme of modernizing the country was built. It focuses on the role of projects implemented in the Gharb valley1 – a coastal plain north of the Moroccan capital, Rabat – in enabling French settlers to acquire a dominant position within the physical, economic, and social landscape of the region and in marginalizing native pastoral groups. In particular, I consider schemes implemented by the colonial administration as part of an official colonization programme and then a partially realized regional plan elaborated by the French modernist architect and urban planner Michel Écochard and some members of the Service de l’Urbanisme. The French regarded the Gharb valley, even before the establishment of the Moroccan Protectorate in 1912, as one of the most promising areas for the development of a modern agricultural hub and for the settling of colonist farmers. The valley, located near the coast, was rich in water, although the uneven distribution of precipitation throughout the year and the irregular water regime of its major river, the Sebou, and its tributaries caused periodic, violent floods.The region’s topography and the presence of relatively high, sedimented sand dunes along the coasts created a barrier in the river’s path towards the ocean and caused the stagnation of water in the central part of the valley and close to the coast. The semi-permanent swamps, called merdjas in Arabic, were used as grazing land by the numerous local tribes during the dry season but were unsuitable for cultivation.2 The French colonial administration implemented a long series of infrastructure projects to contain the floods, reclaim the wetlands, and establish drainage and irrigation perimeters across the valley. Although many of these projects failed or proved insufficient to govern the complexity of the valley’s hydrographic situation, large portions of land were reconverted to modern 44

Mise en valeur in colonial rural development

agriculture. In conjunction with this alteration of the physical landscape, the French relocated local semi-nomadic or sedentary tribes and replaced traditional agricultural exploitations with European farms. The results of these modernization projects in the Gharb valley were widely published in scientific as well as propagandistic literature of the time3. They were presented as a proud colonial achievement and a large-scale model of rural mise en valeur, the French term for development. In the French colonial context, mise en valeur was understood as the combined action of social, civil, environmental and agricultural engineering as applied to agrarian societies and the rural landscape. It required the involvement of a wide range of expertize and conspicuous investments that resulted in the ideation of plans aimed not only at the physical transformation of the landscape but also at the radical reorganization of existing patterns of human settlement and land use. Although they have been less explored than their urban counterparts in architectural and urban history, rural modernization policies were pivotal in an underlying programme of spatial and social segregation of the Moroccan peasantry that benefitted French settlers and the Moroccan rural elite. However, as Adam Guerin has argued, modernization of rural Morocco did not unfold inexorably across the country.4 The failure or diversion of many of the implemented programmes shows that the actual practice of colonial modernization was the result of negotiation between the global understanding of colonization and local natural and social conditions. In the next two sections of this chapter, I frame the discourse on rural modernization in Morocco within the French strategy of control of the Protectorate and resource extraction. The structuring of the relationship between the centre and the periphery of the Protectorate is interpreted as a means to establish and secure the flow of goods, people, and information to and from strategic areas of the country, such as mining sites and fertile regions. In the Gharb, the railway lines that crossed the region, connecting it to the capital, became the base for the first rural modernization projects in the area and entailed the expropriation of large landholdings from the local tribes. This land was then assigned to French settlers, making possible the first European settlements. The following three sections begin with the account of a French officer based in Petitjean, one of the major colonist settlements in the Gharb, to understand the new directions that rural development took after the 1930s, in the light of some major changes in French colonial policies and in the demographic and migratory dynamics of the Protectorate. I discuss how the spread of private colonization and the conspicuous investments in water infrastructure for the drainage and irrigation of the Gharb valley prompted the beginning of a second phase of mise en valeur within the region. The unequal distribution of access to resources, services, and land was a further cause of the marginalization of native social groups. The last section of the chapter discusses the partially implemented resettlement schemes conceived by the Service de l’Urbanisme in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Écochard’s view, rural villages constructed for the Moroccan workers who were to be employed on the colonists’ farms and in their agro-industrial settlements anticipated the forthcoming agronomic and hydraulic engineering endeavours, hence operating as triggers for further modernization of the landscape.

4.2 Centre, periphery, and resource extraction In his 1970 article on Moroccan urban planning, Jean Dethier summarized Marshal Hubert Lyautey’s initial influence on the territorial organization of the French Protectorate by listing three main directives that the resident general gave at the dawn of the colonial occupation.5 45

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Lyautey moved the capital from Fez to Rabat, and he designated the latter as the new administrative centre of the Protectorate and the seat of the Sharifian court and the colonial administration. At the same time, he allocated resources to establish a modern commercial harbour in Casablanca, less than 100km south of Rabat. His third decision concerned the development of Port Lyautey (present-day Kenitra), a new town built on the southwest side of the Gharb valley, in close proximity to the estuary of the Oued Sebou, the longest Moroccan river. These three urban poles, among which only Rabat was already a well-established centre, although relatively small compared to Marrakech and Fez, were clustered along less than 150 km of Atlantic coast, on the northeast side of the country. Before French colonial government, the capital city of the Sharifian empire had changed repeatedly and coexisted with the presence of other regional capitals, now recognized as the four Imperial cities of Morocco: Fez, Marrakech, Meknes, and Rabat. The Moroccan Makhzen, the governing institution that predated the French Protectorate, entailed a decentralization of power and, along with it, of taxation from the king to his cohort of royal notables and military representatives.This organization was keen to foster a certain equilibrium of power and prosperity between the regional capitals.6 Lyautey’s directives were guided primarily by pragmatism. Indeed, French colonists could have more easily settled in cities such as Rabat and Casablanca, which were less hostile and remote than Fez or the other inland capitals. However, his choices were also aimed at creating the conditions for a concentration of power to which the sultan should be subjugated and that would supplant the previous equilibrium of distributed powers. The territorial structure outlined by Lyautey prefigured a relationship between the designated centre and periphery of the Protectorate based on which the strategies of controlling the country and extracting resources could be carried out. The connections between the twoheaded centre – Rabat the administrative centre, Casablanca the financial one – and the periphery of the Protectorate, that is, the vast rural, coastal plains and the mountainous landscapes of the Atlas and the Rif, were made possible by the realization of an infrastructure system that facilitated the spreading of colonial influence into the Moroccan territory. The centralization of political, administrative, and financial activities necessarily entailed information exchange between the capital and the provinces, as well as the mobilization of people, military equipment, goods, and services to ensure control of the whole country. On the other hand, the extraction of natural resources, such as phosphates from the Atlas Mountains and, later on, petroleum and agricultural products, generated flows of capital and goods from the inland regions of the Protectorate towards the harbours on the Atlantic coast, from which products were shipped to Europe. These exchanges were buttressed by the construction of railways, roads, and electrification lines.This entire infrastructure was conceived as undergirding elements for the axis of development that extended across what Lyautey defined as the Maroc utile,7 which included fertile rural regions, mining sites, and strategic crossroads crucial to military control of the country. The infrastructure connected all these locations to the core of the Protectorate and thence to the French Metropole and its empire. This model gravitated towards the integration of the Moroccan Protectorate within the global French colonial empire. Indeed, Morocco was seen as the natural link between the French colonies in Central Africa, the rest of the French Maghreb and Europe. Infrastructure investments in rural areas were justified by the ambition of making the Moroccan Protectorate a hub for agricultural production. Meanwhile, the idea of maximizing the extraction of resources by fostering rural development played a central role in the French strategy for the spatial organization of the Protectorate and in the quest to secure the country’s subjugation by attracting private investors and settlers to locations outside the main urban areas. 46

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In the French imagination, the Moroccan rural landscape was invariably depicted as an area of great unexploited potential.8 This image, largely constructed by colonial propaganda, depicted rosy prospects of progress that the arrival of foreign capital and the guidance of the colonial administration could unlock. However, recent scientific literature on the rural and environmental history of Morocco has shown that especially in the early stages of the French colonial occupation, propagandistic arguments outshined pragmatism in rural policy-making. The general aims of the programmes conceived by the French administration were in fact, often determined on the basis of poor knowledge of the geography of the country. The initial burst of enthusiasm and the desire to generate consensus among the French public about the new colonial endeavour led to the elaboration of far-too-optimistic visions of the potential of many rural regions. In much of the French colonial literature until the 1930s, the idea of restoring the myth of a Roman past in which Morocco was the ‘granary of the Empire’ was diffusely employed as a way to legitimize French colonial endeavours in North Africa.9 Colonial propaganda was centred on the idea that under the knowledgeable guidance of the French empire, Morocco would be rehabilitated from the decay in which it had fallen ever since it was overrun by the Arabs. Modern French ideas on warfare and colonization, shrewdly summarized under the label of ‘pacification strategies’, promised to bring political stability, restore civilization and trigger a form of progress that would benefit French settlers and Moroccans.

4.3 The colonization corridor in the Gharb The specialized literature and the rich promotional material produced in the early phase of French colonial occupation converged on the idea that the environmental decay of Morocco’s rural landscape was due primarily to neglect and the native population’s limited technical knowledge, not the country’s climatic and geographic features.10 This presumption supported the belief that a comprehensive programme to improve the productivity of rural areas could quickly turn the Moroccan countryside into a favourable environment for the installation of French farms. Under the influence of these implicit promises of progress and wealth, and also enticed by generous material incentives, colonists from France and neighbouring colonies, especially Algeria11, arrived and settled in the vast plains along the Atlantic coast as well as in the more remote highlands of the Atlas. In parallel with the spread of private colonization that followed the periodical revision of the boundaries of the zone d’insecurité, where land transactions were forbidden to Europeans, General Lyautey launched a campaign termed colonization officielle, to stabilize a French presence outside the main urban centres by settling farmers along main infrastructure lines and to support the further advance of military penetration.12 While the country’s ‘pacification’ advanced, vast portions of land that formally belonged to the sultan or to caïds, the local governors, were expropriated and sold at favourable prices to French private citizens selected through a lottery system and investment companies. A Comité de Colonization was responsible for purchasing or trading with pastoral tribes for private or collective land to be included in the colonization programme. In assigning the landholdings to settlers, the Comité did not consider only the economic feasibility of the agricultural exploitation. Its choices concerning the size and distribution of the lots also sought to support a carefully conceived repopulation strategy. The settling of colonists between Rabat and Meknes, for example, was incentivized because of the scarce presence of French farmers in the area. Likewise, the French administration encouraged the strategic 47

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acquisition of land in those regions where the military occupation encountered greater resistance, such as the Taza region in 1924, the Rif in 1926 and near Kasba Tadla in 1930.13 To ensure the settlements’ permanence, land recipients were required to exploit their newly acquired acreage by means of modern cultural techniques for at least 10–15 years and to dwell for most of the year on their own farms. Renting out the property was forbidden. Although the obligation to reside on the land received many criticisms and was eventually removed from the contracts offered to settlers,14 the advantages offered by the programme attracted an increasing number of people at least until 1933, with a peak of allocations, at the national level, around 1926.15 The Gharb valley offers an example of how the settling of French farmers in rural areas through official public programmes favoured the creation of colonization corridors that offered colonists a competitive advantage in terms of access to resources and services. The settlement arrangements also achieved a physical separation from the native populations, who were relegated to smaller landholdings or pushed towards areas of lower productivity or greater environmental risk.The logic of rural modernization and mise en valeur in the region, which entailed the possibility of repurposing rural land and renegotiating access, was clearly skewed in favour of the French colonists, who were viewed as the main actors in the development schemes. Infrastructure and hydraulic works, along with efforts to restore degraded soils and make a transition from traditional to modern cultural techniques, were employed to justify the large-scale reallocation of land from pastoral tribes to French investors. Whereas the purchase of rural land by private foreign investors spread across various parts of the region depending on the availability of land, the concessions granted through the official colonization programme were mainly located along a so-called colonization route connecting Port Lyautey and Meknes. The development of this colonization corridor, which corresponded to one of the main communication axes between Fez and Meknes, on one hand, and the Casablanca and Rabat urban agglomerations on the other, proceeded in conjunction with the completion of a railway connection between the two regions. The first two rail lines implemented across the valley in the early years of the Protectorate were narrow-gauge railways built primarily for a military purpose. One of the trunk lines travelled along the south border of the valley, in an east-west direction, between the Mamora forest and the southern extremities of the central wetlands. The second trunk started from Port Lyautey and moved northeast following the right bank of the Sebou River until Belksiri (later known as Mechra bel Ksiri), where the line bifurcated towards Ouezzane and the Rif region and towards Mechra Hader (Moulay Bousselham) (see Figure 4.1). In 1920, the Compagnie de Chemins de Fer du Maroc (Moroccan Railroad Company) was constituted to build a standard-gauge railway network across the French Protectorate. In the Port Lyautey region, some new lines were constructed, redefining the geometry of the area’s transportation system. In particular, the trunk line between Port Lyautey and Mechra bel Ksiri was abandoned and the new line that crossed the valley from north to south was moved eastward to circumnavigate the central merdjas. This new layout lengthened the route between Tangier and Rabat considerably, but the modification was necessary because of the relative instability of the moisture-saturated soils, the frequent flooding of the Sebou, and settlers’ unpleasant encounters with what they described as the hostility of the native tribes who inhabited the areas along the river.16 In 1923, the new line connecting Rabat and Casablanca with Meknes and Fez was realized. This trunk line linked the Atlantic coastal regions with the Middle Atlas highlands, crossing the Gharb valley and following a trajectory that only partially overlapped the previous layout. 48

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Figure 4.1 The Official Colonisation in the Gharb valley. Source: Elaborated by the author. Based on: J. Le Coz, The Rharb: Fellahs et Colons, 1964; J. Le Coz, J. Gadille, “Exploitations rurales européennes”, Comité de Géographie du Maroc, Atlas du Maroc, 1958.

Before reaching Meknes, the line joined the new northbound branch to Tangier, creating an intersection in proximity to the Petitjean military camp, which gained importance when the line connecting Fez and Ouijda was completed. The Petitjean intersection became the junction between the south, north, and north-east branches of the national railway system. The shifting of railway lines also determined a decline in importance of those settlements no longer served by the network, such as Sidi Allal Tazi, located halfway between Port Lyautey and Souk el Arbaa, or Dar Gueddari, which retained its role as a provincial souk but saw the relocation of French settlers to the better located Sidi Slimane. The first landholdings allocated through the official colonization programme were located along the railway lines between Port Lyautey and the Beht river, on the edge of the Mamora forest. The land distributed to colonists was previously part of the collective properties of the Chnanfa, Oulad Nain, Oulad Yahia, and Sfafaa tribes, who used it for grazing or, in the vicinity of the Smento and Tiflet streams, for agriculture.17 According to the Moroccan customary laws, although native tribes could claim the right to land that they effectively exploited, collective land formally belonged to the Sultan. Expropriations were made on the basis of a Dahir (sultan’s decree) promulgated on 27 April 1919 that opened the door to official colonization. The Dahir, together with other previous provisions, protected tribal collective properties but, at the same time, authorized the alienation of land deemed ‘unnecessary’ for natives or ‘in excess’ of what they required. This controversial notion offered an expedient by which the colonization committee could apply eminent domain and redistribute land to colonists, who would achieve its mise en valeur by means of modern technologies and cultural techniques. Dispossessions continued throughout the whole French occupation of Morocco, and the assignment of land through the official colonization programme continued until 1950, although the frequency of this process declined drastically after 1934.18 49

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4.4 Water, technology, and rural modernity In official correspondence dating back to 1943 between Pujol, civilian controller and head of the district of Petitjean, his counterpart in the Rabat region, and Pierre Voizard, the secretary general of the Protectorate, the realization of infrastructure projects aimed at improving agricultural production in the Petitjean province was explicitly related to the exploitation of the local workforce, as well as housing problems.19 In this exchange, the civilian controller Pujol argued that the realization of the El Kansera dam, an artificial water reservoir built 25 km southwest of Petitjean, was making it possible to irrigate large portions of land but also obliged French administrators to ‘modify the economic and demographic conditions of the region’.20 These concerns, reflecting the complaints of the many French farmers who had settled in the Petitjean district since the early 1920s, underscored the urgency of stabilizing the local workforce to be employed on the newly created farms. These remarks highlighted one of the main issues around which the debate over urban and regional planning developed in Morocco during the last two decades of the French colonial occupation. By this point, some of the institutional reforms and large-scale infrastructure projects that the colonial administration had implemented across the country had attained a mature phase. However, the rural economy of areas such as Petitjean province, which had one of the largest collections of colonists’ farms anywhere in the Protectorate, encountered a crisis and then a transformation that affected the structure of the physical landscape and had long-term repercussions for how these territories were exploited and inhabited. The changes also entailed further restriction of the freedoms of Moroccan rural tribes while offering little improvement in their quality of life, since access to resources and services remained largely imbalanced in favour of the farmers and other large investors in the area. The initial trigger of this transformation was the disruption of a specific model of interdependence between the global French Empire market and the local conditions of Moroccan agricultural production. Until the early 1930s, large companies financed by international investors, as well as private settlers who bought land at favourable prices through the official colonization programme, were pushed towards engaging in cereal production. Indeed, French geographers and agronomists had agreed, mostly on the basis of the French political agenda rather than by relying on accurate surveys, that Morocco was predestined for wheat cultivation.21 Although this belief was grounded on far-too-optimistic speculations regarding the nature of the soils and the potential productivity of the Moroccan coastal plains, it legitimized the generous subsidies and bonuses granted to farmers who actively contributed towards increasing cereals production. The expectation of a growing internal market and the opportunities that harbours on the Atlantic coast offered for exporting induced French settlers to invest in the production of soft and hard wheat, barley, maize, and sorghum. The so-called ‘wheat policy’ brilliantly achieved its main objective as the area planted with cereal increased by 60% from 1918 to 192922 and it was positively welcomed by settlers who could profit from the generous subsidies on crops that did not require large initial investments. However, the negative counter-effects of this artificially sustained production did not take long to present themselves. The poor diversification induced by the wheat policy exposed Moroccan agriculture to the dangers of price fluctuations. The irregular precipitation patterns that characterized the Moroccan climate had negative effects on those crops, such as cereal, that were produced by rain-fed or dry farming methods, and the alternation between prolonged periods of drought and violent rainfall often resulted in disastrous harvests that negatively affected the average production costs. Although the colonists’ revenues were somewhat less affected by climatic adversities than those of native agriculturists, France had to sustain colonial wheat production in Morocco by means of 50

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an artificially maintained price that compensated for the high production costs. Tariff-free quotas and subsidies became sources of harsh confrontations with the representatives of farmers from the French Metropole as colonial wheat production competed directly with French production.23 The French government granted Moroccan agricultural production the support needed to sustain the colonial endeavour until at least the 1930s. By 1933, however, the amount of wheat surplus that could be neither exported nor sold domestically was so high that the domestic Moroccan wheat market was clearly on the verge of collapsing. The failure of French wheat policy had become inevitable. The crisis facing this production system had a radical impact on the economic, social, and spatial structure of the rural landscape, as it entailed a rethinking of the repopulation strategy implemented by the French administration up to that time. The incentives for extensive farming that had been granted to Moroccan cereals were replaced by an effort to stimulate the development of high-value exportable crops based on irrigation. The idea that the future of colonial agriculture lay in early vegetables, fruits, and permanently irrigated agriculture gained exceptional momentum. Although the potential for vegetable production was, once again, partly limited by competition with French agriculture, fruit crops, especially oranges, became the new staple for agronomists, settlers and policy-makers. This reconversion of colonial agricultural production implied massive investments in infrastructure, a programme for educating settlers and local farmers in more advanced cultivation techniques, and a thorough reorganization of settlement patterns. Since the 1930s, the focal point of official and private colonization along the Gharb corridor had shifted eastward as a perimeter was allocated to settlers in Petitjean and later extended to Sidi Slimane and the surrounding province, on land that belonged to the Cherarda tribes. Although traversed by the Rdom River, the rural land around Petitjean was mainly exploited through dry farming methods, with the exception of some tracts of land along the river banks. From the earliest years of the Protectorate, French engineers had looked at the Oued Beth, a river flowing 20 km west of Petitjean, as a possible alternative water source for the vast province, and at El Kansera as a potential site for a dam and a reservoir to produce electricity and store water to be gradually distributed to the downstream rural areas during the dry season. Moreover, the frequent flooding of the Beth River was considered the main cause of the persistence of water in some of the large wetlands of the Gharb valley. Regulating the Oued Beth’s flow could thus also contribute to the reclamation of vast portions of land in the lower part of the valley between Mechra bel Ksiri and Port Lyautey.24 Work on the El Kansera dam started in 1926 under the government of Theodore Steeg, who had succeeded Lyautey one year earlier, and the project continued until 1936. During his residency in Morocco from 1925 to 1929, Steeg reinforced investments in water infrastructure for energy production and irrigation. He created a centralized fund for major irrigation projects, the Caisse de l’Hydraulique Agricole et de la Colonization, and obtained conspicuous loans from France for water development. The El Kansera dam, along with the hydro-electric power plant built near it, was one of the first established nodes of the national network of electrification in French Morocco. In addition to providing electricity for the area, the construction of the 51-m-high concrete structure at El Kansera also responded to the will to create a colonization perimeter equipped with an infrastructure system that would permit the permanent irrigation of farmland. The project entailed the excavation of a network of canals for the irrigation of about 30,000 hectares around Sidi Slimane and Petitjean.The water regime, regulated by the dam to compensate for the irregular distribution of rainwater across the year, was partially diverted to a main canal 7 km downstream from El Kansera and reached the eastern part of the irrigation perimeter, where most of the colonists had settled (see Figure 4.2).25 51

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Figure 4.2 Irrigation and drainage perimeters in the Gharb valley. Source: Elaborated by the author. Based on: Direction des Travaux Publics, L’Équipement Hydraulique du Maroc, 1954.

Steeg’s ideas on water and rural development anticipated the crisis that would confront Moroccan agriculture in the early 1930s and had a decisive impact on the establishment of the irrigation perimeters that would spearhead rural modernization in the country over the following decades. In 1926, work also began on the Cavagnac dam on the N’fiss in the Marrakech region. In the following year, construction was initiated on the Kasbah Tadla diversion dam that served as basis for the future colonization of the Tadla plain, and surveys were launched for several other dams on major streams in the country, aiming to increase the total surface of permanently irrigated land in the country by 250,000 hectares.26

4.5 Housing the workforce: The Service de l’Urbanisme in the countryside The unstable financial condition of the Protectorate during the interwar period and the shortage of specialized technicians slowed the progression of these major water-related projects. Swearingen estimated that at the end of the Protectorate, only 14.5% of the land reachable with water from the completed dams was actually permanently irrigated.27 This evidence, together with the many accounts of settlers who complained about the delays in project completion, demonstrate that the transition from dry farming to irrigation agriculture within the main Moroccan irrigation perimeters was far from smooth. In fact, at the national level, quantitatively significant results were attained only long after Moroccan independence. 52

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The account given by Pujol, the civilian officer at Petitjean, testifies to the extent to which irrigation technology influenced the relationship between the actors who participated in the structuring of the rural landscape. However, his complaints about the difficulties that the settlers and his administration faced also reflect a considerable discrepancy between the rural modernization programme that the central administration envisioned for this province and its actual realization. This gap eventually became even wider with the increasing complexity of the infrastructure and agricultural development programmes. In the closing section of his short report, Pujol attributed the incomplete exploitation of irrigable land in the Petitjean region – only one-fourth of the land had been put to profitable use and cultivated with crops that had a high rate of return – to the difficulties involved in stabilizing the available workforce around the farms.The French colonists who owned the vast majority of cultivable land had been recruiting workers from the Doukkala region northwest of Marrakech but, according to the report, had encountered difficulties in creating the conditions that would persuade the immigrants to the region to remain there permanently. Pujol continued by foreseeing the construction of five ‘cités ouvrières’ (literally, worker neighborhoods) in Sidi Slimane, Bou Maiz, Dar Bel Amri, Sidi Aggouch, and M’Sada as a possible way to relieve the shortage of workers in the area (see Figure 4.3). Although this proposal was

Figure 4.3 Location of the proposed cités ouvrières in the Beht irrigation perimeter. Source: Elaborated by the author.

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never implemented, it represents one of the first accounts of the intention to develop a network of settlements for rural workers in the area. As such, it was a precursor of several subsequent housing and resettlement schemes. In the 1940s, rural repopulation started to surface in the agenda of the French colonial administrators as the problem of workforce supply became more urgent in areas where the majority of colonists’ farms were located. A series of demographic studies published in 1954–195528 detailed the relationship between urban and rural areas at that time from the perspective of a general increase in the Moroccan population. These studies indicated that the areas devoted primarily to agriculture did not generally experience depopulation. However, the high population growth consistently induced some residents to leave the less productive rural areas and move to the cities or to areas where agricultural modernization offered better employment possibilities. The fast pace of this transformation and the vast migratory phenomenon and housing emergency that it engendered left French administrators largely unprepared. In urban areas, the practical steps undertaken to ensure minimum standards of housing quality and delivery of basic services to the rapidly increasing urban population were largely insufficient. During the interwar period, Moroccan major urban centres saw the emergence of shanty-towns that arose in the outskirts and in proximity to industrial areas. The plans prepared for the Service des Plans (Planning Bureau) by architects such as Henri Prost and Antoine Marchisio did not offer solutions commensurate to the size of the problem. Private and public housing initiatives essentially focused on designing residential neighbourhoods for Europeans, whereas the provisions for indigenous housing, though they received appreciative reviews from the European architectural community, were, until the early 1940s, limited to some symbolic projects such as the Nouvelle Medina (1918), the Citès ouvrieres Lafarge (1932), Cosuma (1932–1937), and Socica (1940–1942), and the Citè d’Ain Chock (1946) in Casablanca, and to speculative operations promoted by Europeans and local entrepreneurs that entailed the transformation of rural land into illegal settlements. Since the late 1930s, the problem of housing for the growing Moroccan population and the territorial imbalance generated by internal migratory movements emerged as two related aspects in the public debate.The many articles by anthropologists and sociologists such as André Adam29, Pierre Suisse30 and others31 that appeared in the Bulletin Économique et Social du Maroc, Hesperis and the Cahiers d’Outre-mer, as well as the studies commissioned by the Service des Affaires Indigènes and the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, attest to a growing interest in the living conditions of people in the medinas, bidonvilles or slums and spontaneous neighbourhoods where the labour force migrated, attracted by the explosive growth of the industrial sector. As a consequence of the prominence of these issues on the Protectorate’s political agenda, the 1940s saw the restructuring of the administrative bodies responsible for public works programmes in the field of architecture and urbanism. In 1944, the Office Chérifien de l’Habitat Européen changed its name to simply Office Chérifien de l’Habitat and was subdivided into two sections, one concerned with the colonists’ needs and the other focused on housing for the local population. A further reform of the technical bureaus occurred with the arrival in Morocco of Michel Écochard. In 1947, the French architect and urban planner contributed to defining the structure of the new Service de l’Habitat. He went on to make changes in his team of collaborators32 and created a new Service de l’Urbanisme in 1949.33 The resulting architectural projects completed in urban areas during these years, including the Carrières Centrales neighbourhood in Casablanca, the Cité Yakoub el Mansour and Quartier Takaddoum in Rabat, and the Cité Saknia in Port Lyautey, attained international recognition and were the subject of various publications in Europe.34 54

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Rural policies in the Gharb show that the repopulation strategies in rural areas were primarily aimed at fixing a deficiency embedded in the model of rural development that the French colonization strategies had promoted. Whereas the most productive land and the financial capital were all concentrated in the hands of a few foreign entrepreneurs who operated in the global food production and exchange market, the workforce to be employed on the French farms had to be found locally. The marginalization of tribal groups, however, had caused a separation between the two groups and considerable migration to urban areas, resulting in an inefficient distribution of the population and of existing rural settlements relative to the main emerging loci of agricultural production in the region. By the beginning of the 1950s, a comprehensive plan for the resettling of the Gharb’s rural population and the provision of basic services and public facilities to promote population growth in the region was conceived under the direction of the Service de l’Urbanisme. The Sebou and Beth drainage and irrigation perimeter represented an unprecedented field for experimentation in rural and regional planning and demonstrate the new turn taken by Moroccan agriculture after the struggles of the 1930s. The rich documentation produced by the Service de l’Urbanisme35 illustrates the idea of realizing a network of rural settlements hierarchically organized according to a central-place or Christallerian model (see Figure 4.4). The preparatory studies entailed the construction or refurbishment of more than 80 centres and the identification of three settlement categories, including some existing settlements to be equipped with specific public facilities as well as new settlements resulting from the relocation and conglomeration of one or more population groups (see Figure 4.5). The primary centres occupied the highest hierarchical level after the regional capital and were conceived as medium-sized cities with the capacity to attract a diversified set of industries.These agro-industrial centres were intended to attract some of the activities that were

Figure 4.4 Central place model. Source: Elaborated by the author. Based on: R. Forichon, P. Mas, “Les problemes de la répartition du peuplement au Maroc”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XXI :76, pp. 471–506, 1958.

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Figure 4.5 Conglomeration of settlements near Temara. Source: Elaborated by the author. Based on: E. Mauret ‘Problèmes de l’habitat dans la région de Rabat’, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XVIII:64, pp. 587–600, 1954.

concentrated in the Protectorate’s major cities at that point, and therefore to counteract rural exodus by favouring industrial and demographic decentralization. The primary centres would ideally be located along railway lines or major routes. However, the proposed distribution of settlements in the Gharb shows that the factor of equal distance between the settlements was the most relevant for their location. The layout incorporated the existing colonist settlements along the Port Lyautey– Petitjean colonization route but extended the network to other centres that had been, up to that point, relatively untouched by the impact of rural colonization policy, such as Dar Gueddari. The schemes also foresaw the creation of primary centres in areas that were substantially uninhabited but conveniently located with regard to infrastructure or in underexploited areas. Secondary communities would function as service centres, equipped with facilities such as silos and warehouses for the storage of cereals and other crops and with the technical equipment necessary for the dispersed third-level settlements, namely the rural villages. In other words, the regional schemes proposed replacing the linear structure determined by the official colonization programme, which had been a foundational component of the French strategy for penetrating the Gharb rural landscape, with a uniformly distributed web of interconnected settlements. They envisioned a pervasive system that would further extend colonial control of the region by means of a carefully conceived and capillary resettlement strategy while also facilitating its full exploitation (see Figure 4.6). A series of surveys was completed to map the distribution of the population and to describe in detail the complex scenario of property types that characterized the area outside the boundaries of the large colonial landholdings. The detailed study of the settlements’ location, size, and function was conducted in collaboration with the Génie Rurale, the rural engineering office that was also responsible for the structural redefinition of the area’s agricultural production.36 Along with the attempt to standardise the distances between the centres and consequently the size of their areas of influence, features such as access to potable water, availability of land and soil productivity, together with the conditions placed on land use by the drainage and irrigation infrastructure, were the main criteria for the distribution and characterization of the settlements.37 56

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Figure 4.6 The network of settlement proposed by the Service de l’Urbanisme in the Gharb Valley. Source: Elaborated by the author.

By comparing the proposed schemes with the previous patterns of land use and population distribution, we can perceive that the rural villages and the higher-level centres were intended to support the existing colonial activities and to facilitate the establishment of new ones within underexploited areas. Villages for Moroccans were distributed along the colonization route and in the Beth perimeter as well as along the Sebou River, upstream of Sidi Allal Tazi where private colonization had been concentrated since the 1930s. These settlements were located in areas almost entirely owned by French settlers and were hence conceived as residential and service centres for rural workers employed on the colonists’ farms.The schemes were, in this sense, meant to consolidate and preserve the colonists’ domination of the region by supplying them with an inexpensive labour force. In addition, villages were planned in areas that were at the time unsuitable for cultivation due to the presence of wetlands, poor soil productivity, or poor access to water for irrigation. The regional plan proposed by the Service de l’Urbanisme made little distinction between areas that were more intensively exploited and inhabited and those where repopulation could be achieved only with difficulty. This lack of differentiation can be only partially ascribed to poor knowledge of the local conditions. The authors’ faith in the potential to compensate for differences between sites by applying advanced development technologies led them to imagine a somewhat utopian scenario of equally distributed access to services and economic and demographic growth. Indeed, the model entailed the replication and capillary extension of the configuration that existed in those portions of the region where French colonization was more firmly rooted. Although the resettlement schemes did not directly propose to relaunch the colonial appropriation of the most productive rural land in the Gharb, they promoted, in essence, a scenario in which the existing power relations between colonizers and colonized were preserved and further expanded across the entire region. 57

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4.6 Conclusion In the first wave of land dispossessions that occurred through the official colonization programme and in the schemes developed by the Service de l’Urbanisme, the settlements – rural villages or medium-sized centres – were conceived as both triggers for rural development and means of stabilizing the existing relationships between colonists and native communities. Sidi Yahia, Sidi Slimane, and Petitjean along the southern railway branch and Mechra bel Ksiri, Souk el Arbaa du Rharb, and Sidi Allal Tazi on the right bank of the Sebou River were created specifically to favour the arrival of French settlers. Connected with the capital via road and railway and equipped with basic services and a modern urban setting, these centres offered colonists some of the comforts and roughly the standard of living of a European city. The most successful centres were also the seat of important associations that represented colonists’ farmers at the local and national levels, such as the Association de Colons de Sidi Slimane or the representatives of settlers in Petitjean and Sidi Yahia. These entities played a political role in negotiations over the management of public works investments and land distribution.38 As political and economic poles, these centres attracted foreign investors and therefore a variety of commercial and productive activities, and they quickly contributed to accelerating the region’s development and modernization. In advocating for the creation of rural settlements in the underexploited part of the Gharb, Écochard and his collaborators drew from the experience of those previously established centres and intentionally proposed building facilities and public spaces that could position residential areas as catalysts for a wider spectrum of transformations. In Écochard’s view, repopulation anticipated and facilitated the establishment of modern farms, the integration of irrigation infrastructure and overall agricultural modernization. Mise en valeur and repopulation were, in this sense, not parallel processes but concurrent phenomena in a dialectic relationship. We have seen how, in the Moroccan context, the construction of infrastructure, land reclamation and amelioration, and the introduction of social and technological innovations conveyed the dominant economic and social position occupied by the actors responsible for implementing those modernization and development policies. In other words, modernization was instrumental in defining the power relationship between colonizers and colonized. In the Gharb, the progressive occupation of the better-located and most productive areas by French settlers and the selective access to resources and services provided – under pressure from local colonist interest groups – by the colonial administration resulted in the marginalization of native communities. Despite the lack of reliable statistics documenting the life of the large nomadic and pastoral communities who inhabited the valley, several authors have indicated that when the Protectorate was relinquished, the living conditions of most of those groups were severe.39 Indeed, colonization had brought jobs and improved the region’s overall productivity, but the unequal distribution of economic and material resources caused the expansion of the gap between the modernized sector – controlled by colonists or the Moroccan elite – and the natives, therefore accentuating social inequality. Acknowledging the interlocking trajectories of development and population policies – that is, the inseparable relationship between the environmental and agricultural engineering programmes on one hand and the regional resettlement schemes on the other – allows us to interpret both of them as integral parts of the colonial discourse. Architecture and urban planning, in the rural context just as in the cities, actively participated in prompting physical separation based on ethnic criteria and, even when it was directed towards providing housing and other services to Moroccans, operated in fact as a coercive force that served to preserve or even exacerbate social differences. 58

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Notes 1 This name is also spelled Rharb. In Arabic, it means “the west”. 2 J. Le Coz, Le Rharb: Fellah et Colons, 1964. 3 Direction des Travaux Publics, L’Équipement Hydraulique du Maroc, 1954; J. Renard, “Grands barrages, hydro-électricité, périmètres d’irrigation”, Réalités Marocaines, 6, pp. 173–291, 1954. 4 A. Guerin, “Disaster ecologies”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, pp. 333–65, n.59, 2016. 5 J. Dethier, “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc”, Bulletin Économique et Social du Maroc, pp. 5–59, n. 118–119, 1970. 6 C.R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 2001. 7 Literally ‘useful Morocco’, the part of the country that could be exploited for its agricultural and mineral resources. 8 A. Leroy, ‘L’agriculture’, H. Avelot et al., La Renaissance du Maroc: Dix Ans de Protectorat (1912–1922), 1922. 9 D.K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, 2007. 10 D.K. Davis, “Desert wastes of the Maghreb”, Cultural Geographies, XI:4, pp. 359–87, 2004. 11 J. Gadille, “L’Agriculture européenne au Maroc”, Annales de Geographie, 66: 354, pp.144–58, 1957. 12 J. Gadille, “La colonisation officielle au Maroc”, Cahiers d’Outre-Mer, 32, pp. 305–22, 1955. 13 Ibid. 14 W.D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages, 1987. 15 J. Gadille, “La colonisation officielle au Maroc”, Cahiers d’outre-mer, 32, pp. 305–22, 1955. 16 E. Michaux-Bellaire, “Le Gharb”, Archives Marocaine, 20, 1913, p. 73. 17 J. Le Coz, Le Rharb: Fellah et Colons, 1964. 18 Gadille, “La Colonisation Officielle au Maroc”, Cahiers d’outre-mer, 32, pp. 305–22, 1955. 19 Correspondance of the Head of Petitjean Province, Archives National du Maroc, E0831, Construction d’habitat 1931–1950. 20 Ibid. 21 H. Cosnier, L’Afrique du Nord: Son Avenir Agricole et Économique, 1922. 22 R Hoffherr, L’Economie Marocaine, 1932, p. 145. 23 W.D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages, 1987, p. 23. 24 J. Le Coz, Le Rharb: Fellahs et Colons, 1964; J.J. Perennes, L’eau et les Hommes au Maghreb, 1993. 25 Direction des Travaux Publics, L’Équipement Hydraulique du Maroc, 1954. 26 Ibid. 27 W.D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages, 1987, p. 141. 28 J.C. Petit, R. Castet-Barou, “Contribution à l’étude des mouvements de la population marocaine, musulmane et de l’exode rurale”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XIX:68, pp. 423–58, 1955. 29 A. Adam, “Proletarisation de l’habitat dans l’ancienne medina de Casablanca”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XII:45, pp. 247–56, 1950 (first part); XIII:46, pp. 44–50, 1950 (second part). 30 P. Suisse, “Physionomie du douar Doum”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XX: 69, pp. 101–22. 31 R. Baron, J. Huot, L. Paye, “Conditions économique et niveaux de vie des travaillers au Douar Doum”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, III:13, pp.177–84, 1936; “Logements et loyers des travailleures à Rabat-Salé”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, IV:15, pp. 3–18, 1937. 32 I. Estienne, “L’amenagement comme strategie profesionelle”, Projets de Paysage, 6, 2011. 33 M. Ecochard, “La nouvelle Organisation du Service de l’Urbanisme”, Bulletin de la Grande Masse, pp. 23–24, 1949. 34 J.L. Cohen, M. Eleb, Casablanca: Mythes et Figures d’une Aventure Urbain, 1998; T. Avermaete et al., Colonial Modern, 2010. 35 The documents are held at the Phototèque of the Ecole Nationale d’Architecture de Rabat. 36 E. Mauret ‘Problèmes de l’habitat dans la région de Rabat’, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XVIII:64, pp. 587–600, 1954. 37 E. Mauret et al., ‘Mise en valeur et équipement rurale de la région de Rabat’, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XX :69, pp. 15–70, 1956. 38 J. Le Coz, Le Rharb: Fellahs et Colons, 1964. 39 R. Gallissot, Le Patronat Européenne au Maroc, pp. 55–56, 1990; Guerin, A. (2016). “Disaster ecologies”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 59: 333–365.

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References Adam, A. (1950). “Proletarisation de l’habitat dans l’ancienne medina de Casablanca”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XII: 45, pp. 247–256, 1950 (first part); XIII (46): 44–50, (second part). Avermaete,T. et al. (2010). Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future, London: Black Dog. Baron, R.; J. Huot & L. Paye (1936). “Conditions économique et niveaux de vie des travaillers au Douar Doum”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, III (13): 177–184. Baron, R.; J. Huot & L. Paye (1937). “Logements et loyers des travailleurs à Rabat-Salé”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, IV (15): 3–18. Cohen, J.L. & M. Eleb (1998). Casablanca: Mythes et Figures d’une Aventure Urbain. Cosnier, H. (1922). L’Afrique du Nord: Son Avenir Agricole et Économique, Paris: Larose. Davis, D.K. (2004).“Desert wastes of the Maghreb: desertification narratives in French colonial environmental history of North Africa”, Cultural Geographies, XI (4): 359–387. Davis, D.K. (2007). Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press. Dethier, J. (1970). “Soixante ans d’urbanisme au Maroc”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, 118–119: pp. 5–59. Direction des Travaux Publics (1954). L’Équipement Hydraulique du Maroc, Rabat: Société d’Études Economiques Sociales et Statistiques du Maroc. Ecochard, M. (1949). “La nouvelle Organisation du Service de l’Urbanisme”, Bulletin de la Grande Masse, 1 (1): pp. 23–24. Estienne, I. (2011). “L’aménagement comme stratégie professionnelle”, Projets de Paysage, 6. Forichon, R. & P. Mas (1958). “Les problemes de la répartition du peuplement au Maroc”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XXI (76): 471–506. Gadille, J. (1955). “La colonisation officielle au Maroc”, Cahiers d’Outre-Mer, 32: 305–322. Gadille, J. (1957). “L’Agriculture européenne au Maroc: Étude Humaines et Economique”, Annales de Geographie, 66 (354): 144–158. Gallissot, R. (1990). Le Patronat Européenne au Maroc: Action Sociale, Action Politique, Rabat: Editions Eddifs. Guerin, A. (2016). “Disaster ecologies: land, peoples and the colonial modern in the Gharb, Morocco, 1911–1936”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 59: 333–365. Hoffherr, R. (1932). L’Economie Marocaine, Paris: Librairie de Recueil Sirey. Leroy, A. (1922). “L’agriculture”, H. Avelot et al., La Renaissance du Maroc: Dix Ans de Protectorat (1912– 1922), Rabat: Résidence Générale de la République Française au Maroc. Le Coz, J. (1964). Le Rharb: Fellah et Colons. Une Étude de Géographie Régionale, Rabat. Mauret, E. (1954). “Problèmes de l’habitat dans la région de Rabat”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XVIII (64): 587–600. Mauret, E. et al. (1956). “Mise en valeur et équipement rurale de la région de Rabat”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XX (69): 15–70. Michaux-Bellaire, E. (1913). “Le Gharb”, Archives Marocaine, XX. Pennell, C.R. (2001). Morocco since 1830: A History, New York: New York University Press. Perennes, J.J. (1993). L’eau et les Hommes au Maghreb: Contribution à une Politique de l’Eau en Méditerranée, Paris: Karthala. Petit, J.C. & R. Castet-Barou (1955). “Contribution à l’étude des mouvements de la population marocaine, musulmane et de l’exode rurale”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XIX (68): 423–458. Renard, J. (1954). “Grands barrages, hydro-électricité, périmètres d’irrigation”, Réalités Marocaines, 6: 173–291. Suisse, P. (1956) “Physionomie du douar Doum”, Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, XX (69): 101–122. Swearingen, W.D. (1987). Moroccan Mirages: Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions, 1912-1986, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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5 Infrastructure and urban planning The port and city of Algiers under French colonial rule, 19th–20th century Souha Salhi

5.1 Introduction The interaction between infrastructures and urban development has increasingly become an important object of urban history studies.This in part is due to the role played by infrastructures in the definition of political, economic, and social strategies.This tendency to “Infrastructuralize a city or to the urbanization of infrastructure”1 has been the subject of several academic articles, where researchers analyze infrastructures from an historical and interdisciplinary perspective.2 However, historical research on urban infrastructures has taken relatively little interest in colonial ports, even though these left a major impact on the geography, politics, and economy of the colonized territories.3 The evolution of maritime technology, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, propelled European colonial expansion. This process reinforced the strategic and military importance of port cities as centres of influence in colonial empires, as is clearly the case of Algiers and Dakar to name former French colonies. In addition, these ports became terminals where raw material congregated before leaving the African continent for the European mainland. Thus, these infrastructures became economic centres attracting investors, merchants, and workers from all walks of life and nationalities who formed the urban community.Therefore, port-cities “receive, on one hand, movements of the colonies and they are new stages for discovering other regions or conquering other continents” (Gras, 2010). On the other hand, colonization favoured the maritimization of the world economy and the system of modern ports restructured port-cities, as Daniel Headrick explains: The new technologies associated with the colonizers explain the founding and growth of colonial cities. They also figure in their settlement and land-use patterns. Certain uses of land were directly related to the functions of the city. Harbors, docks, and warehouses occupied large areas of port cities, as did the stations, yards, and workshops of railroad centers. (Headrick, 1988) Taking Algiers as case study, this chapter sheds light on how port activity during this period shaped colonial maritime cities. It focuses on three points.The first is the process of port planning 61

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during the French colonial period, when the foundations of the main infrastructures, still in use today, were laid out. The second is the interaction between port and city areas through dynamics and issues generated by this harbour activity. The third concerns the integration of the port area in the major urban planning projects of Algiers, from the end of the 1920s to the present day. The objective is to explore how the port infrastructure interacts itself with and within the different urban contexts. We have chosen a methodology that articulates two approaches which allow an understanding of the interdependence of port-city relations in a colonial context. The first we have is morphological. It is based on the assumption that the development of port infrastructure has initiated a modernization of the colonial city. The second is political, analysing the interactions, at local level, between the Chamber of Commerce and City Council. This approach is based on the assumption that the system of port authority established during this period prompted new institutional dynamics that impacted on urban policies. Besides this introductory section and conclusion, the chapter is structured in four main sections. The second section deals with the role ports played in the colonial conquest of Algeria, followed in the third by an historical account of the port of Algiers, 1830–1930.This is complemented by an analysis of port governance issues and the role that the Chamber of Commerce played in that process. We then consider the relation between the port, the city, and urban planning, followed by an examination of the current situation of the port.

5.2 Ports as strategic areas for the colonial conquest of Algeria From the outset of the French occupation of Algeria in 1830, colonial troops immediately controlled the strategic ports of the country’s Mediterranean coast, starting with Algiers, besieged on 5 July 1830, then Oran in 1831 and Annaba in 1832. These became the principal Algerian ports. Algiers, being the capital, was the first port city and formed the backbone of colonial trade. Oran, in the western region, situated close to Gibraltar, became a port of call. Its military importance was enhanced by the taking of the fortress of Mers el Kebir (Lespes, 1930a). Annaba, in the east, became gradually Algeria’s first mining port due to its proximity to the iron and phosphate mines in the region of Constantine (Lespes, 1930b). These port facilities enhanced development of a railway network linking these ports to the hinterland for the transport of raw materials. Therefore, the then-Minister of Algeria and the Colonies decreed, as early as 1857, the importance of constructing a large national railway system connecting Algerian ports with the rest of the country: “The network should be built parallel to the sea, eastwards from Algiers to Constantine, and westwards, from Algiers to Oran, with branch lines departing from the most important ports to the principle line”.4 This project began in 1860, with several railway lines being inaugurated, such as the Algiers-Oran line in 1871 and the Algiers-Constantine line in 1887 (see Figure 5.1). This connected “port-railway” system is closely linked to the territory’s colonization programme. The railways were powerful “pacification” tools that helped secure ways of penetrating remote areas of the country to be colonized and therefore more easily repress insurrectional movements. This is confirmed by a thesis presented in 1881 by an engineer, de Lépiney, who emphasizes that railways allow: “troops [to be brought] quickly to the battle field”, demonstrating “the strategic utility of a line penetrating directly into the south, linking the highlands to the Mediterranean Sea”.5 These lines also made it possible to connect directly “the port of embarkation or the place of consumption to the production centers of the south”,6 considerably speeding up the commercial traffic. This railway network built from the strategic coastal points created a littoralizationof the Algerian territory, the economy of which relied decisively on the 62

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Figure 5.1 Map of the railways of department of Algiers in the early 1900s. Source: Personal archive.

sea and metropolitan France (Côte, 1988).This system encouraged a reconfiguration of the port cities at the centreof colonization strategies.

5.2.1 The development of the port of Algiers: A modernizing benefit to the city The increasing economic and political development of the colony in the 1880s led to new port requirements in order to manage and store large volumes of goods transported from all over the country as outlined in the following extract from a letter of the Algerian Chamber of Commerce in 1892: Cereals, wines, building materials, ores, coals, all kinds of imported or exported goods cover our docks and our port so well that it is almost always a problem, difficult to solve in terms of finding a suitable location to store the drop-off cargo. Most often this is only provided by the use of coercive means taken against traders occupying the land.This situation becoming disastrous […] Traders and trade unions clamor for place.7 The development of the colonial economy and commercial exchanges between the metropolis and the colony therefore compels new functional requirements in the ports, in particular a greater regularity of the maritime services and a rapid circulation of the goods to cover the costs of investment in the port apparatus. These new challenges imply a rationalization of the port area, which gradually expands and redesigns itself by generating industrial infrastructures adapted to each task in the maritime transport chain. This industrialization of the port brought about a modernization movement in the city, which also had to meet the requirements of flexibility demanded by the maritime trade. This modernization movement is reflected in the construction of wide-ranging structures linking port to urban space such as the waterfront, the 63

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Figure 5.2 Port-city of Algiers in the 1930s. Source: Service historique de la Défense, Vincennes.

railway and maritime stations, and warehouses and jetties, offering a new industrial landscape to the colonial capital (see Figure 5.2). From the start of the conquest in 1830, it was the responsibility of Ponts-et-Chaussées engineers to design and implement port infrastructure in Algiers. Placed during the first decades of the occupation in the charge of the Ministry of War and then under the administrative supervision of the Minister of Public Works, these engineers were moved from the city to a local department of public works following the advent of civil government in 1870. Faced with hostile Algerian coasts, the occupation war and the colony’s budget restrictions, they had to even more refine their creativity, efficiency, and rationality in the face of the urgent need for port installations enabling necessary supplies for the creation of the colony.8 These colonial challenges led some of these engineers, often at the start of their careers, to experiment with new technical processes to save money and time. These colonial experiments played an important role in maritime developments taking place in the French metropolitan territory as well as other European ports, as one engineer, Laroche, explains: The need to build a shelter on an inhospitable coast had led not only to a change in ideas with the design of fully artificial ports, but also to realization of work that once had been considered very difficult. From that time, engineers became more daring: material difficulties disappear before the development of tools. Harbor construction is now considered a much more important branch of engineering. (Laroche, 1931) The construction of the dykes and docks of the port of Algiers illustrates these innovative processes. The construction of the northern dyke in 1832 allowed the Pont-et-Chaussées engineer 64

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Figure 5.3 System of artificial concrete blocks designed by the engineer Victor Poirel, 1838. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Victor Poirel to experiment with a system of artificial concrete blocks9 hitherto unknown, which was to be deployed subsequently in several European ports (see Figure 5.3). The construction also allowed an elaborate system of dredging machines to be put in place for the construction of the harbour’s refit basins in 1869 to extract sand and laitance in the rocky bottom and stabilize the foundation (see Figure 5.4). The extension of these port infrastructures that were integrated into several government-sponsored development programmes10 were to help transform the Algiers seafront by serving as a foundation for the development of a new adapted architectural typology, adapted to port constraints such as those of the docks and maritime shelters.

5.2.2 Maritime docks: A new façade for Algiers Unlike dykes and quays built from the beginning of colonization, the realization of the maritime docks, to meet the growing need for storage of port goods, did not begin until 1890. The first maritime docks designed in the port of Algiers were built by the French architect Henri Petit (1856–1926) who presented the Chamber of Commerce with a project for the development of dock-warehouses on 8 July 1891. His proposed facilities consisted of sheds for goods formed within a building of two floors with a 3600m² ground-floor and a level floor of 5600 m² (see Figure 5.5).This dock located in the southern part of the basin of the old port near the dry docks forms a rectangle of 160 mlong parallel to the sea 10 m from the edge of the dock, and 45 m wide with a total area of 7,300 m². The structure of the building is mixed with a timber frame that incorporates openings to illuminate the first floor, wood floors consisting of 6-hole hollow brick slabs and I-beam joists reinforced with soles at points of support of the floor level which allows a range of about 10 m; the floor is covered by a clevis and is supported by metal pillars.11 65

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Figure 5.4 System of harbour’s refit designed in 1869. Source: Fond ancien de l’Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC).

Figure 5.5 Docks designed by the French architect Henri Petit in 1894. Source: Archives Nationales d’Algérie.

However, it was not until the 1930s that the construction of the hangars accelerated, consolidating the port. Their typology is considerably streamlined, the mixed structures in iron and wood giving way to a linear and rigidly reinforced concrete structure, as well as fasciae the ornamentation and arrangement of which were akin to classical architecture have been replaced by quasi sprockets walls. Therefore, the architecture of the hangars is standardized to fulfil only a 66

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Figure 5.6 The port of Algiers in 1950s. Source: Entreprise portuaire d’Alger (EPAL).

strict function of shelter for a commodity in transit facing an increasing speed of maritime flows. If, proportionately, sail vessels remained still important in Algiers until the beginning of the 20th century, these mostly disappeared during the 1930s to give all the space to steamships and fuel tankers, thus accelerating the pace of shipping.12 This network of port facilities is completed by the realization of a hub of maritime stations forming new access gates to the city. These gates are, in actual fact, a way to reconfigure and revitalize adjacent urban neighbourhoods. Therefore, the economic and morphological links between port and city have contributed to the redefinition of urban constructions, creating new institutional dynamics impacting on the way of planning the city (see Figure 5.6).

5.3 The Chamber of Commerce of Algiers and the port-city governance: Power issues and territorial struggles The Chamber of Commerce of Algiers13 played a major role in promoting colonial economy and port infrastructure development in Algeria. This institution, created in Algiers on 7 December 1830, was controlled by local traders, and ensured the territory’s economic interests. This is highlighted in the original decree: [The Chamber of Commerce of Algiers] will be composed of seven merchants including five French, one Moor, and one Hebrew. They will have the choice of electing their president, including a secretary […] the traders of Algiers will recompose their Chamber without the intervention of the Government; but they are obliged to communicate its newly elected members.14 During the entire colonial period, the Chamber of Commerce of Algiers was responsible for the supply of necessary capital to modernize the port’s infrastructures relative to increasing trade demands. 67

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As a capitalist institution, the Chamber of Commerce of Algiers financed the construction of the port by borrowing funds from national and local banks. These loans were repaid by the Chamber through annual instalments, thanks to a system of imposing tax on all goods transiting through the port.15 In return, the state gave a concession of the port grounds to the Chamber of Commerce, in exchange for the latter to undertake public services for port users. These consisted in making use of the port area and maintaining it through the development of roads and a railway network to allow efficient transportation of goods.The Chamber of Commerce also had to ensure the financing of the construction of warehouses and docks essentialfor the maritime industry, as well as their administration, renting facilities out to maritime companies and traders. From 1878, exploiting this concession system to modernize the port for the benefit of trade, the Algiers Chamber of Commerce offered to give the general government of Algeria a sum of 1,700,000 francs upfront, without interest, to carry out works in the port of Algiers. It justified its offer by the insufficient public funds from the state and underlined the urgency of modernizing the port to benefit trade. A Senate report of 26 July 1879, attached to the offer of the Chamber of Commerce, confirms and develops this argument: Needless to point out the chief importance of the port of Algiers, both from the commercial point of view and the military point of view. For too long, necessary and urgent work has been undertaken for its improvement and maintenance. However, the lack of funds allocated to this work on an annual basis did not allow them to be carried out with the desired decision …Concerned about this predicament, the Algiers Chamber of Commerce made a proposal to the Government which would have the effect of allowing the rapid realization of improvements deemed indispensable, without stretching the budget with a new burden.16 To meet this offer, the Chamber of Commerce used a loan from the Banque d’Algérie at a very advantageous interest rate for this public institution: It would contract at a rate not exceeding 6% loan of 1,700,000 francs and would make this sum available to the State in three annual installments, enabling the work to be undertaken with all desirable activity. The State would repay the Chamber of Commerce in twelve years without interest.17 The Chamber paid the interest due to the lender by the collection of a tonnage tax fixed by the State at 0.20 francs per barrel of tonnage on any French or foreign ship entering the port and per barrel of goods landed or boarded for ships calling. A few years later, in 1894, the Chamber of Commerce used the same system of bank loan to build the first docks of the port of Algiers, through a financial credit of 1,100,000 francs made to the State.18 Therefore, through this concession framework, the Chamber of Commerce had the monopoly of port administration by becoming its main treasurer. This institutional monopoly hinged with an increasing land ownership of the port area, located in the centreof the city, involved new issues of governance at local level, particularly with the City Council in charge of urban management.

5.4 The city authority in port planning: A restricted intervention City interventions in the port were subject to an exceptional regime, because, despite its location in the city centre, the port benefits from an autonomous administration. This parameter 68

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meant that new institutional dynamics at the local level resulted in negotiations between municipal actors and port stakeholders on the application of city prerogatives in the port.19 Minutes of deliberation meetings of the City Council on port facilities testify to the numerous discussions that took place with the Chamber of Commerce. The organization of the inner Agha harbour, between 1892 and 1912, was the subject of several conventions between the city and the Chamber of Commerce.Therefore, the convention of 27 April 1912 regulated all city intervention in the organization of the inner harbour, including lighting platforms, police and public safety, and sanitary facilities.20 The different clauses of these agreements were previously fixed by a mixed commission specifically set up by the Governor of Algiers, who was in charge of defining the rights and obligations between the services concerned.These rights and obligations concern essentially the sharing of incurring costs in municipal works between the port and city services; the financial aspect was thus at the centreof discussions. The lighting of the platforms was subject to numerous negotiations between the two institutions.The City Council restricted its interventions to the lighting of spaces not conceded to the Chamber of Commerce and belonging to its land. This was particularly the case of the access ramps leading to the medians; it was considered that “on these roads, the commune would have the same rights and obligations as on the other streets and large roads crossing the city of Algiers. The lighting would therefore be at its expense”.21 The same was not true for the lighting of the inner plots of land accommodating the wharves, on the ground that these lights exclusively benefitted the Chamber of Commerce: “This lighting is necessary solely for the commercial needs of the exploitation of solid land. It would therefore be ensured only by the Chamber of Commerce, or by individuals; the city would not intervene”.22 The extent of intervention was therefore inversely proportional to the degree of commercial exploitation of the port spaces by the Chamber of Commerce. Consequently, for the lighting of the driveways of the solid lands which integrated the network of public roads of the urban agglomeration, the city circumscribed their involvement by the condition of a financial contribution from the Chamber of Commerce – because this lighting would necessarily favor the commercial exploitation of land of which the Chamber of Commerce must ensure special costs. In addition, the Chamber of Commerce would enjoy almost all of the income from said land. It therefore seems fair that the latter should bear a share which the [mixed] commission has set at one-third of the total expenditure.23 The organization of public safety on the wharves was subject to the same criteria of negotiations. A special service of police and surveillance of the inner harbour was formally established by the city and the Chamber of Commerce on 29 July 1911. It was, however, stipulated at the end of this agreement that: the city undertakes to permanently assign police personnel to the surveillance of the port, including 73 officers, 15 agents, 3 French guards and 12 watchmen. The Chamber of Commerce pledges itself to pay as contributory part in the expenses resulting from this organization a fee of 15,705 fr.24 This contractualization of city interventions in the port could explain the marginal place occupied by this territory in the major urban planning plans initiated in Algiers at the turn of the 1920s. In these plans, planners seem to see the port more like a spatial and administrative border, not to be crossed except as a composition element. 69

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5.5 The port in urban planning projects: The marginal area In the 1930s, the way the city was planned began to be transformed. On one hand there was an expansion of the urbanization process towards the surrounding region; on the other hand the State launched numerous urban plans. For that reason “1930–1933 are crucial years for urban planning and architecture in Algiers as the centenary of the colonization favored prestigious operations and large investments” (Deluz, 1988). The legislation25 enabled to draw up new reformation laws to plan the city. Important urban planners such as René Danger in 1929, Maurice Rotival in 1930, Le Corbusier in 1931 and Henri Prost in 1936, designed plans in order to modernize Algiers (Hakimi, 2011). Strongly influenced by the Modern Movement, these urban planners designed the city as a network of functional areas and communication roads. However, little of these urban planning projects integrated the port area, and little consideration was taken on the effect of modernization on the port–city relationship. An analysis of the main urban planning projects prepared during this period shows that the port area was mainly thought as an industrial infrastructure which needed to be connected with the urban area through a road system. In 1930, Maurice Rotival designed the construction of a wide hanging highway encroached on the port area and planned to link the port to the new urban neighbourhoods through a network of elevators and underground ramps (see Figure 5.7). Rotival’s ideas were reused by Le Corbusier in 1931 and by Prost in 1936, who developed the same principles in their urban planning projects. Therefore, in all these plans, except for the maritime station planned by Rotival and Prost,26 the port remained at the margin. Paradoxically, port activities however affected some urban processes especially in surroundings neighbourhoods, where all the industrial and trade quarters were situated. In this regard, Rotival recommended that urban activities had to be organized in the following areas: “The houses on the hillsides, industries and warehouses along the harbor, luxury shops on the seafront and business entreprise in the quarter of La Marine” (Rotival, 1931). Le Corbusier also designed a business neighbourhood next to the port, and Prost designed the industrial area next to the outer harbour of Mustapha. Even if these projects were never completely materialized, they influenced the urbanization of Algiers even after the colonial period. As a postcolonial metropolitan city, from July 1962, Algiers faced an unprecedented urban increment and had to gradually reduce the port area in order to adapt to new urban necessities, an initiative based on a planning ideology similar to that developed by modern planners during the late colonial period.27

5.6 The city of Algiers today, towardsa marketization of port area? Since the 2000s, an ideological shift can be observed in the way the city–port relations are conceived. This is embodied in a strategic plan for the Bay of Algiers by 2035. The city authorities plan to renovate the entire coastal area over a distance of 70 km, taking as example the renovation of the brownfields in the harbours of Marseille and Barcelona which have been undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s.28 The main goal of this planning project is to recover port areas by relocating the harbour industrial activities towards a new deep-water port on the city outskirts. The declared ambition is to open the city to the sea by integrating cultural and leisure activities within the historic port and to modernize the maritime facade of the city. Thus, the port’s industrial identity would be replaced by a leisure harbour favouring a new urban marketing strategy. Moreover, the Algiers Port Authority29 is moving towardsa dematerialization of port spaces in part associated with the containerization implied by new global maritime logic (see Figure 5.8). Many warehouses from the colonial period were demolished since the late 1990s in favour of large container parks, and 70

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Figure 5.7 The Rotival plan for Algiers, 1931. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

this is gradually erasing the port heritage of the 19th–20th century, the rehabilitation of which could have been used as an opportunity for a more authentic urban renovation.

5.7 Conclusion Resituating the development of the port of Algiers in a colonial context seemed essential to emphasize the importance of the planning of transport infrastructures in the context of strategies 71

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Figure 5.8 The container park of the port of Algiers. Source: Souha Salhi, 2017.

of colonial domination. Developing a road, port, or railway was tantamount for establishing political and economic control over entire portions of the territory, and these developments also helped to progress the network of colonial cities, as these infrastructures generated new urban matrices through the opening of tracks, and the realization of stations connecting them to the city. These issues were soon pursued by prominent protagonists of colonization who put infrastructures at the heart of their theories, serving as doctrines used to train officers of the colonial administration system. In 1843, polytechnician and Saint-Simonianist Barthélémy Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864) published a reference work entitled La colonisation de l’Algérie [The Colonization of Algeria] in which he devotes a whole chapter to the question of colonial civil engineering (Enfantin, 1843). Some decades later, in 1895, French law specialist, Arthur Girault, corroborated Enfantin’s philosophy in his book, Principes de colonisation et de legislation coloniale [Principles of colonization and colonial legislation] in which he stated that “the colonial question is primarily a question of civil engineering” (Girault, 1895). The multiplication of case studies on infrastructure development in a colonial context seems then important for the rethinking of the history of African cities.

Notes 1 Roseau, N. (2016), “Pouvoirs des infrastructures”, Revue d’Histoire Urbaine, No 45, p. 8. 2 For further information on these issues, please see: Hein, C. (2011), Port cities. Dynamic landscape and global networks, Routledge, New York. 3 In French scholarship, there seems to be only one book on these issues: Klein, J.-F. and Marnot, B. (2015), Les Européens dans les ports en situation coloniale, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. 4 Archives nationales, Fond partiel du Ministère des Travaux Publics, F/14/8565/Chemins de fer. Algérie et colonies (Dakar à Saint-Louis). 1877–1898. Document n°1: Vérification des comptes des chemins de fer de l’Algérie concédés à la compagnie de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée. 5 Archives nationales, Fond partiel du Ministère des Travaux Publics, F/14/8567/Chemins de fer, Algérie et colonies (Dakar à Saint-Louis). 1887–1898. Chemin de fer d’Alger à Laghouat, Mémoire sur le projet établi par M. de Lépiney en 1881, p. 7. 72

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6 Archives nationales, Fond partiel du Ministère des Travaux Publics, F/14/8567/Chemins de fer, Algérie et colonies (Dakar à Saint-Louis). 1887–1898. Chemin de fer d’Alger à Laghouat, Mémoire sur le projet établi par M. de Lépiney en 1881, p. 11. 7 Archives du département culturel de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Marseille (CCIMP), Exposé des travaux de la chambre de commerce d’Alger (1892), Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, Alger, pp. 316–317. 8 Concerning history of engineers in colonial context, see Vacher, H.(2017), “From mise en valeur to cooperation-Ponts-et-Chaussées engineers overseas and the rise of planning expertise in the twentieth century”, Planning Perspectives, pp. 91–113. 9 Poirel devoted an entire book to this subject in 1841, Mémoire sur les travaux à la mer [Dissertation on work at sea], Carlian-Goeury et Dalmont, Paris. 10 Three major port development programs were undertaken during the colonial period: the first program of port works was approved by the law of 26 August 1848; the second by the law of 22 June 1897 and finally a third program of expansion was voted in 1921. 11 Archives nationales d’Algérie, Fond partiel de la chambre de commerce d’Alger (1889–1962), DZ /AN/1F/316/Construction des hangars-abris (1891)/Exposé du projet de hangar projeté par la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger, rapport fait à Alger le 8 juillet 1891. 12 This is confirmed by the statistics of maritime traffic published by the Chamber of Commerce of Algiers in the appendices of les exposés des travaux de la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger between 1900 and 1930. 13 The French Chambers of Commerce were re-established in 1802 by Napoléon’s Interior Minister, Jean-Antoine Chaptal. Concerning their history and role developing French commercial ports, see Marnot, B. (2011), Les grands ports de commerce français et la mondialisation au XIXe siècle, Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris. 14 Archives du département culturel de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Marseille (CCIMP), MQ 52/03/Commerce international/Relations avec les pays africains/Algérie (An X-1834)/Arrêté de création de la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger signé par Clauzel, Alger le 7 décembre 1830. 15 About the “system of administration by loan” applied in Algeria during the colonial period, see Guignard, D.(2010), La capture de l’investissement public, in L’abus de pouvoir dans l’Algérie coloniale, Presses universitaires de Paris-Ouest, Paris, pp. 105–163. 16 Fond ancien de l’Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC), cote 4°13398C727, Rapport du Sénateur M.Luceau, Examen du projet de loi, adopté par la Chambre des députés, ayant pour objet d’autoriser le Gouverneur général civil de l’Algérie à accepter, au nom de l’Etat, l’offre faite par la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger, d’avancer à l’Etat, la somme de 1,700,000 francs, pour être affectée aux travaux du port d’Alger, 26 juillet 1879, p. 2. 17 Fond ancien de l’Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC), cote 4°13398C727, p. 2. 18 Archives du département culturel de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Marseille (CCIMP), Exposé des travaux de la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger (1894), Décret ministériel concernant l’autorisation d’établir et d’administrer un outillage public sur les quais du port d’Alger, Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, Alger, p. 55. 19 The establishment of the third Republic in France in 1870 allowed the civil administration of the colony to limit military authority, hitherto a powerful presence. This new administrative system led to an increase in local authorities, particularly those of the Chamber of Commerce and City Councils. 20 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville d’Alger, séance du 24 juin 1921, p. 237. This convention was supplemented by several amendments including those of 17 July 1913, 28 July 1914 and 4 January 1921. 21 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville d’Alger, séance du 19 mai 1905, Arrière-port de l’Agha, pp. 106–107. 22 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville d’Alger, séance du 19 mai 1905, Arrière-port de l’Agha, p. 106. 23 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville d’Alger, séance du 19 mai 1905, Arrière-port de l’Agha, p. 106. 24 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville d’Alger, séance du 20 mai 1921, Police des quais, p. 171. 25 To learn more about this legislation, in particular the Cornudet law established in Algeria in the 1920’s, see Hakimi, Z. (2002), “Du plan communal au plan régional (1931-1948)”, Revue Labyrinthe, No13, pp. 131–136. 73

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26 This maritime station was carried out in 1948 by the French architect Urban Cassan (1890–1979). 27 Between 1970 and the beginning of the 2000s, the area of the port space was reduced by half from 126 ha to 55 ha. Concerning the post-colonial economic issues of the Algerian ports, see Setti, M., Mohamed Cherif, F.M., and Ducruet, C. (2011), “Les ports algériens dans la mondialisation: la fin du paradoxe ?”, Revue géographique des pays méditérranéens, No 116, 2011, pp. 85–93. 28 A complete study was published about this project: Amrouche, A. (2012). “Dossier Cinquantenaire. Les projets qui transforment Alger”, Revue Vies des Villes, Hors-série No 3. 29 Known in French as Entreprise portuaire d’Alger (EPAL).

References Archives du département culturel de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Marseille (CCIMP), MQ 52/03/Commerce international/ Relations avec les pays africains/ Algérie (An X-1834)/ Arrêté de création de la Chambre de commerce d’Alger signé par le Général Clauzel, Alger le 7 décembre 1830. Archives du département culturel de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Marseille (CCIMP), Exposé des travaux de la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger (1892), Travaux d’amélioration du port, Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, Alger. Archives du département culturel de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Marseille (CCIMP), Exposé des travaux de la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger (1894), Décret ministériel concernant l’autorisation d’établir et d’administrer un outillage public sur les quais du port d’Alger, Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, Alger. Archives NationalesPierrefitte-sur-Seine, Fond partiel du Ministère des travaux publics F/14/8565/ Chemins de fer. Algérie et colonies (Dakar à Saint-Louis). 1877–1898. Document n 1:Vérification des comptes des chemins de fer de l’Algérie concédés à la compagnie de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée. Archives NationalesPierrefitte-sur-Seine, Fond partiel du Ministère des travaux publics, F/14/8567/ Chemins de fer, Algérie et colonies (Dakar à Saint-Louis). 1887–1898. Chemin de fer d’Alger à Laghouat, Mémoire sur le projet établi par M.de Lépiney en 1881. Archives NationalesPierrefitte-sur-Seine, Fond partiel du Ministère des travaux publics, F/14/8567/ Chemins de fer, Algérie et colonies (Dakar à Saint-Louis), 1887–1898. Chemin de fer d’Alger à Laghouat, Mémoire sur le projet établi par M. de Lépiney en 1881. Archives Nationalesd’Algérie, Fond partiel de la Chambre de commerce d’Alger. 1889–1962. DZ/ AN/1F/316/ Construction des hangars-abris (1891), Exposé du projet de hangar projeté par la chambre de commerce d’Alger, Alger le 8 Juillet 1891. Amrouche, A. (2012), Dossier Cinquantenaire: Les projets qui transforment Alger, Revue Viesdes Villes, Hors-série No 3, pp. 153–193. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bulletin municipal officiel de la ville d’Alger, 19 mai 1905, 20  mai 1921, 24 juin1921. Côte, M. (1988), L’Algérie ou l’espace retourné, Flammarion, Paris. Deluz, J.J. (1988), Urbanisme et architecture d’Alger, Aperçu critique, Pierre Madraga, Liege. Enfantin, B.P. (1843), La colonisation de l’Algérie, P. Bertrand, Paris. Fond Ancien de l’Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC), cote 4 13398C727, Report by french Senator M.Luceau, Examen du projet de loi, adopté par la Chambre des députés, ayant pour objet d’autoriser le Gouverneur général civil de l’Algérie à accepter , au nom de l’Etat, l’offre faite par la Chambre de Commerce d’Alger, d’avancer à l’Etat, la somme de1,700,000 francs pour être affectée aux travaux du port d’Alger, Paris 26 juillet 1879. Girault, A. (1895), Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale, Larose, Paris. Gras, P. (2010), Le temps des ports. Déclin et renaissance des villes portuaires (1940–2010),Tallandier, Paris. Guignard, D. (2010), L’abusdepouvoirdansl’Algériecoloniale, Presses universitaires de Paris-Ouest, Paris. Hakimi, Z. (2011), Alger: politiques urbaines (1846–1958), Editions Bouchène, Saint-Denis. Hakimi, Z. (2002), “Du plan communal au plan régional (1931–1948)”, Revue Labyrinthe, no 13, pp. 131–136. Headrick, D.R.(1988), The tentacles of progress. Technology transfer in the age of imperialism (1850– 1940), Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford. Hein, C. (2011), Port cities. Dynamic landscape and global networks, Routledge, New York. Klein, J.F. and Marnot, B. (2015), Les Européens dans les ports en situation coloniale, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes.

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Laroche, C. (1931), “Evolution des travaux maritimes de 1830 à 1930”, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, marsavril 1931, pp. 183–220. Lespes, R. (1930a), Oran, étude de géographie et d’histoire urbaine, Felix Alcan, Paris. Lespes, R. (1930b), “Le port de Bône et les mines de l’Est Constantinois”, Revue Annales de géographie, no180, pp. 526–541. Marnot, B. (2011), Les grands ports de commerce français et la mondialisation au XIXe siècle, Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris. Poirel,V. (1841), Mémoire sur les travaux à la mer, Carlian-Goeury et Dalmont, Paris. Roseau, N. (2016), “Pouvoirs des infrastructures”, Revue d’Histoire Urbaine, no45, pp. 5–16. Rotival, M. (1931), “Veut-on faire d’Alger une capitale?”, Chantier Nord Africain, Janvier 1931, pp. 27–37. Setti, M., Mohamed Cherif, F.M., and Ducruet, C. (2011), “Les ports algériens dans lamondialisation: la fin du paradoxe?”, Revue géographique des pays méditérranéens, no116, pp. 85–93. Vacher, H. (2017),“From mise en valeur to cooperation-Ponts-et-Chaussées engineers overseas and the rise of planning expertise in the twentieth century”, Planning Perspectives,Volume 34, Issue 1, pp. 91–113.

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6 Living in Lourenço Marques in the early 20th century Urban planning, development, and well-being Ana Cristina Roque

6.1 Introduction Since the possibilities of Lourenço Marques as a field for investment in real estate attracted the attention of capitalists, the conviction has grown that such ports as Durban, East London, and Port Elizabeth, would ultimately find in Delagoa Bay a strong rival for the trade which the more southerly coast towns have so long enjoyed (Delagoa Directory, 1899:5) By the end of the 19th century, as expressed in the Delagoa Directory for 1899, the small settlement of Lourenço Marques, in Delagoa Bay (Baía de Lourenço Marques, present day Maputo Bay), was becoming one of the most important urban African centres in Southern Africa with potential to attract international investors and businessmen and, by extension, people looking for job opportunities. On the one hand, economic growth resulting from increased traffic of goods and people with the Transvaal provided the opportunity for considerable improvements in the city (M.C., 1913; Newitt, 1995:350); on the other hand, the opening of a regular railway connection with Transvaal, transformed the port of Lourenço Marques, already considered “the best harbour of South Africa” (Delagoa Directory, 1899:17), into the main port for the exports of the gold explored in the Rand mines. This development was consistent with the on-going process of colonial urbanization on the eastern African coast in the late 19th century. Expressed in the emergence of modern and important urban centres and ports located at key transport junctions, easily accessible and providing a more direct outlet for East Africa’s exports (Burton, 2017:11; Demissie, 2007:4), this process exposed the attitude of the European powers towards African resources and their exploitation, as well as the specific regional contexts within which these urban centres developed. In the case of Lourenço Marques, the development and growth of the port and the city were closely associated to the economic and political relationship developed since the mid-19th century with the Transvaal.The two governments worked hard to strengthen these relations, being one of the first results the signing of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Borders (29 July 1869).Through this treaty, the Transvaal guaranteed access to the sea and the conditions to implement a railway connection to the coast, which helped to increase the mining industry and facilitated labour movement, 76

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while Lourenço Marques gained the status of international metropolis flourishing based on the gold exports and the increasing trade of labour force to supply the mining sector. As a result, the city swiftly became a melting pot of people with different backgrounds, status, and cultures, with a noteworthy presence of Europeans and Asian people and a growing number of African indigenous people followed by the creation of government agencies and specific legislation to respond to the needs of the population’s growth and the balance between African and non-African people, as well as to improve people’s living and working conditions. This situation put health problems at the heart of Lourenco Marques’ authorities, following which sanitary concerns gained importance as part of the Portuguese colonial policy, whether in terms of seeking solutions for urban sanitation in order to provide the city’s development in a healthy environment, or in what was related to lodging and health conditions of the non-­European population, in particular the increasing contingent of workers in transit to the mines, who were considered the main responsible for the unhealthy situation of the city (Azevedo,1907:267). In any case, the commitment of the colonial authorities was evident in the institutional efforts for transforming the unhealthy village of the 19th century into the successful metropolis of the early 20th century (Roque, 2016:169). And, these efforts had immediate impact on the international opinion as Bayly testified when writing in 1909: few years ago (Lourenço Marques was) decades behind the other maritime resorts of the coast, but with a geographical situation without rival, nothing was left to be done to attract the foreigner, who runs in search of a short distraction to his daily labors. (Bayly, 1909:73) Offering attractions to residents and foreigners, the improvements aimed at enhancing the city’s external image were due to structural interventions with additional results in the visual reference of the city, such as the shaping of different cultural and economic landscapes, and the definition of urban and suburban areas, marked by the unequal allocation of resources due to different social realities and presupposing dissimilar types of approaches and solutions for health and wellbeing issues. Thus, although there was unanimity in situations requiring priority actions, such as the drainage of the marshes or the construction of a sewage system, others were far from having the agreement of the institutions and services involved. Namely, situations in which Public Works, Health Services and the Municipality had to coordinate actions for the organization and management of an urban space, perceived by Europeans as strictly “non-native” but necessarily shared with indigenous people, and in which it was imperative to respond to the needs and problems resulting from the growing concentration of a multiracial population. In this context, and keeping in mind the importance of colonial political and economic interests as main drivers of change in the city’s landscape, this chapter discusses the city’s growth considering not only the projects foreseen for its development, how they were implemented and the official policies, but also the correlation between urban growth/well-being/health and how colonial projects and policies break this link and were used to achieve social inequalities and racial segregation. Therefore, we will address the different ways of organizing the city space in the turn of the 19th century considering the natural characteristics of the area and the anthropogenic actions, as well as the government policies and their impacts and some of the debates they have aroused. By doing so, this chapter aims to shed some light on the complexity of the daily life of Lourenço Marques according to its multiracial and multicultural social composition, on what were the main constraints to the city’s development, the expectations of the population and on how colonial policy brought rational solutions. To this end, in Section two we address the 77

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actions taken to promote public spaces and leisure areas and, in Section three, the measures regarding urbanization, sanitation, and health.

6.2 Gardening the city: Creating beautiful, pledging for health, promoting public spaces, and leisure areas During the last two decades of the 19th century, reforms of the colonial administration were crucial to fostering Lourenço Marques transformation into a large, modern city where mostly Europeans hoped to find the “civic comforts and conveniences they had become accustomed to in Europe” (Burton, 2017:12). To this purpose, the improvement of urban infrastructures contributed greatly, especially since 1877 with the arrival of the first Public Works team. The aims and functions of the new Public Works Office clearly reveals the intention of the colonial authorities to design, organize and manage the city transformation by acting directly on critical axes with immediate impact on the city’s structure, the port, and the city’s environment; namely, the sanitation of the city, which implied the eradication of the swamp and the construction of a sewage system, and the cadastral map and the urban plan, including the upgrading of the port. If sanitation was indispensable for the expanding of the city and the elimination of potential source of diseases, cadastral maps were essential to understand the local ownership structure and to calculate and negotiate the value of the expropriations to be made, whenever necessary1, to implement any projected urban plan. Thus, property register should be prior to the implementation of the 1st urban plan presented in 1887 by António de Araújo (see Figure 6.1) but, the fact is, that work was time consuming and not always easy to achieve, and twenty years later was still far from being complete2.

Figure 6.1 Major António Araújo. Projecto de ampliação da cidade de Lourenço Marques, Moçambique.1887. PT/AHU/CARTI/064/00539. Source: http:​//ahu​.dgla​b.gov​.pt/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/si​tes/2​4/201​6/09/​PT-AH​U-CAR​TI-MO​ÇAMBIQUE.pdf.

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From public health and economic perspectives, the elimination of the wetland areas and the building of a modern, wide, and airy city along with the improvement of the port were major concerns for the colonial authorities and therefore, often forced adjustments between the different state departments, the Municipality and even the private enterprises. Indeed, the city and the port were expected to develop and grow in accordance with the perspectives and interests of the colonial administration and the ability of the metropolitan and local authorities to address and solve the major constraints to the improvements foreseen. The first urban plan and the discussion on the way to expand the port are thus paradigmatic. Based on a reticular layout, Araújo’s plan projected the expansion of the city towards the higher and more airy areas, predicting that the streets projected in the direction of the coast should be large, wide and with the possibility of being extended to the sea, without hindrance, to ensure a good air circulation and a pleasant visual landscape3, and that height and width of buildings should comply with pre-established dimensions depending on the width of the public roads and the characteristics of the construction sites, as regulated by the City Council4. Following the same logic, wide avenues should have large sidewalks shadowed by rows of trees as expressed in the plans for the Avenida Aguiar in 1887 (Morais, 2001:89–90). As for the port, discussions on its improvement involved the possibility of building a new pier and internal ports, namely in the Matola River and in the city’s swampy area; the latter being a particularly interesting hypothesis as, while combining scientific and technological solutions for economic purposes, it does not lack advantages from the environmental point of view, allying directly the works of the port with the works of sanitation of the swamp and of conduction of waters for the city supply (Andrade, 1898). Freire de Andrade drew attention to this last proposal, considering that, despite the high costs involved, the construction of an inland port in the swamp area should be worthy of consideration. According to him combining the drainage and the landfill of the swamp with the construction of new docks, namely shipyards, would also contribute to a better use of the spring-waters of Ponta Vermelha and Infulene, improving the sanitation of the city, which would greatly value the lands of the swamp (Andrade, 1898:339–340) and significantly impact on the city’s landscape. Similar justification applies to other municipal measures, such as the provisions for the removal of garbage or for the control of the circulation of animals in the city’s streets as well as the ones concerning the paving and greening of streets and squares, which should also be seen as crucial to creating a better environment, improving the living conditions of the residents and promoting a healthy image of the city. Municipal provisions, namely those concerning the collection of waste and the removal of dirty waters5, opened the discussion on the alternatives to the weekly garbage collection in barrels, loaded onto the backs of natives who dumped it directly into the sea, and on the need to control the huge number of stray dogs, circulating in the city without muzzles or license, putting at risk the health and physical integrity of the inhabitants and contributing to make the streets dirty and dangerous6. Putrefaction of garbage, bad smells, and pollution, gave a poor image of the city, kept away potential investors and jeopardized more daring projects, such as the preservation and improvement of the Polana beach, already considered an elegant seaside resort and a potential pole of tourism (Azevedo, 1907:269). Therefore, if the elimination of the swamp and the construction of a sewer system were the two faces of the same coin, they would not be completely effective if not supported by additional measures encompassing the whole city, including the coastal areas, and not only the zones which, because of the swamps, were considered responsible for the unhealthy city’s environment. Thus, additional measures also included forestation projects that combined the planting of great power-absorbing trees, eucalyptus type, with the drainage and landfill of the marsh and wetlands 79

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so that these plantations could also contribute to form fragrant barriers to protect the city from unhealthy gases and mosquito clouds. Nonetheless considering the importance of allying healthiness with beauty and the advantages of involving residents in this process, Portuguese administration also encouraged the creation of public and private landscaped gardens, promoted the greening of public spaces and the planting of shade trees in the city’s streets and squares according to local climatic and environmental conditions and the possibilities of acquiring suitable species7. Greening the city was of paramount importance to promote a new and pleasing image of Lourenço Marques and to ward off the stigma of an unhealthy environment associated with the swamps. Therefore, the planning and execution of the gardens and green areas played a prominent role in the Portuguese colonial agenda and involved the colonial authorities and the civil society. The Garden of the Residence of the General Government, the Garden of the Sociedade de Horticultura e Floricultura de Lourenço Marques, and the Garden complex of Praça 7 de Março – Praça Mouzinho de Albuquerque are, in this context, paradigmatic. Based on different planning concepts related to the specific context of each one, these gardens reveal the intention of creating green spaces with the dual function of beautifying the city and creating a healthier environment. And, no less relevant, they also reveal the private/public space dichotomy related to the urbanization process, foreshadowing the concepts of leisure and leisure spaces, thus allowing us to better understand how these concepts relate to each other and how did they mirror the colonial policy in the context of the city’s growth at the turn of the 19th century. The Garden of the Residence of the General Governor in Ponta Vermelha developed around of what would become the governor’s residence, in an area initially belonging to the Mac-Murdo concessionaire involved in the construction of the Lourenço Marques-Transvaal railway connection, before becoming municipal property by provincial decree of 1896. The decision to install there the residence of the General Governor as well as the Portuguese headquarters was due to António Enes, who in 1895, settled in the small building left by the former owners. Till the end of the century, the building will undergo remodelling works to make it the residence of the Governor and the official residence to house high Portuguese and foreign dignitaries in visit to the colony. This was probably the reason behind the decision of creating a garden, in 1912, to substitute the existing small forest of Eucalyptus, Poinciana, and Araucaria. The decision was taken by the Governor Alfredo Magalhães, who had most of the Eucalyptus cut down to begin the creation of a garden that, over time, would be enriched with several species. According to Gomes e Sousa, it was a space of about 17,200 m2, surrounding the Governor’s Palace, enclosed and thought as private space, with a structure combining the planting of trees and ornamental shrubs with fruit trees (Sousa, 1946:30). Located in the highest and most airy area of the city, about 4 km from the city’s business centre, Ponta Vermelha soon became the “noble area of the city”, an exclusive place for the white population to settle in, enjoying a healthy environment and the possibility of having their villas there with private gardens, essential to their well-being (Lazarus, 1901:4). Unlike the gardens of Ponta Vermelha, the Garden of the Sociedade de Horticultura e Floricultura de Lourenço Marques ( later Vasco da Gama Municipal Garden, current Tunduru Gardens), grew out of the initiative of an organization of the civil society, the Sociedade de Horticultura e Floricultura de Lourenço Marques, created in 1885 to recover the marshlands8. Counting among its members with notorious personalities of the city, the Sociedade was supported by the City Council and intended to address all matters pertaining the improvement of the District’s environment, namely to promote and encourage the association between forestation and sanitation works. Accordingly, the garden started as a nursery for botanical species and a field of plant tests to be used in wetlands and marshes9 and, as early as 1886, the nurseries were already able to contribute 80

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for the planting of thousands of trees in the city, including Eucalyptus to be used in swampy areas (Longle, 1887). By 1887, it was already a small botanical garden, properly fenced, and, in 1900, under the jurisdiction of the Municipality, opened to the public as the city’s Municipal Garden. Testifying what was expected to be a public botanical garden, the garden presented a structure compatible with a pattern of organization that combined recreational and educational purposes (Ribeiro, 1893) without neglecting the nursery component that, taking advantage of the use of greenhouses, enabled the beginning of a production of palm trees and ferns that, over time, will become reference species of the garden. With a completely different background, the complex of gardens encompassing the 7 de Março and Mouzinho de Albuquerque Squares resulted from the combination of the landfill of Praça da Picota in 1876 and the creation of a small but well-organized garden (Morais, 2001:78) under the responsibility of the Municipality. Located next to the quay and point of confluence of large-scale commercial arteries, this square-garden was probably the city’s first public garden since it was the centre of the city’s social life and the meeting point of many inhabitants of Lourenço Marques regardless of race, social or economic status. Unlike the other two gardens, this area, partly gardened partly paved, was never fenced, was free to use and commonly shared by the city’s residents, and therefore fitted the concept of public space as “stage for public life” (hkpsi.org), at least till the mid-20th century (Sousa, 1946:56). Regardless of the model adopted, gardens were crucial to beautify the city, improve the environment and health of the residents, and, not least, to create public spaces and leisure areas. In 1897, underlining the growing importance of social life, the Municipality received applications for the concession and licensing of a café-concert, a kiosk and other social facilities in the Garden of the Sociedade, where specific areas for games, granted by the Sociedade to the Sociedade dos Jogos10, were already operating under the management of this institution and in accordance with the garden’s rules. Meanwhile, in the Praça 7 de Março, António Furtado opened a refined bookstore with a “variety of Portuguese, French and English books”11, facing the well-known Chalet Kiosk, not far from the Atelier of Photography of Romão Pereira, opened since 1888, and the prefabricated pavilion housing the first city’s cinematograph near the Custom’s building. Ten years later, the number of kiosks and cinematographs had grown considerably, and the city had a diversity of public cultural and social spaces. In the early 20th century, the kiosks had become fundamental in this respect and the garden complex of the Praça 7 de Março and Praça Mouzinho de Albuquerque was one of the most frequented and lively public spaces in the city (Lazarus, 1901) with 4 kiosks and a bandstand with live music twice a week (O Ocidente, 1889). Local press has drawn attention to the role of these spaces as privileged places of multiracial social and public life, fostering dialogs, discussions and circulation of information and knowledge and, consequently, contributing to the formation of a public opinion, participatory and able to develop the ability to express a critical and reasoned opinion regarding colonial policies12. Whilst the metropolitan magazines, mainly engaged in projecting internationally the image of a new Lourenço Marques, praised the city, the dynamics of its social life and the transformations undertaken in recent decades, aimed to demarcate it from the negative image of the dirty and sickly village of the 19th century (Sim, 1919 apud Sousa, 1951:59). Under the title “A cidade de Lourenço Marques: suas transformações, vida de conforto, jardins e theatros”, the article signed by A. W. Bayly, in 1909, is a kind of tourist guide where nothing is haphazardly left and through which we are introduced to a modern city that would rival its European counterparts of the time. Luxury hotels and casinos, animatographs, theatres 81

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and music halls with international line-up, concerts and museums, terraces, restaurants and cafes, large avenues, gardens, beaches and clubs … were all presented as example of the city’s cosmopolitan life that foreigners and residents could enjoy, anticipating the images taken in the 20s by Santos Rufino (Rufino, 1929) and clearly contrasting the previous descriptions, reporting a picturesque but unmodernized city: Oriental in architecture [… where the] buildings are for the most part old fashioned, many of them having been erected more than a century ago and passed over by the hand of time unmodernised and unrejuvenated, save by very occasional fresh coats of whitewash and glaringly assimilated blue, yellow and red paints. (Lazarus, 1901:3) Although Lazarus’ scepticism was not shared by many, some sectors of the colonial administration were apprehensive about the results of what they considered to be an unbalanced urban growth. The sanitary and health authorities were among the most critical on this point, considering that urban growth was done by neglecting the deplorable conditions in which the population continued to live, exposed to the insalubrities and diseases resulting from the persistence of marshes, lack of cleanliness, and public sanitation (Barreiros, 1899). According to the Health authorities, any plan aiming at expanding the city should use modern technology and equipment, crucial to the elimination and recovery of wetlands and degraded areas as well as to the modernization of the city and the port, but it should also provide the creation of gardens, public spaces and leisure areas for the well-being of the residents. However, while envisaging creating a healthy and pleasant city in accordance with the expectations of the growing population, the Public Works programme presupposed concepts of health and well-being in accordance to the colonial idea of a ‘white city’, in which indigenous population would be kept apart, confined to predefined areas, either by social and cultural differences or because their way of life was not compatible with European standards of living and hygiene. Therefore, any structural measure to improve the city should consider the segregation of non-European people on the basis that such a measure would be a very important part of the solution to the problems resulting from the urban growth of the city. Like other African cities, such as Johannesburg, these areas were already defined as indigenous neighborhoods in the plan presented by Araújo in 1887 (see Figure 6.1), anticipating the division between indigenous and non-indigenous enshrined later in the labour law of 1899 and foreshadowing the idea of the Africans as a source of disease and cause of unhealthy environment as advocated by Serrão de Azevedo or Oliveira e Sousa in 1907. And although Araujo’s indigenous neighbourhood were not built at the time, the city grew in clear opposition between the new wealthy European areas, the unhealthy peripheral indigenous districts and the city centre, highlighting the need for structural changes, but under a logic of definition and affirmation of spaces, based on racial, social, and economic assumptions that helped to consolidate the dualistic structure of the city (Jenkins, 2000).

6.3 Urbanization, sanitation, and health measures: Finding a common path for a social segregation politics At the end of the 19th century, despite the Public Works programme and the recognition of the improvements made in the city, sanitary situation had reached serious worrying health risks. To this end contributed not only the increasing number of inhabitants mostly resulting from 82

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the growing rural-urban migration seeking for job opportunities13, but also reasons of climate and environmental nature, namely the great floods of February 1889 and the torrential rains by the end of 1892 and 1893 (Ribeiro, 1917:248). The city, overpopulated, was provisionally isolated, food and freshwater supplies were compromised and became more expensive while the streets turned into rivers before becoming mud puddles attracting mosquitoes. Under such conditions, mosquitoes also quickly joined the courtyards where, prior to the construction of the municipal slaughterhouse in 1890, the animals were slaughtered in the open air, without sanitary control, fostering focus of infection, attracting bugs and parasites, contaminating air and groundwater. By the same time, architectural buildings, wooden and zinc houses still coexisted in the city’s centre, devoid of hygienic conditions and habitability, but, in any case, with very high rents which made many of the wooden houses collective housing, shared by Africans, Asian and even some Europeans with no financial resources to afford paying other type of accommodation. These conditions, along with poor medical assistance and disabled hospital facilities favour the spread of diseases, which often had their origin in the hospital itself, and ultimately could affect the entire population, regardless of race, gender or age. The virulence of some of these diseases was the leitmotiv for the construction of a new hospital in 1911, and the adoption of specific hygienic-sanitary measures, attempting to eradicate major scourges – smallpox and plague, affecting mostly Africans, and malaria, which pledged mainly the Europeans – and to isolate what was considered the cause of those scourges – the indigenous population. Smallpox and plague were the first to draw attention. Being contagious, they required the isolation of infected patients and specific quarantine sites, which were not always easy to find. In the absence of specific facilities, and since it was not possible to build new ones, other spaces had to be used, namely leprosarium outside the city which, during the 1890 epidemic outbreak, served to house lepers and patients infected with smallpox and plague14. These situations stressed the urgency of structural interventions involving medical logistics and measures to ensure hygienic and sanitary conditions, such as the creation of a Health Police, and encouraged the discussion and implementation of policies for the displacement and relocation of populations with immediate visual imprint in the city’s social landscape. New Health Police was specifically assigned for the identification, removal, and quarantine of infected patients as well as for the inspection of the sanitary conditions and habitability of the different dwellings (Roque, 2016). By removing the source of contagion and destroying the conditions that would facilitate the emergence and spread of these epidemics, the Health Services and the Municipality expected to control, prevent and stop them. However, without jeopardizing their effectiveness in improving public health and promoting a healthy environment averse to the spread of any outbreak of infection, they could hardly be considered preventive as they were generally applied after declaring the epidemic, even in the case of the compulsory vaccination against smallpox. Therefore, though presented as prophylactic measures to be carried out in the specific cases of contagious diseases, most measures were to be used in any situation aiming at eliminating, as quickly as possible, the conditions allowing the existence of foci of infection and removing whatever was possibly infected, namely people. In turn, when implemented after the epidemic was declared, such procedures would hardly be effective in the long run if they were not supported by additional preventive measures, foreseeing treatment of patients and improvement of general living conditions, which required effective collaboration and concerted actions between the services of the Municipality, the Health Services and the Public Works. 83

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Theoretically, inspections should be done in all sectors of the city, covering houses, warehouses, industrial and commercial facilities and other public facilities in order to avoid demolitions by presenting a programme of improvements and reforms to be carried out in the buildings to provide them with the requisite qualification and comfort conditions. However, inspections were mostly carried out in the poorest areas, mainly occupied by nonEuropean population with very low incomes, and all they actually did was give a ‘medical’ opinion on the deficiencies found and attest the lack of hygienic conditions and habitability without providing any specific solution to overcome the deficiencies found or to allocate alternative areas for the construction of houses that had to be demolished. Following these inspections, demolitions should be carried out with the assistance of the Municipality and supervision of Public Works Office along with the interdiction of rebuilding the houses inside the city, and therefore with the implicit forced displacement of the population to peripheral areas. First demolitions date back from 1898 to 1899 but without further information about the areas where the houses could be rebuilt (Vasconcelos, 1899) despite the ongoing discussion on the need to create specific areas for indigenous neighbourhoods outside the city. By the end of the 19th century, in Lourenço Marques, the Health Police acted as institutional instrument of the colonial administration to impose a set of measures defined as ‘good healthy practices’ aiming at cleaning the city of the main causes of disease, which ultimately justified racial and social segregation as clearly advocated by the Head of Health Services of Lourenço Marques, when remembering what he had wrote to the Governor General in 1907: The accumulation in which Negroes, Indians, and Chinese live in houses that are true dens with the dirty habits that characterize them, is one of the most powerful elements of urban unhealthiest and is, in all respects, a permanent danger in the propagation of any epidemic. (Azevedo, 1907:267) Azevedo’s discourse is beyond doubt. Directly or indirectly, indigenous people were always considered the source of infection and the main responsible for the unhealthy environment of the city. Therefore, any solution to improve urban sanitation should pass through the interdiction of them to inhabit the city. As in other colonial cities, Portuguese authorities were “using public health concerns informed by the prevailing colonial medical discourse and practice to remove and relocate Africans” (Demissie, 2007:4–5) and other non-European people to areas that, from the point of view of urbanization, were marginal to the city. Since most of the people affected by these measures could not afford the costs implicit in the procedures required by the Health Council, nor pay the fines required for their non-compliance, the results of the action of the Health Police had, in the short term, a strong social and economic impact, also noticed by a change in the city’s visual urban landscape and its social and economic geography, foreshadowing a dualistic structure – rich city/poor periphery – that will be one of its main characteristics (Jenkins, 2000). On the one hand, the demolitions created areas temporarily devastated to be included later in the urbanization plans and covered by the sanitation projects (Azevedo, 1907:267) while, at the same time, contributed to considerably reduce the number of people who could continue living in the city. On the other hand, the modernization of the city, benefiting from the use of new architectural materials and techniques and urban planning to tame the geography and ecology of the city (Demissie, 2007:5), would meet the needs of those remaining in position to continue living in the city, i.e. the European middle-upper class, reproducing their concepts of comfort and well-being. 84

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Thus, colonial authorities used the Health Services and the Public Works Office to respond to the increase growth of the population and its consequences for the city’s environment and physical space. Through the action of both departments, the city was planned according to an urban grid conforming to the needs and objectives of the colonial administration, albeit planning was also in accordance with the Western concepts of comfort and well-being, security and protection, indispensable to the construction of a protected space separated from what was considered dangerous and violent for Europeans: diseases, bad environment, coexistence with people with different ways of being and living. Preventing anything that could be an attack on the health and well-being of Europeans also brought malaria to the discussion, one of the main causes of death for the Europeans in Lourenço Marques and for the unhealthy environment of the city. And, if the control of epidemic diseases was a challenge, the eradication of endemic diseases, such as malaria, was vital for the city’s growing and development. Therefore, colonial authorities were particularly interested in fighting malaria which, although not a contagious disease, would greatly benefit the possibility of identification of the source of infection – virus reservoirs – (Leal & Howard, 1908:60) and the isolation of patients in case of epidemic outbreaks. Accordingly, in 1907, no matter the fact that general strategies to combat endemic and epidemic diseases shared the combination of principles and procedures already used for smallpox and plague, a specific regulation for malaria’s prophylaxis was published15. Benefiting from an investment in strengthening preventive health measures as well as public works and sanitation, combating endemic and epidemic diseases was a key point of the colonial agenda and was presented as a benefit to the city and all its people. Nonetheless, the way these measures were implemented and how they were articulated with Araújo’s plan (see Figure 6.1) clearly give reason to believe that reality was different. The definition of an area for the indigenous neighbourhood, eccentric to the major urban area, fitted perfectly the idea of controlling the city’s major cause of disease but shows also that the idea of social segregation and inequality underlined the whole city’s urbanization process, being previous to the adoption of any health or sanitary procedures to combat the main diseases and enhancing the role of the Public Works and the Health Services as important key drivers of the colonial system. In fact, most of the actions proposed by the Health Services were not aimed at solving the problem of basic sanitation and public health in general terms, but rather to solve the problems of some inhabitants of the city, namely the colonial elite, while the ‘Other’, being the cause of the problems, was relegated to the periphery as justified by the Head of the Health Services, when writing “Our purpose is to clean the city of unhealthy dwellings and impure dwellers” (Azevedo, 1907:270). Following the first demolitions, the suburbs of Lourenço Marques expanded irregularly in the early 20th century, reproducing the same settlement patterns that were prohibited in the city, lacking any sanitary plan, visibly displaying the dichotomy between centre/periphery, foreshadowing the shaping of different cultural and economic landscapes and underlining the role of the different public services in the planning and management of the city’s growth according to colonial interests and western concepts and values. The white city of architectural buildings and its surrounding poor belt of adobe, wattle, and daub and zinc plate constructions (Jenkins, 2000) were the two sides of the same coin, each one being justified by the same sanitary and safety reasons; the difference being that in the poor peripheries, such a model would enable the easy and quick demolitions of the dwellings, ‘without great losses’ whenever there was any imperative need (Azevedo, 1907:267). As a result, epidemics could easily be eradicated from the city and controlled in peripheries where 85

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infrastructures did not exist, and precarious houses could be easily and quickly demolished or burned, in accordance with the strategic recommendations of the Health Services to fight against endemic and epidemic diseases. In 1908, to reinforce these recommendations and in favour of the effective “cleaning of the city” and the organizing of the anarchic growth of suburbs, the government created the Comissão de Melhoramentos Sanitários da Cidade de Lourenço Marques (Commission for the Sanitary Improvement of Lourenço Marques’ city) which, together with the Public Works Inspectorate, opened the discussion on the need to move forward with the proposal of the Health Services to prohibit the indigenous from living in the city and create peripheral indigenous districts as a measure of hygiene and public sanitation. What began as informal settlements in the outlying areas of the city, due to forced mobility of people but without the imposition of a compulsory and defined space for them to settle, will become an institutionally planned and defined space by the Colonial Administration with the clear objective of creating indigenous neighbourhoods, conceived as spaces of social and racial segregation and deprived of any conditions that could guarantee the health and well-being of those who were forced to inhabit them but easy to control.

6.4 Conclusion At the beginning of the 20th century, sanitation and health issues became one of the main topics of discussion in Lourenço Marques. Becoming a great metropolis was a very demanding process, involving not only the conception of a modern urbanization plan, providing the city with basic sanitary and health conditions, but also its implementation, considering the multiracial society of Lourenço Marques and the people’s needs and expectations. The idea of improving the city’s environment and the well-being of its inhabitants was behind important initiatives such as the greening of the city and the creation of public and leisure areas or the measures to decrease risks of epidemics and was consensual to the colonial authorities and the Municipality while largely supported by public opinion and all sectors of society. However, the concepts of improvement and well-being were not independent from the social and cultural background of the different inhabitants of Lourenço Marques nor from the assumptions on which was based the relationship colonizer/colonized and, therefore, the different measures implemented by the colonial authorities could hardly be seen as fitting and responding to the needs and expectation of all the inhabitants. No matter the great improvements that endowed the city with basic infrastructures in favour of better living conditions (sewage network, piped water and distribution of electric energy, public transport, street and sidewalk pavement, gardens, cultural and hospital facilities, etc.), which were fundamental for the creation of an appellative image of the city to attract foreign investors and boost development, the measures implemented affected only a minority of the population and a small part of the city. In fact, measures and improvements aimed mainly the part of the city where the indigenous population was forbidden to live in order to ensure the creation of a ‘white space’ where nothing was missing and therefore could be attractive for possible white wealthy settlers. This attractive image, inspired by Western cultural, social and economic patterns and interests, concealed the reality of an apartheid-based society, disregarding the fundamental rights of the indigenous populations, forced to live in suburban areas devoid of any sanitary conditions, to where, in time, was not foreseen any plan for its improvement and development. Public Works office and Health Services worked together to make Lourenço Marques a modern city with a healthy disease-free environment and a set of attractions that should meet 86

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Western expectations in terms of comfort and well-being which, in the 20th century, no matter the criticism of the local periodical press (Pereira, 2013) had a significant impact at international level (Bayly,1909). However, in this context, most of the actions performed by the Health Services, instead of acting in the prophylaxis of diseases, relegated them to the peripheries of the city, eccentric to the ‘white area’, where there was no intervention except extreme situations of burning houses or compulsory vaccination in critical periods of epidemics. Well-being was a white concept, conformed to the demands of a white colonial elite who claimed the benefits of development as a counterpart to their civilizing mission. Life in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques was a life of misery. Overpopulated, the suburbs had no running water, no electricity, no sewers, no medical facilities; the streets were dirt tracks and the existing green spaces were nothing but the backyards where the families could make some subsistence crops. Leisure spaces were improvised in the bars, playing cards, and drinking cheap wine, and in the streets and back of the houses where African drumming (batuques) were, from a cultural and identity perspective, the expression of social interaction among Africans, of their way of being and living (Pereira, 2016), as opposed to the concerts, balls, cinema, and theatre plays that animated the downtown nights of Lourenço Marques. Throughout the first decades of the 20th century, the city grew based on social, economic, and racial segregation and inequalities expressed in this spatial dichotomy which reproduce the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Visible in the geography of the city, as in the draft by Araújo in 1887, this contrast assumed that in the name of public health and the well-being of the residents, the practices and uses interdicted in the city were the only ones allowed in the suburbs. Health and sanitary safety reasons justified this attitude supported either by Araújo’s plan, advocating the organization of the city in a social and racial segregation basis (Vales, 2014:168), and by the Health Services’ proposals justifying apartheid on an alleged medical and scientific basis. As presented in the Health Services Report of 1903, Lourenço Marques was the example of the first Portuguese colony where wealthy rich people lived side by side with poor workers, where one could find housing offering all the scales of hygiene and well-being, from luxurious mansions to rundown rooms and apartment. A city where one could eat well, but where one could also starve16.

Acknowledgement Project FCT UID/HIS/04311/2013. CH-ULisboa – Empires, Nature, Science and Environment.

Notes 1 Acordão no85, Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no14, 19 de Junho de 1897:3. 2 Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no19, 28 de julho de 1897:1. 3 Acta no 305 (4 de maio). Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 6, 1897:1. 4 Postura sobre edificações. Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 15, 1897:1. 5 Arrematação para a remoção de águas sujas da cidade. Edital de 21 de junho. Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 15, 1897:3. 6 Proposta para remodelação do código de posturas municipais (18 de junho). Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 16, 1897:1. 7 Acta no 312 (2 de junho). Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 14, 1897:1. 8 Estatutos da Sociedade de Arboricultura e Floricultura em Lourenço Marques, Boletim Oficial do Governo Geral da Província de Moçambique, no33, 15 de agosto de 1885:220–221. 9 Direção Geral de Agricultura, Ofício no 217 de 3 de Novembro de 1886, AHU, ACL SEMU, DGU, Moç. Cx.1389/1L. 87

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10 Estatutos da Sociedade de Arboricultura e Floricultura em Lourenço Marques, op. cit., p. 221. 11 Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 19, 28 de julho de 1897:8. 12 Eg., O Portuguez (1900-1901) or A Tribuna (1904). 13 According to the statistic of 1908, Lourenço Marques had then a population of 9,849 individuals, including Europeans, Asiatic and Africans, most of them sharing their daily life downtown. Ribeiro, 1917:212. 14 Relatório do Serviço de Saúde de Lourenço Marques, no Anno de 1890. 1506 DGU 5ª Repartição Moçambique (1848–1890). 15 Regulamento da Profilaxia Anti-Paludica da Cidade de Lourenço Marques, 1907. 16 Relatório Anual da Província de Moçambique – Serviço de Saúde. Anno de 1903. AHU. SEMU, DGU, Serviço de Saúde, 1902–1903.

References Accordão no 85, Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no14, 19 de Junho de 1897, p. 3. Acta no 305 (4 de maio). Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 6, 1897, p. 1. Acta no 312 ( 2 de junho). Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 14, 1897, p. 1. Andrade, A. Freire de (1898). “As minas de ouro do Transvaal”, Revista de Obras Públicas e Minas, Anno XXVIII, Tomo XXVIII, Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional. Araújo, A. (1887). Projecto de ampliação da cidade de Lourenço Marques, Moçambique. 1887. PT/AHU/ CARTI/064/00539. Arrematação para a remoção de águas sujas da cidade (1897). Edital de 21 de junho. Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 15, p. 3. Azevedo, J. de O. Serrão de (1907). Relatório do Serviço de Saúde de 1907. (AHU, 1514 DGU 5ª Repartição. Moçambique (1908) Serviço de Saúde). In Relatório do Serviço de Saúde de Lourenço Marques relativo ao anno de 1907–1911. Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional. Barreiros, A. G. (1899). Lourenço Marques – Boletim Sanitário do mês de Agosto de 1899. AHU, 1514 DGU 5ª Repartição. Moçambique (1899), Serviço de Saúde. Bayly, A. W.(1909). “A cidade de Lourenço Marques”, Portugal em África. Revista Ilustrada e Colonial, 7 de janeiro. Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 19, 28  de Julho de 1897. Boletim Sanitário do Hospital Militar e Civil de Lourenço Marques – Anno 1899, mês de Março. AHU, 1514 DGU 5ª Repartição Moçambique. Burton, A. (2017). Urbanization in East Africa, c. 900–2010CE, Oxford Research Encycllopedia of African History. On-line publication. Date: March 2017. http:​//afr​icanh​istor​y.oxf​ordre​.com/​view/​10.10​93/ac​ refor​e/978​01902​77734​.001.​0001/​acref​ore-9​78019​02777​34-e-​31. Retrieved January 2018. Demissie, F. (2007).‘Imperial Legacies and Postcolonial Predicaments: An Introduction’, in F. Demissie (ed.), Postcolonial African Cities: Imperial Legacies and Postcolonial Predicaments.Taylor & Francis/Center for Black Diaspora DePaul University, pp. 1–10. Delagoa Directory for 1899. Lourenço Marques and Barbeton: A. W. Bayly & Co. Direção Geral de Agricultura, Ofício no 217 de 3 de Novembro de 1886, AHU, ACL, SEMU, DGU, Moç. Cx.1389/1L. Estatutos da Sociedade de Arboricultura e Floricultura em Lourenço Marques, Boletim Oficial do Governo Geral da Província de Moçambique, no 33, 15 de agosto, pp. 220–221. Jenkins, P. (2000). City profile: Maputo. Cities 17 (3), pp. 207–218. Lazarus, J. (1901). A Souvenir of Lourenço Marques. An album of views of the town. Lourenço Marques:Tabler & Co. Leal, J. R. do Amaral & Howard, C. W. (1908). “Algumas considerações sobre as campanhas antimaláricas em Lourenço Marques”, Relatório do Serviço de Saúde da Província de Moçambique referido ao anno de 1908. Lourenço Marques, pp. 58–78. Longle, A. (1887). Carta de Armando Longle dirigida ao Conselheiro Francisco Joaquim da Costa Silva (22 Julho). AHU – ACL, SEMU, DGU, Moçambique caixa 1389 1L. M.C. (1913). Estatística dos caminhos de ferro das colónias portuguesas de 1888 a 1911, Lisboa: Ministério das Colónias. Morais, J. Sousa (2001). Maputo: Património da estrutura e forma urbana. Topologia do lugar. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte.

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Newitt, M. (1995). História de Moçambique, Lisboa: Publicações Europa-América. O Ocidente, 21  de Julho de 1889. Pereira, M. S. (2016). “Grandiosos Batuques”: Identidades e experiências dos trabalhadores urbanos africanos de Lourenço Marques (1890–1930). PhD. Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Campinas: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. Pereira, M. S. (2013). “Beiço a mais, miolos a menos” : Representação, repressão e lazer nos grupos africanos subalternos nas páginas da Imprensa Periódica de Lourenço Marques (1890–1910)”. In: Nascimento, A., Bitet al. (org.), Esporte e Lazer na África: Novos Olhares. Rio de Janeiro/Lisboa, 2013, pp. 37–61. Postura sobre edificações (1897). Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 15, p. 1. Proposta para remodelação do código de posturas municipais, 18 de junho. Boletim Municipal do Concelho de Lourenço Marques, no 16, 1897, 1. Regulamento da Profilaxia Anti-Paludica da Cidade de Lourenço Marques. Lourenço Marques, 1907. Relatório Anual da Província de Moçambique – Serviço de Saúde. Anno de 1903. AHU. SEMU, DGU, Serviço de Saúde, 1902–1903. Relatório do Serviço de Saúde de Lourenço Marques, no Anno de 1890. 1506 DGU 5ª Repartição Moçambique (1848–1890). Ribeiro, José Silvestre (1893). História dos estabelecimentos scientíficos, literários e artisticos de Portugal no sucessivos reinados da monarquia, Lisboa: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias. Ribeiro, Sousa (Coord.) (1917). Anuário de Moçambique, Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional. Roque, A. C. (2016). “Doenças endémicas e epidémicas em Lourenço marques no início do século XX. Processos de controlo versus desenvolvimento urbano”, Anais do IHMT 16:167–174. Rufino, J. dos Santos (1929). Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique: Lourenço Marques - Panoramas da Cidade, 1 and 3, Hamburgo: Broschek & Co. Sousa, António de F. Gomes e (1946). “Jardins de Moçambique – Jardins de Lourenço Marques”, MDT, no 45, Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional. Vales, T. C. (2014). De Lourenço Marques à Maputo : genèse et formation d’une ville. Architecture, aménagement de l’espace. Université de Grenoble. www.theses.fr/2014GRENH012, retrieved January 2918. Vasconcelos, Alberto C. (1899). Hospital Militar e Civil de Lourenço Marques – Boletim do mês de Março de 1899. AHU 1514 DGU 5ª Repartição Moçambique (1897) Serviço de Saúde. www.hkpsi.org/eng/publicspace/concepts/ Retrived January 2018.

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7 Colonizing and infrastructuring the Angolan territory through colonial settlements The case of the Cela settlement Filipa Fiúza and Ana Vaz Milheiro

7.1 Introduction This chapter addresses the theme of colonial settlements1, studied within the scope of the territorial infrastructuring of Angola between 1875 and 1975, in particular the Cela agricultural settlement, one of the largest of its kind2. Since the early 1900s, the Portuguese government tried to occupy Angola through agricultural settlements, but it was only in 1928 that this type of colonization was implemented, although it resulted, ultimately, in a failed attempt. In the 1950s, the Estado Novo dictatorship initiated a new colonization policy, and the Cela settlement was set up in the Amboim Planalto, near Gabela, South Cuanza, commencing its activity in 1952. The plan of Cela was designed by the architect Fernando Batalha, within the Colonial Public Works. In the 2000s, after the Angolan independence and the civil war that followed, the settlement was renovated by the Israeli cooperation. This intervention resulted in the construction of new houses, following the aesthetics of some of the existing ones, and in the improvement of the public facilities. The settlement was given a new identity, being renamed Aldeia Nova (New Village). The chapter aims to understand how a colonial historical reality – the Cela colonial settlement – is addressed today, in the Angolan official discourse, as a “progressive” scenario and as an exemplary experience in agricultural development and community models. In this case, the official reference is the mochav, an Israeli settlement model. The remainder of this chapter is divided into four sections. Section 7.2 provides an introduction about Angola’s colonization, namely through the settlement of white colonists in agricultural colonatos, since the 19th century until the 1950s. Section 7.3 focuses on the history of the Cela settlement, namely its links to previous experiences, the experts and ideologies associated with the project, and its implementation and development until the Angolan independence. Section 7.4 questions the current models of development being deployed in the now called Aldeia Nova project and frames it into the concept of neocolonialism. In Section 7.5, we conclude that the Portuguese investment in Angola, made in the colonial era, ends up having a much longer resonance in time than one would suppose. 90

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7.2 On Angola’s colonization In Angola, attempts to fixate population through agricultural colonization began in the late 19th century, under Portugal’s monarchic regime, a process that was picked up by the First Portuguese Republic. However, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that this process of land occupation was intensified. Besides being used to exploit natural resources, colonist settlements were a way to justify the Portuguese sovereignty over these territories. In 1954, the President of the Portuguese Republic, general Craveiro Lopes, visited the Cela settlement during his official travel to S. Tomé and Príncipe and Angola (21 May–2 July). In this six-hour visit, he was accompanied by captain Silva Carvalho, the governor of Angola at the time. During the tour – along with his wife, D. Berta Craveiro Lopes – he inaugurated several fountains (at the villages of Freixo and Santiago de Adeganha), launched the construction of a school-chapel at the village of Santa Isabel, and laid the foundation stone of the church of Santa Comba Dão, the main village of the Cela settlement (now Waku Kungo) (BGU, November– December 1954). Carvalho’s speech at the occasion, published in “Boletim do Ultramar” (BGU, November– December 1954), is helpful in contextualizing this enterprise, at national and international levels. One can find, in the words of the governor, new ways to understand the Portuguese colonization policy vis-à-vis the other international cases. Carvalho stated that one seeks to fulfill the aspiration (…) to meet the current development of Angola with mass colonization, in order to firmly ground the future of the Province, as well as to bring the demographic surpluses of the Metropolis to cooperate in the Portuguese expansion. (Carvalho, in BGU, November–December 1954: 365) This subject has been referred by several researchers, albeit without giving sufficient importance to the demographic question. For example, in the book “Passagens para África: o Povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com Naturais da Metrópole (1920–1974)”, the researcher Cláudia Castelo writes that she did not study the case of the Italian colonization of Ethiopia because its purpose was just the relief of demographic pressures in Italy; thus, it was different from the Portuguese colonization policy, whose ultimate goal was to occupy the territory. We can agree, to some extent, with Castelo’s statement, taking into account our limited knowledge of the Ethiopian case. However, one can identify a clear affinity between the Portuguese and Italian colonization strategies for Angola and Libya, respectively, despite the differences in time and method3. Both were devised within a totalitarian regime and justified as a way to the redirect the emigration flow from other places (mainly Europe and South America) to the colonies in order to take advantage of that workforce, especially in agriculture. The discourse concerning the demographic surpluses of continental Portugal and its north Atlantic islands (Azores and Madeira), besides being present throughout the 19th century, finds resonance in António de Oliveira Salazar’s thoughts in the mid-20th century. In 1936, in a speech about the colonial empire within the nation’s economy, Salazar referred that when we reach 9 million [inhabitants in the next 30 years], we will have more than 100 inhabitants per square kilometer in the mainland and islands. It is not possible to make this many people live off the land (…). This increasing population, that agriculture will not be able to feed or (…) absorb, will figure, in a few years’ time, as a problem that requires solutions, and I don’t see other [solution] than colonial emigration and a more intense industrialization of the Country. (…) In those circumstances, this is a logical solution – that the 91

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Colonies produce and sell to the Metropolis the raw materials and with its profits acquire the manufactured products [made in the Metropolis]. (Salazar, 1936, vol. II: 157–159) Furthermore, Salazar considered himself to be a man profoundly linked to the rural world. In 1949, at the inauguration of the dam with his name in the Sado valley, he stated: “Within the spirit of the rural man, which I am – of origin, of blood and of personality – close to the land, the fountain of men’s joy and nourishment” (Salazar, vol. IV, 1949: 359). Later, in 1953, when presenting the 1st Development Plan, he uttered the famous phrase: “To each arm a hoe, to each family a home, to each mouth its bread”, emphasizing a major commitment to agriculture. Silva Carvalho, in the speech mentioned earlier, referred “the concept of internal colonization applied to all the national territory”, thus considering the colonial space as an extension of the Metropolis, taking advantage of the effort of each man where he is most convenient or needed: from the Portuguese provinces where there is lack of land but abundance of hands [that is, the Metropolis], come the men to those other Portuguese provinces where land exists in excess and hands are lacking. (Carvalho, in BGU, November–December 1954: 368–369) At that time, Portugal was already in the period that is referred today as the Second Salazarism, when the country, after the World War II, became increasingly isolated from the international scene due to disagreements regarding the preservation of the dictatorship and the possession of colonies. In this regard, from the 1950s onwards, the government had implemented an integrationist policy that was revealed, for instance, in the changing of the word “colony” to “overseas province”. This decision strengthened the idea of the Overseas land as an extension of the national territory, leading Salazar to claim that “there are no Portuguese possessions, but pieces of Portugal scattered throughout the world. In Lisbon, in Cape Verde, in Angola, in Goa, in Timor or in Macau it is always the Pátria [homeland]” (Salazar, vol.VI, 1958: 10). On another note, Silva Carvalho also brought attention to the “radical mutation of the classical processes of colonization” (Carvalho, in BGU, November–December 1954: 368), where the purely mercantilist thinking, based on the exploitation of resources and of the “indigenous” peoples in order to make fast profits and then return to the Metropolis, had given way to the settlement of white population in the Angolan hinterland, and its future renovation. However, this was not a new idea, as it was already present in Sá da Bandeira’s Overseas policies back in the 19th century. In 1856, the 1st Marquis of Sá da Bandeira4, proposed the formation of “colonies of those born in the Kingdom and adjoining Islands, in the Provinces of Angola and Mozambique”, in order to “drive the Portuguese emigration to Angola and Mozambique to benefit from the labor revenue” (Conselho Ultramarino, 1859–1867 – Consulta de 11 de Abril de 1856). In this case, Sá da Bandeira’s intention was that the settlement of Portuguese from the Metropolis would boost the development of the “indigenous” population, who could be hired for small salaries5 (see Figure 7.1). After the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) and the British Ultimatum (1890), it was generally accepted that the effective occupation of the colonies with white population could be sustained without help from the “indigenous” people. In 1912, Pereira Nascimento6, a former explorer and naturalist in Angola and head of the study mission for the colonization of Benguela, and 92

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Figure 7.1 The British Ultimatum of 1890, cartoon by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro. Source: Pontos nos iis, no. 282 (20 Nov., 1890). Col. Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa.

Alexandre de Mattos, a lawyer in Luanda, published “The Colonization of Angola”. In this book, it is considered that the occupation of the territory could not be strictly made by military means because today, before the modern theories and tendencies of the colonial nations, military occupation is not enough to justify the possession of a colony; the authenticity of that possession is in the commercial, agricultural and industrial occupation and in the conscious and fruitful exploitation of the indigenous people’s labor. (Nascimento and Mattos, 1912: 7) 93

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The authors ended up proposing the occupation of the salubrious areas with people born in the Metropolis. These areas, at the Angolan plateaus, had already been identified in previous studies, and it was considered that the European settler would have the possibility to carry out physical work there without assistance from the “native” population. To ensure the settlement and later “reproduction” of the white colonists, a type of colonization based in the family had to be implemented, guaranteeing the presence of women, who rarely emigrated to the African colonies. At the time, mestiçagem [racial mixture or miscegenation] had started to be perceived in a negative light, and influential figures, such as ethnologist José de Oliveira Ferreira Diniz, former Secretary of the Indigenous Affairs and General Curator of the Angolan Province, by appointment of Norton de Matos (Governor-General of Angola between 1912 and 1915), were very clear in what should be expected from the white colonist in the regions favourable to his settlement, that is, “his propagation without racial degeneration, (…) [in those] areas of the province where the European can only establish himself in a temporary basis, and in which the labor regime has to be compatible with the climate conditions of the region” (Diniz, 1922: 6). As shown, when the creation of state-led colonial settlements was decided in the 1950s, a long way had already been covered, with several colonization experiences that contributed to the discussion on which was the best option to an effective colonization of the territory. In the 1960s, the former governor of Angola, Horácio de Sá Viana Rebelo (governor between 1957 and January 1960), summed up the question: how to develop the settlement without increasing unemployment? Is free colonization to be condemned? That is, is the settlement in Angola of anyone who wishes to do it, without obstacles or supervision or worries from the State regarding the miseries and bad examples, to be condemned? Is the directed colonization, with costs for the State, and the development of the ‘colonatos’ policy, preferable? (Rebelo, 1961: 116) Within a heated debate throughout the 20th century between two options – the free or the directed colonization – the State, in the 1950s, chose the directed one. This type of colonization allowed the State to control the colonists, their production and their habits, an aspect which served better the totalitarian policy that came to power in Portugal in the 1930s, and especially the isolationist polity of the post-war period.To the Portuguese State, in the 1950s and 1960s, free colonization was clearly not an option.This form of colonization presupposed the initiative of the colonist and the investment of his own capital, without any state assistance or control. Nevertheless, the agricultural colonization of several regions of Angola was made concerning this last option, which many considered to be more successful than the official, centralized and state-directed model.

7.3 The Cela settlement Before Cela, the previous official attempt of colonizing Angola through agricultural settlements was carried out in 1928, during the government of the high-commissary Vicente Ferreira. This initiative, written in the Decree-Law no. 704 of the same year, noticed that “only the State can reduce to a minimum the huge difficulties that surround the enterprise and make to coincide the colonization attempts with the major development works, which are the single solid base of their success” (Garcia, 1934: 7). The high-commissary envisioned a large-scale white colonization that would be undertook in the Angolan plateau. It would be carried out by both collective colonization – colonists 94

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gathered in small nucleuses – and singular colonization – isolated colonists to whom mediumsize farms were attributed. These two types of colonization would be also applied in the Cela settlement, many years later. The Organic Statute of the Colonization Services observed that “the action unit, from the social point of view, of the Colonization Services is the family” (Garcia, 1934: 10). This idea served the Estado Novo doctrine well. The Article of the Statute, which referred to the selection of the colonists, would be practically transposed to the Cela Settlement Regulation (see Figure 7.2). In 1948, Ilídio Barbosa, an agronomist of the Agricultural Services of Angola, published the essay ‘Possibilities for the White Colonization in Angola’, where he analyzed the errors previously committed, proposing solutions for the future development of state-directed colonization. Barbosa referred, from among the causes for the failure of the previous attempts, the poor choice of the land, the concession of monetary subsidies, the bad selection of the colonists, the failure to comply with promised benefits, the faults in the execution of the plans and the restrictions to property rights. In short, the “complete absence of any program of preliminary studies” (quote from the report of the mission organized by Paiva Couceiro, in Barbosa, 1948: 3). The Cela settlement, in the Amboim Planalto, a large plateau that was known for its adequate climate for the establishment of white settlers, is located at about 1300 m of height above sea level, in a valley crossed by the river Cussoi. The construction of the settlement began in 1952, following a preliminary study of Barbosa, as “an attempt of acclimatization of the metropolitan rural population to the tropics” (Castelo, 2007: 144). The initial goal was to settle two thousand families in the region. Besides being the result of a state-led colonization policy, the Cela settlement could also be framed in the international debate due to its nature as an example of settler colonialism (Castelo,

Figure 7.2 Salazar’s Lesson: God, Fatherland and Family: The National Indoctrination Trilogy, design by Martins Barata. Source: “Escola Portuguesa”, Lisboa: Bertrand Irmãos. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

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Figure 7.3 Aerial view of Cela (Waku Kungo), 1960s, photo by Luís Possolo. Source: Luís Possolo Archive, FCT Project: The Colonial Urbanization Offices: Architectural Culture and Practice [PTDC/AUR-AQI/104964/2008].

2007). This concept, widely discussed internationally at that time, translated a specific kind of colonization, which differs from the land occupation cases where the ultimate goal is the exploitation of natural resources and of the “indigenous” workforce. At Cela’s, the most important objective would be the massive land occupation with European (metropolitan Portuguese) and the displacement of the “indigenous” people from the site, forbidding the use of its workforce (see Figure 7.3). However, there are different views between some authors, concerning the land occupation and the soil’s fertility. Amílcar Cabral, one of the founders of PAIGC (the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), affirms that the most fertile areas, from where the Africans were systematically removed, were explored by colonial companies and are in the process of being occupied by European settlements. (…) Tens of thousands of African families (more than fourteen thousand in the Cela settlement) were evicted from their homeland to make way for the Portuguese settlers. (Cabral, 2008 [1960]: 51) Under a different perspective, Prof. Mariano Feio refers that the soils were not tested and, for some reason, they had not been not cultivated by the autochthonous people (Feio cit. in Guerra, 2009). The study of the Agricultural Survey Mission of Angola, quoted by Cláudia Castelo, seems to be more consistent: although the vast majority of the low lands (…) didn’t have an effective agricultural occupation (which doesn’t mean that, under traditional uses and rights, they were considered ownerless), a large part of the local population was successively transferred to other areas by the Administration. (Castelo, 2007: 144) 96

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That is to say that the land, despite being uncultivated – most likely because it was not compatible with the regular cultures, or even because it was infertile – naturally belonged to the autochthonous population. Architect Fernando Batalha designed the plan of Cela within the Colonial Public Works Department, headquartered in Lisbon. It comprised fifteen connected villages, each with around 23 houses, in a total of 350. Despite the vastness of the land to be cultivated, the use of “indigenous” labour was forbidden for 10 years. Not only the Angolan Bantus7 were not considered fully-fledged citizens until 1961 but the authorities also feared that the white settlers would take advantage of employing this workforce by refusing to work. In an attempt to ease the habits of the metropolitan settlers into the rural lifestyle in Africa, Cela was thought to embody a familiar environment, simulating some aspects of the everyday life at the Northern Portugal. This was reflected in several aspects, from the names of the villages to the housing typologies and aesthetics, to the folklore, and to the Northern Portuguese traditional clothing used by the settlers, despite the temperature differences between Portugal and Angola. The villages were organically laid out in geometric patterns. Each village had a specific part to play in the whole ensemble, like a bigger church or a viewpoint. To prevent the isolation of the settlers, the villages communicated visually with each other. Each village had basic healthcare facilities, and educational and religious facilities. The main town, Santa Comba Dão, was located in a higher position. Its church is a copy of the one that exists in Santa Comba Dão, Portugal, Salazar’s birthplace. Outside the residential nucleuses, a hospital was built – together with the neighbourhood that would house the healthcare professionals – to serve the farmer settlers as well as the village of Santa Comba Dão. The “impression” of being in Europe and not in Africa is recurrent in the various accounts of visitors to Cela, including foreign ones (as, for instance, Huibregtse, 1976: 159–161). The question of the metropolitan identity was never disregarded. Groups of families coming from the same region, municipality and parish (in European Portugal) should be drafted for the same nucleus in Cela, as specified in the regulations of the settlement. To promote a bigger cohesion among the families, and to ensure their “propagation without racial degeneration”, as Ferreira Diniz argued in the beginning of the century, or their self-sufficiency (an expression used later), “in the villages there are no native indigenous, and all the work has to be done by the settlers themselves” (Afonso, 1961:12). Thus, each village was composed by a population which was homogenous in its origin, enabling a sense of community. In Cela there were colonists from Trás-os-Montes (settled in Santiago de Adeganha, Macedo de Cavaleiros), from the Beiras (settled in Monsanto, Carrasqueiras and Lardosa), Estremadura (settled in Gradil) Alentejo, Azores, and other metropolitan provinces (see Figure 7.4). The model of the colonato was similar to the one implemented in 1928. There were two types of settling, the familiar colonization, usually established in villages, and the medium-size colonization, established in independent agricultural farms (Governo Geral de Angola, 1958, Regulamento da Junta de Povoamento Agrário da Cela). In the first case, which is more relevant to our study, the settlers received a house, a small stable, lands ready for cultivation (15ha), agricultural tools, seeds and some cattle. The colonists were selected according to certain criteria, described in the Regulamento do Colonato (Regulation) (Província de Angola, 1956, Diploma Legislativo nº2: 550): Art. no. 5 – the primary basis of colonization and, thus, the action unit of the colonization Services, under the social point of view, is the family. 1st – the families of the colonists will be formed by selected individuals that give the best assurance of adaptation from the morphological, physiological, psychological, and moral points of view; 97

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Figure 7.4 “On the way to the fountain”, 1954, colonists settle in the new villages of the Cela Colonato: S. Tiago de Adeganha, Freixo and Vimieiro. Source: IICT Photography Collection, INV. ULISBOA-IICT-Col.CEHU-27405, Tropical Research Institute (IICT), University of Lisbon, PRISC.

2nd – those families will be exclusively drafted in the agricultural environments of the Metropolis, adjoining islands, and Overseas. Art. no. 8 – the colonist families will be drafted accordingly to the guidelines established in the paragraphs of article 5th, by the Colonization Section of the Agricultural Services. That recruitment will be done following these rules: 1st – the families will be recruited, whenever possible by the local conditions, in groups corresponding to the initial nucleuses of the villages that will be successively implemented in a given colonization zone; 2nd – the families of colonists will be exclusively from the agricultural milieu, and those that display a better knowledge of the rural and domestic industries of the regions of origin will be preferred; as well as the ones with the greatest number of children; in which one of the members has completed a course in the practical schools of agriculture in the Metropolis or in the Province; the ones with descendants of agricultural colonists; or the ones that had combined agricultural proprieties in the regions where they come from; 3rd – for each nucleus, groups of families from the same region, municipality and parish will be recruited. The Board of the Agrarian Settlement of Cela, headed by engineer Francisco Teixeira Boaventura, managed the colonato and had, as its main responsibilities, the administration of the social facilities and of the agricultural industries, the product commercialization support, the buying of machinery and seeds, and so on (see Figure 7.5). As in the previous attempts of colonization, desertion in the colonato was constant. The youngest, who had the right to attend primary school, left often for the Angolan cities where they could escape the mostly miserable life of being a small farmer.The rural colonists in Angola 98

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Figure 7.5 The Cela Colonato: “The meal”. Source: Overseas Historical Archive, PT-AHU-AGU_ID19017.

could only aspire to a slightly better life than the one they left in the Metropolis, a “new” life which was not seen as advantageous due to the sentiment of uprooting that was common and that made returning to Portugal a recurrent option. Eventually, the lack of hands to work the land became chronic, a situation which was remedied, in a first moment, with the progressive mechanization of the farm: in June 1959 there were about eighty tractors and mechanical plows in the colonato, as well as several mechanical seeders, rakes and harvesters, demonstrating that agriculture was quite modernized there when compared with the one that was generally practiced in our provincial villages. (Afonso, 1961: 14; see Figure 7.6) The big impulse of production in the colonato happened in the 1960s – during the colonial/ independence war, when the investment in Angola reached previously unseen figures – with the combination between the funds provided by the 2nd Development Plan and the growing mechanization. From 1963 onwards, the Board finally allowed the hiring of “natives” for the agricultural activities, contrarily to what was stated in its regulations: that under no circumstance it would be “allowed the use of indigenous workforce by the colonists, who can, however, hire non-indigenous staff ”. This measure coincides with the revoke of the Estatuto do Indigenato (Indigenous Statute), Decree-Law no. 43893 of 1961, and with the revoke, later in 1962, of the Indigenous Labor Code, replaced by the Rural Labor Code, where “any distinction between ethnical or cultural groups is removed”, and where “all workers, independent of their cultural affiliation, are regulated by the same law” (Decree-Law no. 44309). The Undersecretary of State for Overseas Development between 1958 and 1960, Carlos Krus Abecassis, who was very critical of the course of the settlement, proposed a series of studies in order to change its operating methods, which he considered based on superficial information. 99

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Figure 7.6 The Cela Colonato: “Preparing the land”. Source: Overseas Historical Archive, IICT/ACTD/AHUD19000.

Abecassis feared that the colonato could drift to an “economic, social and political disaster of severe consequences” (Abecassis, 1960: 90). Those studies would therefore allow a more sustainable development of the settlement, supporting scientific-based decisions. It was then determined to proceed with: The prospection, in the field and in the laboratory, and the experimentation, both systematically conducted, with scientific spirit, and the dissemination of the knowledge and results among the colonists; The careful and systematic study of the conditions of commercialization, transport and industrialization of the different products of the agricultural operation; The selection and graduation of the different kinds of colonization, recruitment and preparation of the colonists, the determination of the property dimensions and its distribution in the different areas, [and with the solving of] the accessory problems of labor, production structuring, commercialization and industrialization of products, and eventually of the essential supplies and consumptions. (Abecassis, 1960: 112–113; see Figure 7.7) Although the Board made some decisions that were criticized, even by the Portuguese Government (such as the case of the purchase of Red Danish dairy cattle from Denmark, a breed which didn’t adapt to the climate – Ribeiro, 1981: 185; Boaventura, 1960: 10), the colonato continued to expand.This situation was witnessed by the Portuguese geographer Orlando Ribeiro, who visited the settlement twice, in 1960 and 1969, conceding that “the colonato, after the initial excitement and some years of dismay, seemed to have entered decisively in a viable path (Ribeiro, 1981: 185). This evolution was due to the simultaneous investment in the middle-sized farms, which cultivated more profitable products, and in the product processing through the industrialization of several areas. Factories to produce eggs, dairy products (milk, cheese, yoghurts, butter) and to process other foodstuffs, such as fruit, were built. However, other 100

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Figure 7.7 The Cela Colonato: “Aviary”. Source: Overseas Historical Archive, IICT/ACTD/AHUD18088.

essential decisions for the development of the colonato, such as the hydroelectric harnessing of the Queve River, remained only on paper. At the end of the 1960s, the population of Cela reached nearly 1200 people, but from then until the Angolan independence in 1975, the population decreased and the tendency would be the gradual abandonment of the settlement. In part, this was because of the war for independence, which begun in 1961.

7.4 Neo-colonialism? According to Orlando Ribeiro, “for years Cela was a sort of visitor’s room of Angola, where the myth of the Portuguese colonization was displayed to the admiration of strangers. Some foreign geographers were deluded by the mirage of a white colonization in tropical Africa” (Ribeiro, 1981: 183). In 11 November 1975, the date of the Angolan independence, the settlement was already abandoned. The subsequent civil war was especially destructive in that region. Until the beginning of the 21st century, little was done for the agricultural development of the country. Insufficiencies were reported in 1996, such as the lack of state support in the preparation of the soil, as well as the shortage of seeds, pesticides and fertilizers (Eugando, 2004: 83). In 2002, with the end of the long civil war, the Israeli participated in some official agricultural projects which some saw as “ruinous (…) for the State”, including in Aldeia Nova, the settlement previously named Cela (Costa, 2017). According to the professor Haim Yacobi, this may configure a case of neo-colonialism, due to the exploration of the Angolan natural resources by multinational Israeli corporations, which benefit from the relationship between Angola, that wants to replace the colonial narrative with a new discourse, and Israel, that wants mainly to sell technology and weaponry (Yacobi, 2015). 101

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The pilot project of Aldeia Nova began in 2003 and was inaugurated in 2005 by the President of the Angolan Republic, José Eduardo dos Santos. Santos declared that one of the objectives of the project would be “not only the promotion of integration [of soldiers from both factions], but also national reconciliation, in order to transform Angola in a country for all” (Angop, 2005). The project was supposed to be replicated in several provinces of the country. In the case of Aldeia Nova, the goal was to develop, recover and reactivate the rural agricultural production in the former Cela Settlement, with the purpose of reducing the poverty of that population and integrating the dislocated people and the discharged war soldiers in a social system that can help them return to civilian life. (Costa, 2013: 138) Indeed, a major part of the current farmers were selected among former military members of the FALA and FAPLA, the armed wings of the two main Angolan political factions (Rosa and Kassana, 2016). Following Elisa Costa’s research, the reason for the selection of this settlement, from the colonial time, to be developed in recent years, was due to the existence of structures and infrastructures (…) and to the fact that it possesses an excellent location, fertile soils, and to the mild weather and regular rainfall of its microclimate (the same reasons that were invoked during the colonial period when the location for the creation of the Settlement was chosen). (Costa, 2013: 139) We thus infer that no new study was carried out and that the Aldeia Nova project was based in the knowledge that was produced during the colonial era, giving rise to statements which are very similar to the ones produced during the Estado Novo. But, as we have seen, the fertility of the soils of the region, for instance, was never a consensual subject. In the 1980s, Orlando Ribeiro affirmed that it was “an airplane flight in this convergence of ramps surrounded by mountain-islands, and therefore swampy in the center and covered by tall green grass, [which] led the governor to consider the area very fertile” (Ribeiro, 1981: 182; see Figure 7.8). The model of the settlement has also not changed substantially. The agronomist Fernando Pacheco said to the Le Monde Diplomatique that the project is still based on the Portuguese model and cannot be separated from its function in the colonial economy, being therefore unsustainable in the present time (Conchiglia, 2008). Although the official discourse declares that the model followed by the Aldeia Nova project was inspired in the Israeli Mochav – “a system of collective agriculture where individual farmers are freely associated, but where: they are not owners [of the land]; they don’t choose the parcels to cultivate; they can’t hire workforce; they are required to sell all their production through the local cooperative, which functions as a (national) ‘commercialization antenna’; they can only acquire production goods through the cooperative; they resort to machinery services provided by the cooperative; and receive from it technical-economic guidance” (Costa, 2013: 141) – if we replace “local cooperative” with “Board of the Agrarian Settlement of Cela”, we have roughly the same working model of the colonial era. Pacheco also highlights the high cost of settling the families (Conchiglia, 2008), like what happened in the 1950s and 1960s. He also criticizes the size of the project, stating that it is too 102

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Figure 7.8 Houses built by the Israeli cooperation. Source: Filipa Fiúza, 2009, FCT Project: Homes for the biggest number: Lisbon, Luanda, Macao [PTDC/ ATP-AQI/3707/2012].

ambitious and that, facing a shortage of trained and qualified staff, one should invest in small cooperatives and associations to help small farmers in the production of the food needed by the population, since modernizing agriculture takes generations (Pacheco, 2010). The continuing problems of electric energy shortage, a remainder of the colonial period, did not help the occupation of the rural zone by the population, which continues to try its luck in the cities. In 2013, José Bettencourt, assistant-director of Aldeia Nova, said that “as we are not connected to the public energy network, we operate with sixty-two generators which consume one hundred thousand liters of gasoline per month” (Maussion, 2013), a situation which increases the prices of goods. Pacheco concludes: “farmers work as they did fifty years ago, the technical knowledge, the seed quality and the material equipment have not truly evolved” (Maussion, 2013; see Figure 7.9). Currently, one of the main obstacles to the continuation of the project is the possible withdrawal of Israeli funds from Angola, as a consequence of its favourable vote in the recognition of the Palestinian State (VOA, 2016). In the beginning of 2017, Portuguese newspapers announced the visit of the Angolan Minister of Agriculture to Lisbon, in order to strengthen bilateral cooperation in the area. By then, it was stated that the Angolan government intends to receive from Portugal further support in technical capability and laboratory accreditation, [as well as] cooperation in the recovery of the Angolan bibliographic and scientific archive which is present in Portugal, and in the publication [and] update of the soil maps of Angola. (Lusa, 2017) 103

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Figure 7.9 One of the original houses of Cela. Source: Filipa Fiúza, 2009, FCT Project: Homes for the biggest number: Lisbon, Luanda, Macao [PTDC/ ATP-AQI/3707/2012].

This aspect only strengthens Pacheco’s consideration that “scientific knowledge [in Angola] practically stopped in 1975” (Pacheco, 2010).

7.5 Conclusion In the 1950s, the Cela settlement appeared almost as an anachronistic project. In fact, it was an attempt to direct colonization, with many affinities with the 1928 colonization effort, which was nevertheless more progressive, as it also included free colonization. In spite of the apparent increase in the knowledge on the Angolan territory, some errors may have been committed, due to the lack of serious studies on soil fertility, on the size of the plots to be cultivated by the colonists in the villages, on the cultures and on the most suitable agriculture techniques. In Cela, and before 1960, colonist farmers could not hope to have a much better life than they had in their homeland, and thus many of them abandoned the settlement. However, the “disaster” that was predicted by many ended up not happening, very much due to the colonial/independence war in the 1960s. During the war, the private and public investment in Angola increased, and many of the assumptions that supported the project were gradually altered. In the meantime, the “native” population was allowed to work and the growing agricultural mechanization and industrialization allowed to make the best of the goods produced, some of which were able to be exported. After the Angolan independence, some effort was made to resume Cela’s production. Nowadays, the Angolan regime uses the Aldeia Nova project as a symbol of progress, carrying out numerous propaganda campaigns through the official media, in a similar way to what the Estado Novo regime did. More than 40 years after Portugal’s decolonization, the memory of the colonial time is naturally very much alive and, especially in the political discourse, there is 104

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an expected resentment, which is nevertheless pushed to the background in order to provide solutions to the more technical issues. The Portuguese investment in Angola, in the colonial era, ends up having a much longer resonance in time than one would suppose.

Notes 1 In Portuguese, colonatos. 2 This chapter is part of an ongoing research project entitled “Coast to Coast – Late Portuguese Infrastructural Development in Continental Africa (Angola and Mozambique): Critical and Historical Analysis and Postcolonial Assessment”, that seeks to survey, catalogue and contextualize the infrastructure process of the former Portuguese colonial territory in continental Africa (Angola and Mozambique), during the last century of Portuguese colonization (1875–1975), in order to analyze the extension of the colonial strategies’ influence in the current development models prevailing in these two countries. 3 Further information on the Italian colonization of Libya can be found in Capresi (2009). 4 Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, 1st Marquis of Sá da Bandeira (1795–1876), was a Portuguese military officer (since 1810) and politician during the Constitutional Monarchy (1820–1910), who took high positions such as Prime Minister (1836–1837, 1837–1839, 1865, 1868–1869, and 1870), and President of the Overseas Council (1851–1856). 5 Since then, several authors have studied the subject of the Colonization of Angola throughout the last century of Portuguese presence in Africa. 6 Pereira do Nascimento, along with the agronomist Sacramento Monteiro and the lieutenant Ferreira do Amaral, was part of the committee appointed by Paiva Couceiro (Governor of Angola between 1907 and 1909) to analyze the possibilities for European colonization in the plateau regions of Angola, in order to make political choices based in scientific data. See Castelo (n.d.). 7 Bantu is a general label for the many ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa who speak Bantu languages.

References Abecassis, C.K. (1960). “Prosseguimento dos trabalhos do colonato da Cela”, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, 426 (Dec. 1960), pp. 85–126. Afonso, A.M. (1961). O colonato europeu da Cela, em Angola, Lisboa: Agência Geral do Ultramar. Angop (2005). “Kwanza-Sul: Presidente da República regressa à capital do País”, ANGOP, 01/12/2005. [online] Available at: www.a​ngop.​ao/an​gola/​pt_pt​/noti​cias/​polit​ica/2​005/1​1/48/​Kwanz​a-Sul​-Pres​ ident​e-Rep​ublic​a-reg​ressa​-capi​tal-P​ais,4​e173d​34-4a​22-44​e3-b8​87-d0​bcefd​a216b​.html​ [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Barbosa, I. (1948). Possibilidades de Colonização Branca em Angola, Lisboa: Edições da J. A. C. de Portugal. Boaventura, F. T. (1960). Memorandum – A Colonização do Planalto da Cela e o II Plano de Fomento, 5  de Fevereiro de 1960, Arquivo Huistórico Ultramarino [Cota: OP11506]. Cabral, A. (2008). Amílcar Cabral. Documentário, Lisboa: Edições Cotovia (org. António Duarte Silva). Capresi, V. (2009). The Built Utopia. The Italian rural centers founded in colonial Lybia (1934–1940), Bologna: Bononia University Press. Castelo, C. (2007). Passagens para África. O Povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com Naturais da Metrópole (1920–1974), Porto: Edições Afrontamento. Castelo, C. (n.d.). “Colonização do Planalto de Angola”. [online] Available at: https​://at​agrar​ia.fi​les.w​ordpr​ ess.c​om/20​12/06​/colo​nizao​_plan​alto_​angol​a.pdf​ [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Conchiglia, A. (2008). “Angola’s kibbutz”, Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2008. [online] Available at: http:​ //kit​.mond​edipl​o.com​/spip​.php?​artic​le510​8 [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Conselho Ultramarino (1859–1867). Annaes do Conselho Ultramarino. Parte Official, Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, S. 2 (Jan. 1859) - S. 8 (Jan. 1867). Costa, E. (2013). Cela: dos velhos paradigmas às novas dinâmicas de desenvolvimento agrícola e rural, Castro Verde: 100Luz. Costa, G. (2017). “Terra Queimada”, Expresso, 08/01/2017. [online] Available at: http:​//exp​resso​.sapo​.pt/i​ ntern​acion​al/20​17-01​-08-T​erra-​queim​ada [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Diniz, J. de O.F. (1922). A Colonisação Europeia em Angola, conferência realizada em 17 de Fevereiro de 1922, Lisboa: Liga Pró-Colónias. 105

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Eugando, P. (2004). Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Agrícola no Município do Waku Kungo – Cela, em Angola: 1995–2001, [Master thesis] Lisboa: ISCTE. Garcia, A.A.T. (1934). A Tentativa de Colonização Oficial de 1928, Coimbra: Coimbra Editora. Governo Geral de Angola (1958). Regulamento da Junta de Povoamento Agrário da Cela, Luanda: Imprensa Nacional de Angola. Guerra, V.A. (2009). “Colonato da Cela - A Grande Mentira sobre Angola”, Fora de Benguela (blogspot), 10/07/2009. [online] Available at: http:​//for​adebe​nguel​a.blo​gspot​.pt/2​009/0​7/col​onato​-da-c​ela-g​ rande​-ment​ira-s​obre.​html [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Huibregtse, P.K. (1976). Angola, the Real Story, Den Haag: Forum. Lusa (2017). “Portugal vai apoiar Angola a melhorar produção de arroz e trigo”, in PAIS ao Minuto, 15/02/17. [online] Available at: www.n​otici​asaom​inuto​.com/​pais/​74249​1/por​tugal​-vai-​apoia​r-ang​ ola-a​-melh​orar-​produ​cao-d​e-arr​oz-e-​trigo​ [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Maussion, E. (2013). “Angola quer voltar a ser uma potência agrícola mas ainda há obstáculos”, Jornal Público, 13/07/2013. [online] Available at: www.p​ublic​o.pt/​afric​a/jor​nal/a​ngola​-quer​-volt​ar-a-​ser-u​ ma-po​tenci​a-agr​icola​-mas-​ainda​-ha-o​bstac​ulos-​26818​492 [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Nascimento, J.P.; Mattos, A.A. (1912). A Colonisação de Angola, Lisboa: Typ. Mendonça. [s.n.] “No colonato da Cela”, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, 353–354 (Nov.-Dec.1954), pp. 358–372. Pacheco, F. (2010). “Modernizar a agricultura demora gerações”, Jornal de Angola, 14/06/2010. [online] Available at: http:​//jor​nalde​angol​a.sap​o.ao/​polit​ica/m​odern​izar_​a_agr​icult​ura_d​emora​_gera​coes [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Província de Angola (1956). Colonato da Cela. Legislação publicada respeitante a este colonato, Luanda: Imprensa Nacional de Angola (inclui o Regulamento do Colonato da Cela - Diploma Legislativo n 2:550). Rebelo, H. de S.V. (1961). Angola na África deste tempo, pensamento e acção no governo da Província, Lisboa: Edição do autor. Ribeiro, O. (1981). A colonização de Angola e o seu fracasso, Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda. Rosa, K. da; Kassana, L. (2016). “Angola a crescer - Vida além da crise”, Jornal de Angola, 31/12/2016. [online] Avaible at: http:​//jor​nalde​angol​a.sap​o.ao/​econo​mia/v​ida_a​lem_d​a_cri​se [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Salazar, A.O. (1935–1966). Discursos e Notas Políticas, Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 2 vol. (1937), pp. 157–159; 4 vol. (1958), p. 359; 6 vol. (1967), p. 10. VOA (2016). “Angola aguarda oficialização de “medidas” de Israel”, VOA, 29/12/2016. [online] Avaible at: www.v​oapor​tugue​s.com​/a/an​gola-​aguar​da-of​icial​izaca​o-med​idas-​israe​l/365​5519.​html [Accessed 28 Jun. 2017]. Yacobi, H. (2015). Israel and Africa: A Genealogy of Moral Geography, Abingdon: Routledge.

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8 Diamang’s urban project Between the Peace of Versailles and the Colonial Act Ana Vaz Milheiro and Beatriz Serrazina

8.1 Introduction At the beginning of the 20th century, Lunda, in Northeast Angola, was described as “the land at the end of the world” (Soromenho, 1957). However, for Diamang–Angola Diamond Company it was the only and best place to be. In 1934, less than twenty years after its creation, Diamang was already recognized as a “role model” within the Portuguese colonial project. In a special edition of the newspaper A Província de Angola about “the biggest piece of the Empire”, Diamang was labelled as “one of the most valuable and beneficial members in the economy of the Colony and the enterprise that most competed for its income, and therefore, its development” (Pina, 1934). In order to understand this exceptionality, the chapter focus on the early stages of the urban development of the Lunda region as a result of Diamang settlement in 1917.To support the diamond mining activity in that edge of the Empire, until then devoid of any intervention within the framework of the Portuguese “civilizing mission”, it was crucial to construct the necessary infrastructures for a henceforth inhabited area. Notwithstanding the critical and unstable moment in national and international politics, between the Peace of Versailles (1919) and the Colonial Act (1930), Diamang asserted itself in a powerful and paradigmatic way. The study of housing typologies and collective programmes set up in Lunda uncovers a rigidly hierarchical social system, which, despite suggesting a strong mimicry of life in the “Metrópole”, also incorporates the indigenous culture in its planning. In this regard, this chapter intends to analyse the Company’s urban strategies, identifying the first settlement models and their relationship with the native built pre-existences, as a primordial way of guaranteeing the establishment of the workforce. It is possible to recognize that, in the Lunda region, the “effective occupation” promoted by Estado Novo was overtaken by Diamang’s own methods, focussing on an industrial and scientific approach. Given these circumstances, the autonomy of private companies in the development of former Portuguese colonies should be acknowledged. Even though later on the company’s development project would become more aligned with the Portuguese overseas policies, in its first years it stood out as an important and original approach to the colonial process. Belgians and Americans were in charge of most of what happened during this first period. Due to 107

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geographical proximity, Diamang arose in a close relationship with two other mining companies that were working in Belgian Congo – Société Forrestière et Minière du Congo (Forminière) (at the north side of the Cassai watershed) and Union Minière do Haut Katanga (UMHK) (at Katanga, east side of Lunda) – leading to the creation of a wider network of knowledge production, that went beyond colonial borders. The remainder of this chapter is divided into six sections. The first section provides a brief background of the company’s inception, covering its national and international circumstances. The second section uncovers the occupation strategy promoted by Diamang, focusing mainly on infrastructures. Afterwards, the third and fourth sections address some of the urban planning ideas deployed in Lunda regarding European and African workers, respectively. Lastly, before a few concluding remarks, the fifth section explores how the international networks fostered by the company were seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the Portuguese colonial project.

8.2 Filling the void: Diamang’s arrival in Lunda In 1907, Johnston and McVay, two Belgian mining prospectors from Forminière, found a few diamonds in the Chiumbe River, in the border between Belgian Congo and Angola.This discovery led to the creation of PEMA – Companhia de Pesquisas Mineiras de Angola (Angola Mining Search Company), in 1912, that later confirmed the existence of an extensive diamond field in the Cassai watershed. The enterprise, created by general Paiva de Andrada and Baltazar Cabral, was supported financially and economically by Forminière, which reflected its transcolonial nature. A few years later, in 1917, PEMA gave rise to Diamang, settled in a wide area of 52,000 km2, covering a huge part of the Lunda district (more than half of Portugal’s area) (see Figure 8.1). The company was funded by several investors: Portuguese (Henry Burnay and Banco Nacional Ultramarino), Belgian (Société Générale de Belgique and Mutualité Coloniale), French (Banque de L’Union Parisienne) and North-American (Ryan-Guggenheim). The presence of chartered companies like Diamang was no longer something new in Portuguese colonies. At that time, the Government was looking for foreign investors to construct the basic infrastructures that would allow the “effective colonization” of the interior of Angola and Mozambique, whose extensive areas were very difficult to control. Earlier, in the last decade of the 19th century, Mozambique, Nyassa and Zambeze Companies had already been established as big chartered enterprises1.These private companies formed “colonial power blocs” which were “independent of any effective political control” (Vellut, 1982). They were created as “real substitutes” for the State and had administrative powers over local populations in a defined area (Direito, 2013). About the “development of Angola’s wealth”, an article published on the English newspaper The African World, in August 1926, offered a few thoughts: The future of Angola also requires the continuity of administrative methods, the increase of transport facilities by land and sea; cheaper and frequent communications between Lisbon and Africa, efficient railways. Large agricultural and mining areas are still waiting for exploitation. So, for the development of Angola, it is mandatory to reach foreign capital and initiatives. (BGC, 1926) However, besides the lack of money, in the aftermath of the Scramble for Africa, almost nothing was known about Lunda. That territory was not even considered on the Pink Map – Mapa Cor de Rosa – that Portugal had taken to the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), in order to claim the

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Figure 8.1 Diamang’s settlement in Lunda allowed occupation of the hinterland. Source: © Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa – CML.

land connection between Angola to Mozambique. It was only after the British Ultimatum, in 1890, that Portugal, despite losing the proposed land corridor, got Lunda instead. Brandão de Melo, one of the first Portuguese serviceman in the Diamang’s region, reported a void area. As he described, “throughout the company’s concession area, there were no roads, no bridges, no communication routes” (BGC, 1932). The latest information about that area dated back to Henrique de Carvalho’s expedition, when he explored the Matiânvua Kingdom between 1884 and 1888. Melo recognized that the Portuguese control ended 300 km way from the Cassai region; in fact, it was not until 1926 that Lunda was considered a militarily pacified area (Pélissier, 1986). On the other hand, the troubled times caused by World War I also influenced what was happening in Lunda in those first years of the company’s settlement. For the Portuguese government, it was essential to guarantee that the occupation promoted by Diamang could work as a “plug” to withdraw any tentative of territorial claims that could potentially show up after the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919 (BGC, 1932). Also, Ernesto de Vilhena, Diamang’s managing director from that year on (until his death, in 1967), considered the war to be a “providential” moment to redefine Portugal’s colonial strategy: “we need to abandon the unproductive

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routine, to embrace new processes without hesitation, to take radical measures and to move towards our goal”.To Vilhena, it was all about “decentralization”, “promotion” and “nationalization” (Carvalho, 2014). At that time, Norton de Matos was one of the strong-men in charge of Portugal’s overseas policy and had some ground-breaking ideas for Angola2. He demanded that colonial officials had “zest for initiative and responsibilities, an almost encyclopaedic competence, not only for tax collection and justice administration, but also for public works and road improvement, [in order] to launch temporary bridges, to create and explore farms, to set up clean and hygienic indigenous and European villages” (Galvão and Selvagem apud Fonte, 2012). In this regard, the settlement of Diamang in Lunda was in tune with his plan to create a widely spread occupation, that would cover all the territory, from the coastline to the hinterland (see Figure 8.2). The agreement signed between Norton de Matos and Diamang, on the 9th of December of 1920 (which became the baseline for the contract signed in 1921 between the Colonial Government and the company), had the “character of a true association between the Colony and the company for the exploitation, for the benefit of both and of the community, of one of the great latent riches of the territory, until recently totally ignored and whose discovery is exclusively due to the work of Diamang”. The company committed to support the development of Angola, “devotedly and with all its strength”, while Norton de Matos, on behalf of the Colonial Government, undertook to “provide Diamang with all the support to guarantee the intensive use of the concessions granted and [to overcome] other difficulties that may arise”3.

8.3 Occupation strategy: A pioneer in the edge of Angola Diamang was planned like a microcosm, where the diamond production was the driving force of the civilization process (Carvalho, 2014). As James Maguire had previously stated about chartered companies, these enterprises, as “pioneers of empire”, were “in their essence primarily and necessarily commercial (…) [but that] does not diminish the value of their services to the Empire” (Maguire, 1896). In fact, Diamang provided plenty of services that supported the company’s operations: among others, the company covered health, sanitation, religion, energy production, agriculture, farming, transportation, information, native’s assistance, music, topography, urbanization and conservation issues. In order to carry out this immense and multidimensional project, architecture and urbanism, as tools to plan and design infrastructures and buildings, were a key element. The diamond deposits, located near the water lines, dictated the location of the settlements to be built. After a first work centre in Chitato, the company’s headquarters were established in Dundo, in 1920, possibly due to its greater proximity to the Luachimo and Dundundo rivers. Later, along the Chiumbe and Luembe rivers, the centres of mining exploration of Cassanguidi, Vila Paiva de Andrada and Maludi structured the region in three mining groups. Communication networks were the first infrastructure to be built, guaranteeing the crucial connections within such a large area. In Dundo, the postal station was founded in 1922 and the radiotelegraph station in 1925. The road network was also an essential infrastructure and it was one of the most praised features of Diamang’s project. Road brigades were responsible for its construction and permanent maintenance. Its dimension dramatically increased in the first years of activity: while in 1929 it had 285 km, in 1936 there were already 1460 km built in Lunda, the same length of a complete Portugal Tour (Diamang, 1936). All the goods had to be transported by land, as the rivers were only navigable from Tshicapa upwards, in the Belgian Congo. It was to this city, the headquarters of Forminière’s operations, that Diamang sent its correspondence and where the trade took place.

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Figure 8.2 The company’s villages were based along river lines, in a close relationship with the Belgian Congo. Source: © Universidade de Coimbra, 2018 [Courtesy of the Project Diamang Digital].

Other main concerns of the company were public health and sanitation (Varanda, 2007). These issues were addressed in two different ways: through the development of sanitation missions all across Lunda, in order to ensure that all the potential workforce was kept healthy, and through the segregation principles that worked as a rationale for urban planning. One of the first brick and zinc buildings in Lunda was indeed Dundo’s Central Hospital. It was built in 1926 and it had different services for white and black people. From then on, every village or mine area would have their own sanitation office, health clinic or hospital, depending on their size (see Figure 8.3). At that point, Dundo and Vila Paiva de Andrada were the biggest settlements in Northeast Angola, even if none of them had more than a hundred buildings. The inhabitants were mainly Diamang’s workers. In 1931, the Governor General Sousa e Faro ordered the exclusion of these settlements from the “Map of existing settlements and their classification” (Portaria nº753,

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Figure 8.3 Dundo’s pharmacy in 1927. Source: © ANTT, PT/TT/HB/C-2/5/1/14, Rapport no. 14.

9.04.1931). From then on, they would be Diamang’s private towns. However, at the same time, all the roads built by Diamang were considered state property. It was clear that the relationship between the Colonial Government and the company was, by then, being shaped in a conflicting and ambiguous way.

8.4 An absence of Africa in Africa: Settlements for European employees In Lunda, urban planning was a reflection of social and racial hierarchies. African workers didn’t have a place in the European settlements. Besides, the plan of these urban centres exposed the inhabitants’ position in the company, through the spatial organization and building typologies. In this regard, Diamang’s built environment recalled some of the typological ideas of a company town: unincorporated areas, therefore not controlled by state authorities, inhabited entirely by company’s employees (Porteous, 1970; Garner, 1992), where allocation of housing and access to recreational facilities was dictated by racial and social criteria and where paternalism was taken as “the hegemonic ingredient of company power” (Carstens, 2001). During the visit of the Colonies Minister, in 1932, Diamang’s headquarters were compared to an “oasis in the desert”. For those who visited Diamang, it was “comforting to see Dundo’s marked appearance of civilization” (Diamang, 1936). Buildings had a homogenous aesthetics that denounce a really centralized formal planning. As Porteous noticed, “architecturally, uniformity was often carried to the point of monotony, especially when exacerbated by the tendency for companies to paint each house alike” (Porteous, 1970). This uniformity was expected to reinforce the company’s power, inducing the feeling of control and authority. The town was developed along a standard grid pattern (see Figure 8.4), possibly designed by the group of American engineers that managed Diamang in its first decade4. The wide and long streets shaped several blocks, which were, nevertheless, constrained by topography: at the town centre, situated in a plateau, these were laid down in a regular pattern and, when closer to the rivers slopes, they would take irregular outlines. Rather than being named, the streets were numbered (odd numbers for north-south streets and even numbers for the east-west ones). 112

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Figure 8.4 Dundo and Vila Paiva de Andrada plans (around 1930). Source: © Authors’ drawings based on a Dundo’s plan from Companhia de Diamantes de Angola’s archives in MAUC, Universidade de Coimbra and an Andrada’s plan from diamang.com.

The centre was composed of the two most important buildings in Dundo: the Representation House (K18) and the Club (named Casa do Pessoal – Staff House), right in front of each other. The Club, that later would have several branches across Lunda, was a recreational facility for European employees. It was considered an exceptional place as, in there, employees could find leisure activities that mimicked the older days back at the “Metropole” and made everyday life a bit easier: cafeteria, terrace bar, playroom, skating rink, sports fields and even a cinema. Near these two buildings, were the Church and the Acclimatisation Garden, the latter also playing an essential role in Diamang’s settlement. It was used to study which plants and cultures could be grown in Lunda. Dundo’s hospital was in the south part of the town and it was composed of several pavilions. By the time it was built, it was detached from the main centre (even if then on the urban fabric would grow in its direction). It was the first building that later would shape an area dedicated to medical and scientific research, including Dundo’s Ethnographic Museum, opened in 1936, some research laboratories and a Native Village built according to native urban models, in order to celebrate Lunda’s folklore and cultural traditions5. Like in any other company town, “around this central nexus lapped a sea of housing peculiar both for its uniformity of style and for its obviously contemporaneous character” (Porteous, 1970). That way, Dundo was a town of single-family houses and had low construction density – it fulfilled the widely spread garden-city ideas. This urban model, created by Ebenezer Howard, 113

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was a “surprisingly suitable option” when it came to thinking urbanism in colonial Africa: it was appropriate to cope with the climate and insalubrity and it worked as “useful political tool to enhance racial segregation” (Mendes e Fernandes, 2013). When workers arrived at Lunda, they would be given a house and all the household items needed. Every time they would leave Lunda for some reason, they would be given a different house on their return as every building belonged not to them but to Diamang. Like the streets, each building had a number, given by the time it was finished. It would always start with a K letter – from the word key. Colonial architecture archetypes were dominant: exterior covered porches, natural ventilation grilles and outbuildings in the backyard. A few years later, when Gilberto Freyre visited Diamang, in 1951, he reported that in Dundo one could feel the “absence of Africa in Africa” (Freyre, 1954). The company’s offices and warehouses were located in the north part of the town, facing Dundundo river. These acted as a barrier that separated the European settlement from the African villages that surrounded Dundo. So, beyond the bureaux, one could find the Native Neighbourhood, later known as the Assimilados Neighbourhood (see Figure 8.5). For workers living here, the path to the city centre was long, recalling the ideas of the sanitary cordon or buffer zone, largely used in the colonial urban plans. Reports described this quarter as “hygienic and planned in a modern way”: it meant to be a role model for the native people.Yet, the Native Quarter had a separated numbering so that it was perfectly clear that it was apart from Dundo’s centre. Vila Paiva de Andrada was established in 1928. It was the only town that got a Portuguese name (in memory of general Paiva de Andrada, one of the founders of PEMA) and became the most important mining settlement – being later known as “Diamang’s East capital”. It followed Dundo’s urban model: wide boulevards and a well-defined centre. Like in the company’s headquarters, the Representation House and the Club were together. Around them there were schools and, again, a garden. Housing, though, was not laid down in blocks, but lined along lengthy streets. Besides, as it was a mining town, Andrada was planned in a close relationship with the mining site. The surrounding landscape was made of mining plants, railcars and

Figure 8.5 Perspective of “Type of Indigenous Village Diamang” (as a side note: Voluntários’ villages in Dundo should be built according to this plan). Source: © Universidade de Coimbra, 2018 [Courtesy of the Project Diamang Digital].

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warehouses with the Native Neighbourhood right next to them. Due to the lack of wood, a hydroelectric station was built in 1930 (according to a plan made by the engineer Alberto Jaime de Azevedo), enabling a local power supply. An extensive report published in the newspaper A Província de Angola, covering Angola’s Governor General António Lopes Mateus’ visit to Diamang, in 1936, described Dundo and Andrada, as well as other towns, as “beautiful, organised, model towns” (A Província de Angola, 1936).Wattle trees were everywhere, becoming a picture postcard of Diamang’s towns.ToVilhena, “vegetation should function as a natural complement to buildings”6. However, nothing was meant to last long. After attending the inauguration of some new houses, Mateus was surprised when someone told him that these were ephemeral and would later be replaced by newer and bigger ones – for him, they were already “comfortable and bright”. Also, when visiting Maludi, Mateus could see that the old town of Luaco, one of the first settlements in Lunda, was already “a part of the past that was lagging behind the mining sites”. Despite being less than twenty years old, its buildings were in ruins. In fact, Diamang’s towns were “essentially a temporary pioneering devise” as they were built to explore and exploit previously unknown territories (Porteous, 1970). Their growth and expansion was dictated by the discovery of new mining sites and their fate was to disappear after the extracting process was completed. The temporary nature of the mines made Diamang’s settlements temporary too. Nevertheless, the company was committed to create its own “urban image” as special attention was given to the embellishment of every town. Each building had a detailed preliminary study. Everything was “tentative” and everything could be “improved” (Porto, 2009).This was true not only in planning these urban centres, designed for the one hundred and forty Europeans that lived in Lunda by the 1930s, but also, and particularly, in harbouring the almost nine thousand Africans who worked in the mining fields.

8.5 Stabilizing workforce: Settlements for African workers After reading the first report on sanitary conditions in Lunda, made by Dr Gillet, Forminière’s head doctor, in 1921,Vilhena considered that indigenous working conditions were “absolutely deplorable” as there were no proper facilities for these men: it was necessary to adopt some special measures regarding labour supply7. Gathering workforce was always the main concern at Diamang. There were too little native people for such a great venture. Since the earlier times, workers had to be recruited from other regions of the colony (and later from São Tomé and Principe), with the support of Portuguese colonial authorities. In order to keep them in Lunda, it was mandatory to build infrastructures and to provide good living conditions (see Figure 8.6). This problem was also faced by the Belgian companies. At that time, Forminière and UMHK had realized that the small number of African people in the region did not comply with the harsh housing policies generally used by mining companies in South Africa, namely De Beers, the world’s leading diamond company founded by Cecil Rhodes. The mining compound system, an urban model very popular in every De Beers’ mine, started to be blamed for the high death rate among black workers, as the poor facilities triggered the spread of several diseases, riots and strikes. Thus, to avoid this situation, at UMHK “it was advisable to stabilize the African labour force by stabilizing the place of residence of the workers and allowing them to lead a family life in the locality where they were working” (Maquet, 1962). Good housing conditions became a synonym for ensuring plenty of workforce. To address this challenge, UMHK and Forminière set up several measures that lead to the creation of AMOI, the Service Provincial des Affaires Indigènes et Maind’oeuvre (Provincial Service of Indigenous Affairs and Manpower). It didn’t take long for Diamang to organize a similar department. As Jorge Varanda pointed out, “according to the company’s management judgement, the benefits of stabilizing workforce 115

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Figure 8.6 “Village built for African workers near Luaco mine in 1927”. Source: Universidade de Coimbra, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Departamento de Ciências da Vida, Arquivo Fotográfico de Botânica, Documentário Africano, “Minas de diamantes do Luaco (Lunda). Bairro de trabalhadores indígenas. Julho 1927”, cota: PT-UC-FCT-BOT/F/03-205.

resulting from having their families in the mining region outweighed the benefits of the control that the closed compound system supposedly provided” (Varanda, 2017). In fact, in 1931 Diamang was already celebrating the success of the company’s “attraction policy” – which seemed to be a copy of UMHK’s “stabilization policy” – and, in 1936, SPAMOI (Indigenous Labor Propaganda and Assistance Service) was formally created. It was set up after Leopold Mottoule’s visit to Diamang. Mottoule, one of the head-doctors at UMHK (but whose career had begun at Forminière, in 1923), was by then internationally known8. He highlighted the important role of family, food, children, schools and professional education in the daily life and health of African workers. Diamang adopted some of the Belgian doctor’s recommendations9, regarding the construction of social equipment and the urban design (Mottoule, 1946)+. For instance, the company respected the call to put men from the same region in the same village, in order to recreate their familiar environments. As part of a wider workforce stabilization strategy, SPAMOI’s goals regarding urban planning were very clear: to engage volunteer workers in the conservation and enhancement of their villages and farming fields; to show them the benefits of long-term work and their permanence in the same place; (…) to take the natives to settle near of the mining camps, to build their houses of adobe or barred wood, with large dimensions and to provide them with the necessary material. (Spamoi, 1937) One of the first measures taken was the construction of “propaganda villages” for prometidos and ex-contratados10.These villages, under the authority of local sobas, should be comfortable in a way 116

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that the workers could feel “as in their own villages”. Just like at Forminière, planning villages similar to the native ones was also taken as a stabilization method (Derksen, 1983). The houses were placed at the disposal of some workers, “on the condition that they would bring in more working men; therefore, they were delivered for propaganda purposes” (Spamoi, 1937). As noticed by Samuel Coghe, “the relocation of native villages also provided the perfect opportunity to improve housing conditions. Although housing structures varied substantially throughout the colony, many doctors and administrators viewed the archetypical African cubata (hut) as utterly unhygienic, as a construction that lacked space, proper ventilation and cleanliness” (Coghe, 2017). More durable materials, such as zinc and brick, were used whenever possible and workers were required to keep their houses in “perfect hygienic conditions”: they had to bury the garbage, to collect the cans, to land the holes, to throw away containers of stagnant water; the objects were often exposed to the sun and the floors disinfected (see Figure 8.7).The villages, described as “faultless”, were organized accordingly to different housing dwellings: natives lived under gable roofs; but while the contratados had no windows, voluntários had a few small ones.The assimilados were also under gable roofs, but their houses had plenty of windows and a backyard. For that matter, spatial-social hierarchization continued to be reinforced through the housing typology, even among African workers. All these were small buildings, only with one room, ranging from 6 m2 to 11 m2. For the company’s administration, Diamang simply reproduced the pre-existence local native special organization, as one could read in Dundo Museum reports: “We should not seek to line their cubatas at the roadside without meeting the proper sanitary conditions, water and land for their food crops. One must combine “business with pleasure”, keeping its typical villages, friendly and graceful corners, which are sometimes rustic natural museums of indigenous art. Sobas’ houses are large and important; young men live in poor and small dwellings. However, despite this apparent material inequality, all are mutually hospitable, a living symbol of harmony, camaraderie and unity” (Dundo’s Museum Report apud Porto, 2009). It seemed like Diamang

Figure 8.7 Soba Baraca’s village, near Camabouco’s mine, winner of the Best Village Contest in 1957. Source: Agostiniano de Oliveira, Universidade de Coimbra, 2018 [Courtesy of the Project Diamang Digital].

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was keen on keeping some African traditional dwellings to respect locals’ preferences; in fact, “pleasure” could and should be combined with “business” as maintaining native houses (rather than building new ones) was also a lot cheaper (Mello, 1963). On this note, regarding African settlements, the villagization proposed by Diamang could be considered as “the rural counterpart of the larger special settlements for ‘detribalized’ Africans near the bigger cities, like the so-called centres extra-coutumiers that would be established from the 1930s onwards in the Belgian Congo” (Coghe, 2017)11. From this perspective, Diamang’s urban practices were really close to those promoted by Norton de Matos for Angola’s urban development as SPAMOI’s villages allowed to control the subversion of indigenous populations and to reverse the demographic decrease resulting from the forced migration of workers. As both of these ideas were later applied to two urban systems used in Angola – colonatos, from 1945 onwards, and regedorias, reintroduced in 1962 (Curto e Cruz, 2017) – it is possible to argue about Diamang’s indirect role on their conception.

8.6 A sovereignty concern: Transcolonial networks The first reports from the “Urbanization and Sanitation Services” show that the exchange of transnational knowledge was intense12. Correspondence was mainly kept with South Africa and Belgian Congo, reinforcing the status of Diamang as a company with several intercolonial relations. In Lunda, the idea of a Colonial Empire closed on itself was completely swept aside. Ernesto de Vilhena actively promoted the application of so-called “scientific colonialism”. He kept himself updated with the most progressive advances in science and organized missions by the world’s leading scientists to Dundo. Diamang’s peripheral location was used to reinforce its efforts as a “strong instrument of pacification and culture” (Mello, 1963). The company always presented itself as a “corner of the Colony”. However, being at the edge of the Empire allowed Diamang to create an “architectural dialect” sustained by intricate intercolonial connections, which supported the “existence of an expanded sphere of influence over the communication and transfer of architectural ideas both within and between colonies, and within and between companies” (Roberts, 2014). In fact, many considered that Diamang’s autonomy and its international relations undermined Portuguese sovereignty. In the early years of Diamang’s activity, Bento Roma, governor of the Lunda district, denounced “an intimate connection between the company and Forminière” (Roma, 1922). Despite being established in Portuguese colonial territory, Diamang was in a border region that fostered a closer relationship with the Belgian companies, especially for the daily based activities. The existence of this tight relationship was later reaffirmed by Vilhena, in correspondence with Salazar: recalling the first years of the company, he remembered how important the “friends from abroad” had been to Diamang13. Because of Diamang’s strong cross-border connections, securing Portuguese authority became a fundamental task. During his visit to Diamang, Bento Roma chose the future place for the Chitato district headquarters. The location was justified by a sovereignty concern: it had to be seen from Dundo so that those working for the company “would not forget that they were in Portuguese territory and subject to Portuguese laws” (Roma, 1922).The chosen name – Portugália – reinforced this idea. So, 4 km away from Dundo, on the sloping side of a high hill, this new village could be seen by everyone around. Nonetheless, it would always be the “poor relative”, when compared to Diamang’s towns (Amaral, 1978). It was only a one street settlement. By the time engineer Manuel Goulartt de Medeiros and architect Frans Schacherl, from the “Building Construction Mission”, made an urbanization plan for Portugália, in 1940, one could only find there a church, a dispensary, four houses and a prison14 – not much, one 118

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Figure 8.8 Diamang’s houses were seen as a “role model”. Houses in Andrada. Source: © Courtesy of diamang.com.

could say; but certainly enough for its purpose. Nevertheless, in one of his reports, Bento Roma admitted that Angola was lagging behind when compared to what was happening in Lunda, reinforcing the idea of a State within a State (that deputy Cancela de Abreu would later use to portray Diamang): On this subject [urbanization and construction of buildings], which I also approached, comes the insinuation that the State is in arrears with the company. Admittedly, we do not currently have buildings like the ones they have in Dundo, but we’ll have better ones soon. And what we already have is a factory of brick much and much superior to the one of the company. (Roma, 1922; see Figure 8.8)

8.7 Conclusion The first decade of Diamang’s settlement in Lunda was spent covering critical areas like sanitation, food and accommodation. It was only at the turn of the 1940s, when the company consolidated its production, that a stronger investment in other infrastructures occurred. An exponential growth production and profits allowed a higher mechanization of the mining sites; the population grew, mainly due to the arrival of Portuguese technicians and their families; the number of urban settlements increased and several infrastructural developments were promoted; regular air transportation was guaranteed and the social facilities became more specialized and diverse (Porto, 2009). The nomination of Quirino da Fonseca, a Portuguese engineer, as Diamang’s Technical Manager, in 1934, would be seen as the starting point of this “company’s nationalisation process”. 119

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The decentralization and the foreign investment promoted by the Portuguese First Republic, earlier seen as a “magical recipe” to administrate the Portuguese colonies (Monteiro, 1942), were being questioned by the Colonial Act, enacted in 1930. In this regard, concessions given to Mozambique’s chartered companies were not renewed. However, Diamang had already asserted itself in a powerful way that could not be ignored. The company was one of the major funders of the Portuguese Empire. Indeed, in these initial years, Diamang stood out as an important and original approach to the colonial process within the Portuguese overseas project. The Colonial Government acted as if the company actually was the ninth colony of the Empire, with its own rules. Like other private enterprises, Diamang became a “key actor in the translation of transnational influences to architectural production at the edges of empire, and continuing to shape the nature of the built environment far from the established centres of architectural practice and debate” (Roberts, 2014). In this regard, later on Diamang would continue to be taken as an important “role model” to think Angola’s development as shown by the visit made by Francisco Monteiro Grilo, Superior Inspector of Colonial Promotion, in 1951, just before the First Development Plan (1953-1958), in order to check out and understand what was being planned and built in Lunda. A few years earlier, in 1949, Rogério Cavaca, the first director of the Portuguese Colonial Urbanization Office15, also visited Diamang’s quarters – which suggests that urban and architectural knowledge could have then been traded between the Office and the company16. However, rather than allowing clear conclusions, this remark leads us to some questions: what were the significance and the autonomy of private chartered companies within the colonial urbanization process? And how important was transnational knowledge in urban planning, especially in border areas where boundaries seemed to be faded?

Notes 1 About Mozambique’s chartered companies, see Barry Neil Tomlinson (1977), “The Nyassa Chartered Company, 1891–1929”. The Journal of African History, vol. 18, nº1, pp. 109–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Leroy Vail (1976), “Mozambique’s Chartered Companies: The rule of the feeble”. The Journal of African History, vol. 17, nº3, pp. 389–416. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Bárbara Direito (2013), “Políticas Coloniais de terras em Moçambique: Manica e Sofala sob a Companhia de Moçambique, 1892–1942”. Tese de Doutoramento. Lisboa: Instituto de Ciências Sociais. 2 General José Norton de Matos (1867–1855) was, among other positions, Governor General of Angola (1912–1915), Minister of Colonies (1915), Minister for Foreign Affairs (1915–1916) and High Commissioner of Angola (1921–1923). 3 “Contrato entre o Alto Comissário e a Companhia de Diamantes de Angola” in Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, Arquivo Burnay, Correspondência, cx. 50, n.º 18. Torre do Tombo: PT/TT/ HB/1-23/18. 4 Report from Henry Oppenheimer’s “English friends” about Diamang situation, 10.09.1923. It stated that Norton de Matos desired to increase the number of Portuguese employees in Lunda, as the main administration was comprised of four American engineers: Eulich, Linn, Holdridge and Parkinson. Torre do Tombo: PT/TT/HB/1-21/30 Correspondência, cx. 48, nº 30. 5 About Dundo’s Museum see Nuno Porto (2009), Modos de objectificação da dominação colonial: o caso do Museu do Dundo, 1940–1970. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Manzambi Vuvu Fernando (2010). “Diamang, Museu e o conhecimento do “Outro” – a pesquisa em duas épocas distintas no Museu do Dundu”. Arte/Cokwe, a Arte na Sociedade Cokwe e nas comunidades circunvizinhas. Luanda; e Juliana Bevilacqua (2016), “De caçadores a caça: sobas, Diamang e o Museu do Dundo”. Tese de doutoramento em História Social. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo. 6 According to Vilhena, Diamang was importing several tree species from Continental Portugal and Madeira Island. Companhias Coloniais: Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, 1940-1964. Torre do Tombo: PT/TT/AOS/D-N/2/5/1. 7 Ernesto de Vilhena’s letter, from 26.04.1922, on which he reflects about the report made by Dr. Gillet in 31.10.1921. Torre do Tombo: PT/TT/HB/1-6/24. 120

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8 Annales de la Société Belge de Médecine Tropicale, nº 44-2, pp. 205–06, 1964. 9 These ideas were later compiled in Mottoule’s book “Politique Sociale de L’Union Minière du Haut Katanga pour sa Main-d’Oeuvre et ses résultats au cours de vinght années d’application” edited by the Belgian Colonial Institute, in 1946. In this Aide-Memoiré para o Service de la main d’ouvre indigène (MOI) UMHK’s “indigenous policy” is spelled out as a “stabilization policy” that consisted of “employing all the normal means to bring African workforce to enjoy the work and stay as long as possible”. 10 African workforce was organized through three different groups: contratados were men from other regions of Angola who were coercively brought to Lunda with the help of the Portuguese authorities; voluntários were from Lunda and they could work on mines and them go back to their villages at the end of every day; prometidos were former contratados that from then on wanted to stay as voluntários. About labour conditions, see Todd Cleveland (2015), Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975. Athens: Ohio University Press. 11 The Centres extra-coutomiers were areas near the colonial city centres, controlled by the Belgian administration, where the indigenous population, who had left its place of origin, would be kept.These centres worked as a labour reservoir to provide workforce whenever needed. These were used in Katanga, where UMHK was based. See F. Grévisse (1951). Le centre extra-coutumier d'Élisabethville: Quelques aspects de la politique indigène du Haut-Katanga industriel. Institut Royal Colonial Belge. Section des sciences morales et politiques. Mémoires.Volume 21. 12 MAUC – Diamang: Relatórios de Urbanização e Saneamento, Plantas e Jardins, from 23.01.1928. 13 Vilhena’s letter to Salazar, from 1.07.1949.Vilhena wrote that “our friends from abroad, who contributed so much to the creation and early works of Diamang, and who, by the exemption always shown in regard to the income they could earn, have contributed so much in the current prosperity of the Company, [allowing it] to occupy the first place among all existing enterprises in the Portuguese Overseas”. Torre do Tombo: Notas e Apontamentos Diversos 1º, PT/TT/CDA/1/01. 14 Plano de Urbanização da Zona Central de Portugália. Missão de Estudo e Construção de Edifícios, 1940. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino: PT/IPAD/MU/DGOPC/DSUH/2042/01484. 15 Colonial Urbanization Office (GUC – Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial) was launched by Marcelo Caetano in 1944 to optimise Portuguese efforts in the field of urbanism and tropical architecture, providing qualified technical teams of architects, engineers and specialists in tropical medicine and climatology. See AnaVaz Milheiro (2012).“O Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial e o traçado das cidades luso-africanas na última fase do período colonial português”. urbe. Revista Brasileira de Gestão Urbana, 4(2), 215–232; Ana Vaz Milheiro (2013). “Africanidade e Arquitectura Colonial: A casa projectada pelo Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial (1944-1974)”, Cadernos de Estudos Africanos, 25, pp. 121–139. 16 Both visits were referred in Diamang’s report from 1950. Companhias Coloniais: Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, 1940-1964. Torre do Tombo: PT/TT/AOS/D-N/2/5/1.

References Amaral, Ilídio do (1978). “Contribuição para o conhecimento do fenómeno de urbanização em Angola”. Finisterra – vol. XIII, n. 25. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Geográficos da Universidade de Lisboa, pp. 43–76. BGC – Boletim Geral das Colónias (1926). II – 015, “Desenvolvimento das riquezas de Angola” (The African World, Londres, 14 de Agosto). Portugal: Agência Geral das Colónias, p. 238. BGC – Boletim Geral das Colónias (1932). VIII – 088, [Número especial dedicado à visita do Sr. Ministro das Colónias – Armindo Monteiro – a S. Tomé e Príncipe e a Angola]. Portugal: Agência Geral das Colónias, pp. 244–294. Carstens, Peter (2001). In the Company of Diamonds: De Beers, Kleinzee and the Control of a Town. Athens: Ohio University Press. Carvalho, Maria João Crespo Vilhena de (2014). “As esculturas de Ernesto Jardim de Vilhena: A constituição de uma coleção nacional”. Tese de doutoramento. Lisboa: Universidade Nova. Coghe, Samuel (2017). “Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1930–45”. Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 52(I), pp. 16–44. Curto, Diogo Ramada e Bernardo Pinto da CRUZ (2017). “The Good and the Bad Concentration: Regedorias in Angola”. Portuguese Studies Review, vol. 25, nº 1, pp. 205–231. Derksen, Richard (1983). “Forminière in the Kassai, 1906–1939”. African Economic History, nº 12, pp. 49–51. DIAMANG (1936). Súmula da origem, desenvolvimento, actividade e acção colonizadora da Companhia de Diamantes de Angola – Homenagem e recordação da visita de Sua Ex. o Governador Geral de Angola, Coronel António Lopes Mateus. Dundo: Companhia de Diamantes de Angola. 121

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Direito, Bárbara (2013). “Políticas Coloniais de terras em Moçambique: Manica e Sofala sob a Companhia de Moçambique, 1892–1942”. Tese de Doutoramento. Lisboa: Instituto de Ciências Sociais. Fonte, Maria Manuela da (2012). Urbanismo e Arquitectura em Angola: de Norton de Matos à Revolução. Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio. Freyre, Gilberto (1954). Aventura e Rotina. Livros do Brasil. Garner, John (1992). The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age. Oxford University Press. Maguire, James Rochfort (1896). The Pioneers of Empire. London: Methuen Publications. Maquet, Jacques (1962). “Social aspects of industrialization in Elizabethville”. Workshop on Problems of Urbanization in Africa. UNESCO. Mello, Henrique de Sousa e (1963). Companhia de Diamantes de Angola. Lisboa: Tip. Silvas, Lda. Mendes, Rui e Mário G. Fernandes (2013).“A apropriação tropical da cidade jardim – o caso Moçambicano”. PNUM, Coimbra, pp. 1179–1192. Monteiro, Armindo (1942). “As Grandes Directrizes da Governação Ultramarina no período que decorreu entre as duas Guerras Mundiais 1919–1934”. Boletim Geral das Colónias, XVIII, nº 206 e 207. Portugal: Agência Geral das Colónias. Mottoule, Leopold (1946). Politique Sociale de L’Union Minière du Haut Katanga pour as Main- d’Oeuvre et ses résultats au cours de vinght années d’application. Mémoires. Institute Royal Colonial Belge, Section des sciences morales et politiques. T. XIV, Fasc.3, Bruxelas. Pélissier, René (1986). História das campanhas de Angola: resistência e revoltas 1845–1941. Lisboa: Estampa. Pina, Adolfo (ed.) (1934). Angola, A Província de Angola: número extraordinário dedicado à Exposição Colonial Portuguesa e em honra da Restauração de Angola em 15 de Agosto de 1648. Luanda: Empresa Gráfica de Angola. Porteous, J.D. (1970). “The nature of the company town”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, nº 51. The Royal Geographical Society, pp. 127–142. Porto, Nuno (2009). Modos de objectificação da dominação colonial: o caso do Museu do Dundo, 1940–1970. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Relatórios Anuais – Serviço de Propaganda e Assistência à Mão de Obra Indígena (SPAMOI), Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (CDA), 1937–1952 [at diamangdigital.net]. Roberts, Wendy (2014). “Company Transfer: The Architectural Dialect at the Edges of Empire”. Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 31, Translations, Christoph Schnoor (ed.). Auckland: Sahanz, pp. 591–600. Roma, Bento (1922). Exposição do governador do distrito de Lunda sobre a Companhia de Diamantes de Angola. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino. PT/IPAD/MU/IGM/SDI/2476/06092. Soromenho, Castro (1957). Viragem. Lisboa: Biblioteca editores Independentes/Edições Cotovia (Livros de Bolso), ed. 2008. Varanda, Jorge (2007). “A bem da nação: Medical Science in a Diamond Company in 20th century in Angola”. Tese de Doutoramento. Londres: University College. Varanda, Jorge (2017). “Diamang: retrato visível e oculto da nona colónia”. Jornal de Notícias História, n. 8, Junho, pp. 8–23. Vellut, Jean (1982). “Hégémonies en construction: Articulations entre Etat et Entreprises dans le bloc colonial Belge (1908–1960)”. Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 16, nº 2, pp. 313–330. Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis.

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Part II

Post-colonial urban planning in Africa

9 Local governance and urban planning Centralization, de-concentration, and decentralization in Africa Carlos Nunes Silva

9.1 Introduction Urban planning is in most countries a competence of sub-national government. For that reason, the local institutional framework and the role of local self-government in that structure, combined with the action of the state, sub-national de-concentrated public administration institutions, and civil society organizations, are important dimensions in the study of how cities, towns, and other human settlements are governed and planned. The degree of decentralization and autonomy of local self-government is thus an important element in any system of urban governance, reflected in the capacity of local self-government to plan and to govern cities, and a key factor in the effectiveness of the spatial planning system in developed and developing countries. The level of local autonomy affects the planning process, its efficiency, effectiveness, and outcomes, as well as the accountability and the quality of the entire planning process. Decentralization and autonomy create new spaces for citizen participation in urban planning and for gradual changes in the existing power structures within the multi-layer spatial planning systems. In other words, the degree of local government autonomy – organizational, functional, and financial – determines the relative importance of local government within the local governance system and through that the quality and relevance of local spatial planning. This autonomy depends on constitutional guarantees but also on the concrete laws in the different policy areas. And above all, it is dependent on the capacity and on the extent to which local government is able to collect revenues from the local economy without interference of central government, and on the capacity to control the local political agenda, in articulation with economic actors, social organizations, and citizens. In other words, the level of autonomy, and therefore the capacity to plan, is not only an outcome of constitutional rules and laws but also the result of contextual factors, national and local, that impact on central–local relations. Decentralization in Africa has been expanding in the last decades as numerous African countries have undertaken processes to elect sub-national governments, often at the municipal level (Seethal, 2012), but in some cases also for regional tiers (García et al., 2015), ensuring some 125

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degree of fiscal autonomy and financial capacity, as well as expenditure responsibility, as recent studies have shown consistently (UCLG, 2008; 2016; Dickovick et al., 2010). Despite these positive changes, local government in Africa continues to be underdeveloped when compared to other regions of the world, being responsible for less than 5% of the public expenditure and less than 1% of GDP according to the World Bank, although with variations among countries (quoted in UCLG, 2008), which means a local government with a relatively low capacity to autonomously plan and govern cities, towns, and other human settlements. Recent years witnessed also major advances in the study of decentralization and in the study of local government reforms in an increasingly great number of countries around the world (Marshall et al., 1999; Devas et al., 2006; Ross, 2006; UCLG, 2008; Barrios-Suvelza, 2012; Kortt et al., 2016; Golosov et al., 2016;Teng-Calleja et al., 2017; Askim et al., 2017), with some of these studies adopting a comparative perspective (Kuhlmann, 2007; Grant et al., 2010; Nemec, 2016; UCLG, 2016;Wollmann et al., 2016; Dlabac et al., 2018; Ebinger et al., 2018).There has been in addition an increasingly large number of studies on local government reforms and policies, most of which point the advantages and the limitations of the different types of reform (Khan, 2008; Wollmann, 2008; Knox, 2009; Swianiewicz et al., 2010; Hlepas et al., 2011; Terlouw, 2016; Bel et al., 2018; Swianiewicz, 2018). Some of these studies provide ample evidence on the need to apply the reforms considering the territorial specificities (Dollery et al., 2010), the way citizens perceive the impact of these reforms (Reitan et al., 2015), or the specific historical and political circumstances responsible for the challenges confronting local self-government. These changes and advances in the study of decentralization includes also an increase in the number of studies on African countries (Wunsch, 2000: 2001; Cameron, 2001; 2002; Smoke, 2003; Olowu, 2003; Tosun, 2008; Piper et al., 2009; Dickovick et al., 2010; Kessy et al., 2010; Pallangyo et al., 2010; Hagberg, 2010; Dickovick, 2014). The research in which this chapter is based is part of this growing interest about the role of local government in urban governance in the African continent and more specifically the role it plays in urban planning. The chapter addresses three main research questions: ‘What is the type of Local Government in the five Lusophone African Countries and how does it shape the capacity of local government to plan and to govern cities, towns and other human settlements’? More specifically the chapter seeks to answer these two related research questions: ‘What is the degree of local government autonomy in these five Countries and how does it affect its role in the spatial planning system’? and ‘What are the determinants of the current level of autonomy of these five local government systems’? The chapter takes an institutionalist approach in the sense that it seeks to explore the relevant factors that account for and explain institutional change in sub-national tiers of government in these five African countries. In other words, the chapter looks at institutional building at the sub-national level, including in this notion the spatial planning system, in Lusophone African countries, as the dependent variable. The chapter explores the nature and organization of local government, how it impacts on the governance of urban areas, how it could be done better, and compares and draws practical lessons from each of the five Lusophone African countries, which among other aspects shared a common administrative culture during the long colonial period: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe. In particular, the chapter explores and discusses: the driving forces that have influenced recent reforms in local government; the implementation of the current formal institutional models of local government in these five countries; central–local relations, particularly in the field of spatial planning; the challenges confronting sub-national tiers of government in these countries, following the transition in the early 1990s to multi-party democracies, market economies and formally decentralized countries; the 126

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constraints affecting the implementation of these decentralization reforms; the consequences for the spatial planning system in each of these countries; and the opportunities for improvements. As the studies referred before employ different kinds of methods, comparison is somehow problematic. The chapter employs a systematic analytical framework designed to measure and to compare the degree of local autonomy and to infer from it the capacity of local government in each of these countries to engage in the governance of cities, towns, and other human settlements. In doing this, the chapter contributes to the understanding of how different degrees of local autonomy affect the capacity of municipalities to steer the spatial planning system by offering a structured comparison of the five Lusophone African countries. The chapter is organized into five main sections. The next provides a brief reference to the five Lusophone African countries.This is followed by the analytical framework.The section after that presents the results, analysis, and discussion, in particular regarding the spatial planning system. The last section summarizes the main conclusions and points the need of further research on these issues.

9.2 Lusophone African countries The five Lusophone African countries – Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe – independent since 19751, share a long common colonial past, including the same colonial local administration culture, designed for the control of the colonial territory and not as a true sub-national system of local self-government2. Also common was the systematic and continuous devaluation of the traditional local authorities, where they existed, which were gradually replaced by the colonial administration system, a process that weakened these local traditional institutions. As a result of this weakening or erasure of pre-colonial African local institutions, the new independent countries inherited the highly centralized local administration culture that characterized the colonial period. If Cape Verde had a relatively well-developed local administration institutional framework, at the end of the colonial period, in Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe, on the contrary, local government was narrowly developed. In Angola and Mozambique, the colonial local administration reached out some areas of the vast territories of these two colonies only in the last decades of the colonial period, and even so with very low administrative intensity (Silva, 2016). In the case of Mozambique, large parts of the territory were administered by sovereign companies until the 1940s (Fonseca, 2001), which were responsible for urban management in the respective territories. In Angola, several municipalities in the border region, where the military conflict was more intense during the colonial war (1961–1974), the civil administration was replaced in the early 1970s by the military administration. Nonetheless, despite these commonalities, there are important differences between these five countries, in area, population, in the number of sub-national units of government, and in the level of development (see Table 9.1). Different has also been the political process that followed the independence of these countries in the mid-1970s notwithstanding numerous similarities in the political system adopted in the first Constitutions3. The inherited highly centralized local administration culture was somehow reinforced in the transition period for independence and in the first decade and half in the post-colonial period, with the aim to guarantee the integrity of the national territory, enhancing the leading role of the ruling political party as referred in Silva (2016)4. If during the colonial period local administration has been always understaffed, underfunded, with limited competences and highly dependent on central government, as shown in Silva (2016), most of these weaknesses remained in the post-colonial period, although not uniformly. 127

Carlos Nunes Silva Table 9.1 The Lusophone African countries Area (km2) Population* Regional and local tiers Capital

Angola

1,246,700 25,789,024 18 Provinces 164 municipalities 518 Comunas Cape Verde 4,033 531,239 22 municipalities Guinea-Bissau 36,125 1,584,791 8 regions + Bissau Sector 36 Sectors Mozambique 799,380 28,861,863 11 Provinces 128 Districts 53 municipalities Sao Tome 1,001 201,784 1 Autonomous and Region Principe 6 districts (= ‘municipalities’)

Date of independence

IDH rank (2018)

Luanda

11 November 1975

147

Praia Bissau

5 July 1975 10 September 1974

125 177

Maputo 25 June 1975

180

São 12 July 1975 Tomé

143

* Demographic data: 2018 for Sao Tome and Principe; 2014 for Angola; 2016 for Cape Verde; 2018 for Guinea Bissau; 2017 for Mozambique.

In fact, the political process in the post-independence period developed along specificities that make these countries different from each other. Apart the first fifteen years of independence, the Revolutionary period or first Republic, characterized in all these five countries by a single-party political regime, a highly centralized state, an economy administered by the state in key sectors, and the inexistence of local self-government, the following period – the II Republic or Democratic period – is characterized by sharp differences among them, as signalled in Silva (2016), Fonseca (2006), Chabal (1983), among others, in part due to the uneven implementation of a multi-party democratic political regime, to the gradual and uneven implementation of local self-government (Santos, 2012; Santos, 2012a; Feijó et al., 2013; Feijó, 2014; Freitas, 2014; Brito, 2014; Cistac, 2014; Kosta, 2014; Nascimento and Rocha, 2015;), and the unequal development and expansion of a full market economy. In sum, the newly independent countries adopted a single party political regime, being subnational government no more than a simple form of administrative de-concentration during this entire initial period, with one or two sub-national tiers, an institutional model that lasted until the early 1990s when a shift occurred in these five countries, associated with the adoption of a new political constitution in each of them (Miranda, 1991; Gouveia, 2000; 2014; Guedes, 2004; Alexandrino, 2010; Alexandrino et al., 2014; Machado et al., 2014), a constitution that introduced a multi-party political regime, a market economy, and an explicit formal system of local self-government, which is being regulated and gradually implemented on the ground since then, although at different rhythms in each of these countries, as is examined in the following sections of this chapter.

9.3 Analytical framework The analytical framework for the comparison of local government, in which urban planning is embedded as one of its main functional areas, has two layers: the first explores the context that frames local government action (see Figure 9.1); the second examines the degree of local 128

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1. Nature of the state (federal/regionalized /unitary) 3 2 5. Local government autonomy

1

2. Political system (non democratic/ democratic)

0

4. Sub-national tiers of government

I. II. III. IV. V.

3. Economic system (market/planned)

Nature of the State: 1. Unitary; 2. Regionalized; 3. Federal Political System: 1. Authoritarian; 2. National Democracy; 3. National and local democracy Economic System: 1. Planned; 3. Market Sub-national tiers of government/administration: 1. One tier; 2. Two tiers; 3. Three tiers Local self-government autonomy: 1. Low; 2. Medium; 3. High

Figure 9.1 Analytical framework: The context of local government action. Source: Author.

government autonomy, how it changed over time, and how it potentially affect local government policies, namely its competences in the field of urban planning (see Figure 9.2). In the first layer, the analysis is focused on 4 of the 5 dimensions considered in the framework.The first dimension considered is the nature of the state – Federal or Unitary – which has an important influence on the kind of intergovernmental relations and on the level of autonomy of local government5. The level of decentralization may be different in federal states and unitary countries. In the federal case, the organization of local government can vary substantially from state to state, and therefore also the structure of the spatial planning system. The second dimension is the political system – democratic or non-democratic – as it determines the possibility to exist a true form of local self-government, along with the possibility to exist a political and administratively decentralized spatial planning system. If most political systems in African countries are now multiparty, with national and local leaders elected by universal suffrage, in some areas of the continent political and institutional systems remain under significant tension and local government is so poorly developed that any form of spatial planning is in practice the responsibility of central government with no or very little engagement of local citizens. This has considerable impacts in the capacity of sub-national tiers of government to plan and govern cities and other human settlements. The third is the economic system – market or planned economy – which influence the existence of other stakeholders and the possibility of networked urban governance. The fourth dimension in the model is related to the sub-national tiers, its 129

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I. Organizaonal: autonomy of self-organizaon 3 III-4. Financial: borrowing autonomy

2

II-1. Funconal: range of funcons

1 0 II-2. Funconal: policy discreon

III-3. Financial: own revenues

III-2. Financial: block grant

III-1. Financial: fiscal autonomy

I. Organizaonal autonomy: 1. Low; 2. Medium; 3. High II. Funconal autonomy: 1. Low; 2. Medium; 3. High III. Financial autonomy: 1. Low; 2. Medium; 3. High Figure 9.2 Analytical Framework: Local self-government autonomy. Source: Author.

nature and number of tiers and degree of fragmentation. Finally, the fifth dimension refers the degree of autonomy of local self-government.This dimension is further developed in the second layer of the analytical framework as described in the next paragraph. The second layer of the analysis is intended to measure and compare the degree of local autonomy, the most important defining characteristic of a local government system, and a determinant of the capacity of local government to plan and to govern the city and other human settlements. The analytical framework considers three main dimensions: organizational, functional, and financial.The first – organizational autonomy – refers the extent to which local government is free to decide about its own organization. The second – functional autonomy – considers the functions and tasks performed by local government and is subdivided into two sub-dimensions: the first – functional formal autonomy – refers the extent to which local government is formally autonomous and has a choice regarding which tasks to perform; the second – range of functions – refers the tasks in which local government is effectively engaged with political discretion through its own financial resources and own staff. The third dimension – financial autonomy – comprises four sub-dimensions: fiscal autonomy refers the extent to which local government can tax its population; block grant proportion is the fraction of unconditional financial transfers received by local government from central government budget; own resources refers the proportion of revenues derived from own local sources (e.g., taxes, fees, charges); borrowing autonomy is the extent to which local government can borrow. For the first and second dimensions – organizational and functional autonomy – the empirical analysis focused mainly the constitution and the main laws on local government in order to 130

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assess the range of functions assigned to local government, the respective competences, the level of discretion to perform these functions, as well as the kind of control that central government can exert over them, namely in the spatial planning system, before or only after the decision is taken, exclusively over legality issues, or more than that. An important factor in this process is also the capacity of local government to influence directly or indirectly the decision-making process in higher levels of government, in decisions concerning issues with relevance for the municipality. For the third dimension, besides the sources referred, the analysis took also into consideration public finance data.

9.4 Centralized, de-concentrated, and decentralized local governance: Results, analysis, and discussion If during the colonial period the local administration system was in essence the same in all Portuguese African colonies, in the post-colonial period it changed and had a divergent evolution over the years in the newly independent countries. These changes have been introduced predominately from above, by the state, and in part also by external influence, and not by a genuine challenge from local communities below. Only in one of the four dimensions considered in the first layer of the analytical framework there were no changes from the first Republic (1975– 1990s) to the second Republic (1990–…), the two main periods considered in the analysis. There was no change in the nature of the State – Federal versus Unitary state – as all countries remained unitary states since the independence. Sao Tome and Principe adopted, in the second Republic, a form of politico-administrative regionalization, which in practice has very limited autonomy and did not represent a significant change in the division of powers in the field of spatial planning in the country6. In Cape Verde, there have been also attempts to introduce a meso government tier. The process for the institutionalization of these Administrative Regions has been approved in Parliament in October 20187. If implemented, the law approved in the Parliament will change significantly the current institutional framework by moving spatial planning powers downwards from central state to the regions. Issues of nationalism or political regionalism have also been raised, and continue somehow latent, in the two larger countries, as illustrated by the case of Cabinda8 in Angola, or the claims of RENAMO, the main opposition party in Mozambique, for greater autonomy in the Provinces, including in matters of territorial governance. RENAMO proposed that the Governor of the Province should be directly elected or indicated by the party with more votes in the national election in the respective territory. RENAMO has more influence in the centre and north of Mozambique and according to this proposal, the governors of the provinces in the centre and some in the north of the country would be members of RENAMO, taking into account the recent past electoral results in the area9. In the second dimension – the political regime – there was significant change in the five countries. The single party political regime was replaced, in the new Constitutions adopted in the early 1990s, by a multi-party political system (Miranda 1991; Gouveia, 2000). In the two Island states, the political system changed also in practice at the local level, through the establishment of a true system of local self-government, with the boards of the municipalities being also directly elected, which potentially opened up the possibility of a real decentralization of spatial planning competences to the lower tiers of sub-national government10. Despite the common move towards democracy at the national level, the different political contexts – continued political instability in Guinea-Bissau, long civil wars in Angola and Mozambique – explain the different progress registered so far in each of these three continental countries in comparison with the two island states. 131

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In the third dimension considered – the economic system – there was a similar change from the first to the second Republic in all five countries, in the sense that in all of them there was a move towards removing the strict control the State had in key economic sectors, opening these economic sectors to the private initiative, a move also described as one from a planned to a market economy. In the fourth dimension considered – structure of sub-national tiers of government – there was also significant change in the law in all these countries, with the introduction of a formal tier of local self-government, although not yet implemented on the ground in Angola and Guinea-Bissau11. In addition to this, there has also been a move towards de-concentration of central government functions to the Province, the regional tier in Angola, and to the Province and Districts in Mozambique. Recent changes in the Constitution of Mozambique, as referred before, will transform these two tiers in forms of elected self-government, starting in 2019 and in 2024, respectively. The application of the eight additional criteria, with the aim of measuring the degree of local autonomy, shows also the existence of these two groups of countries, with Mozambique in between the two, as part of the country shares some of the characteristics seen in Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe but with most municipalities still functioning as a mere form of local state administration. This more detailed analysis provided by the second layer of the analytical framework shows indeed that the two islands states are apart from the other three continental states, since they have local self-government established in the entire national territory, Mozambique only partially, although expected to expand also to the regional level, and Angola and Guinea Bissau continue to have only forms of de-concentrated state administration. In the two island states, the municipalities have been implemented as forms of local self-government, as legal and autonomous entities with directly elected boards. Therefore, the autonomy and the capacity to act freely is greater than in the other three countries. Cape Verde emerges as the country in which local government has more autonomy, considering the range of functions, effective political discretion and organizational autonomy12. Nonetheless, although with more autonomy than the other countries, local government in Cape Verde has still in practice a low level of organizational, functional, and, above all, financial autonomy (low fiscal autonomy, high dependence on central government transfers, low financial self-reliance, and low borrowing autonomy)13. Angola and Guinea-Bissau, despite the constitutional guarantees, did not implement yet on the ground the system of local self-government14. These two countries have only the Local Government system formally defined, which means, in practice, that local government is still only a form of administrative de-concentration without political or administrative autonomy. Nonetheless, Angola is clearly more advanced than Guinea-Bissau in the decentralization process, with clear proposals and projects for the implementation until 2022 of a true system of local self-government. In Guinea-Bissau, the first local election has been announced and planned several times since the transition to democracy in the early 1990s but has not yet been implemented. In 2014, the then new coalition government, with members from all parties represented in the national assembly and a programme approved by unanimity, after years of continuous political crisis, announced a policy of administrative decentralization with the implementation of local selfgovernment units, and local government democratic elections in 2017, besides other important changes, namely the elaboration of the national spatial plan. Important to note here is also the fact that this reform opted for the revitalization and recognition of the traditional authorities as partners and supporters of the State in the administration of the territory, an option that if fully implemented may raise similar challenges as those already discussed in the case of Angola (Guedes, 2008). This coalition government did not last long, with its dismissal a year later being 132

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followed by political instability15. The 2014–2018 plan for decentralization and implementation of a true system of local self-government was abandoned and once again Guinea-Bissau lost one more opportunity for setting up the basic institutional conditions for the governing of cities, towns, and other human settlements. In the case of Angola, both projects of law presented in the national parliament of Angola in 2017 by the main opposition party, UNITA, and by the government, for the implementation of municipalities as a form of local self-government, were approved in May 2017.16 In 2018, new progress has been made with a full new package of legislation approved by the council of ministers on May 2018, after the first meeting of the Council of Local Governance17, newly established by the recently elected third President of the Republic of Angola, João Lourenço18,19. Local elections are now expected to take place in 2020, before the 2022 legislative election.The reform is planned to be implemented gradually and it is expected to reach and to be applied in all municipalities in the course of the next 15 years. In the meantime, during 2018 and 2019, administrative de-concentration will be implemented, including the transference of competences, human resources and financial resources, as well as an extensive legislative reform. The aim is to improve the capacity of the current municipal administrations in the provision of local public services, in order to prepare these local institutions for the challenges associated with the decentralization process. An important change announced for this transition phase is the assignment of an important part of local taxes to the municipal administration, which up until now have been collected and managed by central government, and the transference of competences in the education, health, and road infrastructure sectors20. Mozambique is somehow in the middle of these two groups, as it shares characteristics of both, in the sense that there is in practice only partial implementation of the local selfgovernment system established in the Constitution, due to the adoption of a strategy of gradual implementation of local government units21. Nonetheless, the continued financial dependence of local government in the island states means in practice a similar lack of autonomy in the field of spatial planning, with the main decisions being taken by central government departments responsible for territorial planning and for public works. If this is so, why is there a gap between the Constitutional blueprint and laws and the facts on the ground, namely in the field of spatial planning? What factors or determinants explain this? Why did these countries opt to decentralize in the early 1990s? In other words, why is local government so poorly developed in these countries and how does this lack of real autonomy of the existing municipalities affect their ability to plan and govern cities, towns, and other human settlements in each of these five countries? In relation to the first question – Why is there a gap between the Constitutional blueprint and the facts on the ground? – different factors have to be considered. First, the colonial heritage and the associated lack of tradition and experience. The administrative culture and the uneven and asymmetric degree of local government implementation in the former Portuguese colonies is one of the factors responsible for the current weakness of the local government system in each of these five African countries and concomitantly of local government planning capacity. As argued before (Silva, 2016), the Portuguese colonial power, similarly to what other European colonial powers have done, did not preserve the traditional local authorities as potential forms of local government, which in the last decades seem to have been reconsidered in some countries (UNCHS, 1991). Instead of that, the colonial power implemented a highly centralized administrative system in the colonies, a clone of the centralized sub-national territorial administration framework that existed in mainland Portugal during the dictatorship from 1926 to 1974. And where the traditional authorities were preserved they were instrumental in the consolidation of the colonial power in the lower levels of the administrative network. 133

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Part of the difficulties experienced in the governance of cities and other human settlements in these newly independent countries derives from this lack of a decentralized administrative culture that trusts and supports sub-national tiers of government, a characteristic that marked the entire colonial period and which these new countries inherited in the mid-1970s. A second factor is the de-colonization process and the complex political transition that took place. The nature of the political and administrative system in the first decade and half, the single party political regime, the administrative centralization, and the planned economy were all important determinants for the non-adoption and implementation of a true system of democratic local self-government. But also important was later the role of an all dominant ruling party in the multi-party democracy that was established in these countries, all of them marked by a top-down party control culture and the associated hierarchical accountability inside the party. Other factors, such as the persistence of informal power mechanisms, the role assigned to traditional authorities22, the elite resistance in the central State apparatus, or the fact that decentralization was perceived as a potential source of challenges to the ruling party and to the national political elites, and perceived also as a risk to national territory integrity23, contributed for the maintenance of a highly centralized administrative system. Other specific political characteristics in the post-independence period, as is the case of civil wars in Angola and in Mozambique, or the political separation between Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, in the 1980s, or the frequent political instability in Guinea-Bissau, in contrast with Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe, are additional factors responsible for the differences encountered in the degree of administrative decentralization in these countries, on the type of local government in the post-independence period, and therefore for the differences in the spatial planning system, in the capacity to plan and implement, and differences in planning practices as well. Local government finance in these countries comes from two main sources: first, state grants, and second local own taxes. However, the grants transferred are insufficient, taxation powers are limited, the local tax base is small, and the access to borrowing is limited or inexistent. This overall lack of resources for the implementation of a full local government system in these newly independent states is an important constraint on the autonomy of local government, which continues to depend largely on central government, and therefore a significant constraint on its capacity to autonomously plan and govern cities, towns, and other human settlements. This low ratio of local expenses to public expenditure is a clear indicator of the dependency of local government from central government, as Jibao and Prichard (2015: 1) show, by reference to other African countries. Without appropriate financial means, the capacity of local government to plan and govern cities in these countries is therefore smaller than what is inscribed in the Constitution. For example, in Cape Verde, where decentralization took place earlier than in the other countries considered in this study, municipalities are fiscally constrained by the lack of own source revenues, which means that they have to rely on central government transfers, mostly conditional, for the provision of local public services, especially in the small and poor municipalities, which facilitates central government control of local government in almost all relevant policy areas. In the municipalities with larger urban centres, as is the case of the municipality of Praia, in Cape Verde, or the municipalities in the capital cities of the other countries, this dependency of local government and the correlate high degree of control by central government, may be somehow lower, as these municipalities have potentially the possibility to collect more revenue from property taxes and other taxes than other smaller and less urbanized municipalities, allocating these resources to local public services according to their own autonomous political criteria and not according to spending criteria defined by central government. However, even in these 134

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cases local government cannot set their own tax rates as these are set out in laws issued by central government. Dependency is even greater due to the fact that local governments cannot in practice challenge central government in any effective way if central government does not fulfil its obligations inscribed in the law.This lack of financial capacity and the high financial dependency from central government undermines the capacity of local government to govern cities, towns and other human settlements in these five countries. If all these factors together shed light on the complex processes responsible for the current differences between the Constitution and other laws on local government, on one side, and the reality on the ground, the reasons that led all these five countries to start a process of incremental decentralization in the early 1990s can be found internally as well as in the international context of that time. In fact, a number of factors acted together to activate these institutional changes. First, the new international context in Africa, one that favoured and supported democratization, decentralization, and the market economy; decentralization was then seen as a basic condition for an improved governance, more efficient and equitable. Pressures from donors and international development agencies in favour of decentralization is certainly another factor, as was the internal pressures from the national intellectual elite and from the Church for the introduction of a multiparty democracy. However, this process was not uniform. On the contrary, there are profound differences. One reason for these differences is the fact that some of these countries opted for a partial and gradual decentralization, or geographic gradualism, starting with the most important municipalities, capitals of province or those with larger urban centres, as in the case of Mozambique so far, and in Angola as planned for the implementation of the reform announced. And if in Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe the option was for the simultaneous implementation in geographic terms, covering the entire national territory at the same time, in all of them the option was for functional gradualism, or gradual decentralization in organizational, functional, and fiscal terms, which alone has been and will continue to be a source for differences between the local government systems of these five countries that until four decades and half ago shared the same centralist administrative culture of their colonizer country. If functional gradualism is consensual, considering the level of resources existent at the local level, geographic gradualism is seen by almost all sectors outside the government political sphere, in Angola and Mozambique, as anti-constitutional and an additional factor of regional imbalances24. And as has been found in other African countries, as the case of Malawi illustrates (Hussein, 2006), there are enormous institutional capacity problems, including the lack of trained staff, financial resources, that prevent an effective implementation of local government reforms in the Lusophone African countries. The institutionalization and enforcement of meritocracy within the municipalities is another challenge for the success of current decentralization reforms in these countries, similarly to what has been found in other countries in Africa, as the case described in Mamogale (2014) suggests. A recruitment approach that privileges the party affiliation over qualification credentials affects local government performance as well as the capacity of the municipalities to plan the city and other human settlements. Therefore, parallel to the decentralization programme the depoliticize of the local government system in these countries, after one and half decade of single party regime and almost three decades of multi-party regime steered by the same dominant ruling party, is another mandatory reform. The reforms ahead need to be carefully designed and implemented, and to focus on the following key areas: local elections and democratic control, central–local relations, the size of local government units, the meso tier of self-government, financial resources, and citizen participation in local government decision-making. All of them with a potential high impact in the functioning of the spatial planning system in these countries. 135

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9.5 The spatial planning system: Centralized, de-concentrated, and decentralized Spatial planning in each of these five African countries, as other local policy fields, reflects the historical, political, and administrative circumstances, as examined in the previous section. The centralized administrative culture, inherited from the long colonial period, in which urban planning was carried out mainly by central government de-concentrated departments, poorly resourced and under staffed, with the exception of the last decades of the colonial period, and even so only in some of the main urban centres, and the political options in the first decade and half after the independence, are some of the common characteristics that tie these countries, explaining in part the similarities found in the legal systems that structure spatial planning. In the same way that some aspects of the colonial local administration system continued to be applied, also urban models, planning laws and building construction codes inherited from the colonial period continued to be used in the first years post-independence. The divergent political evolution that followed the transition in the early 1990s to a multiparty political regime, to the market economy, and the decentralization policy gradually adopted and implemented explain to some extent the differences that have been developing since then in the respective spatial planning systems. In fact, if during the first decade and half after the independence, spatial planning, besides being rather rudimentary, was a highly centralized policy field in all these countries, the political changes in the early 1990s have been also reflected in the planning institutional framework. In addition to this, the magnitude and complexity of urban problems also asked for changes in the way cities were planned and governed. In the cases of Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe, there are not yet a comprehensive spatial planning law, but in the case of Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique, the political and administrative transition in the early 1990s led to the adoption in the following decade of a formal spatial planning system25. There are nonetheless differences in the level of implementation, being Cape Verde more advanced in this process, with most of the plans considered in the respective spatial planning system, including those at the municipal level, approved and enforced for some years now26. On the contrary, the implementation of the spatial planning system in Angola is delayed, confronted on the ground with the lack of a true system of local self-government. Mozambique, as seen before, is somehow in between these two countries in the sense that in part of the country directly elected municipal boards are already politically fully responsible for the decisions taken regarding the elaboration and implementation of land use plans, typically the municipal master plan, the urban plan and the detailed urban plan. On the contrary, in Angola, as there are no elected municipalities, land use planning continues to be a competence of de-concentrated state local administration departments. Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe do not have yet a formal comprehensive and coherent spatial planning system defined in the law, with different tiers and planning tools, despite attempts in the past to legislate with this purpose. There are, however, legal acts that deal directly or indirectly with urban planning. Even if not approved and enforced, these legislative initiatives are a good indication about the nature of the spatial planning system that has been considered. In the case of Guinea-Bissau, the planning laws prepared or announced in 2006 assigned spatial plans, in the three geographic tiers of the spatial planning system – national, regional, and municipal – to central government, specifically to the Ministry of Public Works, due to the inexistence on the ground of a true system of local self-government, appropriately staffed and resourced. This happens also with the national network of protected areas in GuineaBissau27, which are all administered directly by the central state, the same centralized approach 136

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followed in the municipal plan for Bissau28, the capital of the country, whose municipal council could not be responsible for this relatively complex technical work. Colonial legislation on the built environment continued to be applied for some years after the independence, as happened in the other four countries29, which also contributed to the highly centralized administrative framework. Another factor that favoured centralization in the spatial planning sector is the fact that the land, rural and urban, was nationalized in 1975, just after the independence. In the Land Law adopted in 197530, and in the subsequent revisions, in 1998 for instance, central government holds most of the powers in the management of these assets, thus limiting the capacity of local government. The National Spatial Planning Policy announced by the government that took office in 2014 has not been formulated due to the political crisis that followed. In Sao Tome and Principe, despite the formal existence of a system of local self-government, the districts31 are under-resourced and under-staffed being therefore unable to fulfil a truly significant role in a formal spatial planning system, with the exception, to some extent, of the municipality of Água Grande, which comprises the national capital city. Several attempts have been made since the beginning of this century towards the adoption of a formal spatial planning system. In 2002, a special National Commission was established, inside the Ministry of Public Works, to run the process of land distribution for urbanization and construction32. The process for the distribution of land for urbanization is a good indication of the still highly centralized administration in the field of urban planning in São Tomé and Príncipe in the first decade of this Century, one decade after the transition to democracy and nearly a decade after the institution of a formal local self-government system in the country. Even if the district (municipality) was entitled to have a representative in this Commission, that is clearly not what it should be, since urbanization and urban land management must be a local government competence and not a competence of central government. In 2005, the Ministry of Public Works launched the process for the elaboration of the National Spatial Plan33, a Working Group with representatives of several stakeholders, controlled by central government, was constituted, but the plan was never concluded. In 2009, confronted with the proliferation of illegal housing construction in the main urban settlements, fines and other related measures to combat illegal acts were introduced34. Colonial legislation in this sector continued to be applied well beyond the Independence Day. This inherited colonial legal frameworks related to the built environment reflected the then highly centralized colonial administrative culture. In the case of São Tomé and Principe continued to be applied after the independence the building construction code of 195935. More recently, in 2010, in the context of the Sao Tome and Principe and Brazil international technical cooperation programme in the field of urban development, one of the aspects focused was the elaboration of legislation on spatial planning and urbanism, on housing policy and housing programmes, among other issues in this field. In 2014 was published a planning law for the capital city, for the main urban centres in each district (municipality) and for the capital of the Autonomous Region of Príncipe36. This law is expected to be applied until the national spatial planning system is defined. This planning law established a highly centralized planning regime, with central government (Ministry of Public Works) being responsible for all plans. In the case of the plan for the expansion area of the capital, the competences were assigned in the law to the Ministry of Public Works through the Commission “Expo Gongá” created specifically for this purpose. In the case of the other five districts, the plan is prepared in collaboration with the district and in the Autonomous Region in collaboration with the respective regional government37. In 2018 started the elaboration of the National Spatial Planning of São Tomé and Príncipe38. Besides the National Plan, the consortium is also engaged in the elaboration of the Spatial Plan for the Autonomous Region of Príncipe and the Spatial Plan for each district 137

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(municipality). Although in a rather centralized way, the country is on the eve of having for the first time a full spatial planning system implemented in the entire national territory. In the other three countries was introduced a formal spatial planning system in the first years of this century. This formal spatial planning system comprises three tiers of government (national, regional, and municipal) and four categories of planning instruments (spatial development instruments, sector spatial plans, special plans, and land use). Three of these four categories of planning instruments are competence of central government. Although the regional tier is responsible for the regional development plan, the planning law establishes that until a regional tier of government is fully established, these plans remain responsibility of central government. The planning and management of protected areas is also a competence of central government39. There is thus a strong concentration of formal planning competences in central government. Even so, ample competences for the preparation and implementation of the respective municipal plans, all plans within the category of land use plans, have been assigned to the municipalities in the planning laws in each of these three countries – Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. In relation to municipal plans, the role of the state is formally confined in essence to the control of the legality, whether the plan prepared by the municipality conforms with higherlevel spatial plans adopted by central government or by state de-concentrated departments. In practice, however, municipalities are constrained by the lack of technical and financial resources, thus being dependent of central government political decisions, namely technical and financial support, even for the preparation of the respective land use plans. This dependence that results from the interaction with upper level legally binding spatial plans, be it regional or national level plans, is in fact in part due to the lack of technical capacity of most municipalities to negotiate with central government better conditions when a regional or national plan is being prepared. The dependence is even greater in all aspects related to the financing of infrastructures and equipment proposed in the land use plan. In the case of Angola40, and to some extent also in Mozambique41, the planning competences assigned to municipalities in the spatial planning system are currently held in practice by central government and its local de-concentrated departments until local self-government is fully implemented. This turns the current spatial planning system highly centralized in practice. The same happens with the regional tier in both countries – the Provinces – with the competences assigned to them in the spatial planning system being held in practice by central government planning departments. When the regional or national plan does not exist, the degree of discretion of central government is even greater, with decision being taken on a case by case basis. As this is still the predominant condition in these countries, with the exception of Cape Verde, the degree of administrative centralization in practice is much greater than what could be expected from the fact that these three countries introduced their respective formal spatial planning systems more than a decade ago42. This dependence of local government is perceived in all stages of the planning process, during the plan preparation stage, or in the implementation, suspension, alteration, or revision stages of the process. Since municipalities are not able to raise enough financial resources for the full implementation of their plan proposals, the selection of local policy priorities is largely determined by central government decisions or through a myriad of policy incentives adopted by central government, namely by providing financing for specific kinds of investment and not for others. In fact, a major constraint pending on the spatial planning system is the fact that the tax base of local government is too small for it to fulfil its planning functions. The current decentralization and formal local autonomy is meaningless as local government has no sufficient own financial resources to exercise its planning functions. This is accentuated by the fact that 138

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the system relies to a large extent on specific grants allocated to specific projects and less on general grants which are conducive to more autonomy. In other words, the degree of decentralization and the effective coordination between the different layers of government, national and sub-national, are key determinant variables responsible for the differences found in the real functioning of the spatial planning system in these countries. The inexistence in practice of a true system of local self-government turns the spatial planning system, which formally assigns most of the planning tools to central government, in a system more centralized than those found in more developed countries. The implementation of true systems of local self-government is thus the most important reform that lies ahead in these countries if the current planning status is to be changed.

9.6 Conclusion In conclusion, although decentralization still appears in the official discourses mainly as a form of organization and management of local issues, and despite the fact that it is being imposed from top down in all these five countries, the view of decentralization as an instrument of political devolution and reinforcement of local democracy seems also increasingly present in these countries. Four and half decades after the independence, there is clearly a political option towards decentralization and local democracy, which will impact in the future capacity to plan and govern cities, towns, and other human settlements, as well as on the quality of life of its citizens. The new constitutions adopted in the 1990s, and the following revisions, vested local government in these five countries with substantial capacities, functions, and financial autonomy. The answer to the first research question is thus that these countries shifted, at least formally, from being highly centralized countries to countries characterized by forms of administrative deconcentration and increasingly also by decentralization, namely in the field of urban planning. The answer to the second research question suggests that in relation to the degree of local government autonomy, there was indeed an overall increase in the last years, more organizational and functional autonomy than financial or fiscal autonomy, although with considerable variation among the five countries, namely between island and continental states. Decentralization means more than mere delegation of tasks or de-concentration of public administration services. Decentralization is the transfer of competences but also the transfer of the necessary means (human resources, financial resources, and so on) and the power to decide required by the functions assigned to local government. And this, as shown in the previous sections of this chapter, is far from being the rule, namely in the field of spatial planning. The inexistence of a true system of local self-government, fully implemented, in some of these five countries, with adequate organizational capacity and human and financial resources, is one of the most important institutional weaknesses that affect the governance of urban areas, and urban planning in particular. The answer to the third research question suggests that the current situation and the differences and similarities among these countries are the result of the complex history referred before, made up of a common colonial past and a similar transition to a socialist state after the independence, but also the outcome of the complex and variable political processes that each of these five countries experienced after the independence and in particular after the transition to democracy in the early 1990s. The determinant variables of this current level of local autonomy and governing capacity include, among others, historical factors (colonial heritage, de-colonization process), post-independence political options (single party system, the militarization of state power, planned economy, centralism), the continued public finance constraints over the years, the international political context in Africa, the existence of a dominant political party, the fact that centralization was perceived by central governments in these countries as a key condition 139

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for political stability, the perception of decentralization as a risk for the national integrity, the role of national elites, political and intellectual, and the political option for a simultaneous versus gradual implementation of local self-government since the early 1990s. The recent proposals for local government reform in Angola and Mozambique point for the gradual implementation and consolidation of a true system of local democracy, with more resources being allocated to the sub-national tiers, which will likely impact positively in the capacity to govern cities, towns and other human settlements, with decisions more consistent with people’ local needs. All these institutional changes towards the implementation of a true system of local self-government represent a positive shift in the capacity of local government to govern cities and other human settlements in these countries, even if with huge differences among them when a more fine grain criteria is employed in the comparative analysis of their local autonomy levels. Despite the ambitious decentralization discourses, namely in Angola and Mozambique, in practice there is a real risk that these countries will continue to be centralized across most of the dimensions of intergovernmental relations considered in this study. The institutional weakness, in particular in the sub-national tiers of government, will offer arguments for the maintenance of centralized inter-governmental relations. The implementation of these reforms in Angola and Mozambique is contingent upon the existence of adequate administrative, technical, economic and financial capacity. There is, thus, an urgent need of comprehensive capacity building programmes associated with the implementation of these institutional reforms. However, these shifts are only a first step in a process that requires time and persistence. Compared with more developed countries, the contrast is enormous, in particular in the degree of financial self-reliance or regarding the tasks and services provided by local government units. Even in the case of Cape Verde, where the decentralization process is more advanced, none of the municipalities are politically and economically strong enough to balance the power and control from the centre. The same can be said of the meso level in Mozambique and Angola, which so far are only mere forms of administrative de-concentration. Besides the political and economic constraints, these countries are confronted with important institutional deficiencies that prevent or raise additional difficulties to the decentralization policy. But above all, for an effective and efficient governance of cities, towns and other human settlements in these five African countries, it will be necessary to transfer more functions to local government and to change the current central-local share of public resources, besides all the other operational changes that together will improve the overall institutional capacity of local government in these countries, namely in the field of spatial planning. The local finance system is also here the weak link, as reported frequently in the literature on local government. Additional research is certainly needed to follow up the development of these findings. For instance, decentralization is perceived as a process that may reduce political conflict by assigning power to various local or regional groups with different political affiliations, as is the case in Mozambique and Angola, although the opposite can also occur, if the current decentralization process exacerbates conflicts by deepening the previous divisions and by providing the political opponents with substantial new capacities and resources at the local and regional levels, as seems to have been feared by the ruling parties in the past, in Angola and in Mozambique. In fact, in Angola and Mozambique, two countries that experienced long and severe civil wars after the independence, the decentralization process may create new focus for conflict between central government and sub-national tiers of government, in regions or ethnic areas traditionally aligned with opposition political parties. In the case of Angola, where the Constitution, the law and the political practice seem to give a more extensive support to traditional forms of authority than in any of the other countries, the decentralization process may represent the blow of new life into these forms of local political authority, non-democratic, not elected and not accessible 140

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to women, and non-Republican, as it is inherited. And since part of the competences of the lower tiers of local government can be assigned to these traditional authorities this may raise serious issues of equity and equality among citizens living in different regions. In sum, the success of the current decentralization processes, in particular regional and municipal autonomy in the spatial planning system, depends to a large extent on how central–local relations are designed and implemented. The maintenance of the dependence of local government in relation to central government, namely financial dependence, can only produce failed reforms in the field of spatial planning. In other words, the low level of decentralization and low autonomy of local government emerges from this analysis as the dominant explanatory variable for the problems and failures encountered in the governing of cities, towns, and other human settlements in these five African countries, namely for its low capacity to hold and apply the formal competences assigned to local government in the respective spatial planning system.

Notes 1 1974 for Guinea-Bissau. The liberation movement (PAIGC) declared unilaterally the independence in 1973. Portugal recognized the independence in September 1974, few months after the overthrown of the dictatorship in Portugal in 25 April 1974. 2 See Silva (2016) for a detailed overview of the history of this political process in the colonial period. Vasconcellos (1921), Almeida (1920), Moura (1913), and Ulrich (1908) provide a rigorous picture of local administration in these Portuguese colonies in the beginning of the XX century. The Rebelo da Silva reform (Decreto Orgânico das Províncias Ultramarinas, 1 December 1869, published in Diário do Governo, 9 December 1869) established the basis of what became the Portuguese colonial local government system, with successive revisions in the decades that followed. 3 For a comprehensive overview of the historical process of local government institutionalization in the current five Lusophone African countries, see Silva (2016). 4 Similar trends for the reinforcement of colonial practices in the field of local government have been found in other African countries too, as in the case of rural local government in Zimbabwe (Murisa, 2014). 5 In Africa, for instance, most states are unitary republics, but there are also three federal states (Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa) and three constitutional kingdoms (Lesotho, Morocco, and Swaziland). For an analysis of Federalism in Africa, see Dickovick, 2014; Erk, 2014; Bihonegn, 2014. This is reflected in the sub-national administrative organization. All five countries considered in this study are unitary republics. 6 Law nº7/90 – Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe (Constituição da República Democrática de São Tomé e Princípe). Revised in 2003 (Law 1/2003, 29 January 2003 – Constitution of São Tomé and Príncipe). Law 10/2005 – local government law (“Lei n. o 10/2005 – Lei de Revisão da Lei Quadro das Autarquias Locais”; replaced law 10/92, 9 September 1992). The Autonomous Region of Principe was established in 1992 and is regulated by a specific law (“Estatuto Político-Administrativo da Região Autónoma”). Local elections have been postponed due to financial constraints. The 2013 local and regional elections were postponed to 2014 and the 2017 election postponed to 2018. The last regional election, at the time of writing, took place in 7 October 2018. The União para Mudança e Progresso do Principe (UMPP) elected 5 of the 7 members of the Regional Assembly. The Movimento Verde para Desenvolvimento do Príncipe (MVDP) elected 2. The UMPP won with overall majority all regional elections.The President of the Regional Government continues to be José Cassandra (UMPP). The MLSTP/PSD did not elect any member to the Regional Assembly in 2018. In the words of the new President of the Regional Assembly, this regional parliament should also produce legislation avoiding therefore to have only the role of control of the executive activity as happened in the past mandates. This activity was carried out every 3 months. In the new legislative period (2018–2022), the regional government will be scrutinized in the regional assembly once a month. 7 The Government’ regionalization proposal, supported by the MdP party, considers 10 regions in the 9 occupied islands, being two of these Administrative Regions in the Island of Santiago (Governo Cabo Verde – “Proposta de lei que cria as Regiões Administrativas e regula o seu modo de eleição, as suas 141

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atribuições e organização”, submitted to Parliament on 04 April 2018). The cost of the Government’ proposal is estimated in 3,64 million Euros per year (400 million Cape Verde Escudos/year). In June 2018, the MpD Government suspended its proposal in Parliament and postponed the debate to October. The creation of regions is dependent on 2/3 of the votes in Parliament. The PAICV, the main opposition party, announced that it supports the creation of regions although only if without additional cost for citizens/taxpayers and as part of a larger reform of the state. For that a full package of new local government laws was submitted by the PAICV to Parliament in 2018. With the support of 2 deputies from PAICV and the 2 from UCID, the other opposition party, the government proposal received the necessary 2/3 majority of the votes for approval in October 2018. At the time of writing, the law is still in Parliament. The PAICV regionalization proposal: GP-PAICV – “Projeto de Lei das Regiões Administrativas”, submitted to Parliament on 18 May 2018). 8 In Cabinda, the liberation movement FLEC (Frente de Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda) founded in 1963 continues to claim the independence of Cabinda from Angola, which now, as during the Portuguese colonial period, is an exclave province of Angola. Occasional political tension continues to mark life in the territory (e.g., kidnapping of foreign citizens, armed attacks, as reported in the press, etc.). Despite the numerous internal divisions over the years, the movement continues politically active abroad with frequent political campaigns in European countries. 9 Renamo first made this formal proposal when the president of the Republic was Joaquim Chissano. The negotiations continued with president Gebuza and later with President Filipe Nyusi, which indicates how difficult it has been for FRELIMO to accept the division of power that would result from decentralization. This change will certainly impact on urban planning and in the governing of cities, towns, and other human settlements in Mozambique. This project of decentralization, agreed between President Nyusi and Afonso Dhlakama, President of Renamo as part of the Peace Agreement, and which is incorporated in the proposal for the revision of the Constitution (“Proposta de Lei de Revisão Pontual da Constituição da República de Moçambique”) was approved by the Parliament of Mozambique on 23 May 2018 (submitted on 9 February by President Nyusi). According to these changes in the Constitution, the Governor of Province will be elected, starting with the legislative election in 2019. The Governor will be the number 1 of the party list with more votes and no longer nominated by the Head of State as has been the case since the independence in 1975. The Administrator of District (the tier between Province and Municipality) will also be elected, starting in the legislative election of 2024, and no longer nominate by the Minister of Home Affairs (Ministro da Administração Estatal). In the 2019 election, these administrators will be nominated by the Minister of Home Affairs as before, but only after consultation with the Governor (then already elected), a procedure that did not exist before. This constitutional revision also affects the election method in the municipalities.The mayor is the number 1 in the list with more votes for the municipal assembly, starting in the election of October 2018, and no longer, as before, through direct election (Law 14/2018, 18 December). 10 In Cape Verde, the first local election (municipal election) took place in 1991. It was followed until now by six more local elections in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016. In the 7th and most recent election, in 2016, the MpD won in 19 municipalities, the PAICV in 2 (Mosteiros and Santa Cruz), and an independent list (Independent Group Basta) in 1 municipality (Boavista). Electoral participation was nearly 58%. In São Tomé and Príncipe, in the local election held on 7 October 2018, the party MLSTP won in three districts (municipalities) – Lembá, Água Grande, and Cantagalo – out of the six districts and has a coalition with other parties in other 2 (Lobata and Caué). The ADI party won in 1 district (Mé-Zochi). In the previous local election, the ADI won in five out of the six districts (district is the name given to municipalities in São Tomé and Príncipe). 11 At the time of writing, the national parliament in Mozambique has already approved the election of the Governor of the Province (starting in 2019) and the election of the Administrator of the District (starting in 2024), besides the election for the municipality (starting in the October 2018 municipal election, the mayor will be the number one of the list with more votes for the municipal assembly and no longer directly elected). Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, and now also Mozambique, have all their tiers of sub-national government with boards directly elected. Angola and Guinea-Bissau have not yet decentralized. Sub-national tiers of government are mere forms of administrative de-concentration (or State Local Administration). 12 Local Government laws have been reformed several times in Cape Verde since the turn to democracy in the early 1990s. Law 134/IV/95 – defined the statute of the municipalities (Lei nº 134/IV/95, de 3 de Julho – estatuto dos Municípios). A major reform took place in 2010 (Lei 69/VII/2010, 16 August) 142

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when an ambitious decentralization ‘programme’ was adopted (e.g., reference to a regional tier, as well as to a sub-municipal tier – Freguesia – for instance). In 2018, new proposals have been submitted to the national Parliament by the national government and by the main opposition party, including, besides the regionalization proposals, a new local finance law, a new statute for the municipalities, a new regime of control of the municipalities by central government, a new statute to the democratic opposition at the local level, and a revised spatial planning law. See also Baker, 2006. 13 Law 79/VI/2005, 5 September – Local Government Finance Law.This pattern seems to continue in the new proposals (GP-PAICV [2018]. Projeto de Lei que estabelece o regime financeiro dos Municípios [submitted to Parliament on 18 May 2018]). 14 Constitution of Angola, 2010. Constitution of Guinea-Bissau 1996 (Constituição da República da Guiné Bissau, 1996). For Guinea-Bissau, see also Nora et al., 2007; Bordonaro, 2009; Fistein, 2011. 15 After several years of political instability following the dismissal of the government elected in 2014, national legislative elections are scheduled to take place in early 2019. 16 UNITA (“Projeto de Lei Orgânica sobre as Bases do Sistema de Organização e Funcionamento do Poder Local”); Government proposal (“Proposta de Lei Orgânica sobre as Bases Gerais do Poder Local”). In August 2017 was approved Law n.º 15/17, 8 August, on local government (Lei n.º 15/17, de 8 de Agosto Estabelece as bases do sistema de organização, funcionamento e implementação das autarquias locais). 17 ‘Conselho de Governação Local’ (Decreto Presidencial nº 36/18, 9 February 2018). 18 João Lourenço is the third President of the Republic of Angola, elected in 2017 (23 August), succeeding José Eduardo dos Santos, in power from 1979 to 2017. This Council is a consultative board of the President of the Republic on local governance issues. The council is constituted by several ministers and by the governors of the 18 Provinces, among other members (Decreto Presidencial nº 36/18, 9 February 2018). 19 Being on public discussion at the time of writing. This package of legislation includes 6 laws covering issues of organization and functioning of local government; competences; local finance law; and central–local relation (Proposta de Lei Sobre a Institucionalização das Autarquias Locais; Proposta de Lei Sobre a Orgânica das Eleições Autárquicas; Proposta de Lei Sobre a Organização e Funcionamento das Autarquias Locais; Proposta de Lei Sobre as Finanças Locais; Proposta de Lei da Tutela Administrativa Sobre as Autarquias Locais; Proposta de Lei das Transferências de Atribuições e Competências do Estado para as Autarquias Locais). 20 Decreto Presidencial 208/17, 22 September 2017, and Decreto Presidencial 281/17, 15 November 2017, regulate the organization and functioning of State Local Administration (Province and Municipality). Decreto Presidencial 20/18, 29 January 2018 establishes the delimitation and de-concentration of competences between central government and State local administration (Province and Municipality). Decreto Presidencial 40/18, 9 February on de-concentration and decentralization, establishes the financing regime of State local administration entities (current municipal administrations; governors of province). Decreto Presidencial 89/18, 9 April establishes the rules of the Fund for the financing of the State local administration. 21 Only 53 municipalities at the time of writing. In the case of Mozambique, the evidence available suggests that it was mainly due to the political decision taken by FRELIMO of not allowing RENAMO, the main opposition party and contender in the civil war, to control vast areas of the country at the municipal level (see, among others, Brito, 2013). The first local election took place in 1998, in 33 municipalities; the second in 2003, in 33 municipalities; the third in 2008, in 43 municipalities; the fourth in 2013, in 53 municipalities and the fifth on 10 October 2018, in 53 municipalities. In the 2013 local election, the main opposition party – RENAMO – did not took part in the election as a form of protest. The party FRELIMO won in 49 out of the 53 municipalities in 2013. In 2018, FRELIMO, the party that supports the national government since independence, won in 44 out of the 53 municipalities, including the capital Maputo. RENAMO won in 8 municipalities, including in 2 capitals of Province (Nampula and Quelimane). The MDM (Movimento Democrático de Moçambique) kept in 2018 the municipality of Beira. The official results in 5 municipalities won by FRELIMO have been contested by RENAMO. There were numerous episodes of violence during the 2018 electoral process, before, during and just after the local election. In 2018, local election electoral participation was around 60%. The implementation of true forms of local self-government in other African countries suggests that citizens and the country were better served through somehow gradual decentralization and democratization of local government than by radical and disruptive political and social changes, as Simeon et al. (2009) point for the case of South Africa.The recent Constitutional revision in Mozambique, as part of the Peace Agreement between the Government and Renamo, reinforces local 143

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self-government and reverts the option of gradual implementation, at least at the level of Provinces and Districts, which will all have elected boards at the same time (Provinces in 2019 and Districts in 2024). 22 In South Africa, the recognition of customary law as a law equal to its common law brought doubts, namely lack of clarity of the role of traditional leaders and parallel administrations (Kanyane, 2017). The case studies included in UNCHS (1991) provide useful information on the articulation between formal local government and traditional authorities.The resurgence of traditional authority in the postcolonial period across Africa has also been noted by Murisa (2014) in the case of Zimbabwe, which goes against democratisation intentions of decolonisation. 23 The fear that decentralization could strengthen separatist tendencies and undermine therefore the unity of the state was also noted in other contexts outside Africa, as is the case, for example, of local government reforms in Georgia examined in Swianiewicz et al. (2010). This in part explains the low capacity local government has to plan and govern cities in this period. 24 UNITA and other opposition parties expressed strong opposition to the geographic gradualism option adopted by the Angolan government. Similar opposition has also been expressed vigorously by civil society organizations, including the catholic church (Conferência Episcopal de Angola e São Tomé and Príncipe) and other religious groups (e.g., Tocoistas), for instance. 25 The spatial planning system in unitary states is generally organized in three geographic layers, overlapping the vertical administrative structure of the state: national, regional, and local levels. This is also the case in the three countries that already defined one – Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. In all three, the local tier corresponds to the municipality and to land-use planning tools. See Silva, 2015. 26 The Planning law that defines the current Spatial Planning System in Cape Verde is the Decretolegislativo 4/2018, 6 July 2018, which revised the previous planning laws. This is the second change of the initial 2006 planning law. Decreto-legislativo 1/2006, 13 February 2006 (‘Aprova as Bases do Ordenamento do Território e Planeamento Urbanístico’); Decreto-legislativo 6/2010, 21 June 2010 (revised for the first time the ‘DL 1/2006 – Bases do Ordenamento do Território e Planeamento Urbanístico’). Lei 60/VIII/2014, 23 April 2014 (‘Estabelece o regime das operações urbanísticas, designadamente o loteamento, a urbanização, a edificação e a utilização e conservação de edifícios’). In 2013 was approved the national spatial plan (DNOT – Directiva Nacional de Ordenamento do Território – Lei n.º 28/VIII/2013, de 10 de Abril), whose elaboration started in 2009. More recently, in 2016, was approved the planning law for the coastal area (Decreto-lei n.º 14/2016 de 1 de março 2016 – regula o processo de elaboração e implementação dos planos de ordenamento da orla costeira e do mar adjacente, designados por POOC_M). Municipal plans in Cape Verde are now (in the 2018 planning law): (i) Planos Municipais de Ordenamento do Território (PMOT), which comprises the Plano Director Municipal (PDM) (the municipal master plan) and the Plano Detalhado (PD); and (ii) Planos Intermunicipais de Ordenamento do Território (PIOT), which comprises the ‘Plano Diretor Intermunicipal’ and the ‘Plano Detalhado Intermunicipal’. The spatial planning system comprises also the National Spatial Plan (DNOT – Diretiva Nacional de Ordenamento do Território), The Sectorial Spatial Plan (PSOT – Plano Sectorial de Ordenamento do Território), the Regional Spatial Plan (EROT – Esquema Regional de Ordenamento do Território), typically one per island; the Special Spatial Plan (PEOT – Plano Especial de Ordenamento do Território), namely Plan for Protected Area, Plan for the Coastal Area, Plan for Hydrographical Basin, Plan for Special Tourist Zone or for Industrial Zone. 27 The natural parks network in Guinea-Bissau has profited from international aid, from the PNUD and UNESCO, for example. It is an area within the field of spatial planning in which some form of planning is practiced. The network comprises the following areas: Parque Natural dos Tarrafes do Rio Cacheu, Parque Natural das Lagoas de Cufada, Parque Nacional Marinho João Vieira-Poilão, Parque Nacional das ilhas de Orango, Parque Nacional de Cantanhez, Área Marinha Protegida das ilhas Urok, Reserva de Biosfera de Arquipélago de Bolama-Bijagós. 28 MOPCU – DGHU(2005). Decreto-lei 17/95, 30 October. 29 For instance, the building code (RGEU – Regulamento Geral das Edificações Urbanas) adopted in 1951 and revised n 1971 was only replaced in 2006 by the new Building Code (‘Regulamento Geral da Construção e Habitação Urbana’). 30 Land Law: Law 4/75, revised by Law 5/98, 23 April. All urban and rural land was nationalized. It was not possible to privatize it. 31 The name given in the country to the municipalities. 32 Despacho 1/2000. Cancelled Despacho nº 1/99, 8 January 1999 that suspended the distribution of land (previously nationalized) for urbanization due to irregularities in that process. Despacho 20/12/2002 144

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(MOP) established, in the Ministry of Public Works, a national commission for the distribution of land plots for urbanization (“Comissão Nacional de Distribuição de Terras destinadas a Urbanização e Construção”). See also Eyzaguirre, 1989. 33 “Plano de Ordenamento do Território” (Decreto nº 12/2005). 34 Despacho conjunto nº 12/2009 – illegal housing constuction (“construções de génese ilegal”). 35 Regulamento Geral das Edificações Urbanas, Boletim Oficial de S. Tomé e Príncipe, 29 January 1959. 36 Decreto-lei 29/2014, 29 September 2014. 37 “Secretaria RegionaI para o Meio Ambiente, Recursos Naturais, Infra-estruturas e Ordenamento do Território” 38 Still in preparation at the time of writing (2018). The National Spatial Plan (“Plano Nacional de Ordenamento do Território de São Tomé e Príncipe”) was launched by the Ministry of Infrastructures, Environment and Natural Resources (“Ministério das Infraestruturas, Ambiente e Recursos Naturais”) and is being prepared by an international consortium of enterprises that comprises the NRV-Norvia (Portugal), in association with Ofek (Israel), and a Law firm (Portugal). The contract is financed by the African Development Bank and is part of the National Strategy for the Reduction of Poverty in São Tomé and Príncipe. 39 The network of protected areas in Mozambique comprises: Parque Nacional de Gorongosa; Parque Nacional do Arquipélago do Bazaruto; Parque Nacional do Banhine; Parque Nacional do Zinave; Parque Nacional do Limpopo; Parque Nacional das Quirimbas; Reserva Nacional do Chimanimani; Reserva Especial de Maputo. 40 Planning law: Law 3/2004, 25 June 2004 (“Lei do Ordenamento do Território e do Urbanismo de Angola”). Municipalities are explicitly responsible for municipal plans and inter-municipal plans. Municipal plans are classified in global: Plano Director Municipal (Municipal master plan) and partial: Plano Urbanístico; Plano de Ordenamento Rural. In practice, however, the entire planning system is being operationalized by central government departments. This is clearly visible in the activity of the National Institute of Spatial Planning and Urban Development (Instituto Nacional de Ordenamento do Território e Desenvolvimento Urbano – INOTDU), as defined in the Decreto Presidencial 9/16, 15 January 2016. It is a Public Institute dependent from the Ministry responsible for Spatial Planning and Urbanism.This 2016 law assigns ample competences in the field of spatial planning to this Institute, at national and sub-national levels. This INOTDU inherited in 1995 the structure and functions of the first planning unity created in 1977 in the Ministry of Planning being responsible, within central government, for spatial planning (then named physical planning). 41 Planning law: Law 19/2007, 18 July 2007 (“Lei n.º 19/2007, de 18 de Julho – Política do Ordenamento do Território da República de Moçambique”). Decreto n.º 23/2008, 01 July 2008 – aproves the regulation of the planning law 19/2007 (“Aprova o Regulamento da Lei de Ordenamento do Território”). Municipalities are explicitly responsible for these three types of land use plans: Planos de Estrutura Urbana (the municipal master plan); Planos Gerais e Parciais de Urbanização; Planos de Pormenor. 42 Angola in 2004; Cape Verde in 2006; Mozambique in 2007. Before that all the three countries had adopted over the years since the independence planning laws which however were not articulate enough to constitute a coherent whole. For example, in Mozambique: Plano de Estrutura do Maputo (1982), Plano da Área Metropolitana do Maputo (1998), Plano de Estrutura do Maputo (2008), among others.

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Reitan, Marit; Kari Gustafsson & Arild Blekesaune (2015). Do Local Government Reforms Result in Higher Levels of Trust in Local Politicians? Local Government Studies, 41 (1), 156–179. Ross, Cameron (2006). The Tortuous Path of Local Government Reform in the Russian Federation. Local Government Studies, 32 (5), 639–658. Santos, B. (2012). Breve história do processo de desconcentração, descentralização e governação local em Angola. Rumo à democracia local. Luanda: República de Angola, Ministério da Administração do Território, Direcção Nacional da Administração Local do Estado. Santos, O. M. (2012a). O Município na Constituição Angolana. Curso de Pós- Graduação em Direito Municipal Comparado dos Países de Língua Oficial Portuguesa. Lisboa: Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de Lisboa. Seethal, Cecil (2012). South Africa’s Local Government Elections of 2011. South African Geographical Journal, 94 (1), 9–21. Silva, Carlos Nunes (ed.) (2015). Urban Planning in Lusophone African Countries. Farham: Ashgate. Silva, Carlos Nunes (ed.) (2016). Governing Urban Africa. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Simeon, Richard & Christina Murray (2009). Reforming Multi-level Government in South Africa, Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue Canadienne des Etudes Africaines, 43 (3), 536–571. Smoke, P. (2003). Decentralisation in Africa: Goals, Dimensions, Myths and Challenges. Public Administration and Development, 23, 7–16. Swianiewicz, Pawel (2018). If Territorial Fragmentation is a Problem, is Amalgamation a Solution? –Ten Years Later. Local Government Studies, 44 (1), 1–10. Swianiewicz, Paweł & Adam Mielczarek (2010). Georgian Local Government Reform: State Leviathan Redraws Boundaries? Local Government Studies, 36 (2), 291–311. Teng-Calleja, Mendiola; Ma. Regina M. Hechanova, Ramon Benedicto A. Alampay, Nico A. Canoy, Edna P. Franco & Erwin A. Alampay (2017).Transformation in Philippine Local Government. Local Government Studies, 43 (1), 64–88. Terlouw, Kees (2016). Territorial Changes and Changing Identities: How Spatial Identities are Used in the Up-scaling of Local Government in the Netherlands. Local Government Studies, 42 (6), 938–957. Tosun, Mehmet Serkan & Serdar Yilmaz (2008). Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Auth Centralization, Decentralization, and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Washington: The World Bank. UCLG (2008). Decentralization and Local Democracy in the World. First Global Report. Barcelona: United Cities and Local Governments. UCLG (2016). Fourth Global Report on Decentralization and Local Democracy. Co-Creating the Urban Future. The Agenda of Metropolises, Cities and Territories (GOLD IV 2016). Barcelona: United Cities and Local Governments. Ulrich, R. E. (1908). Sciencia e Administração Colonial.Vol. 1. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade. UNCHS (1991). The Management of Secondary Cities in Sub−Saharan Africa:Traditional and Modern Institutional Arrangements. Nairobi: United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. Vasconcellos, E. (1921). Colonias Portuguezas – Geographia Physica, Politica e Economica (2.ª ed.). Lisboa: Typographia da Companhia A Editora. Wollmann, Hellmut (2008). Reforming Local Leadership and Local Democracy: The Cases of England, Sweden, Germany and France in Comparative Perspective. Local Government Studies, 34 (2), 279–298. Wollmann, Hellmut; Ivan Koprić & Gérard Marćou (eds) (2016). Public and Social Services in Europe from Public and Municipal to Private Sector Provision. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wunsch, J. S. (2000). Refounding the African State and Local Self-Governance:The Neglected Foundation. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 38 (3), 487–509. Wunsch, J. S. (2001). Decentralization, Local Governance and ‘Recentralization’ in Africa. Public Administration and Development, 21, 277–288.

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10 The resilience, adaptability, and transformation of the South African planning profession Verna Nel and Martin Lewis

10.1 Introduction The urban and regional planning profession in South Africa was established early in the 20th century and initially had a close relationship with the Royal Town Planning Institute. It has since grown and established its own formal organizations and planning schools. However, this growth has been slow, with planners striving for recognition and status while facing competition from other, longer established professionals such as land surveyors, civil engineers, and even lawyers, who contend that they can do planning work. Furthermore, the profession was denounced for colluding with the apartheid regime, or at least being subverted to serve its aims (Muller, 2000). Thus, by the dawn of democracy, the profession had lost both its legitimacy in the eyes of the new government and its faith in itself (Oranje, 2014).Transformation of the planning profession, including its legislation, planning curricula, and institutions, was essential for it to survive and regain credibility. Legislation introduced since 1994 has supported the profession by requiring all municipalities to produce spatial plans and by establishing a professional Council whose mandate is to transform the urban and regional planning profession (RSA, 2002). But has urban and regional planning been resilient enough to adapt, to change its attitude and approaches to meet the needs of the country, and thus re-establish its credibility? To answer this question, this chapter traces the historical evolution of the profession from its early beginnings to the present day, using a review of academic literature, policy documents, and legislation. Additionally, data from the South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN) as well as information obtained through the South African Planning Education Research (SAPER) project has been used. The SACPLAN dataset contains anonymized records of registered planners since 1986. The SAPER data consists of responses of a survey of 226 planners as well as information obtained through over 90 in-depth interviews held with planners, academics at planning schools and people closely associated with the planning profession. These interviews were conducted during the first half of 2018. Using this primary and secondary data, we aim to evaluate the evolution and resilience of the South African urban and regional planning profession. This evaluation is conducted against the adaptive cycle proposed by Holling and Gunderson (2002), a model of the resilience and 149

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potential of a system over time. We find that planning has survived its crisis of legitimacy, with policy and institutions now in place to improve the profession’s resilience and standing and to transform planners’ mindsets and approaches. The following section describes concepts of resilience and the adaptive cycle.This is followed by an overview of the history of the planning profession. The penultimate section discusses the resilience of the profession while the final part concludes the paper with as assessment of the current status of the profession.

10.2 Resilience and the adaptive cycle The adaptive cycle model is derived from complexity theory (Holland, 1992, 2012; Manson, 2001; Helbing, 2009) that is used to model complex adaptive systems. A social-ecological system is complex because it comprises natural (ecological) and human (social, cultural and economic) systems, and adaptive because it can cope with volatility due to the interaction of these systems (Du Plessis, 2008; Folke, 2006; Seeliger & Turok, 2013, 2014;Walker et al., 2004). It is dynamic and responds to changes in its environment. Over time, the system may fluctuate between relatively stable states, with small perturbations rippling through it and shocks being dampened, or a large jolt may tip it into a different, sometimes less healthy, state (Gallopín, 2006). The resilience of the system will determine the nature and extent of the shock required to effect a dramatic change. Resilience can be expressed as the distance to the threshold between the current state and a less favourable state: the shorter the distance, the lower the resilience (Walker and Salt, 2006). Although there is no single definition of resilience (Meerow et al., 2016; Chandler, 2014), there are broad conceptualizations that are applicable in different circumstances. Common to these is the ability to rebound, or ‘bounce back’ or recover from a shock, reflecting the Latin root resilire, to spring back (Davoudi et al., 2012; Simmie & Martin, 2010; Seeliger & Turok, 2013). This implies a single equilibrium point to which the system returns after a disturbance. A term sometimes used to describe the single equilibrium perspective is ‘engineering resilience’, from materials science. This concept of resilience is also applicable to people (Chandler, 2014) or communities following a disaster (Goldstein, 2012). The term ‘ecological resilience’ recognizes multiple equilibrium points, where the system can absorb a disturbance but retain the same structure and function (Gunderson, 2000). ‘Adaptive’, or ‘social-ecological’ resilience refers to the system’s ability to change in response to internal or external pressures but retain the same function (Walker & Salt, 2006: 32). Intrinsic to this type of resilience is the appreciation of change and, critically, the ability to adjust by modifying the system’s behaviour to retain the system’s core identity. The dynamic capacity of systems to evolve over time underlies the adaptive cycle model (Holling, 2001). Walker and Salt (2006: 75) note that the concept of adaptive change, or ‘creative destruction’, had already been described by Schumpeter in 1950. The adaptive cycle model was devised to explain how an ecosystem responds to change (Holling, 2001; Holling & Gunderson, 2002), but it has also been applied in other contexts (Simmie & Martin, 2010). The cycle is influenced by the assets or potential of the system: how connected it is, and the flexibility or rigidity of its connections. These determine the system’s sensitivity to perturbations and hence its ability to retain its function and adapt. The cycle has four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release, and re-organization. Rapid growth, the first phase of the cycle, is where opportunities are explored and exploited (Holling, 2001; Holling & Gunderson, 2002). Connections are formed and capital is accumulated.With time, capital and connectedness increase, as does the rigidity of the system, decreasing its resilience: ‘the more internally connected… the more structurally and functionally rigid and 150

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less adaptive’ it becomes (Simmie & Martin, 2010: 33). The conservation phase is characterized by increasing regulation, efficiency and stability, but within a narrowing range of conditions (Walker & Salt, 2006). The rapid growth phase could be described as entrepreneurial and the conservation phase as bureaucratic. The release phase occurs when a shock or an accumulation of stresses exceeds the resilience of the system and the connections binding the system break, releasing stored capital that now becomes available for reuse in a renewed system (Holling, 2001).The onset of the release phase is often rapid, leading to chaos, although the build-up to the release may be gradual (Kinzig et al., 2006). In the fourth phase, re-organization, the potential for renewal emerges out of the collapse which then leads to a new rapid growth phase, starting a new cycle (Holling & Gunderson, 2002). Resilience is strongest in the first and fourth phases, rapid growth and re-organization, where controls are weak and potential high (Holling, 2001), and weakest in the second and third phases, conservation and release, where the system becomes more regulated and interconnected (Walker & Salt, 2006; Simmie & Martin, 2010). Although the four phases generally follow consecutively, this need not happen (Nel, 2016). Thus, it is possible for a system to miss a phase or become stuck in a particular phase. If a system becomes degraded to the point where its resources have been lost, it can become rigid and lose its resilience (Holling, 2001). Rigidity traps may occur where there are high levels of social control, or where the benefits for elites are too limited to be worth the cost of change or the cost (in the form of energy or resources) outstrips any advantages (Gerrits et al., 2009; Gerrits, 2012). Because systems are connected, large-scale systems can affect those on a small scale in time and space. Gunderson and Holling (2002) refer to this as ‘panarchy’. In addition, there can be mismatches of scale, physical and temporal, between different interlinked systems. Thus, change on a national scale, such as a regime change, can affect systems closely linked to it. Sometimes a large system may change more rapidly than smaller systems, instead of more slowly, as is usually the case (Cumming et al., 2006; Holling & Gunderson, 2002). This was initially the case in South Africa, where change moved faster on a national level than in the smaller systems, such as the planning profession.

10.3 History of the South African planning profession The devastation brought about by the South African War (1899–1901) and severe droughts led to the urbanization of destitute Afrikaners and black people drawn to the opportunities in the young mining industry. The result was uncontrolled development in the cities, and the situation worsened after World War I (1914–1918). Housing shortages and slum development obliged city authorities to recognize the need for town planning and ‘radical social improvements’ (Mabin & Smit, 1997: 197). However, the political reaction to this need was far removed from the ‘garden city’ or modernist ideals espoused by the fledgling planning profession. The state saw town planning as controlling new development – including enforcing racial segregation of residential areas – and was not much concerned with redeveloping existing areas (Oranje, 2014; Mabin & Smit, 1997). The first town planning legislation was passed from the 1930s, in the form of provincial town planning ordinances, modelled on British legislation.These ordinances required municipalities to control land development in ‘white’ areas by means of town planning schemes, but the power to approve development was vested in the provincial government. The national government retained control over the development of black areas, which were largely divorced from town planning (Parnell & Mabin, 1995). At much the same time, national legislation was passed, and funding made available, for roads and housing, which were deemed more critical than development control in white urban areas. 151

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The national focus on housing and infrastructure determined the ‘pecking order among town planning, roads and housing’ and ‘relegated town planning and its proponents to a subservient role, far behind roads and housing, which the then State saw as crucial for the control and reproduction of established colonial economic relationships’ (Oranje, 2014: 4; emphasis in the original).Town planning’s influence and potential to oppose the state, whether the British colonial or the apartheid government, were thus limited not only by the state’s focus on control but also by the low status of town planning among land surveyors, engineers and architects (Oranje, 2014). With a ‘narrowed professionalism’ that ‘pandered to the propertied’, town planning became ‘a disappointing substitute for the exciting practices imagined by the pioneers’ (Mabin & Smit, 1997: 202). The colonial and the apartheid segregationist ideologies shaped planning.Without the power (or desire) to oppose the inequities and iniquities of apartheid, planners focused on the technical aspects of planning. Yet international philosophies, such as high modernism, with its focus on separation, decongestion and homogeneity, did influence the structure of South African cities where they were applied along racial lines (Parnell & Mabin, 1995). These philosophies – combined with a segregationist ideology during the rapid urban growth that occurred during the two decades after World War II – resulted in sprawling, car-dependent cities where the poorest (black) communities were located on the urban periphery, far from amenities and social services (Turok, 1994). This pattern of development remains deeply entrenched in the shape of South African cities (NPC, 2012). In 1919, the first formal town planning association was formed in the Transvaal province (Mabin & Smit, 1997) but it appears to have had little influence. A national association, the South African Institute of Town and Regional Planners (SAITRP), was formed in 1954, with the objectives of advancing the art and science of planning and applying high technical standards in the management of development. The themes of conferences hosted by SAITRP confirm this technocratic bias (Beauregard, 1998; Muller, 2000), as do articles in the Journal for Regional Planning and its successor, the Town and Regional Planning journal from 1978. One of these, for example, maintains that the role of a town and regional planner is to do what society expects them to do (Theunissen & Theunissen, 1982). From 1965 onwards, several town planning schools opened in South Africa, none of which were accessible to students of colour until the 1980s (Mabin & Smit, 1997). Urban and regional planning was predominantly a profession comprising whites serving a white minority; an indictment on a profession that should have been infused with social goals for a just city (McCarthy, 1983; Oranje 2014). Despite the state’s efforts at control and repression after the Soweto uprising in 1976, it could not control the accelerating urbanization of blacks and the burgeoning shanty towns that ensued. By 1986, in the White Paper on Urbanization, the government had acknowledged the permanence of blacks in urban areas (Mabin & Smit, 1997). The apartheid system was crumbling, and so was the urban and regional planning profession, with growing divisions between members (Muller, 2000). The South African Council for Town and Regional Planners (SACTRP), established by the Town and Regional Planners Act of 1984, with the first Council appointed in 1986, was to be the ‘vanguard of the movement for transformation’ (Muller, 2000: 286). Demands for transformation were heard at the SAITRP Annual General Meeting in 1992, where black planners sought improved access to planning programmes and recognition of technical (diploma) qualifications. Dissatisfied with the response by the profession at this and subsequent meetings, a separate association, the Development Planning Association of South Africa (DPASA), was formed, facilitated by Professor John Muller (Mabin & Smit 1997).The response of SACTRP to 152

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the demands of the predominantly black planners and the splitting of the profession was to seek amended legislation and to widen its registration to accommodate all planners. It also produced a position paper that firstly acknowledged the profession’s role in apartheid and secondly set out revised principles for a more just society (Muller, 2000). During the transition to democracy, the concepts in the document ‘South African cities: A manifesto for change’ (Dewar & Uytenbogaard, 1991) influenced planning thought and later found their way into planning legislation and policy (Oranje & Meyer, 2000), such as the Green Paper on Planning and Development (NDPC, 1999) and the later White Paper on Spatial Planning and Land Use Management (DLA, 2001). However, the first post-democracy planning legislation was the Development Facilitation Act of 1995 (DFA), which was intended to expedite the development of housing for the millions of households in informal settlements (RSA, 1995). Importantly, this Act also introduced normative principles to guide planning decisions, a concept that was carried through to the White Paper of 2001 and subsequent legislation. It also required local authorities to proactively plan development linked to their budgets in the form of land development objectives that were later modified into a mandatory integrated development plan (Harrison, 2001), which contains a spatial development framework. Hence, through policy and legislation, the state was creating an enabling framework for the transformation of urban and regional planning, with principles supporting sustainable development, equity, redress, and participation, a facilitative approach to land use management, and a new focus on spatial planning (Parnell & Mabin, 1995). While policy and legislation were creating opportunities for planners, the profession reached its nadir in 1995. At a workshop sponsored by the national Department of Land Affairs at Club Mykonos, Langebaan, Western Cape, the ‘tainted, morally bankrupt, internally fractured’ profession (Oranje, 2014: 5) acknowledged its complicity in creating a country with severe social, economic and spatial divides and recognized the need for change (Muller, 2000; DLA, 1995). The amalgamation of SAITRP and DPASA was agreed on at the workshop and formalized in 1996 as the South African Planning Institute (SAPI) (Muller, 2000; SAPI, 2016). SACTRP continued to press for transformation, leading to revised legislation, the Planning Profession Act of 2002 (RSA, 2002), and the creation of the South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN). In 2017, the fourth SACPLAN Council was appointed to continue the process of transforming and promoting the profession and to maintain high ethical standards and proficiency. The urban and regional planning profession received welcome attention from national government in 2006 when it was listed as a ‘scarce skill’ within the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa and the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition, both initiated by then president Mbeki. A shortage of planners meant that the spatial transformation so desperately needed was being frustrated and economic development held back as land use applications could not be processed (Todes & Mngadi 2008). Todes and Mngadi (2008) investigated the capacity of the planning profession in a report commissioned by the Department of Labour. Using data from a variety of sources, the authors concluded that there was indeed a shortage of planners to meet the developmental needs of the country. According to their estimate, there were about 3,800 planners in 2004 and in the order of 4,000 planners in 2008 (taking emigration, retirements and exiting the profession into account). The majority of these were not registered with any professional body. (Table 10.1) A later evaluation of the capacity of local government undertaken by the Municipal Demarcation Board (2012) confirmed that there was indeed a lack of capacity in local governments, except in the case of the large metropolitan municipalities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and eThekwini (Durban). The smaller the municipality, the less likely it was to have a planner in its employ. Of the 470 planners employed in municipalities at the time, more than 153

Verna Nel and Martin Lewis Table 10.1 Estimates of number of qualified urban and regional planners 2007 Source

Number of planners

SACPLAN database 1800 SAPI 1599 South African Qualifications Authority 4125 Source: Todes & Mngadi, 2008.

half (53%) were employed in the largest municipalities, while there was on average one planner per municipality in those provinces without a metropolitan municipality, and several municipalities consisting of small towns did not employ a planner at all (Municipal Demarcation Board, 2012). Unsurprisingly then, planning has been listed in the Department of Higher Education and Training’s scare skills lists since 2014. The ratio of planners to population appears to have decreased over the past decade. Based on the calculations by Todes and Mngagi (2008) of the number of planners and an estimated population of about 48.3 million people (Statistics South Africa, 2012), the ratio of planners to population was roughly one planner to 12,700 persons in 2008. According to the most recent registration data from SACPLAN (June 2018), there are 2800 registered planners in a population of 57.73 million people1 with a ratio of one planner per 20,600 persons. Changes have also occurred in planning education. In 2001, the Heads of the Planning Schools met in Bloemfontein to discuss the skills and capabilities that planners required and hence what was needed in a planning curriculum. The outcome of this process was the ‘Bloemfontein competencies’ document, which set out the knowledge, proficiencies and approaches that planning schools needed to pass on to their students (Harrison et al., 2008).These competencies have since been revised through SACPLAN’s Standards and Competencies project (SACPLAN, 2014a). Although the White Paper on Spatial Planning and Land Use Management was published in 2001, and spatial planning had been mandated as part of municipal integrated development plans since 1996, provincial ordinances still governed land use management (Van Wyk, 2012). Two draft land use management bills were rejected by Parliament in 2001 and 2008. It was only after the Constitutional Court confirmed that the constitutional mandate to local government of ‘municipal planning’ includes spatial planning and land use management, and the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) was ordered to prepare new legislation, that work on a Bill began again in earnest.The Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act 16 of 2013 (SPLUMA) came into effect in 2015 (RSA, 2013). By the end of 2016, legislation and policies that create a niche and a demand for urban and regional planners were in place. In addition, professional organizations such as SACPLAN (Statutory Council) and SAPI were active in promoting the profession. SACPLAN initiated a standards and competencies process to define the skills, knowledge, and competencies required by planners, which would form part of planning schools’ curricula, to institute an examination system to ensure that all registered planners will have the required competencies, and to promote continuing professional development (SACPLAN, 2014b). A recent development in urban and regional planning is the elevation of the spatial planning function, and particularly the national spatial development framework, to the Presidency; while the implementation of SPLUMA in the form of land use management is moving to the Department of Cooperative Government, which is responsible for municipalities and provinces2. Currently, the DRDLR is responsible for the planning profession and for oversight of 154

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SACPLAN. However, there is uncertainty regarding the future home of the profession within government structures. It appears that the institutional and policy structures are now in place for an effective and relevant profession.

10.4 Resilience of the planning profession The South African urban and regional planning profession has largely followed the phases of the adaptive cycle listed above: rapid growth, conservation, release and re-organization. However, the initial stages of growth appear to have been slow and short-lived rather than rapid and expansive. Nonetheless, there was idealism and energy in the desire to apply the new garden city and modernism concepts to urban areas. Sadly, not many new niches were explored or exploited and the enthusiasm of the early planners was dulled by the narrow view of planning as the regulation of development (Oranje, 2014). In time, the limited scope of urban and regional planning and the dominant control mentality that clung to segregationist legislation and rules, meant that the profession soon entered a conservation phase. With the focus on technical issues rather than the normative concerns of social justice, inclusion and equity, professionals who should have been concerned with creating a new and better future (Connell, 2009) turned into technocrats (Watson, 2009). Instead of leading with new ideas, planning acquiesced to the country’s political masters, ignoring the effect of segregationist policies on the social-ecological system. Rigidities set in, reducing the resilience of the national and regional planning systems and setting the stage for collapse. In some of the metropolitan municipalities, heavy-handed implementation of the new legislation and fears of litigation have weakened rather than strengthened the resilience of the planning profession. The release phase of the planning profession lagged behind the political transformation that began in 1990 and led to the first democratic elections in 1994. It was not until 1995, at the Club Mykonos workshop, that the planning profession was forced to reconsider its purpose, role, and values. Discarding discredited apartheid values and institutions, the profession was now free to explore new avenues, principles, and functions – such as the growing emphasis on spatial planning – and search for innovative ways to support the reconstruction and development of the nation. Furthermore, the changed political environment now fostered the flow of international planning thought, concepts, and theories into South Africa that had been stifled during the apartheid era (partly because of sanctions). By the end of 2002, the urban and regional planning profession had new institutions (SACPLAN and SAPI) and legislation requiring planners to have expertise in spatial planning, land use management, and the application of development principles. It had entered a re-organization phase with many ingredients to enable it to take the lead in the redevelopment and renewal of apartheid-ravaged urban and rural spaces. According to the adaptive cycle model, the planning profession should have entered a new rapid growth phase by 2017, but the evidence for this is mixed. There are signs of growth, but also of continued rigidity and low status, as mentioned above. Some quotes from respondents from the SAPER interviews reflect these attitudes. I can change anything. I can through, building a relationship with the minister, I can do something that no-one has ever done.Which is very unique, I think. Not unique in the old world but I think unique in the time span we are in. There is a positive energy.

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I guess for planning in South Africa it’s an ongoing struggle to win and maintain legitimacy in the context of apartheid and the planner’s role in apartheid. And then, I suppose post-apartheid, the planning, planning thinking around denser cities and the kind of urbanist form of …I suppose the way in which I was trained, really struggled to gain traction, [but] unfortunately perpetuating the apartheid city and increasing the political control over the decision making around planning. The reform in the legislation …[the] Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act, I think started to push spatial planning back into a more leadership space around integrated planning and more sustainable cities and giving it more legitimacy and more sway in the political sphere. I just feel that planners, we are supposed to be the people who talk the most. But if you’re going to a meeting it is always the case that the planner is the last one to talk or who never says anything. So, I would say that for planners to be more vocal.We need, I think we need more vocal planners so that the planner voice can be heard in that the importance of planning is known. Because if you are in a room full of experts and there’s the engineer and there’s the sociologist, there’s the economist, all those other people already by the mere fact of their profession, people want to listen to them. But when it comes to a planner, someone might not even pose a question to you if you are part of the panel for example. So, for the planner to be vocal and want to be heard. So, the people should want to hear what this person has to say. Urban and regional planning remains a relatively obscure profession in the eyes of many South Africans. It may be that we often find ourselves in municipalities, in engineering departments, in University’s in engineering faculties and so. But I think we are still the step children I suppose in a way in government in many departments. I think that statement has been made for the last 50, 60 years in South Africa about planning being a step child. Consequently, it fails to attract and retain top students and academics, who opt for better known and more prestigious professions such as engineering and medicine. For many students, planning is not their first choice of a career; rather, it is their last resort if not accepted into architecture or engineering (Oranje, 2014). Furthermore, the profession continues to face encroachment by other professions, such as land surveying.The latter profession vehemently objected to draft regulations for the Planning Profession Act of 2002 requiring ‘planning work’, such as spatial plans and land development applications, to be submitted or signed off only by registered planners (DRDLR, 2017). ‘Ring-fencing’ planning work for registered planners only is one of the profession’s goals and was a major issue raised by planners during workshops in 2015 on amendments to the Planning Profession Act of 2002 (DRDLR, 2017). The demand that jobs such as spatial planning and dealing with land use management applications be reserved for planners through legislation is perhaps indicative of the profession’s continuing low self-esteem as indicated in the quotes below. I think in private practice I think planners face what they would regard as unfair competition from un-registered non- registered people. Some of them are professionals from other associated disciplines, some of them are people with very little planning background. … I think there could be real concern if it is from someone who’s not doing, whose got no 156

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training and hasn’t had any exposure, and who … are messing things up. But I think, and I know that is a big concern, but I think it extends further. I get the sense that there’s a bigger worry in planning that there’s no work reservation. Challenges in the profession, like I said, we don’t have job reservation so we, there’s a lot of times where we try to fix stuff that was done by other architects or by owners that they didn’t know anything about. The quality of planning work undertaken by planners has also been questioned (Dewar & Kiepel, 2012; Du Plessis, 2013, Musvoto et al., 2016; Odendaal & McCann, 2016; Todes et al., 2010; Todes, 2012). This does not suggest a proud and committed profession dedicated to improving the quality of life for South Africans. Cases of plans drawn up by registered planners that are reproductions of documents prepared for other clients, but where the planning consultant omitted to change the name of the client or municipality, reflect badly on the profession. Many planners, stuck in a regulatory mindset, have struggled to adapt to a normative approach to planning. Those who have wanted to take this approach have been discouraged by persons from the legal fraternity working within this space at municipal level. Thus, for many, land use management and control remain at the core of their daily functions. These issues notwithstanding, we do also find evidence of transformation towards a profession that is eager and able to make a difference. Legislation, such as SPLUMA, has created an environment conducive to stimulating, creative and meaningful planning. Moreover, institutions such as SACPLAN, SAPI and the South African Association of Consulting Professional Planners are functional, promoting the profession and the continuous development of planners through the SACPLAN competencies process and the biennial SAPI Planning Africa conferences. Among the findings of a survey of 226 registered planners on the SACPLAN LinkedIn network, conducted as part of the SAPER project, is an indication that over 30% chose planning as a career because they wanted to change society, 38% were interested in the subject, and 68% found their work extremely or mostly fulfilling. The composition of the profession has also changed over the past decade. Whereas planning was once dominated by white males, this has changed to more accurately reflect the racial structure of the national population (see Table 10.2 and Figure 10.1). From 1994 to 2004, the percentage of black planners had grown from a mere five per cent to 19% (Todes & Mngadi, 2008) and currently (2018) stands at 63%. Conversely, the percentage of whites has fallen dramatically from 90% in 1994 to 26% in 2018. Table 10.2 Changes in composition of planning profession  

African Coloured Indian/Asian White Other Total

Number of planners

Percentage

Pre-1994 1995–2004

2005–2017

Pre-1994 1995–2004

2005–2017

27 6 9 825 7 874

1919 116 179 787 29 3030

3.1% 0.7% 1.0% 94.4% 0.8% 100.0%

63.3% 3.8% 5.9% 26.0% 1.0% 100.0%

86 4 16 537 3 646

13.3% 0.6% 2.5% 83.1% 0.5% 100.0%

Source: SACPLAN / SAPER.

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Figure 10.1 The growth in registration of planners. Source: Sacplan.org.za.

Furthermore, there has been a steady increase in the number of registered planners as depicted in Figure 10.1. The growth in registered planners is positive for SACPLAN and could be coupled to increased effectiveness and efficiency of the organization. Increased interest in planning is also evident in growing enrolments for planning programmes. Most of these students were not part of the apartheid technocracy and bring new ideas and hopes to the profession (Oranje, 2014). Their diversity of ideas, backgrounds and skills bolsters the profession’s resilience, as does the diversity of the planning schools’ programmes and specializations (see Page, 2011). From the evidence available, it appears that the profession has reorganized and is beginning a new growth cycle. As these are the phases of the adaptive cycle with the most options, flexibility and resilience (Simmie & Martin, 2010: 34), this bodes well for the profession. Regrettably, there appear to be members of the profession, and also certain non-planners doing planning related work, who are trailing behind, fixated on control, accepting low ethical standards, and more concerned about furthering their careers than helping to change the country (Oranje, 2014).

10.5 Conclusions This chapter explored the resilience of the South African planning profession over the past century. We based our analysis on the adaptive cycle model, which identifies four phases of growth and decline common to a complex adaptive system such as a social-ecological system.To apply the adaptive cycle model, we first traced the history of the profession from its establishment in South Africa, through the apartheid era to the present day.We found that the initial growth and enthusiasm of the profession was short-lived and swiftly quenched.The profession was absorbed into the state bureaucracy, where it remained until the dawn of democracy. Instead of urban and regional planning leading the way to transformation, it was the state that led, through legislation. When change came, it was rapid. It brought changes to the profession’s institutions and curricula and a normative rather than control-oriented approach to planning. The history of urban and regional planning can be seen to follow the adaptive cycle model, from rapid growth, through conservation and release, to the re-organization that has opened the door to a renewed period of growth. Although the profession was stifled during apartheid, it has had the resilience to survive and emerge with a restored sense of purpose.The current transition period between re-organization 158

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and a new phase of rapid growth is an opportunity to boost resilience. The profession’s institutions can use this opportunity to imbue planners with enthusiasm and build their capacity to improve the South African quality of life. SACPLAN, as the profession’s statutory body, and voluntary associations such as SAPI and South African Association of Consulting Professional Planners, can lead the way. But it is the individual planners who must take up the challenge to work towards a more just and resilient society.

Acknowledgements We acknowledge with gratitude the financial support from the South African National Research Foundation for the South African Planning Education Research (SAPER) project (a jointly funded ESRC/NRF higher education grant).

Notes 1 Statistics South Africa (2018) Media release. http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11341 2 Personal communication, Andries Nel, Deputy Minister, Department of Cooperative Government, 17 November 2018.

References Beauregard, R. A. (1998). Subversive histories: Texts from South Africa. In Sandercock, L. (ed.), Making the Invisible Visible, A Multicultural Planning History. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Chandler, D. (2014). Resilience:The Governance of Complexity. Routledge, London. Connell, D. (2009). Planning and its orientation to the future. International Planning Studies 14(1): 85–98. Cumming, G. S., Cumming, D. H. M. and Redman, C. L. (2006). Scale mismatches in social-ecological systems: Causes, consequences, and solutions. Ecology and Society 11(1): 14. www.e​colog​yands​ociet​y.org​ /vol1​1/iss​1/art​14/. Davoudi, S., Shaw, K., Haider, L.J., Quinlan, A.E., Peterson, G.D., Wilkinson, C., Fünfgeld, H., McEvoy, D., Porter, L. and Davoudi, S. (2012). Resilience: A bridging concept or a dead end? ‘Reframing’ resilience: Challenges for planning theory and practice. Interacting traps: Resilience assessment of a pasture management system in Northern Afghanistan. Urban resilience: What does it mean in planning practice? Resilience as a useful concept for climate change adaptation? The politics of resilience for planning: A cautionary note. Planning Theory & Practice 13(2): 299–333. Dewar, D. and Kiepiel, J. (2012). Spatial development frameworks on a broader scale: An integrative approach. Town and Regional Planning 61: 30–35. Dewar, D. and Uytenbogaardt, R. S. (1991). South African Cities: A Manifesto for Change. Urban Problems Research Unit, University of Cape Town. DLA (Department of Land Affairs) (1995). Report on the Workshop on the Future of the Town and Regional Planning Profession, 21–23 November 1995, Club Mykonos, Langebaan, Western Cape Province, South Africa. DLA (Department of Land Affairs) (2001). White Paper on Spatial Planning and Land Use Management. Government Printer, Pretoria. DRDLR (Department of Rural Development and Land Reform) (2017). Presentation on Proposed Amendments to the Planning Profession Act, 15 August 2017, Premier Hotel, Ekurhuleni, Gauteng. Du Plessis, C. (2008). A conceptual framework for understanding social-ecological systems. In Exploring Sustainability Science: A Southern African Perspective. Burns, M., and Weaver A. (eds), African Sun Media, Stellenbosch, pp. 59–90. Du Plessis, D. J. (2013). A critical reflection on urban spatial planning practices and outcomes in postapartheid South Africa. Urban Forum 25: 69–88. Folke, C. (2006). Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses. Global Environmental Change 16: 253–267. Gallopín, G. C. (2006). Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity. Global Environmental Change 16: 293–303. 159

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RSA (Republic of South Africa) (1995). Development Facilitation Act (Act 67 of 1995). Government Printer, Pretoria. RSA (Republic of South Africa) (2002). Planning Profession Act (Act 36 of 2002). Government Printer, Pretoria. RSA (Republic of South Africa) (2013). Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act (Act 16 of 2013). Government Printer, Pretoria. Seeliger, L. and Turok, I. (2013). Towards sustainable cities: Extending resilience with insights from vulnerability and transition theory. Sustainability 5: 2108–2128. Seeliger, L. and Turok, I. (2014). Averting a downward spiral: Building resilience in informal urban settlements through adaptive governance. Environment and Urbanisation 26(1): 184–199. Simmie, J. and Martin, R. (2010). The economic resilience of regions: Towards an evolutionary approach. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3: 27–43. SACPLAN (South African Council for Planners) (2014a). Guidelines for Competencies and Standards for Curricula Development. Document number 8/4/1/C&S/Curr/12-2014. SACPLAN, Midrand. SACPLAN (South African Council for Planners) (2014b). Consolidated Report on Competencies and Standards. Document number 8/4/1/C&S/SQ/12-2014. SACPLAN, Midrand. SAPI (South African Planning Institute) (2016). Reflections: 1996–2016 −20 Year Reflection. SAPI, Johannesburg. Statistics South Africa (2012). Census 2011. Statistical report P030142011. Government Printers: Pretoria. www.s​tatss​a.gov​.za/p​ublic​ation​s/P03​014/P​03014​2011.​pdf. Theunissen, V. and Theunissen, F. (1982). Mr Town and Regional Planner, I presume? Town and Regional Planning 14: 14–19. Todes, A. (2012). New directions in spatial planning? Linking strategic spatial planning and infrastructure development. Journal of Planning Education and Research 32(4): 400–414. Todes, A., Karam, A., Klug, N. and Malaza, N. (2010). Beyond master planning? New approaches to spatial planning in Ekurhuleni, South Africa. Habitat International 34, 414–420. Todes, A. & Mngadi, N. (2008). City Planners. Report for the Human Science Research Council study on scarce skills for the Department of Labour. Turok, I. (1994). Urban planning in the transition from apartheid: Part 1: The legacy of social control. The Town Planning Review 65(3): 243–259. Van Wyk, J. (2012). Planning Law (2nd ed.). Juta, Cape Town. Walker, B. and Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining People and Ecosystems in a Changing World. Island Press, Washington, DC. Walker, B., Holling, C.S., Carpenter, S. and Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5–13. Watson, V. (2009). Seeing from the south: Refocusing urban planning on the globe’s central urban issues. Urban Studies 46, 2259–2275.

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11 Setting standards and competencies for planners Martin Lewis and Verna Nel

11.1 Introduction The Planning Profession Act (36 of 2002) (PPA) states that the South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN) must ‘strive to achieve the transformation of the profession to ensure its legitimacy and effectiveness’ and ‘promote the profession and pursue improvements in the competence of planners through the development of skills, knowledge and standards within the profession’ (RSA, 2002, Sections 2(c)(i); 2(c)(iii)). As the statutory council responsible for the planning profession in South Africa, SACPLAN is mandated by the PPA to set standards for the planning profession, accredit urban and regional planning programmes, and promote a high standard of planning education and training. As a first step, it had to ensure that the urban and regional planning curriculum of higher education institutions responds to the requirement to transform the profession. It had to ensure that graduates from urban and regional planning programmes will be able to transform the apartheid city. Apartheid planning, under the watch of the urban and regional planning graduates of that era, was largely responsible for the structure of South Africa’s cities as we find them today (Mabin & Smith, 1997). Legislation, such as the Development Facilitation Act (67 of 1995) (RSA, 1995) and later the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act (16 of 2013) (RSA, 2013), now obliges the profession, through its regulatory body SACPLAN, to transform the urban and regional planning curriculum so it can redress the legacy of past planning practices. It has become necessary for ‘planning’ to be redefined to make its meaning clear in the new context. It was thus necessary for the planning profession to be ‘reinvented’ as contained in the motto SACPLAN adopted, ‘Reinventing planning, changing lives’. The existing set of competencies for urban and regional planners had to be re-evaluated and redesigned. SACPLAN had to devise principles to drive this transformation. These principles had to be people driven and focus on growth, while still emphasizing sustainable development and reconstruction in order to guide planners to mediate and manage competing interests, spatial as well as individual. They had to help planners to balance regulatory practices and facilitation, to achieve the desired spatial, environmental, social, economic and cultural outcomes, to promote sustainability, to be action oriented, to recognize the influence of informality, and to be socially, economically and culturally transformative (SACPLAN, 2014a). Sihlongonyane and Lewis (2016) 162

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put forward a conceptual framework of transformation divided into four categories: transformation of the mind, transformation of practice, transformation of space, and transformation of society. To achieve these four types of transformation, it was necessary to investigate the curriculum and the competency outcome sets. This chapter discusses the process SACPLAN used to formulate a set of standards and competencies for the profession. SACPLAN approached this task from the angle of the ideal outcome and competency set for a new graduate, taking into consideration the substantial differences in the types and levels of the various qualifications. A baseline was needed to ensure that a graduate with a three-year undergraduate degree and an Honours degree, a graduate with a four-year undergraduate degree, and a graduate with a two-year Master’s degree would have comparable sets of competencies. Half a century ago Perloff (1957:3) argued that ‘the future of city planning is certain to be greatly affected by the type and quality of education provided in our institutions of higher learning’. This is as true today, in respect of the wider context of spatial and regional planning, as it was then to city planning. One of the key objectives of the competencies generation process was to set standards to guide the nature and quality of planning education both at higher education institutions and post qualification through continuing professional development. The chapter aims to contribute to the literature in respect of determining competencies for the field of urban and regional planning specifically, as well as the built environment generally. We document the events that obliged the profession to generate these competencies and the pressures that necessitated the formation of a set of competencies that would not only prepare graduates, but that can also transform the profession. Although we discuss the competencies within a South African context, our chapter may also be able to inform other international planning bodies and educational institutions should they embark on the creation or re-evaluation of their own sets of competencies. Due to the increased mobility of graduates along with their prospects of finding employment opportunities in a global market, planning educators are required to continuously review and re-evaluate their curricula for international relevance. This chapter provides a rare practical case study of the process of generating competencies in a global South context. The objectives of this chapter are to explain firstly, the factors that influenced the process of developing competencies and standards for the planning profession; secondly, what would be an ideal set of competencies and thirdly, what set of competencies should be used to transform the planning profession within South Africa. The methodology used in the development of the Competencies and Standards was based on desktop research followed by active consultation. For the desktop research, we drew on and evaluated previous research and literature on competencies and standards for planners. This included the experiences and competencies of international planning bodies such as the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Planning Institute of Australia, the Canadian Planning Institute, and the Institute of Town Planners, India. Thereafter, the competencies and standards generated went through a rigorous consultation process in the form of workshops and focused discussions with a number of stakeholders. There were several iterations of revisions leading to the set of competencies presented here. As the process and stakeholders are well documented by Sihlongonyane (2018) they are not repeated here. This chapter is also informed by results of the South African Planning Education Research project (SAPER). One of the main objectives of this project is investigating the value of the curriculum and the social and economic value of planning education in South Africa.1 Specifically, the views of some of the anonymous respondents that were interviewed by the authors are included. 163

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The chapter is organized into seven sections besides the introduction and conclusion. In the next section, we present the reasons for change in the planning profession in South Africa, thereafter exploring the process that lead to the identification of new competencies for planners in the following four sections.The chapter ends with two sections on the context of implementation and discussion of the competencies needed in South Africa.

11.2 Reasons for change In November 1995, the then Department of Land Affairs2 held a workshop at Club Mykonos on the future of the urban and regional planning profession. In the introduction to the workshop, Angela Bester, Deputy Director-General of the Department, recognized the need for the profession to embark on a process of transformation. She made four observations about planning: that it is as much about the past and the present as it is about the future, that it is political, that it should empower people, and that it is a collaborative effort. She added that in transforming the planning profession there is a need to re-define planning and the role of the profession. Its role needs to change. The profession must change to reflect the broader South African society (Bester, 1995). The following were some of the other delegates’ contributions. Hague (1995) identified three themes: the role of the planner, the definition of planning, planning education and requirements for registration, and said that education was ‘vital to the development and enhancement of professional standards’. Muller (1995, quoting Bridges, 1991), said that transition is the ‘psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation’ and that ‘change is external, transition is internal’. Schutte (1995) commented that because of pressures to address the profession’s shortage of manpower and the immediate need to tackle certain interconnected problems, changes would be required to the ‘conventional concepts of planning education, including the structure and content of courses and the standards by which performance is measured’. Harrison (1995) said that planners (and by implication the planning profession) were at a crucial stage to ensure the future of planning in South Africa and that planning education should lead the way towards ‘a revitalized and contextually relevant planning practice’. The theories and models that have informed planning and planning education largely originated from Europe, dominated by British planning (APA 2013), and America, ignoring and negating an African traditional system (Sihlongonyane, 2018). During the interviews held with planning academics as part of the SAPER project, one respondent indicated that some of the theory that is being taught in urban and regional planning programmes is not relevant to South African practice. This respondent was further of the opinion that some of the planning theorists have not spent enough time in practice to appreciate the local context. In addition to the theories and models from Europe and America was the apartheid system of planning that left fragmented and divided cities (Harrison et al., 2008, Todes, 2011, Watson, 2011). Sihlongonyane (2018:72) indicated that ‘to a large degree, planners lost credibility in the public eye, due to their involvement in projects driven by the apartheid government’. Through the SAPER interviews, various challenges currently facing the planning profession were mentioned. Although these interviews were held after the development of the SACPLAN competency sets, it is clear from the interviews that these challenges existed prior to the finalization of the competency set. These include the capacity at municipalities, the mismatch between the qualifications held by employees and the requirements of the positions they are appointed in, and the power of private planners (or lack thereof) to steer developments. The National Development Plan (NPC 2011:275) identified ‘planners (and other development and built environment professionals) who lack an understanding of economic principles, market forces and 164

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commercial realities to negotiate better development outcomes, and also of informal livelihood practices and the challenges these raise for flexible and empowering regulation’ as one of the difficulties within the planning system. Moreover, the ambit of planning has changed. Faling and Todes (2004:31) argued that planning within South Africa had become ‘more extensive,… [and] embraces urban, rural and regional contexts; it includes a developmental orientation; and it has gone beyond a focus on the physical and spatial dimensions’. In the light of the changing context, the requirements for more appropriate theory and the demands placed on planners in practice it is unsurprising that planning education came under the spotlight with regard to direction and relevance. By 2012–2013, SACPLAN was under increasing pressure to revitalize planning education, since planning and the planning profession were under scrutiny to see whether they could respond to the changing socio-political environment. The National Development Plan (NPC 2011:289) identified the need to build capacity within the urban and regional planning profession to improve effective spatial governance and plan implementation. Oranje (2012:7) notes that ‘planning education needs to assist in the pursuit of two objectives: ‘empowering people’ and ‘creating enabling places’ for this process of empowerment’. Tapela (2012:11) argued ‘that the curricula of planning schools should focus on local substantive contexts and case studies, and develop deeper and more sustained collaborations with local actors in implementing locally responsive curricula’. The State of Planning in Africa 2013 overview report indicates that planners need the skills to ‘identify the levers for appropriate interventions’ (APA, 2013:24) and list the eight levers as private sector investments, decentralization and local government powers, city growth management, rural growth management, democratic participation, sustainable development and climate change, planning, budgeting and implementation, and use of technology (APA, 2013:24–25). As the statutory body responsible for the planning profession and tasked with the mandate to evaluate and accredit higher education planning programmes, SACPLAN was required to set verifiable and defendable standards and competencies for planning schools (programmes or departments of urban and regional planning at higher education institutions). SACPLAN identified four contextual factors to guide the development of these: the diversity of local needs and choices, the need for more sustainable patterns of development, the high level of economic inequality in South Africa, and the complexity of the country’s rural history and land use practices (SACPLAN, 2014a). SACPLAN acknowledges that planners will not be able single-handedly to solve all the problems those factors involve, but they do indeed have a leading role to play. Planners must promote more efficient spatial patterns that must be visible in human settlement formation and growth. The form of settlements must be inclusive, encouraging social and cultural integration and ensuring that the poor are included. To do this will entail identifying land for urban expansion while simultaneously taking cognisance of needs and pressures in the rural areas. Many cross-cutting issues, such as gender, poverty, informality, appreciation of diversity, and communication and collaboration between planners, communities and civil society had to be taken into account (SACPLAN, 2014a). The pace of change after 1994 was slow and progress was hampered by challenges within the profession. Several authors have commented on the impediments such as resistance to change. Harrison et al., (2008:4) indicated that although there is visible change at a national level ‘there are problems of bureaucracies peopled with individuals who are likely to be resistant to change’. Klein (1991:35) also indicated that some planners were accused of limiting ‘the potential for any real transformation of society and space to take place, and indeed, that planning perpetuates the [old] status quo’. This was also confirmed by Watson (2011) who lamented that apartheid 165

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planning law was still in effect fifteen years after its demise. Todes (2011:121) commented that the ‘traditional forms of land use management are integral to property values and are fiercely defended in parts of the city, but these exist in the context of remaining fragmented and differentiated systems inherited from the apartheid era’. Interviews with planning academics confirmed some of these failures within the planning profession. One particular issue that has come to the fore pertains to the reluctance to adopt new ways of thinking and doing, instead continuing apartheid era mode planning, and thus not adapting to the changing values and developmental role of planning. According to one academic, ‘it’s not necessary the way of the past but the outcomes are quite similar to that which we saw in the past’. Another respondent mentioned that what is being taught at university level is not materializing in industry. Other failures experienced included the lack of planning implementation, political influence or political power, the inability of planners to push transformation and specifically spatial transformation as well as inclusive growth onto the agenda, thus leading to sluggish spatial transformation. These failures stress the importance of addressing the competencies of urban and regional planners at a formative level within their education to ensure that graduates are properly capacitated to deal with the demands of practice. The competencies process was also intended to assist existing professionals, including employers, to identify competency gaps to ensure that these could be tackled as part of the project. In addition to the above, Sihlongonyane (2018:74) indicates that a ‘blurring of professional boundaries between planning and other related professional disciplines had become a source of huge confusion in the regulation of the profession’. Several interviewees confirmed that the negative impact of unqualified persons conducting planning work has had a direct impact on the quality of planning being conducted. At the same time that SACPLAN came under pressure to revitalize planning education (2012–2013), the higher education landscape was changing and many universities were recurriculating. The National Qualifications Framework (NQF), which was formulated to create an integrated framework for learning achievements, facilitate access, mobility and progression within education, enhance the quality of education and ensure continuation towards personal development (Ensor, 2004), changed from an 8-level to a 10-level system. There were also changes to the Higher Education Qualifications Framework and later the Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework with regard to qualification descriptors and qualification typologies. As part of these changes, certain qualification types, such as the Bachelor of Technology degree, were discontinued. It was necessary to ensure that new graduates are relevant, not only in South Africa, but internationally. As Professor Derek van der Merwe, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Vice-Principal of the University of Johannesburg, said: ‘It simply is a fact that our students have to be globally competitive’ (quoted in Betts et al., 2009). SACPLAN had to provide the guidance to make this happen within the planning schools. It had become necessary for SACPLAN to address what is included in the curricula against what is expected in practice. One respondent indicated that there was a need for universities to produce ‘industry-fit students’.

11.3 The planning competencies literature The identity of planning as a discipline and a profession, and hence the essence of what planners should know, has been debated for the past half century (Frank et al., 2014; Whitzman, 2009). The nature of the competencies planners require and the curriculum for imparting them, have also been debated.Various proposals that have been made are summarized here. 166

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The evolution of the planning curriculum and competencies is linked to the epistemological basis of planning, the requirements of practice and the changing role of planners (Bunker, 1972; Edwards & Bates, 2011; Frank et al., 2014; Stubbs & Keeping, 2002). Initially planners were simply designers, but over the past 50 years they have also become analysts, social scientists, communicators, mediators, marketers, managers and implementers of sustainability programmes (Davoudi & Pendlebury, 2010). Oranje (2012:7–8) argues that ‘planning education must learn from planning practice (and vice versa)’, it should ‘develop the language, facilitation and translation skills of planning students’, it should ‘emphasize creativity and innovation, and be likewise’, and it should ‘be about community empowerment and development and enable creative and responsive place-making’. These role changes are reflected in the curriculum. When the rational-systems approaches came into fashion in the 1960s, planning began to be viewed as a ‘scientific’ endeavour (Klosterman, 2011; Muller, 1992). From the late 1980s, planning became a social sciences discipline and subjects such as geography, sociology, and economics were added to the curriculum. Critiques of rational planning (Flyvbjerg, 1998), Marxist critiques, and calls for community participation, advocacy, and gender and race equality (Healey, 2003; Sandercock, 1999; Sandercock & Forsyth, 1992), along with growing awareness of the need for more sustainable development (Campbell, 1996), led to a greater focus on social and environmental issues (Davoudi & Pendlebury 2010; Frank, 2006). The gradual expansion of the planning curriculum, linking it to local contexts and traditions, has led to divergent offerings (Edwards & Bates, 2011; Frank et al., 2014;Whitzman, 2009). Planning competencies are often organized into three groups of knowledge: substantive knowledge (theory or episteme), practical and technical skills, and values (Alexander, 2001; Frank, 2006). Competencies that are considered vital are critical thinking and problem-solving, communication (written, oral and graphic) and being able to work with others, especially in multicultural contexts (Alexander, 2001; Edwards & Bates, 2011; Frank et al., 2014; March et al., 2013), ethical planning (Frank et al., 2014; Klosterman, 2011), plan making, design and statistical analysis (Sandercock, 1999), research and data collection, computer literacy, including use of geographic information systems, and spatial analysis (Alexander, 2001; Edwards & Bates 2011; Frank et al., 2014). Disciplines such as planning emphasize the need to function in a globalizing world but must also reflect local imperatives (Amirahmadi, 1993; Frank, 2006; Zetter, 1980). In Europe, key themes are urban renewal and regeneration, sustainability and resilience in the face of climate change (Frank et al., 2014). However, the African Association of Planning Schools has agreed to focus on themes more relevant to the challenges of Africa, such as informality, climate change, and access to land (AAPS, 2010). Common components of the curriculum are planning history and theory, economics, legal aspects and planning law, urban history and theory, sustainable development, cultural and social aspects, and instruments to implement plans (Edwards & Bates 2011; Klosterman, 2011; Frank et al., 2014). The sources reviewed above mostly relate to English-speaking countries; however, there is a small but growing literature on planning and planning education in other countries. Among these are India (Mahadevia & Joshi, 2009), Pakistan (Ahmed, 2011), China (Leaf & Hou, 2006; Zhang, 2002), Asia (Kunzman, 2015), and the Arab Gulf countries (Rizzo, 2014).

11.4 Some history The process of generating new planning competencies for South Africa started in 2000 at a Heads of Planning Schools meeting in Bloemfontein. The competencies were framed as ‘areas 167

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of knowledge’ rather than a ‘set of competencies’. During 2005, urban and regional planning was identified as one of South Africa’s seven priority areas for the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition. This initiative was unsuccessful in delivering tangible benefits but it did prove a turning point for the planning profession. In 2006, a first meeting was held to discuss the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) Planning Standards Generating Body for the planning profession (SACPLAN 2014b), but there was no evidence at this meeting of any real ability to tackle competencies in respect of level descriptors and outcomes, and no international comparison was provided. In 2010, SACPLAN embarked on a four-year process, involving consultation and discussion workshops, to develop and agree on planning competencies (Sihlongonyane 2018). Various guidelines were written to help generate the standards and competencies: Competencies and Standards for Curriculum Development, Registration of Planners, Accreditation Criteria, Recognition of Prior Learning Policy and Procedures, Continuous Professional Development Policy and Procedures, and Examination System. An amendment has been proposed to the Planning Profession Act (36 of 2002) in respect of implementing the proposals arising from these guidelines and filling certain gaps in this legislation (SACPLAN 2014b). The process identified five factors that emphasized the importance of the planning profession in South Africa: the severe economic inequality, the high consumption of fossil fuels, the need to plan for a predominantly urban future, the private and public sectors’ investment in land development as the primary drivers for spatial change, and poor areas with very few economic drivers. Clearly, new graduates will have to be prepared to deal with the problems caused by these factors. They will have to create an environment that can generate and support economic growth in the context of the National Development Plan, ensure that the benefits of development are distributed equitably, create more efficient spatial patterns, identify land for redistribution, encourage human settlements that are inclusive, promote food security, foster sustainable livelihoods, ensure sustainable spatial systems and protect the natural environment. The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with the inclusion of sustainable cities and communities as Goal 11, further strengthened planning as an important tool for sustainable development. Implicit in this is the importance of ensuring that new graduates are properly prepared to deal with the changing environment. During a seminar series held in May 2018 in South Africa, Dr Shipra Narang Suri (Coordinator, Urban Planning and Design Branch, UN-Habitat) pointed out that the responsibility of the planning profession in the achievement of the SDGs as well as the New Urban Agenda is visible throughout those documents. She further indicated that planners can play an important role in supporting local authorities in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, demanding and supporting reforms in national polices, building up and sharing knowledge, testing and helping scale-up innovations, as well as bottom-up monitoring (Suri, 2018).

11.5 The Bloemfontein competencies During 2000, the South African planning schools met in Bloemfontein to develop a set of competencies that would embrace the field of planning and provide a framework that would take into account the variations in planning education. These competencies were set in such a way as to allow the planning schools to distinguish focus and speciality areas (Harrison et al., 2008). SACPLAN later took the same approach in developing its standards and competencies to encompass the diversity (and allow for the autonomy) of the different planning schools. 168

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The Bloemfontein competencies identified six main outcomes: 1. moral and ethical dimensions of acting in the public domain, 2. theoretical and contextual knowledge and the ability to apply this in action, 3. knowledge linked to spatial plans and polices, 4. programmes and project linked and synthesized within a framework of integrative development, 5. academic research to develop critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, and 6. managerial and communicative skills (Abrahams et al., 2012; Harrison et al., 2008). Each of the six outcomes had sub-outcomes (Abrahams et al., 2012; Harrison et al., 2008). The sub-outcomes of Outcome 1 were aspects such as orientation to social justice, appreciation of diversity, a people-centred approach, efficiency in resource use, orientation towards sustainable development, and professional ethics. The sub-outcomes of Outcome 2 included methods of planning; histories, philosophies and theories of planning; theories of the natural, social, economic, developmental and political environment; theories of urban design; theories of urban, metropolitan and rural development; and the South African context with its related challenges. The sub-outcomes of Outcome 3 were aspects such as analysis and organization of information, and interpretation and application of knowledge in preparing plans and policies and implementing plans and development processes. The sub-outcomes of Outcome 4 included integrated development and thinking, and understanding of the legal, policy and institutional frameworks in South Africa. The sub-outcomes of Outcome 5 included research skills, the application of knowledge to planning problems, and communication, decisionmaking, and organizational skills. The sub-outcomes of Outcome 6 included social dynamics, power relations, political process, governance, and various kinds of management such as financial, organizational, and project management. It also included the ability to relate to people and work with them, to work in teams as well as individually, and to communicate effectively.

11.6 SACPLAN’s competencies SACPLAN took just over two years to develop the standards and competencies (2012–2014). During the first phase of the project, two workshops were held with the Committee of Heads of Planning Schools and one with other stakeholders. In the second phase, further workshops were held with the Committee, voluntary associations in urban and regional planning and representatives from the built environment and other bodies interacting with urban and regional planners, such as the Law Society. SACPLAN and its consultants also held workshops with planners and other stakeholders in the urban and regional planning field in various provinces (one workshop covering the Limpopo, North-West, Mpumalanga and Gauteng provinces, one covering the KwaZulu-Natal and Free State provinces, and one covering the Eastern, Western and Northern Cape provinces). From this process, SACPLAN identified three sets of competencies: generic, core, and functional. The generic competencies are the skills essential for any professional. They are common to both built and natural environment professionals. The core competencies are the specific set of knowledge and experience that qualified planners must possess to do planning work successfully. The functional competencies are the ‘how to’ skills set, which focus on techniques and methods of preparing spatial plans.While they include some components that are not unique to the planning profession, such as surveys and computer aided design, others, such as layout planning, plan making, plan administration, implementation, and land use management are fundamental skills required by planners. The competencies are linked to cognitive levels for the planning profession akin to the levels set out in the South African NQF (SAQA, 2012): 169

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Level 1 Awareness of and basic understanding of terminology and concepts, and ability to source further information and insights when required in the work environment. Level 2 A good understanding of a field of knowledge, or an ability to apply a methodology. Level 3 Ability to apply or engage with the area of competency with an increasing degree of mastery and sophistication. These three level descriptors identified by SACPLAN were designed to simplify the level descriptors to be used by the planning schools in developing and re-curriculating their planning programmes. The purpose of the SAQA level descriptors is ‘to ensure coherence in learning achievement in the allocation of qualifications and part qualifications to particular levels, and to facilitate the assessment of the national and international comparability of qualifications and part qualifications’ (SAQA 2012:4). SACPLAN’s level descriptors are intended to help it assess and compare national and international planning qualifications and to help urban and regional planning schools to ensure that curricula for qualifications to be accredited by SACPLAN conform to the NQF level requirements. The NQF level descriptors use ten categories to describe the competencies required across the ten levels: scope of knowledge; knowledge literacy; method and procedure; problem-solving; ethics and professional practice; accessing, processing, and managing information; producing and communicating of information; context and systems; management of learning; and accountability. SAQA states that: ‘Level descriptors provide a broad indication of learning achievements appropriate at that level’ and that: ‘There is progression in the competencies from one level to the next’ (SAQA 2012:3-4). SACPLAN’s Levels 1, 2, and 3 are roughly equivalent to the NQF’s Levels 6, 7, and 8, respectively3.

11.7 Changes in the implementation environment To develop and eventually implement a set of standards and competencies for the planning profession, SACPLAN needed support documents.The first of these was a guide for curriculum development. It was necessary to define ‘planning’ so as to establish a common understanding. Although planning had been defined previously, the definition had evolved with time. The definition in the PPA was an attempt to align the planning profession to international thinking as well as to South African conditions. As part of the standards and competencies project, it was necessary to revisit the PPA’s definition to re-evaluate and expand it as the basis for the formulation of competencies. Planning was interpreted as a people focussed activity, a strategic, rather than a comprehensive activity, which implies selectivity and a focus on what really makes a difference to the fortunes of an area over time. Planning is a field of expertise which involves initiating and managing change in the built and natural environment, across a spectrum of contexts, ranging from urban to rural; and delineated at different geographic scales (national, region, sub-region, city, town, village, neighbourhood), in order to further human development and environmental sustainability. (SACPLAN, 2014a: 6) On the basis of that interpretation, the PPA’s definition and the South African context, SACPLAN developed a context for planning in South Africa that would form the basis for the standards and competencies. The second document was a guide for the registration of urban and regional planners. It recommended extending the registration categories and the practical training requirements for the different categories of training. The practical training is designed to ensure a greater breadth of experience in certain key areas and to enable candidates to put their theoretical and academic 170

Standards and competencies for planners Table 11.1 Generic competencies with underlying competencies Competencies

Underlying competencies

Critical thinking

Issue identification; Problem solving; Research and analysis; Innovation and creativity; Societal and political awareness; Strategic thinking Integrity and trust; Diversity and inclusiveness; Collaboration and consensus building; Change management Listening; Written and oral communication and presentation; Information and knowledge; Information and technology; Internal and external Communications Vision and leadership; Responsiveness and influence; Team building; Climate of excellence; Managing resources and results; Project management Continuous learning; Ethical standards; Professionalism

Interpersonal Communication

Leadership and management

Professionalism and ethical behaviour Social responsibility

Legal responsibility; Community activism; Leadership and participation; Social justice

Source: SACPLAN, 2014a: 15–19.

knowledge into practice. It is divided into four knowledge and experience categories: 1. survey and research, 2. plan formulation, 3. plan implementation and administration, and 4. other types of planning work in related fields. The emphasis differs for the different registration categories; for instance, technical planners will focus more on surveys than strategic planning, with the opposite applying to professional planners. However, all planners have to demonstrate experience in all categories. The sub-areas of category 1, survey and research, are: planning surveys and analysis; operational surveys; data collection, compilation, analysis, and interpretation; development potential evaluation; planning research; and academic work (including further studies, teaching, and publications). The sub-areas of category 2, plan formulation, are: policy formulation; strategic spatial planning; spatial planning at different scales and in different contexts (e.g. national, regional, sub-regional, urban, rural, local); layout plans, township plans, land development plans; land use planning; housing and informal settlement upgrading; rural development; and integrated development planning.The sub-areas of category 3, plan implementation and administration, are: land use management; land use schemes; preparing, motivating and evaluating applications in terms of land use schemes; development control; consent use in terms of statutory requirements; administration and coordination of development applications; appeals; planning law; plan evaluation; management of development processes; and site planning. The sub-areas of category 4, other types of planning work in related fields, are: facilitation, negotiation, mediation, and arbitration; environmental management; urban design; transportation planning; infrastructure planning; property development and management; project management; corporate strategic planning; project development and business plans; and other planning work (SACPLAN 2014c:16). Other documents include frameworks that were developed to inform the Occupation Specific Dispensation and the Organising Framework of Occupations,4 accreditation criteria for planning programmes and schools, a continuous professional development policy and procedure, and the professional examination process to ensure that the candidate is competent to practice as registered planner. 171

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11.8 Competencies needed in South Africa The performance outcomes of each of SACPLAN’s three sets of competencies, generic, core, and functional, with their respective sub-competencies, are linked to the NQF level outcomes as well as to the SACPLAN level descriptors. On the basis of these level descriptors, each planning school needs to identify which level is appropriate for each competency in its programmes. It is a requirement for universities to address all the competencies identified in its programmes, so any qualification submitted to SACPLAN for accreditation in terms of the PPA must ensure that at least 65% of its credit points are devoted to the core and functional competencies as defined in the guide for curriculum development. The generic, core, and functional competencies and their underlying competencies are shown in Tables 11.1, 11.2, and 11.3. The generic competencies as shown in Table 11.1 are mandatory and are in line with international best practice.The graduate must be able to develop and evaluate arguments and write with clarity and logic, within a structure, across a range of media. The Table 11.2 Core competencies with underlying competencies Competencies

Underlying competencies

Settlement history and theory Planning theory

History of settlements; Planning history; Urban and rural development theory and processes; Informality Theory of planning; Land use theory; Urban planning theory; Rural planning theory; Spatial theory; Ecological and environmental theory Principles, methods, and planning practices for developing sustainable cities and regions; Concepts of sustainability, relevance and application in urban and regional planning; Local Agenda 21; Sustainability indicators and assessment Theories of urban structure; Theories and city design approaches; Theories of spatial change; Principles of layout planning; Principles of land use management; Place making in the public realm Regional development theory; Regional policy; Regional planning practice; Development planning Public policy; Governance and community participation; Planning law; Comparative planning systems; Professional practice Natural systems; Environmental management and planning; Climate change; Sustainability Land use analysis and planning; Infrastructure planning

Planning sustainable cities and regions (spatial systems) Urban planning and place making Regional development and planning Public policy, institutional and legal frameworks Environmental planning and management Land use and infrastructure planning Transportation planning and systems Land economics Integrated development planning Social theories related to planning and development Research Source: SACPLAN, 2014a: 20–31.

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Theories, processes and methods of transportation planning; Interaction between transport, land use, environment and infrastructure; Sustainable transport Economic development; Land economics; Access to land; Property development process Integrated development planning processes (international and South African contexts); South African IDP Geographical aspects of planning; Sociological aspects of planning; Anthropological aspects of planning Research methodology; Research reports and papers

Standards and competencies for planners Table 11.3 Functional competencies with underlying competencies Competencies

Underlying competencies

Survey and analysis

Surveys; Analysis and synthesis; Mapping, GIS, and computer aided design (CAD); Technology in planning Land use and tenure analysis; Socio economic and demographic analysis; Physical and environmental analysis; Infrastructure and public services analysis; Spatial analysis; Institutional and stakeholder analysis City-wide analysis and planning; Local area analysis; Local area planning Site analysis; Layout planning and site planning; Township development Integrated development planning; Strategic planning (including scenario planning; Spatial planning Land use management; Planning schemes; Development controls; Planning applications

Strategic assessment

Local area planning Layout planning Plan making Plan administration, Implementation and land use management Participation and facilitation

Participation processes; Facilitation; Dispute resolution; Negotiation

Source: SACPLAN, 2014a: 32–39.

graduate must also be aware of challenges and opportunities.The core competencies as shown in Table 11.2 distinguish the urban and regional planning graduate from other professionals. Issues such as poverty, informality, and diversity form an integral part of the core competencies. The functional competencies as shown in Table 11.3, which focus on techniques and methodologies, are those the graduate requires to complete a project successfully.

11.9 Conclusion In this chapter, we explained SACPLAN’s process of developing a new set of standards and competencies for the planning profession, which became necessary to ensure that SACPLAN could meet its mandate, set out in the PPA, to ‘achieve the transformation of the profession to ensure its legitimacy and effectiveness’ (RSA, 2002). As the statutory council responsible for the planning profession, SACPLAN identified the higher education sector as the starting point for transforming the apartheid city structure. New planning graduates will be better equipped to enter the world of work, and able to address the challenges the profession has been facing in South Africa, especially since 1994. The competencies also provide a foundation for researchers. They will also guide qualified and registered planners to maintain their professional competence throughout their working lives through continuing professional development in line with the rules of the profession (DRDLR, 2013). The universities that offer urban and regional planning programmes have begun to align their current qualifications to the requirements set out in the Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework and to the Competencies and Standards Guideline document published by SACPLAN. Some have already completed the process. SACPLAN has seen the development of the standards and competencies as a dynamic process that will be re-evaluated continually and re-assessed to ensure its relevance, legitimacy, and effectiveness.The impact will be visible within 173

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the education sector and will thus begin to trickle through to the urban and regional planning industry. Furthermore, this process provides a basis for determining the competencies that can be expected of planners with different qualifications and registration categories in the workplace.This will assist organizations in employing graduates with the right mix of knowledge and skills for any particular type of work. Besides clearly defining the competencies to be expected from planners, this process should also raise the standard of registered planners and the image of the profession as a whole.

Notes 1 The South African Planning Education Research project (SAPER) is a collaborative research initiative, aimed at investigating the value of the curriculum and the social and economic value of planning education in South Africa (including the employability of planners in South Africa). In addition to a survey of 217 planners, over 90 interviews had been conducted at the time of writing with people in planning and planning-related fields. 2 Now the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) 3 Details of the SAQA level descriptors can be found in the South African National Qualifications Framework document, available at http:​//www​.saqa​.org.​za/do​cs/mi​sc/20​12/le​vel_d​escri​ptors​.pdf.​ 4 These pertain to job levels within the public service and municipalities.

References AAPS (Association of African Planning Schools) (2010). Summary of discussion and proceedings. Conference on Revitalising Planning Education in Africa, Dar es Salaam, 5–8 October. https​://af​r ican​ plann​ingsc​hools​.org.​za/im​ages/​downl​oads/​repor​ts/AA​PS-20​10-Co​nfere​nce-R​eport​.pdf.​ Abrahams, G., Berrisford, S., Klein, G. and Ovens, W. (2012). SACPLAN Planning Competency and Standards generating process: status quo report. 20 January 2012. SACPLAN Midrand. Ahmed, N. (2011). An evaluation of planning education in Karachi, Pakistan: Learning from the past to tread into the future. Global Built Environment Review 7(3): 1–21. Alexander, E. R. (2001). What do planners need to know? Journal of Planning Education and Research 20(3): 376–380. Amirahmadi, H. (1993). Globalization and planning education. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1993(20): 537–555. APA (African Planning Association) (2013).The State of Planning in Africa – An Overview. Urban Planning Design Branch, UN-Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya. Bester, A. (1995). Introduction to workshop on the future of the town and regional planning profession, 21–23 November 1995, Club Mykonos, Langebaan, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Betts, K., Lewis, M., Dressler, A. and Svensson, L. (2009). Optimizing learning simulation to support a quinary career development model. Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education 10(2): 99–119. Bridges, W. (1991). Managing Transitions. Reading, MA, Addison, Wesley. Bunker, R. (1972). Planning education and educating planners. Royal Australian Planning Institute Journal 10(1): 40–44. Campbell, S. (1996). Green cities, growing cities, just cities? Urban planning and the construction of sustainable development. Journal of American Planning Association 62(3): 296–312. Davoudi, S. and Pendlebury, J. (2010). The evolution of planning as an academic discipline. Town Planning Review 81(6): 613–645. DRDLR (Department of Rural Development and Land Reform) (2013). Planning Profession Act (36/2002): South African Council for Planners: Rules and code of conduct. Government Gazette 37189,Vol. 582, 23 December 2013. Government Printer, Pretoria. Ensor, P. (2004). Contesting discourses in higher education curriculum restructuring in South Africa. Higher Education 48: 339–359 Edwards, M. M. and Bates, L. K. (2011). Planning’s core curriculum: Knowledge, practice, and imple­ mentation. Journal of Planning Education and Research 31(2): 172–183.

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Faling, W. and Todes, A. (2004). Employer perceptions of Planning Education in South Africa. Town and Regional Planning 47: 31–43. Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il. Frank, A. I. (2006). Three decades of thought on planning education. Journal of Planning Literature 21(1): 15–67. Frank, A. I., Mironowicz, I., Lourenço, J., Franchini, T., Ache, P., Finka, M., Scholl, B. and Grams, A. (2014). Educating planners in Europe: A review of 21st century study programmes. Progress in Planning 91: 30–94. Hague, C. (1995). Forum for effective planning and development. Paper presented at workshop on the future of the town and regional planning profession, 21–23 November 1995, Club Mykonos, Langebaan, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Harrison, P. (1995). Educating planners of the twenty-first century. Paper presented at workshop on the future of the town and regional planning profession, 21–23 November 1995, Club Mykonos, Langebaan, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Harrison, P., Todes, A. and Watson, V. (2008). Planning and Transformation: Learning from the Post-Apartheid Experience. Routledge, London. Healey, P. (2003). The communicative turn in planning and its implications for spatial strategy formation. In Campbell, S. and Fainstein, S. (eds). Readings in Planning Theory (2nd ed.). Blackwell, Oxford. pp. 237–255. Klein, G. (1991). Planning for transformation. Town and Regional Planning 31 September: 35–46. Klosterman, R. (2011). Planning theory education: A thirty-year review. Journal of Planning Education and Research 31(3): 319–331. Kunzmann, K. R. (2015). The state of the art of planning and planning education in Asia, disP – The Planning Review 51(4): 42–51. Leaf, M. and Hou, L. (2006).The ‘third spring’ of urban planning in China:The resurrection of professional planning in the post-Mao era. China Information 20(3): 553–585. Mabin, A. and Smith, D. (1997). Reconstructing South Africa’s cities? The making of urban planning 1900– 2000. Planning Perspectives 12(2): 193–223. Mahadevia, D. and Joshi, R. (2009). Subversive urban development in India: Implications on planning education. Working paper, Centre for Urban Equity, CEPT University, Ahmedabad. March, A., Hurlimann A. and Robins, J. (2013). Accreditation of Australian urban planners: Building knowledge and competence. Australian Planner 50(3): 233–243. DOI:10.1080/07293682.2012.745887. Muller, J. (1992). From survey to strategy: Twentieth century developments in western planning method. Planning Perspectives 7(2): 125–155. Muller, J. (1995). The purpose of planning. Paper presented at workshop on the future of the town and regional planning profession, 21–23 November 1995, Club Mykonos, Langebaan, Western Cape Province, South Africa. NPC (National Planning Commission) (2011). National Development Plan. National Planning Commission, Pretoria. Oranje, M. (2012). Revisiting planning education at the University of Pretoria. Town and Regional Planning 60: 1–9. Perloff, H. (1957). Education for Planning: City, State and Regional. John Hopkins, Baltimore. Rizzo, A. (2014). Rapid urban development and national master planning in Arab Gulf countries: Qatar as a case study. Cities 39: 50–57. RSA (Republic of South Africa) (1995). Development Facilitation Act (Act 67 of 1995). Government Printer, Pretoria. RSA (Republic of South Africa) (2002). Planning Profession Act (Act 36 of 2002). Government Printer, Pretoria. RSA (Republic of South Africa) (2013). Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act (Act 16 of 2013). Government Printer, Pretoria. SACPLAN (South African Council for Planners) (2014a). Guidelines for Competencies and Standards for Curricula Development. Document number 8/4/1/C&S/Curr/12-2014. SACPLAN, Midrand. SACPLAN (South African Council for Planners) (2014b). Consolidated Report on Competencies and Standards. Document number 8/4/1/C&S/SQ/12-2014. SACPLAN, Midrand. SACPLAN (South African Council for Planners) (2014c). Guidelines for the Registration of Planners. Document number 8/4/1/C&S/Reg/12-2014. SACPLAN, Midrand.

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12 African design and CIAM expansion after the Charter of Athens Elisa Dainese

12.1 Introduction After World War II, urban planning and architectural design were mobilized to deal with geopolitical insecurity and human unsettlement, and to guide the reconstruction of territories in and outside Europe. At this time of extreme urgency, discontent emerged among the members of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Architects and urban planners found that old CIAM institutions and pre-war ideologies could not deal with the problems and frustration caused by the war.They gradually abandoned the Charter of Athens (1933) and other previously acclaimed methods. This prompted an intense period of research outside traditional disciplinary and geographic boundaries. This chapter examines CIAM’s post-war questioning of modern culture and its growing interest in African architecture and planning. It considers the first CIAMs and the Charter of Athens, together with later meetings such as CIAM 9 (1953) in Aix-en-Provence, at which African examples were discussed. In particular, the essay focuses on designs by the groups GAMMA and ATBAT-Afrique for Casablanca (Morocco); research on the bidonville Mahiedinne in Algiers (Algeria); and the Volta River project in the British Gold Coast (now Ghana). These projects show the complex relationship between post-war reconstruction in Europe and housing design in the African colonies, where CIAM members took on a new role as experts in international development during the post-war evolution of welfare policies and development-aid politics. This chapter also examines the persistence of old colonial frameworks in CIAM’s design methods during the transition from colonial to postcolonial societies. Finally, it illuminates how the post-war questioning of the Charter of Athens led to a growing interest in the social sciences, the concept of “habitat”, and CIAM’s research on African “minor” traditions. The method used in this essay does not pretend to reconstruct a true and complete history of the CIAM congresses or post-war design in Africa. Instead, it regards the history of CIAM as a complex genealogy of facts, traces, and details in various places. By recomposing some of these fragments, it aims to highlight moments of internal struggle and shifts in the positions of several CIAM members. The elaborate history of CIAM – and the ninth meeting specifically – shows many different realities, meanings, and values of modern architecture around the world, not just in the African colonies. CIAM’s geographical and epistemological expansion in Africa, led by 177

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protagonists who supported the earlier Charter of Athens and the subsequent Charter of Habitat in the 1950s, left behind unexpected imprints there. After World War II, architecture included heterogeneous voices rather than one monolithic modernity. As noted by Ciucci (1981) and Maniera (1976), the idea of unified foundations and intentions for the Modern Movement had come from designers, theorists, and historians such as Le Corbusier and Nikolaus Pevsner. In 1928, CIAM seemed to endorse this “unity of goals” for transforming architecture. For several decades, the congresses were a focal point for constructing a new ideology for the Modern Movement.1 By investigating several projects that do not follow that idea of unity, this essay favours a genealogy of events where diverse perspectives are not only possible, but necessary. As Tafuri (1979) remembers, a plural history (or a history of pluralities) can produce frictions that resist the “singular” history and nourish future subversions and reinterpretations. For obvious reasons, the process does not seek an end, but instead attempts to break down walls erected by ideas of unity and totality, so that they can be surpassed. The rest of this chapter includes three main sections. The first section examines the history of CIAM and the development of the Charter of Athens (1933). The second analyses CIAM’s post-war development and geographic expansion. It also questions the role of modern designers in the construction of new networks of transnational planning. The third section looks more closely at CIAM 9 and the African “habitat”.

12.2 CIAMs and the Charter of Athens CIAM officially met ten times, from 1928 to 1959.2 The first meeting (CIAM 1, 1928) was held under the auspices of Hélène de Mandrot, patroness of the arts, who proposed a reunion of creative spirits at her chateau in La Sarraz, Switzerland. During the second meeting (CIAM 2, 1929), modern architects developed the Frankfurt statutes to legitimize CIAM’s enterprise by establishing three operative organs: the general assembly of its members; several national working groups for individuals and practitioners; and CIRPAC, the Comité International pour la Résolution des Problèmes de l’Architecture Contemporaine (International Committee for the Resolution of Problems in Contemporary Architecture).3 Scholars such as Banham (1963, 70), Ciucci (1981, 554), and Mumford (2000) have examined the results of the congresses–especially the first meetings from CIAM 1 (1928) to CIAM 4 (1933) – and declared them to be central in the ideological construction of the Modern Movement. These congresses initiated the academic phase of modern architecture, culminating in the development of the Charter of Athens in 1933. In particular, 1930–1933 was a period of fundamental change when different interpretations of the zoning of the functional city were debated. CIRPAC met three times to organize CIAM 4, initially to be held in Moscow, but tensions between the French and German groups led the fourth congress to be moved to Athens. The most intransigent faction of CIAM – German architects and European designers working in the Soviet Union – did not attend (Ciucci 1981, 571–572). The rest of the story is well known. CIAM 4 (1933) was held on an ocean liner, Patris II, that cruised between Marseilles and Athens in a euphoric atmosphere, remote from the terrible events happening in Europe at that time. This meeting marked the beginning of the great myth of the Modern Movement and its celebration of unifying events and individual figures shaping the future of modern architecture and urbanism. Previous meetings had addressed complex human experience, but CIAM 4 switched to a more unified vision for subsequent CIAMs. Less enthusiastic members described CIAM 4 as the first of the “romantic congresses” and the first meeting to be dominated by the French group (Banham 1963, 71). 178

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There were also conflicting opinions of the Charter of Athens, the main product of CIAM 4. According to Leonardo Benevolo, the Charter of Athens was one of the most important products since CIAM was founded (Benevolo 1977, 534-7). Reyner Banham defined it as “the most Olympian, rhetorical, and ultimately destructive document to come out of CIAM” (Banham 1963, 71). Unpublished until 1943, near the end of the war, the Charter of Athens generally has been considered a celebration of CIAM’s functional city of the 1920s–1930s, although it contains material developed later during World War II.4 The charter included about a hundred recommendations for improving conditions in the contemporary city, along with proposals for how this would be done. The proposals were grouped under five main headings: Habitation, Leisure,Work,Traffic, and Historic Heritage of Cities.The tone of the charter was dogmatic and general; however, its vision was broader than previous design methods, as it considered cities in relation to their surrounding region (Banham 1963, 72).5 The Charter of Athens was recognized as a celebration of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, which opposed the “pre-machine age utopia” of the dispersed garden city (Le Corbusier 1967, 94).6 Developed from previous ideas such as his Ville Contemporaine for Paris, the Radiant City was based on a biological analogy and separated into functional zones with a linear organization; however, as Kenneth Frampton points out (1969), it relied on the same basic idea as the garden city: green belts would divide zones with different functions (inhabiting, working, recreation, and circulation) to protect inhabitants from tuberculosis and other diseases. The Radiant City and the Charter of Athens had an “air of universal applicability” in their rigid functional zoning and their single type of urban housing: high rises. According to the most vehement critic (Banham 1963, 72), this housing type was “merely the expression of an aesthetic preference” but it implicitly discouraged research into other forms of housing. The Charter of Athens and the Radiant City responded to the Russians’ proposed dis-urbanization of cities and regions during the Soviet area. CIAM was represented there by German members such as Hannes Meyer and Ernst May, who had emigrated to Moscow. Frampton (1969) shows how the plan proposed an alternative to the Soviet dispersed settlement, but also to the American suburb, where capitalism was annihilating the sense of community. For the US and the Soviet Union, the charter and its ideal city proposed a “biological” and “spiritual” freedom associated with universal socialism and the concentration of power in the collective administration (Frampton 1969). Le Corbusier designed the Radiant City only a few years after traveling by airplane to South America in 1929. Since the 1920s, he had admired airplanes. The illustrations and text in Vers Une Architecture (Le Corbusier 1923) and his photographic album Aircraft (Le Corbusier 1935) present only a small part of his interest. From above, Le Corbusier observed the Latin American landscape: its colonial settlements, forests, rivers, and the pampas. It was on this trip that he made the first sketches of his plan for Rio de Janeiro: 60 km of elevated highway with housing underneath. From the plane, he experienced overcrowded cities in a different way: Being neither technician nor historian of this amazing adventure […] I let myself be carried off on the wings of an airplane, make use of the bird’s-eye view, of the view from the air, to which end I directed the pilot to steer over cities. (Le Corbusier 1935) Le Corbusier understood that an aerial view distances an observer from situations on the ground and encourages critical insights.7 Since then, aerial photographs have represented a planner’s-eye view in considering urban form (Vidler 2003). This new perception informed not only Le Corbusier’s sketches and plans 179

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for Rio, but also his ideas for North Africa. He visualized the large, curving coastal outline of Africa as the starting point for a new urbanism that would benefit people on the ground, but also would be admired from above due to its concern for the “fifth façade” and its place in the regional surroundings. The Radiant City and the functional city presumed a particular economic structure for modern industrial society. Not only in Europe, acquiring land for the public good would require land tenure to be reorganized at a large scale: the whole city and the region. Meanwhile, architects and urban designers would take an inventory of cities’ populations and develop a plan to produce permissible goods.8 As Mumford (2009, 3) notes, since the first CIAMs, Le Corbusier had called for new technologies and methods for standardizing and industrializing housing production. For the house to be produced like a machine, he believed that regional and urban transformations had to be accompanied by economic changes (Ciucci 1981, 563). Units could be designed in a way that considered characteristics of the surrounding region. In Le Corbusier’s iconography of the early 1920s, the airplane and other machines symbolized modernity and the virtues of modern technology and production methods.9 Consequently, the flow of cars guided the design of the infrastructure of the Radiant City and its 400-m road grid, where vehicular and pedestrian traffic were totally separate.

12.3 Post-war designers and CIAM geographic expansion At the CIAM meetings before World War II, members discussed the role of the architect and the relation between architecture and the state, but did not arrive at a common position (Ciucci 1981, Mumford 2000). According to the French group led by Le Corbusier, only the state could implement the ideas of the architect. A different position was held by Mart Stam, Hans Schmidt, and Hannes Meyer, three renowned architects affiliated with the German group who emigrated to Moscow in the 1930s. They sought an architecture that could change the structure of society. Like the French group, they believed in collective society, but also recognized the internal conflicts of its class structure.10 After the war, geopolitical unrest and the urgent need for reconstruction mobilized urban planners and architectural designers, but also raised questions about the role of the architect. A new option emerged for designers: instead of continuing to work for a single imperial power, they could offer assistance to the emerging Third World.11 As an expert in “international development”, an architectural and urban designer could become a protagonist in new networks of transnational planning. At the same time, the design discipline started to incorporate social, economic, technical, and climate-related knowledge. Architects began to work with experts in other disciplines because planning in the Third World and the introduction of modernization required a more comprehensive approach.12 After World War II, CIAM expanded its membership, interests, and geographic influence. Before and during the war, many European designers had been displaced by the rise of Nazi power and the modern totalitarian state. Between 1928 and 1939, more than a hundred architects emigrated from Germany and Austria to Britain (Benton 1995, 13). Architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer moved to the United States, while others started working in the colonies of the declining European empires. In 1947, this internationalization was described in a letter from Josep Luis Sert to Siegfried Giedion: “I think, we cannot continue to consider Central Europe as the main field of interest for CIAM”.13 Indeed, in the early 1950s, CIAM members were working also in North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Several participants at CIAM 9 (1953) worked or had interests in Africa: Ernst May had practiced in British East Africa since 1934; Jane Drew worked with Maxwell Fry in Ghana in the late 1940s; Michel Écochard, French architect and urban planner, 180

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designed in colonial and post-colonial Africa and the Middle East; and Georges Candilis and Shadrach Woods worked with engineer Vladimir Bodiansky in North Africa.14 Many of these architects contributed to post-war research, management, and development of the African city, with economic growth and social progress becoming central topics.15 African colonies had played a decisive role during the war by supporting their European empires. After the war, those European governments provided welfare to Africa, but mainly to legitimize their former colonial power than to compensate for war damage or to enter a more benevolent phase of colonial rule. Several scholars (Burton 2003 and Eckert 2004) have shown how European powers built new civic centres, neighbourhoods, and towns to control African urban workers and monitor a difficult political situation that could erupt in social turmoil and violence. Almost all of the former colonial territories faced major internal problems due to exponential urban growth.16 Discontent and urban riots had developed in British and French colonies even before World War II, including boycotts and peaceful marches in British India. Protests against occupation and exploitation occurred also in African countries under British rule. In the 1930s, urban tensions arose also in French colonies, especially in North Africa.17 To reduce disobedience and retain control, the colonial governments provided better housing in the African colonies, especially for workers (Avermaete 2014, 33–34). A new global and political balance emerged after the Second World War. The late phase of colonial empires coincided with the new Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. It also coincided with the development of the United Nations, the international organization that replaced the ineffective League of Nations. The UN urged its members to respond to the pressing need for housing amidst the political uncertainties in Europe and elsewhere (Dampha 2014). Since the colonial territories’ fights for liberation were not associated directly with either the US or the Soviet Union, they became “playing fields of intense foreign policy agendas” (Avermaete 2014, 34). After the war, the Soviet Union began to establish diplomatic relations with individual African countries, while the US encouraged the imperial powers of Europe to negotiate a withdrawal from their overseas colonies.18 Both of them used aid packages, technical assistance, and sometimes even military intervention to support newly independent nations that were willing to align with their foreign policies. Even before this phase of national independence, financial structures were established to implement post-war development in Europe and its colonies. Indeed, regions in the Third World readily expanded and industrialized, but faced the problems of a rapidly growing urban population. Despite this growth, as well as the imminent end of the French colonial empire heralded by the war in Vietnam that began in 1955 and by the conflict in Algeria (1954-1962), North Africa experienced a subsequent period of prosperity. This was due partially to funds from the Marshall Plan, which the US initiated in 1947. This plan assisted European reconstruction and offered $1.1 billion to French overseas territories, especially in North Africa (Avermaete 2014, 35–40). Between 1930 and 1946, the Moroccan urban population increased by 232 per cent, while the 1954 census in Algiers, the main city in Algeria, recorded sixteen bidonvilles (shanty towns) with populations over 1,000.19 Assistance from development-aid politics prompted existing urban planning methods to be reconsidered. The French protectorate in Morocco invited Michel Écochard, acclaimed French architect and urban designer, to guide development there.20 De Raedt (2014) and Uduku (2003) describe how the United Kingdom authorized the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts (1940) and France legitimized the Fonds d’investissement pour le développement economique et sociale (FIDES, 1946). FIDES was one of the most prominent organizations in Africa because it released enormous amounts of money for infrastructure projects.21 Both organizations became official channels for funding large-scale projects for colonial growth. In particular, they focused on projects for housing, health, and 181

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education. Before the war, CIAM had encouraged its members to become involved in activities of the League of Nations. After the war, it invited members to participate in international development and UN activities.22 Indeed, CIAM sought to lead the reconstruction of Europe and the social-economic development of the colonies. Introduced during CIAM 7 (1949), the new Charter of Habitat played a key role in advancing a new socio-economic and development agenda. CIAM formulated the Charter of Habitat to replace the pre-war Charter of Athens, but also to influence international policies – especially UN policies – so that its members could obtain new commissions in the Third World (Deyong 2001; De Raedt 2014; Avermaete 2014). It was for the UN Economic and Social Council that some members of the French CIAM group and founding members of the French-North African group ATBAT-Afrique, prepared the definition of “habitat”. Likewise, in 1952, when the French delegation met in Sigtuna, Sweden, to prepare for CIAM 9, it developed a proposal entitled Housing for the Greater Number that would establish a Building Research Organizing Committee (BROC) as a subsidiary of the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) Housing Sub-Committee.23 This proposal was to be presented to the UN Economic and Social Council. Bodiansky, Écochard, and others developed it as part of their research on the “habitat”. It included research activities, meetings, and a housing seminar under the auspices of the UN Technical Assistance Administration (TAA) that would be held in Morocco to focus on “cooperative and aided self-help housing”.24 The research and activities described in the proposal were intended to extend the group’s influence, build new neighbourhoods and towns in Morocco and North Africa, and offer solutions to increasing urbanization in other parts of the Third World, including South America.25 In Paris, during the 1954 UNESCO meeting, CIAM representatives affirmed this position and declared that the “habitat” and its charter were “an urgent necessity [that] could be of immediate assistance in guiding housing growth, particularly in the more rapidly developing parts of the world”.26 In the mid-1950s, the UN Technical Assistance Programme finally financed a series of advisory missions led, for example, by Otto Koenigsberger, the international architect and consultant who had worked in exile in Egypt.27 The missions visited several Third World countries: Ghana (1954), Pakistan (1957–1958), Nigeria (1962), and Singapore (1963). The subsequent projects for socio-economic development occurred before the end of the imperial enterprise or immediately after, demonstrating the persistence of interest in former colonies during post-colonial and independent times.

12.4 CIAM 9 on the African “habitat” and its design As Ciucci (1981) recalls, the first CIAMs debated contrasting positions among members and sometimes led to divisions between factions. Despite these differences, it was generally agreed that the academies had to be stripped of the role of proponents of monumental architecture to support political power. At CIAM I (1928), the congress declared that “architecture should be freed of the sterile influence of the Academies”.28 By the end of World War II, however, many members argued that the Charter of Athens, CIAM’s main instrument for design, had become “the established dogma” of modern design. It was being applied around the world, even in Third countries, and was being enforced in major schools and planning offices. The recent geographical and disciplinary expansion of CIAM, together with its awareness of failures in the application of the functional model, led to discontent among CIAM members. Architects and urban designers had lost confidence in old CIAM institutions and pre-war ideas. Theorists criticized CIAM’s functional city. In the words of Reyner Banham, it had become a model “conceived in ignorance of the city’s specific functions” (Banham 1963, 72). As a result, designers gradually 182

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abandoned the 1933 Charter of Athens and other previously acclaimed models that could not deal with the demands and frustration caused by the war. This post-war questioning of modern society went hand in hand with a growing interest in the Third World, and African regions in particular. After World War II, CIAM designers conducted intense research outside Europe as part of a geographical and disciplinary expansion of the field. Even architects with no official contacts or concerns in the colonies started investigating the non-Western world.29 They studied work by their colleagues who were designing for the Third World. They also became interested in African traditions and in discoveries that were made during the colonial period. In addition, following the invitation of the Charter of Athens, designers started collaborating with other specialists in a multidisciplinary environment (Le Corbusier 1975, 100–101). CIAM previously had relied on knowledge from the “hard” sciences such as medicine, but post-war meetings expanded to include other disciplines: especially the human sciences, anthropology, and geography. Consequently, architectural theory was shaken to its foundations. At first, there was no sign of a rupture with the past, but at CIAM 7 (1949) in Bergamo, new research on the concept of “habitat” began to emerge. As Banham (1963, 72) recalls, many wartoughened students participated in discussions with the older creators of the Modern Movement. Collectively, they started developing a new Charter of Habitat to replace the Charter of Athens. CIAM 8 (1951), which registered even more students, officially recognized the inadequacy of the Charter of Athens and introduced the theme of the Core, which defined the “community […] and not merely an aggregate of individuals” and rejected the notion of “civic centre”, which had been associated mainly with administrative buildings.30 CIAM 9 (1953) in Aix-enProvence celebrated the concept of “habitat” and social properties of design. Later remembered by the youngest participants as one of the most successful congresses, CIAM 9 enabled members to expand their discussions to include non-European and African cultures. They projected the post-war model of design in African countries – especially in French North Africa – as a hopeful instrument for progress that could enhance the universal character of the functional project. The definition of “habitat” was not published until October 1953, after CIAM 9, by Vladimir Bodiansky, an architect in the French section of CIAM who was working in North Africa and was in close contact with Le Corbusier. Built for “the greatest number” – the increasing worldwide population in need of housing after World War II – “habitat” was defined as a system of “cells” (dwellings) that “are born, live and die”. It was not a shelter, but “a cell of a socially organized body” (Bodiansky 1953, 290).The “habitat” superseded the functions described in the Charter of Athens and its research on the city. As part of the passionate search for alternatives to the modern enterprise, it focused on relations and associations instead of forms and functions. By addressing the post-war loss of faith in the ideology of progress and production, and by gaining support from the human sciences, the notion of “habitat” promoted the density of experience and the humanization of the environment. The members of CIAM 9 discussed several examples of “habitat” that drew lessons from other cultures. For the first time in the history of the congresses, work in African colonies was presented. The GAMMA and ATBAT-Afrique groups showed their projects for Casablanca in the French protectorate of Morocco; the CIAM-Alger group displayed its research on the bidonville Mahiedinne in Algiers, the capital of French Algeria; a group of British architects presented its work on the Volta River project in the British Gold Coast (now Ghana); and a fourth group from Paris showed its research on French Cameroon31 (see Figure 12.1). The Volta River project was a prime example of British infrastructure to continue exporting gold and manganese to the motherland.32 The presenters at CIAM 9 investigated the project for a dam and hydroelectric power station on the Volta River, accompanied by a modern town 183

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Figure 12.1 Volta River project. Source: Preparatory Commission, 1956.

for 90,000 people. This was one of the first examples of social engineering developed by the British government for the Gold Coast. Since the early 15th century, colonial powers had used various architectural and urban methods in new settlements to confine Africans or curtail their movement. As in the Volta River project, they relied on cheap workers to amass and export local resources. Both British and French empires built export infrastructures while segregating the natives, but their approaches were different, as described at CIAM 9. During the rapid growth of 184

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African cities, the British adopted forced relocation and racial segregation to avoid the spread of disease, while the French used geographic segregation based on socio-economic, religious, and cultural differences.33 Both led to enormous slums that kept the locals at the outskirts of the city. This complex issue became the core of CIAM 9’s discussions of North Africa. The presentations of projects for Casablanca in Morocco, designed by the Groupe d’architectes modernes Marocains (GAMMA) and the African branch of the Atelier des bâtisseurs (ATBAT-Afrique), contributed to the ongoing debate on the urgent need for housing in the colonies.34 Another presentation investigated the situation in Algiers and its shantytowns. The urban grid developed by CIAM-Alger, a French group working in Algeria, focused on bidonville Mahieddine, one of the oldest and largest slums in the region.35 Its study of this squatter settlement considered the relation between architecture and people, the increasing urban pressure, and the African workers’ need for housing (see Figure 12.2). As some scholars have pointed out (Goerg 1998; Eckert 2004), this new colonial policy favoured the socio-economic development of the African metropolis contrasting pre-war urban transformations that affected housing regulations and generated the segregation of the Africans in divided sectors. A point of no return was reached at the beginning of the 20th century, when the separation of Europeans and natives became common practice, with the indigenous population confined to its ancient town centre or separated from the European area by a green belt. In the British colonies, this division was described as a measure to fight the spread of infectious diseases, but this sanitary discourse coincided with the racial segregation of the natives (Swanson 1977; Nightingale 2012). This policy followed the guidelines of the Charter of Athens, with its rejection of the 19th-century tenement city and its promotion of green areas that could prevent the spread of disease. Le Corbusier had often emphasized that the modern city must not become unhealthy suburbs. In his lecture at CIAM 4, he focused on three “essential joys” for a healthy, robust modern metropolis: the sky, trees, and light.36 In turn, this ambition became part of the Charter of Athens.

Figure 12.2 CIAM-9, Mahieddine Bidonville, Section of the CIAM-Alger grid, 1953. Source: © FLC / SOCAN, 2019.

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Like pre-war colonial endeavours, the urban projects that GAMMA and ATBAT-Afrique presented at CIAM 9 continued to use sanitary intentions to separate African and European areas, but their designs departed from earlier attitudes in many ways. They tried to find answers to major problems that had been caused by European neglect of the colonies: housing shortages for African workers, obsolete urban neighbourhoods for the natives, and inadequate educational and health facilities in the poorest quarters. Écochard and ATBAT-Afrique’s method for designing the colonial “habitat” began by observing the modern industrial city and considering how to reorganize land tenure. This approach was similar to how Le Corbusier had developed his Radiant City. Unlike the Radiant City, however, these designs did not start from universal values, but from analyses of local Moroccan buildings and towns, including their social characteristics and historical traditions (Eleb 2000; Chaouni 2011). To design modern housing for the Carrières Centrales in Casablanca, GAMMA and ATBAT-Afrique drew from the honoured tradition of the ancient medinas of North Africa, the rural environment of “the casbahs of the Sahara, the ksour of the fortified village of the Atlas Mountains, the collective fortress’ granaries”.37 They surveyed North African building types and the African “minor” tradition, on the ground and from the air. These analyses had a major influence on their projects. They proposed dedicated urban neighbourhoods for native Moroccans, whereas pre-war projects had confined local people to their ancient town centres, the medinas, or allowed them to live only in the bidonville on the outskirts of the city.38 Before the war, CIAM’s intentions had relied on Taylorist ideas of rationalization and standardization to overcome limitations of traditional craftsmanship. A prime example of Existenzminimum in low-rise housing was Ernst May’s Frankfurt experiment, discussed during CIAM 2 (1929). CIAM’s intentions soon expanded to include the systematic design of functional settlements and high rise, vertical housing, as proposed by Le Corbusier during CIAM 4 (1933). Developed further in his book The Four Routes, Le Corbusier promoted the vertical city as the main way to save urban populations from air raids (Le Corbusier 1947, 44-7). He advocated using new building techniques to create tall buildings with an average height of 150 feet that could contain three or four times as many inhabitants as a traditional, low-rise urban fabric on the same amount of land. The projects that GAMMA and ATBAT-Afrique presented at CIAM 9 continued this ongoing debate about low- versus high-rise housing. At CIAM 9, the GAMMA group displayed a grid for urban development entitled “Moroccan Habitat”.39 From 1946 to 1952, Écochard (GAMMA’s director at that time) designed and built the Carrières Centrales as a Moroccan “habitat” outside Casablanca. It was organized with a “housing grid” that started from a basic unit of 8 × 8 m, with an urban pattern that accommodated 350 inhabitants per hectare and could be extended into a horizontal, low-rise city. Its “neighbourhood unit” included 1,800 inhabitants: a number drawn from surveys of traditional settlements around souks (open-air markets) and small North African towns. Écochard divided the housing grid into separate courtyard houses that the Protectorate offered to Muslims, mainly from the bidonvilles.The design of each block relied on observations of the modern low-rise city, but also on analyses of the traditional “habitat”: the ancient medina quarter of the North African city and its peculiar street pattern. In contrast, ATBAT-Afrique, founded in 1947 by Le Corbusier, called its CIAM 9 grid “Habitat du plus grand nombre” and inserted three collective, five-storey buildings among the lower courtyard houses of Écochard’s Carrières Centrales.40 ATBAT-Afrique director and French architect Georges Candilis, together with New York philosopher and architect Shadrach Woods, developed two new reproducible building types that followed CIAM’s and Le Corbusier’s interest in the high-rise city. The housing units in these taller buildings exceeded the minimum standards for the low-rise housing of the Existenzminimum, as well as the 186

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expectations of the Charter of Athens. Inspired by their study of the traditional “habitat” of Morocco, these projects were a vertical and suspended version of the traditional North African courtyard. The Sémiramis Building (a name derived from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon) included a double-height, enclosed courtyard for privacy and a façade with protruding passageways that was “designed for that segment of the population that has remained closest to the Muslim way of life”.41 The Nid d’Abeille Building (Beehive) had passageways along the north façade and a geometric pattern of large openings in the south side to bring light into the socalled “Muslim” courtyards (see Figure 12.3). Both GAMMA and ATBAT-Afrique developed new hybrid building types that interpreted the traditional North African “habitat”. Although they were genuinely interested in the established practices of the region, some of their appropriations of traditional African architecture relied on exotic fascinations. Their modern designs froze certain Moroccan traditions into archaic, immutable forms: for instance, the casbah and the ksour.The courtyard is one such example: ATBAT-Afrique removed it from its social and cultural context, then multiplied it vertically into a high-rise housing model.42 This arrangement disregarded the courtyard’s complex social role and promoted a stereotype of North African privacy. Similarly, ATBAT-Afrique’s modern patio did not operate as a place of encounter among people and cultures, unlike the traditional medina. As Chaouni explains, this modern translation separated people according to their religion and gender (Chaouni 2011, 64). During CIAM 9, architects and planners started to question previous design techniques that were based on social engineering. They also developed new responses to the extreme housing shortage in Africa. At the same time, they regarded the African city as a laboratory where they

Figure 12.3 Vertical housing units designed by Candilis and Woods among the houses of the Carrières Centrales, Casablanca, 1952. Source: Photograph by Michel Écochard. Photothèque, École Nationale d’Architecture de Rabat.

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could test new ideas from the Charter of Habitat before applying them to the reconstruction of post-war Europe. This Western-centric approach would become an unfortunate future for several societies in the Third World.

12.5 Conclusion According to Banham (1963, 73), CIAM collapsed due to the “inability of the founder-members to resist the temptation to faire école”. Towards its end, in the late 1950s, its structure was too formal to permit new explorations of the non-functional “habitat”, but during two vital periods – around 1930–1933 and 1949–1953 – CIAM was the major worldwide venue for questioning and disseminating ideas of modern architecture and town planning. During that first period, CIAM united its members in a vigorous discussion of the city and its surroundings. Although its architects did not share a common position on housing or urban models, their different perspectives helped advance research on the modern city. During the second period, after World War II, CIAM continued to examine the metropolis, but with a broader vision than the functional model provided. At CIAM 9, it strongly affirmed the social dimension of architecture and welcomed research on the African “habitat”. The achievements of CIAM 9, namely the Charter of Habitat and its applications, for example in Africa, were as important to architecture and architectural history as CIAM’s earlier documents, including the Charter of Athens. The designs presented by GAMMA and ATBATAfrique on Casablanca, the research on the bidonville Mahiedinne in Algiers, and the Volta River project in the British Gold Coast revealed complex relations between housing and infrastructural development in the African colonies, with further implications for reconstruction in Europe. In some CIAM projects in Africa, old colonial thinking persisted in modern design methods, even as African societies were transforming from colonial to postcolonial. At the same time, other CIAM members with a commitment to international development played a major role in the evolution of welfare concepts and development-aid politics in Africa. Unlike previous colonial enterprises that treated native settlements as a temporary and unplanned part of the city, they researched the African “habitat” and designed neighbourhoods for indigenous populations. The Charter of Habitat developed from the Charter of Athens, the hope for reconstruction after World War II, and the desire for a better future after the failure of the socialist project of the Weimar Republic. Enriched in countries beyond Europe, and with an emphasis on collective and social qualities, the African “habitat” studies at CIAM 9 questioned the modern pursuit of universality and the pre-war rhetoric of rationalism. Instead, they promoted the post-war interest in the human sciences and research on African “minor” traditions, leaving a legacy that invites further exploration in contemporary architecture and urban design.

Notes 1 This coherent line of development and its formulation grew out of an enlightened vision of society. See Ciucci (1981, 553-4) and Maniera (1976, vii). 2 Several scholars have written about CIAM, its development, and the construction of the rational project. On the history of CIAM, see Mumford (2000) and Mumford (2009). For one of the best summaries of the development of CIAM, see Banham (1963); for CIAM documents, see Steinmann (1979). 3 Elected by the Congress, CIRPAC became the executive body of CIAM. 4 The French version of the Charter of Athens was published in 1943, but the English translation was published only in 1975 (Le Corbusier 1975). 5 Le Corbusier developed the regional results of the Radiant City only in 1944, in his book Les Trois établissements Humains (Le Corbusier 1945). 188

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6 Developed by Le Corbusier in the 1930s, the book La Ville Radieuse was both a project and a manuscript published in 1933. The research for the book was based on Le Corbusier’s presentation during CIAM 3 in Brussels (1930). The book was published in English in 1967, as The Radiant City (Le Corbusier 1967). 7 Le Corbusier described the airplane “lesson” with his usual eloquence: “From the plane I have seen landscapes that might be termed cosmic.What an invitation to meditate, what a reminder of the earth’s fundamental truths” (Le Corbusier 1930). During a flight over the Atlas Mountains in 1933, he said, “The flight of a plane provides a spectacle with a lesson – a philosophy. […] The non-professional who flies (and so whose mind is empty) becomes meditative: he can take refuge only in himself and in his own works. But once he had come down to earth his aims and determinations have found a new scale” (Le Corbusier 1935). 8 Le Corbusier’s propositions are discussed in Frampton (1969). 9 Since 1929, the plane has been a visual instrument for urban planning and architectural design and a tool for comprehending cultural repercussions of industrialization. See Bacon (2001). 10 On the discussion on the role of the architect by the French and German groups, see Ciucci (1981, 558-9). 11 The Third World was a concept introduced in the early 1950s to designate countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. See Lee (2010). 12 On this topic, see Avermaete et al. (2014, 330). 13 As quoted in Kohte (2009). 14 For the participants at CIAM 9, see Mumford (2000, 228). 15 Several scholars have discussed this phenomenon, using the phrase “welfare colonialism” (Young 1994) or “developmental colonialism” (Cooper 2002). See also Beeckmans (2017, 360). 16 With a focus on newly independent states, this topic is discussed in Avermaete et al. (2014, 330).  17 On the relation between architecture and colonialism in French North Africa, see Cohen et al. (2003); AlSayyad et al. (1992); Çelik (1997); Cohen, Eleb (1998); Rabinow (1989); and Wright (1991). On the process of decolonization in North Africa, see Cooper (1997). 18 See Breyer (1979). On the transfer of architectural and urban knowledge between socialist countries and Africa, see Stanek (2012) and Avermaete (2012). 19 On urban migration in Morocco, see Chaouni (2011, 63). For the Algerian case, see Çelik (2003). 20 On Écochard’s development for Casablanca, see Écochard (1955), Eleb (2000), Cohen, Eleb (2002), Avermaete (2010), and Avermaete et al (2014). 21 For more information on FIDES, see Dulucq (1997). 22 On this topic, see the discussion on the design for the palace of the League of Nations, in Ciucci (1981, 558) and Mumford (2000, 9-10). 23 CIAM, Housing for the Greater Number (Stockholm Meeting, 1952, unpublished report), BAKE0153-g19, Bakema Archive, NAi, Rotterdam. 24 CIAM, “Proposal for Housing Seminar under TAA,” Housing for the Greater Number (Stockholm Meeting, 1952, unpublished report), 1-3, BAKE0153-g19, Bakema Archive, NAi, Rotterdam. 25 A.F. Ewing, “UN TAA Check List for Presentation of Seminars, Group Training and Demonstration Projects for 1953,” Housing for the Greater Number (Stockholm Meeting, 1952, unpublished report), 1, BAKE0153-g19, Bakema Archive, NAi, Rotterdam. 26 “Minutes of a Meeting of the Council and Delegates of CIAM at the headquarters of UNESCO, Paris, June 30th, 1954,” Sert Collection B9; also in Deyong (2001, 118). 27 On the UN missions led by Otto Koenigsberger, see Koenigsberger et al. (1980) and Liscombe (2006, 178 and note 40). 28 Declaration of La Sarraz, as reported in Banham (1963, 71). 29 The most famous was the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (Strauven 1998). 30 For the definition of “core,” see Giedion (1958, 127) and Bosman (1992). 31 42-JT-X-1-37, gta Archives, ETH, Zurich. 32 On the Volta River project, see D’Auria (2010); D’Auria, De Meulder (2010); Jackson (2014, 197–8 and 201–2); and Jackson, Oppong (2014). 33 On the difference between British and French colonial architecture and urbanism in Africa, see Demissie (2011) and Njoh (2008). 34 For GAMMA and ATBAT grids, see Risselada et al. (2005, 26–9). 35 For the CIAM-Alger grid, see Çelik (2003) and Risselada et al. (2005, 22–5). 36 As reported in Mumford (2000, 79). 189

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37 Panel caption in the exhibition La cité verticale at the CIAM meeting in Aix-en-Provence, 1953, gra/ ETH Archives. See also Eleb (2000, 61), Candilis (1953), and Chaouni (2011, 78). 38 On the “new approach” adopted by GAMMA, see Chaouni (2011, 62). 39 On Écochard’s development for Casablanca, see Écochard (1955), Eleb (2000), Cohen, Eleb (2002); Avermaete (2010); and Avermaete et al. (2014). 40 On Candilis and Woods’s project for Casablanca, see Smithson and Smithson (1955), Cohen (1992), Eleb (2000), Cohen, Eleb (2002); and Avermaete et al. (2014). 41 “Recherche pour des logements économiques, par ATBAT-Afrique,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 60 (1955): 41. Translated by the author. 42 On the different types designed by ATBAT-Afrique, see Eleb (2000, 60).

References AlSayyad, N. (1992). Forms of Dominance on the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise. Aldershot; Brookfield,Vermont: Avebury. Avermaete, T. (2010). Framing the Afropolis: Michel Écochard and the African City. OASE 82, pp. 77–100. Avermaete, T. (2012). Coda: The Reflexivity of Cold War Architectural Modernism. Journal of Architecture 17(3), pp. 475–477. Avermaete, T. et al. (2014). Casablanca Chandigarh: A Report on Modernization. 1st ed. Montréal; Zürich: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Park Books. Bacon, M. (2001). Le Corbusier in America:Travels in the Land of the Timid. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT. Banham, R. (1963). CIAM. In: Encyclopedia on Modern Architecture. London: Taylor & Hudson, pp. 70–73. Beeckmans, L. (2017). The “Development Syndrome”: Building and Contesting the SICAP Housing Schemes in French Dakar (1951–1960). Canadian Journal of African Studies 51(3), pp. 359–388. Benevolo, L. (1977). Storia dell’Architettura Moderna. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Benton, C. et al. (1995). A Different World: Emigre Architects in Britain 1928–1958. London: RIBA Heinz Gallery. Bodiansky,V. (1953). Notes on the Subject of a Habitat Charter. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 24(3), pp. 289–294. Bosman, J. (1992). I CIAM del dopoguerra: un bilancio del Movimento Moderno. Rassegna 52, pp. 11–13. Breyer, K. (1979). Moskaus Faust in Afrika. Stuttgart-Degerloch: Seewald. Burton, A. (2003).Townsmen in the Making: Social Engineering and Citizenship in Dar es Salaam, c. I9451960. International Journal of African Historical Studies 36(2), pp. 331–365. Candilis, G. (1953). Habitat Collectif Marocain ‘Etude Atbat-Afrique’ 3 Immeubles Yype. L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (Contribution francaise à l’évolution de l’architecture, 1. Habitation) 46, pp. 98–99. Çelik, Z. (1997). Urban forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Çelik, Z. (2003). Learning from the Bidonville, CIAM Looks at Algiers. Harvard Design Magazine 18 (SpringWinter), pp. 70–74. Chaouni, A. (2011). Depoliticizing Group GAMMA: Contesting Modernism. In: D. Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 57–84. Ciucci, G. (1981). The Invention of the Modern Movement. Oppositions 24, pp. 552–575. Cohen, J.-L. (1992). The Moroccan Group and the Theme of Habitat. Rassegna 52, pp. 58–67. Cohen, J.-L. & Eleb, M. (1998). Casablanca: mythes et figures d’une aventure urbaine. Paris: Hazan. Cohen, J.-L. & Eleb, M. (2002). Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures. New York: Monacelli Press. Cohen, J.-L. et al. (2003). Alger: paysage urbain et architectures, 1800–2000. Paris: Imprimeur. Cooper, F. (1997). The Dialectics of Decolonization. Nationalism and Labour Movements in Post-war French Africa. In: F. Cooper, A.L. Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 406–435. Cooper, F. (2002). Africa Since 1940:The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Auria, V. (2010). From Tropical Transitions to Ekistic Experimentation: Doxiadis Associates in Tema, Ghana. Positions 1, Grand Plans, pp. 40–63. D’Auria, V. & De Meulder, B. (2010). Unsettling Landscapes: The Volta River Project. OASE 82, pp. 115–138.

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Dampha, L.F. (2014). The United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions and African Reconstruction. Paris: L’Harmattan. De Raedt, K. (2014). Between “True Believers” and Operational Experts: UNESCO Architects and School Building in Post-colonial Africa. The Journal of Architecture 19(1), pp. 1–24. Demissie, F. (2011). Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Deyong, S. (2001). Planetary Habitat: The Origins of a Phantom Movement. Journal of Architecture 6(2), pp. 113–128. Dulucq, S. (1997). La France et les Villes d’Afrique Noire Francophone. Quarante ans d’Intervention (1945–1985). Paris: L’Harmattan. Eckert, A. (2004). Regulating the Social: Social Security, Social Welfare and the State in Late Colonial Tanzania. Journal of African History 45(3), pp. 468–489. Écochard, M. (1955). Casablanca: le roman d’une ville. Paris: Éditions de Paris. Eleb, M. (2000). An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism: Écochard, Candilis, and ATBAT-Afrique. In: S.W. Goldhagen, R. Legault, eds, Anxious Modernisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 55–73. Frampton, K. (1969). The City of Dialectic. Architectural Design 39(10, October), pp. 541–546. Giedion, S. (1958). Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goerg, O. (1998). From Hill Station (Freetown) to Downtown Conakry (First Ward): Comparing French and British Approaches to Segregation in Colonial Cities at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. Canadian Journal of African Studies 32(1), pp. 1–31. Jackson, I. et al. (2014). The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Jackson, I. & Oppong, R.A. (2014). The Planning of Late Colonial Village Housing in the Tropics: Tema Manhean, Ghana. Planning Perspectives 29(4), pp. 475–499. Koenigsberger, O. et al. (1980). Growth and Urban Renewal in Singapore. Habitat International 5, pp. 85–127. Kohte, S. (2009). Tropical Architecture. Archithese 6, pp. 66–71. Le Corbusier (1923). Vers Une Architecture. Paris: les Éditions G. Crès. Le Corbusier (1930). Précisions sur l’état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme. Paris: Cres. Le Corbusier (1935). Aircraft. London: The Studio Ltd; New York: The Studio Publications Inc. Le Corbusier (1945). Les Trois établissements humains. Paris: Denoël. Le Corbusier (1947). The Four Routes. London: D. Dobson. Le Corbusier (1967). The Radiant City. New York: The Orion Press. Le Corbusier (1975). The Athens Charter. New York: Grossman. Lee, C.J. (2010). Making a World After Empire. The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. Athens: Ohio University Press. Liscombe, R.W. (2006). In-dependence: Otto Koenigsberger and Modernist Urban Resettlement in India. Planning Perspectives 21(2), pp. 157–178. Maniera, M.E. (1976). William Morris e l’Ideologia dell’Architettura Moderna. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Mumford, E. (2000). The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 73–91. Mumford, E. (2009). Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–1969. New Haven:Yale University Press. Nightingale, C.H. (2012). Segregation. A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Njoh, A.J. (2008). Colonial Philosophies, Urban Space, and Racial Segregation in British and French Colonial Africa. Journal of Black Studies 38(4), pp. 579–599. Preparatory Commission (1956). The Volta River Project, Vol. 2. London: HMSO. Rabinow, P. (1989). French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Risselada, M. et al. (2005). Team 10: 1953–1981: in search of a utopia of the present. Rotterdam: NAi. Smithson, A. & Smithson, P. (1955). Collective Housing in Morocco: The Work of ATBAT-Africa: Bodiansky, Candilis-Woods. Architectural Design 1, pp. 2–8. Stanek, Ł. (2012). Introduction:The ‘Second World’s’ Architecture and Planning in the ‘Third World.’ Journal of Architecture 17(3), pp. 299–307. Steinmann, M. (1979). CIAM: Dokumente 1928–1939. Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. Strauven, F. (1998). Aldo van Eyck:The Shape of Relativity. Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura.

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Swanson, M.W. (1977). The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909. Journal of African History 18(3), pp. 387–410. Tafuri, M. (1979). The Historical Project. Oppositions (USA) 17, pp. 55–75. Uduku, O. (2003). Educational Design and Modernism in West-Africa. DOCOMOMO Journal 28, pp. 76–82. Vidler, A. (2003). Photourbanism. In: G. Bridge, S. Watson, eds, A Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 35–45. Wright, G. (1991). The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Young, C. (1994). African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.

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13 To survey, control, and design Doxiadis and Fathy on Africa’s future and identity (1959–1963) Filippo De Dominicis

13.1 Introduction In an era that appeared to solidify a dichotomy between East and West, the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa emerged as the terrain on which to experiment global theories and practices of architecture and planning. Beyond the circulation of models and ideas, political and economic circumstances fostered the rise of innovative and alternative strategies, particularly when unfolding ambitions of global control could be supported by technological progress. While Western elites sought to provide an environment in which the democratic world could develop freely, Asian and African nations were hampered by a technology gap that, according to Sauvy, constituted the primary ground for their designation as “Third World” (Sauvy, 1952). Hence, the Third World became the place where a new world balance was being created. Seeking political and economic control, the Eastern and Western blocks began undertaking a global campaign of modernization and development. The effects of developmental politics on the transnational planning discourse were rather impressive. Since the early days of decolonization, technical progress in underdeveloped Asian and African nations required the presence of professionals in urban design and planning for the elaboration of large-scale and long-term systems that, mirroring the structure of world powers and markets, would definitively lay the foundations for new and globally-oriented strategies (Shoshkes & Adler, 2009;Wakeman, 2014; Hein, 2017). Planners and architects turned into veritable global experts, bridging urban planning with politics, economics and social sciences. Acting as consultants for international institutions and private foundations – namely the major agents involved in the challenge of modernization – architects and planners started travelling, working and networking throughout the globe. Their new and outsized role called for a novel approach to the profession: rather than producing formally-defined structures, planning experts were encouraged instead to explore generative systems and models, to not only design but rather instruct, support and steer the mechanisms of development and growth. Against this background, the African continent stood at the crossroads of multiple interests. As decolonization progressed, Africa gradually emerged as the largest site of experimentation for different and often contrasting visions of modernization. This chapter aims to, on the one hand, reveal how experts in architecture and planning approached the African continent and its modernization. Also, in what ways the ambition to 193

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modernize Africa drove a number of world-renowned practitioners to develop their own planning instruments and to adapt and expand their approach towards the largest design scale. On the other hand, this chapter aims to understand the complex interaction of actors and factors that pushed contradictions and contrasts to the greatest extent, especially when Western expertise was called to shape new strategies for planning the African continent. In particular, by analyzing the fruitful but conflicting collaboration between the Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis and the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, this chapter helps to shed light on some diverging aspects in the path of modernization and growth, ultimately revealing how alternative evolutionary and developmental strategies resulting from a new approach to Africa ended up shaping a new discourse on global design and planning.

13.2 The developmental approach of Constantinos Doxiadis1 In October 1959, the Greek architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis was invited to speak at a seminar in Warsaw. His lecture focused on Dynapolis, a model of the forthcoming city of the future.2 The model city served as a demonstration of the need for modernization and technical progress, especially in underdeveloped countries, to which Doxiadis and his firm had been paying particular attention since the mid-1950s (Doxiadis, 1960a). The brief theoretical outline published for the Warsaw seminar was followed by a more comprehensive dossier, released in January 1960 and printed by Doxiadis Associates (DA), in preparation for a lecture Doxiadis was to give in Oslo. Conceived as an internal document and accompanied by multiple charts, diagrams and plans, the file provided a detailed account of Doxiadis and his firm’s efforts in the field of urban planning. During these years, nearly all the activity of DA centred on Dynapolis, which gradually took shape as the interest of the firm shifted towards underdeveloped countries. An innovative concept developed by Doxiadis over a five-year period, Dynapolis was intrinsically dynamic in its developmental nature. The plans of Beirut, Baghdad and, most importantly, Khartoum, were among the best examples of what Doxiadis intended for Dynapolis. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the model city was to regulate and control all transformations occurring in countries “entering the era of development” (Doxiadis, 1960b).3 Through Dynapolis, Doxiadis attempted to give spatial application to his renowned ekistic approach and, at the same time, to further advance his long-standing interest in underdeveloped countries (d’Auria, 2016). Dynapolis was one of the first tools Doxiadis created to experiment with his post-ideological perspective. It also provided a solid theoretical basis for the new network of professionals acting on a global scale. Combining professional activity and theoretical reasoning, the Greek planner aimed at elaborating a veritable science of planning that could integrate political expectations with technical issues (Bromley, 2003).4 Dynapolis grew to become a model with which to plan and control development at the largest scale under a Western and technically-oriented imprint. Against this background, the African continent would play a contested but increasingly consistent role. The theoretical framework in which Dynapolis would later be inscribed was already clear to Doxiadis in 1955, when he accepted the invitation to speak at a conference with the theme ‘The Future of Freedom’. Sponsored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom and funded by the Ford Foundation, the international meeting was aimed at countering the cultural appeal of postwar Soviet communism and spreading the Atlantic consensus across the world (Scott-Smith, 2002, p. 2; Gilman, 2003, p. 56; Theodosis, 2015, pp. 76–84).5 Doxiadis, who was the only planner invited,6 centred his lecture on the economics of development and growth in underdeveloped countries (Doxiadis, 1955, p. 1).7 As technical modernization was to find its way across national borders, he argued, the issue of global development was to become 194

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a question of primary importance, to be pursued at all costs. For him, development was no longer a matter of political systems, especially in the young nation-states of the Third World, which, after the Second World War, had not yet achieved substantial political awareness.8 Whether through democratic or communist methods, Doxiadis said, what underdeveloped countries needed was the free circulation of knowledge and capitals. His aim was to demonstrate that freedom was essential for progress and modernization, and that the urban realm was the principal terrain on which this could be achieved. Beyond the ideological conflict between East and West, and against the rise of nationalisms, the post-ideological vision of Doxiadis stressed the need to stimulate private initiative – the energy and the enthusiasm displayed by each individual struggling for progress (Doxiadis, 1955, p. 8). At the same time, international agencies, global elites, and educational institutions would steer and structure the freedom of individual actions, thus counterbalancing the efforts of the newly independent national governments. For Doxiadis, these international agents provided for the speediest and largest “mobilization of leadership, capitals and labor forces” (Doxiadis, 1955, p. 10). In that sense, technical development was to drive the prospect of a political evolution, finally permitting the vision for a comprehensive plan of a global and post-ideological civilization.The idea of Dynapolis, conceived four years after the 1955 conference, was nothing more than the spatial rendering of those thoughts. In the years that followed the conference, Doxiadis took on the challenge of economic growth and development in a number of planning experiences around the world (Pyla, 1994; 2002). The planning tenets he developed through these projects had converged quite naturally into a sort of spatial abstraction, which emerged as the logical response to themes and topics already pointed to in 1955 (see Figure 13.1). As the field of development defined its disciplinary limits and methodology, Doxiadis – as a planner – was ready to play his part (Gilman, 2003, pp. 203–205).The first task was to make sense of the importance of these transformations in underdeveloped countries, as well as the significance of those countries in understanding and outlining the city of the future.To do this, Doxiadis assembled an impressive collection of data he had gathered in the course of his professional life.9 According to the available statistics, countries entering the era of development were about to undergo the fastest rate of economic growth in the world. In addition, the predicted trend mostly related to urban areas. Compared to the overall rate of growth, which was expected to remain stable for a long time, the number of people moving to cities was predicted to rise exponentially. Against this background, there was the need for a flexible, dynamic, and expandable structure, mirroring the end of ideologies, to which the Western imperative of modernization and economic growth could easily apply (Gilman, 2003, pp. 56–62).10 Dynapolis emerged as the logical answer, an instrument to guide individual initiative, steer the flow of capitals, and mobilize the labour force along the path of development. Doxiadis had already understood that the newly independent states of Asia and Africa were in the midst of an economic and political transition they had never before experienced. He argued that to reduce the length of the transitional phase as much as possible, growth had to be extremely rapid, supported by all means and pursued at all costs. Thus, time was a crucial element. Third World countries, Doxiadis contended, must be able to undergo their development through the implementation of an instrument of control that provided human initiative with the “freedom to develop freely and naturally along a planned and predetermined course”, thus allowing it to transcend physical limits and national borders, and progress towards a transnational perspective of democratic cooperation (Doxiadis, 1960b). With Dynapolis, Doxiadis succeeded in translating his post-ideological perspective into spatial principles. However, it was clear that the supposed freedom he claimed would need to be constrained by a predetermined course – the one guided by the Western ambition of control and power over countries struggling for development (Gilman, 2003, p. 59). As a consequence, 195

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Figure 13.1 Greater Khartoum Masterplan. Source: D-GA 324, Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives 2529, © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.

while elaborating Dynapolis, Doxiadis experimented with the development of a common theoretical ground, in which the desire for power and control could be framed as a matter of developmental need for which the Western countries could provide adequate technical solutions. Fundamentally, Dynapolis came to be a model that would interact with the newly established national governments and rein in their ideological impetus (Gilman, 2003, pp. 60–61). Upon that developmental platform, Doxiadis sought to build a network of professionals and officials who would at last put his planning tenets into practice, without foreclosing the possibility of further theoretical advancement. In the first stage, Africa remained in the background, and it was only at the end of the 1950s that the entire continent emerged as the most fertile terrain on which to explore the path of modernization in a global perspective.

13.3 The city of the future and the African turn On 19 January 1960, DA sent a grant application to Waldemar Nielsen, associate director of the Ford Foundation’s International Affairs Programme in New York. Officially, the application 196

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was submitted by the Athens Technological Institute (ATI), a branch of DA established in 1958 to handle research programmes worldwide (Bromley, 2003). Funds would be used to implement an 18-month educational project related to Islamabad, the newly designated capital of Pakistan, where Doxiadis had been serving as the main planning consultant since February 1959 (Mahsud, 2005, pp. 10–22; Doxiadis Associates, 1961a; Doxiadis Associates, 1964b). Indeed, the plan for the new Pakistani capital was gradually emerging as the most accomplished example of Dynapolis (Khan, 2011). For Doxiadis, Islamabad had to epitomize the way in which the city of the future should be implemented. Therefore, in order to disseminate his findings and test the ground for further research on a larger scale, Doxiadis turned to the Ford Foundation, with which he had already collaborated in 1958 (Provoost, 2006).The Athens Technological Institute and its educational arm, the Graduate School of Ekistics (GSE), was to disseminate research findings and achievements, as well as the theoretical implications resulting from the Pakistani test. Indeed, while the premise of the project rested largely on topics and themes featuring Islamabad’s design, its aims were broader and more ambitious.The underlying idea consisted in selecting and gathering relevant materials and making them available to “everybody concerned with the city of the future”. In this manner, Dynapolis became the centre of a global education programme designed to steer underdeveloped countries towards a techno-oriented Western model of growth (Wakeman, 2016).The successive opening of four branches of the Graduate School of Ekistics – in Indonesia,Venezuela, Colombia, and Ghana – between 1958 and 1960, further attests to this. Students enrolled in the planning and ekistics programmes were encouraged to follow classes in sociology, demography, economics, geography, history, transportation, housing, administration, architecture, and landscape architecture. Subsequent training in one of DA’s offices would later enable each participant to become familiar with the firm’s professional practice, acknowledging his virtual membership in a circle of professionals across the world. The ultimate goal of Doxiadis was clear: while generating a growing interest in what the city of the future should look like, he sought to establish a class of global experts that would export his post-ideological technocratic model beyond the Western hemisphere. The grant was approved in March 1960 and two months later, the research project The City of the Future (COF) was launched.11 During the preparatory phases, Doxiadis was in contact with international specialists and agencies. In September 1960, after formulating research guidelines, he issued the first document on the scope and the design of the project (Doxiadis, 1960c). Following an agreement with the Ford Foundation, the research group set aside the plan of Islamabad, which became the mere background of a more elaborate structure. Additionally, aspects such as training, education, and technical skills were greatly emphasized. The aim was to develop the city of the future as an “abstract and theoretical model” through which the massive growth of existing cities could be addressed. In other words, the research project developed from the need to test Dynapolis on a global scale. Indeed, education came about as a consequence of the need for practice. For Doxiadis, the COF should be an open-ended manual of recommendations resulting from continuous action. Planning and design experts would be dispatched across the globe to collect information and materials from local administrators and technicians. However, the aims of the project were not merely technical. While offering services to countries and governments looking for rational planning solutions, Doxiadis sought to control the expertise for managing future transformations and to steer the forthcoming mechanisms of growth towards a predetermined developmental path. What Doxiadis envisioned was far from being a do-it-yourself method. On the contrary, it was rather an encrypted vocabulary of planning which would be put into practice by the same 197

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professionals who had been educated in and entrusted with its conception and assemblage. Indeed, experts involved in the research project were asked to explore the possible implementation of Dynapolis in the surveys they were carrying out around the world (Doxiadis, 1960d). It was in this context that Africa, with an absence of big cities but the projected growth of its centres, began to emerge as a privileged site. In fact, it was the only geographical location to which Doxiadis explicitly referred during the inaugural meeting of COF researchers. Nonetheless, apart from the reasons related to ongoing transformations, his interest in Africa also aligned with the political and cultural concerns of the Ford Foundation, which looked to educational projects as a tool for development and control, especially in the countries of the Third World. Until the end of the 1950s, most of its funds had been directed to the governments of India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia. Something new occurred in 1959, when the interest of the Foundation turned to the African continent as one of their main investment sites (Sutton, 1960). Africa had been always considered a domain of the European powers. Nevertheless, the vacuum left by the end of colonial rule, and the consequent rise of nationalism led to a fundamental shift. For the first time, the United States were forced to move in – “motivated by the self-interest to counter a possible Soviet involvement” (Ajami, 1970). The East-West dimension and the Soviet threat were the key issues that drove American attention towards Africa, which was then emerging as “the greatest open field of maneuver in the worldwide competition between the bloc and the non-communist world” (Schraeder, 1994, p. 15). Among the agents of US foreign policy, private foundations were tasked with undertaking early political action, and Ford was on the front line. Waldemar Nielsen – associate director of the International Affairs Programme, and profoundly involved in African matters – played a pivotal role in re-orienting the research project (Nielsen, 1969). In December 1960, he met with Doxiadis in New York and they agreed to disregard South Asia and Pakistan, and instead focus on Africa. There, increasing intra-territorial conferences and projects, as well as a renewed Pan-African enthusiasm could be the background against which to challenge an alarming balkanized geography and establish programmes on a continental scale. In that sense, Ford’s geo-political motivation coincided with Doxiadis’ need to test his dynamic, post-ideological model at the largest scale. Leaving behind the nation-centred action that characterized the late 1950s, the world was becoming the ultimate horizon of planning, and Africa the largest platform on which to project methods and tools for a global strategy of control (Sutton, 2000). However, the role of the African continent – and the subsequent claim for its potential unity – soon became a contested topic, subject to different interpretations and readings.

13.4 Hassan Fathy and the role of the African continent The Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy was one of the first consultants involved in the COF. As all agreed that the aims of the project should be initially field-tested in Africa, there was great anticipation regarding the results of the continental survey. Fathy’s experience made him an ideal match; he was familiar with the topics Doxiadis was developing, having already collaborated with the firm first as a practitioner and then as a teacher at the Graduate School of Ekistics (Pyla, 2007). Hassan Fathy left Athens for Cairo on 7 December 1960. His three-month fieldwork included over 20 cities in North and sub-Saharan Africa. According to an early travel plan, the trip was to cover the entire continent, departing from Cairo to Khartoum and Juba, then moving south to Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam and Beita, then west to Brazzaville, Yaoundé, Fort-Lamy, Kano and Monrovia, and finally northward to Tunis and back to Cairo. However, stops south of Douala 198

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were cut off to favour some West African sites. The final travel plan included 22 cities, which were then reduced to 18 due to the lack of regular flight connections between Khartoum, Juba, Geneina and Fort-Lamy (see Figure 13.2). As a result, Fathy was forced to fly directly from Sudan to Nigeria, thus leaving out large areas of western Sudan and Chad, about which he had had great expectations. After landing in Cairo and visiting Khartoum, Lagos and Kano, he moved to Cameroon. Once back to the Atlantic coast, he travelled through Togoland, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Liberia, Guinea, and Senegal, finally reaching North Africa with just one stop in Tripoli. Forced to alter his schedule numerous times on account of health troubles, Fathy had serious problems maintaining regular contact with the project deputy director, Mr. Papaioannou, who had requested, on behalf of Doxiadis, that Fathy’s travel plans also include East Africa – Mogadishu, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam. Despite this, during his travels, Fathy was able to offer DA some of the reasoning he would later employ in Athens. In a letter sent from Abidjan on 11 February 1961, he raised two points

Figure 13.2 The African survey of Hassan Fathy. Source: D-COF 7, Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives 23634, © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.

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that would be crucial in the reports that would follow. The first was explicitly related to planning. Fathy immediately pointed out that Dynapolis – a “thing for Africa more than for anywhere else”12 – was the only way to defeat the chaos that the African city was experiencing.The second point was directed at local authorities who, according to Fathy, should be aware of the assistance coming from research and educational endeavours, like those that COF was undertaking. These two assertions were to become the cornerstones upon which the Egyptian architect built his vision for Africa, essentially expressed in the introductory report he drafted a few months after his return to Athens (Fathy, 1961a). Convinced that development should follow from a “well-established” economic and political hierarchy, Fathy started refusing what he designated as the “state of apartness” that then characterized the African city.13 Rather, he said, the aim was to trigger a process of growth that lead cooperating “race-sectors” to work and interact with one another, reaching a stable and homogeneous condition. Beyond that, there was his unshakable faith in inscribing each human action within its ultimate end, the total integration of man and nature in a symbiotic and harmonious whole. Urbanization was not an exception to that rule, and it was naturally considered by Fathy as something inherently connected to the process of human evolution. Apart from representing the mere satisfaction of a sociable or, as Fathy termed it, “gregarious” instinct, the city had a specific role in the fulfilment of human destiny, and it was for that reason that he repeatedly wondered what the African city was for, and for what purpose people tended to come together into larger and larger towns. Such preliminary reasoning was marked by a highly spiritual stance, and acted on a twofold plan: on the one hand, he hypothesized, they prevented planning from being something merely related to practical problems like traffic flow and population growth. On the other, those arguments would have helped to inscribe planning in a broader process: in order to understand how the African city would enable its citizens to promote the city of the future, it was crucial to consider urbanization as the long-term goal of Nature, and to promote the total integration of human society and universe. The evolutionary discourse of Fathy stemmed from the Darwinian ideas of natural selection and species conservation. However, being deprived of their mechanistic aspects, these ideas were burdened with a teleological faith, and were explicitly employed to understand how urbanization could contribute to the broader path of evolution. For Fathy, the city was to be considered a vital link in the chain that included primary impulses such as marriage, reproduction, and the protection of children, and it led to the continuation of the species towards its evolution (Fathy, 1961a). Against this background, urbanization in Africa had to play a key role: to ultimately achieve its goal and participate in the fulfilment of human destiny, the African city should undertake a complete process of morphogenesis. Any discourse of growth, expansion and development would make no sense unless embedded in an evolutionary prospect aimed at re-placing the African urban culture in its proper setting. Fathy was aware of the fact that Africa was on the threshold of an epochal turn, as demonstrated by the rate of increase of urban population and the speed of the transformations he had observed. Nevertheless, the “state of apartness” that marked the African city was so acute that, he claimed, no hypothesis of urban evolution could be advanced on that basis (Fathy, 1961a). In this sense, his considerations were not far from those of Doxiadis. The Greek planner, who had put Africa and polar areas on the same level, yearned to find a new tabula rasa where new big cities could freely grow. However, compared to Doxiadis’ quantity-based and technologically-driven vision, the approach of Fathy was much more complex and, to some extent, intricate: a consideration of urbanization as one of the crucial steps in the evolution of Nature – such that of Fathy - entailed framing the city of the future very differently from Doxiadis’ developmental vision. Fathy conceded that Africa had the right to 200

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choose its own path according to what its native and creative imagination could offer human civilization, and contended that the whole continent should have a pioneering role in exploring the future of the city. For him, urban growth was not the end of a mere developmental process but the starting point of a reinforced evolutionary frame in which a set of appropriate devices could be formulated. It was useless, he argued, to reproduce solutions or borrow ready-made answers that had already led to the end of European culture. At the dawn of a new era in Africa, there was the need to cope with settlement patterns that were changing faster than anywhere else in the world. According to Fathy, difficulties resulting from unnatural and imbalanced growth should be tackled according to the condition of impermanence that characterized the African city, with the gradual implementation of some adaptable and versatile solutions. Nonetheless, he insisted, there was no time to let natural selection take its course. Such a metamorphic, evolutionary jump – which would have allowed the African continent to move forward and write its new history – had to be free of trials and errors, considered to be costly and time-consuming. Because at the time the African city was unable to provide any improvements in human living standards, it was up to the Western nations to first propose, and then assist in undertaking, an appropriate course of action. Keenly aware of the responsibility Westerners had accumulated in Africa over the centuries, Fathy argued that now it was their duty to help liberate and encourage African imagination and creativity. While expanding on the evolutionary perspective he had deduced from his fieldwork, Fathy raised two crucial points. The first, grounded in the dramatic conditions he had observed, referred to the search for a continental specificity that would project the African city into the future and allow for the achievement of a homogenous and harmonious condition. The second point, emerging as a consequence of the first, questioned whom would be in charge of such achievements, in technical and political terms (Fathy, 1961a).

13.5 Dynapolis in Africa In the months that followed the draft of the introductory report, Fathy systematized his assessment and finished around ten monographic files on the cities he had visited. Some of them – Cairo, Kano, Lagos, and Abidjan – were also accompanied by photographs, drawings and plans (see Figure 13.3). All these materials mostly aimed at verifying how effectively the layout of Dynapolis could handle the problems of density and growth affecting the African city, and in which way the forces acting within the urban body could converge into a minimal – or at least optimum – configuration. To achieve this, Fathy simply overlapped the grid of Dynapolis onto the existing fabric of each city. What emerged was something very powerful, located halfway between analysis and design, which rendered clear the gaps and imbalances that characterized African urban patterns at that time.14 As a matter of fact, the ultimate pursuit of COF was not to provide specific schemes or plans, but rather to question whether or not Dynapolis could be the most appropriate tool for coping with the growth of cities. Fathy’s tentative drafts headed in this direction, although most of the issues he had raised shifted from the line established by Doxiadis. While he deduced that neither the indigenous township nor the European nucleus could trigger any sort of evolutionary trend, he also rejected the notion of the African city as a sort of tabula rasa. Thus, Fathy laid the basis for extracting design solutions from what was already on site. In doing so, he devised some inspiring principles beyond those that emerge from the examination and detailing of specific problems related to each site. Problems and solutions regarding quality of life had to be investigated, he said, not only in terms of data: thus, for instance, gaps resulting from the previous unbalanced growth – especially those between 201

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Figure 13.3 Plan of the Greater Kano (Dynapolis). Source: D-COF 8, Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives 19866, © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.

technical advancements and traditional materials – called for the implementation of creative architectural solutions. Stemming from a large educational push, these would be the key to trigger the “genetic” evolution that Fathy sought. On the other hand, to make evolution organically balanced and expandable, beyond abstract subdivisions and national borders, Fathy gradually envisaged the need for a wider approach.The regional scale thus emerged as the most appropriate field to encompass geographical and human factors in a more suitable perspective: “as the Dynapolis principles are applied more widely, to embrace the concept of Dynaregion, the importance of a time-scale adapted to the growth of the city and the region becomes more and more clear” (Fathy, 1961b). The detailed analysis he carried out in Cairo, Kano, Oumdurman, Khartoum, Lagos, Abidjan, Bouake, Ouagadougou,Togo and Dahomey, and Tripoli displayed with increasing evidence how the African city resulted from the contradictory combination of elements differing in their constitutive qualities. Beyond the claim for an evolutionary perspective and the need for an overall harmony of parts, Fathy’s ultimate goal was to prove that Dynapolis was the only instrument ensuring the “flexible relationship of urban organisms within the region”. The model city would operate as a large-scale ekistic pattern – first along a regional scale and then expanding to the entire continent – and thereby provide for the overall balance, while “space sectoring and time staging” would fulfil the need for safeguarding specificity and diversity, consequently stimulating the imagination and creativity of cooperating communities (Fathy, 1961a, p. 20). Those were 202

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the issues that needed to be addressed for the African city to attain its complete morphogenesis. However, Fathy understood that Dynapolis could fit only contexts marked by a higher degree of instability; as these evolved and tended to their optimum configuration, Dynapolis should be replaced by something more appropriate that could mirror the new balance: The Dynapolis configuration and pattern of growth will hold good for human settlements while our present space-time relationships persist. But once communications, for example, have changed our relationship to space and time, then Dynapolis will have to be totally revised. The optimum configuration of the settlement will change as the determining forces change. (Fathy, 1961c) The most urgent question now laid in understanding who was responsible for implementing all of this. For Fathy, the problem was one of technique, not intention:15 his survey demonstrated how the entire continent suffered from a deep lack of “experts in all fields” (Fathy, 1961b, p. 5). At the same time, he was strongly persuaded that the main concern was to avoid perpetuating the balance of power that had characterized the former colonial period: if it was true that Africa was on the threshold of a new epoch, those mechanisms of dependence—still supported by some African leaders – had to be overcome by all means.16 In order to trigger a process of independence and let Africa stand on its own, he said, support for training and education was crucial, and likely much more important than any material or financial aid: the new Africa must be built by Africans themselves in the frame of a continent-wide and rational plan, and Westerners should be ready to take up this cause, as they were chiefly responsible for the continent’s underdeveloped condition. It was in this context that Fathy conceived of his vision of evolution, as well as the only way to implement the African City of the Future. African governments should hire Western professionals “with no political or commercial bias” to draw up plans that would address the mass of ongoing heterogeneous activities and enable all interests to work together (Fathy, 1961b, p. 7). In this sense, politics played a key role, and initiatives like those undertaken by the Kennedy administration – which encouraged young American technicians to relocate to underdeveloped countries – were welcomed by Fathy with growing enthusiasm (Fathy, 1961b, p. 8). In order to avoid any possible divergence between “the City of the Future and the countryside of the future in Africa”, the first step was to “fill the infrastructure of the ekistic pattern” (Fathy, 1961b, p. 7). As such, Fathy’s discourse shifted from theoretical, evolutionary premises to more practical conclusions, which focused on politics and planning matters. Ultimately, he came to deem infrastructure as the basis upon which to develop an ekistic pattern and to expand intervention to the largest scale possible. He turned to infrastructure after having investigated and tested Doxiadis’ theoretical models, leading the way in implementing what resulted from his field research in terms of design practice. For his part, Doxiadis largely benefitted from Fathy’s conclusions as all his fieldwork materials were subsequently used to conceive what would later become the first continental plan for Africa. Fathy ended his collaboration with the COF research project on 7 November 1961, after delivering a lecture emblematically entitled “Dynapolis in Africa” (Fathy, 1961d). During his last speech, he repeatedly underlined how the “battle for the development of Africa” had to be fought at the largest scale possible and rely first and foremost on Africans themselves: “without exploiting the potential skill of the African, there can be no future for the continent”. This was ever truer when considering the chasm between Africa and the ever-increasing influx of Western technology and money (Fathy, 1961d). On 11 October, one month before Fathy’s departure, DA released a document titled “Regional Development Through Transport in Africa” (Doxiadis 203

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Associates, 1961b). It was likely that Fathy was among those who inspired the draft report. Initially included in the activities of the COF, the document would be later converted into a more extensive text known as the Africa Transport Plan (Doxiadis Associates, 1962; Doxiadis Associates, 1964a).

13.6 From infrastructure to Ecumenopolis “Regional Development Through Transport in Africa” was the first attempt to put the conclusions of Hassan Fathy into a design-oriented perspective. Both the interest in infrastructure and the use of the widest possible approach stemmed directly from the work of Fathy, which had gradually turned to infrastructure in order to tackle the question of how the harmonious overall balance he was arguing for could actually be attained. At the same time, infrastructure was also one of the key issues for those institutions dealing with African post-colonial development. In 1961, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) held a meeting with West African transport and public works ministries on the role of transnational roads and railways (UNECA, 1961b). The position of UNECA was clear: as a major obstacle to economic growth, transport deficiencies had to be overcome as soon as possible. Topics other than infrastructure were substantially neglected. In the position paper that preceded the conference, published in the June 1961 issue of Ekistics, there was no reference to urban issues, although it was implied that transport problems were mostly related to imbalances in population density and distribution (UNECA, 1961a). With the Africa Transport Plan, Doxiadis tried to merge theoretical and institutional issues, in order to stress his perspective of urban growth to the broadest scale. On the one hand, Doxiadis fully acknowledged solicitations coming from the African governments. On the other, he turned such a political and institutional claim into an instrument with which to enhance his theoretical approach. Doxiadis’ preliminary points logically followed from Fathy’s conclusions. Like the Egyptian architect, he considered Africa as a separate continental entity endowed with its own political and economic character. On that basis, the first task was to dissociate from external influences and instead recuperate the traditional layout of transnational exchanges and inland networks, which had been gradually abandoned due to coastal colonization. Africa had to turn towards its own interior, Doxiadis argued, in order to expand its economic base and discover the proper setting for its future urban growth. At that time, though not suffering from overpopulation, Africa was not even able to feed itself. Against this background, infrastructure emerged as the primary tool to re-establish exchanges between the coastal and inland regions and occupy the underpopulated and uninhabited lands spread over the continent. “Looking inward”, in the words of Doxiadis, meant challenging the outward pattern established by colonial powers and, at the same time, laying the groundwork for a balanced development (Doxiadis Associates, 1961b). Admittedly, while borrowing its theoretical bases from Fathy’s conclusions, the discourse of Doxiadis differed substantially in its ultimate purposes. The balanced development he was calling for radically diverged from the harmonious whole that would have eventually placed the African continent on the course to a future civilization. Though sharing a common approach, Doxiadis and Fathy were going their separate ways. Compared to Fathy, indeed, Doxiadis was merely presenting Africans with a direct incentive for their full-scale modernization and growth, but he was not permitting them to play any sort of active role. There was no means for Africans to find the way on their own, as the final goals had been already been set by supranational institutions such as UNECA, UNESCO or the UN Special Fund for Development.17 At this stage, the main decisions were to be taken at the highest level, and Doxiadis attempted to 204

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take full advantage of this structure of power. Apart from his efforts in countering the former colonial pattern, he ended up aligning his strategy with the proposals coming from transnational bodies. Economic growth, to be pursued quickly and at all costs, had to depend exclusively on mechanization and technological improvement, no matter how they occurred. An investment in infrastructure was the surest way to guarantee the free circulation of goods, so as to increase the volume of trade within and outside the African continent. Furthermore, neither international institutions nor global experts like Doxiadis had any interest in leaving Africa lagging behind, as its economic growth would certainly bring enormous benefits not only to African people but to the Western world. For Doxiadis, growth implied first the monetization of the exchange as much as possible. Unlike Fathy, he considered imperative the maximum exploitation of the available resources and the sale of the greatest amount of output, two facts that demanded, in turn, the highest degree of connection and accessibility. On the one hand, road and railway networks were the essential tools for implementing and developing his theoretical model, an ekistic pattern extended up to a regional scale; on the other hand, and most importantly, infrastructure was instrumental to prefigure a new economics, as well as to favour the flow of Western capitals throughout the continent. Mechanization in transportation systems would require an increase in energy supply, as well as an optimization of resource exploitation, conditions that required growing Western investments and technological improvements (UNECA, 1961a). With this strategy, the Greek planner expected to counter the lack of an economic base and to challenge the consequent underemployment that had marked the urban areas of the African continent. Beyond the long-standing dichotomy between practical matters and theoretical issues, Doxiadis was heading towards his ultimate goal. Like his Egyptian colleague, he never gave up underscoring the importance of urban development, as well as the significance of the framework within which such development should arise. For both men, placing the city at centre stage entailed leaving behind balkanized nation-state policies, and turning to institutions calling for regional cooperation and unity. Unlike Fathy, however, Doxiadis looked to Africa as the testing ground of a technologically driven urban layout on a global scale, which would call into question the very nature of the city. Far from triggering a process of site-specific evolution, and setting the continent on the path towards global civilization, the narrative of the Greek planner aimed instead at developing a model of growth focused on a global system. In Doxiadis’ perspective, the economic takeoff was not a matter of training local people to work on their own, but relied on the possibility of purchasing and monetizing the labour force to the fullest extent. Such an enlarged perspective, which entailed the growing circulation of people and money, as well as an ever-increasing supply and demand of resources, also required a new theoretical frame in which infrastructure had to play a key role. As a matter of fact, Doxiadis’ theoretical focus had already moved from Dynapolis to a more extended and comprehensive system. In January 1961, during Fathy’s travels in Africa, Doxiadis issued “Towards Ecumenopolis”, a confidential report that focused on how to devise a “different approach” to the City of the Future. Unlike Dynapolis, which projected the past model of growth forward in order to gradually predict what would happen in the next hundred years, Ecumenopolis consisted first in pre-establishing the farthest layout, as if the whole Earth were covered by one big city, and then working backward to understand how to shape the settlements of the proximal future (Doxiadis 1961a).18 With Ecumenopolis, Doxiadis extended his interest above and beyond built-up areas to include the productive and natural environment. In that framework, infrastructure was first intended as the skeleton of a body covering the entire globe and resulting from the balance between settlements, production and nature. The notion of optimum configuration had definitively evolved into 205

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something else: to truly fulfil its destiny, the city was supposed to reach the maximum possible extension. For Doxiadis, there was no longer room for creative solutions, as both the environmental balance and its formal layout depended on and mirrored the highest level of technical advancement. Substantially underpopulated and technologically backward, but possessing enormous potential, the African continent seemed to Doxiadis the best terrain to reenact a comprehensive process of development in which all factors of growth would be involved and, most importantly, controlled. Suffering from a lack of big cities - he wrote in his second report on Ecumenopolis – Africa was the largest and most suitable area to welcome inbound capitals and investments. For Doxiadis, Africa was the ideal testing ground for implementing a set of transitional economies marked by the highest rate of increase (Doxiadis 1961b). The flow and circulation of money would have gradually supported production and technical advancement, the two crucial requirements to expand urban organisms and reach an appropriate balance between settlements, nature and productive areas. The Africa Transport Plan was intended to provide the basic layout of that vision. Indeed, the ultimate horizon of Doxiadis was the global city. Although the Africa Transport Plan remained on paper, the COF research team kept formulating studies on West Africa. Thematic charts related to demography, resources, education, trade and migration were combined with the infrastructural analysis provided by the Africa Transport Plan. What resulted – a set of maps displaying settlements, routes, railways and human corridors – was to be the first step in understanding which factors to consider when forecasting Ecumenopolis, the world city to come (see Figure 13.4).

Figure 13.4 Ecumenopolis in West Africa, D-COF 1115, Constantinos A. Source: Doxiadis Archives 25882, © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.

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13.7 Conclusion In less than three years, the African continent became the platform where worldwide concerns converged. Relying on political and economic interests, the planning and architectural debate found in Africa the terrain on which to ground alternative strategies for development. Geographical features and the overall political condition, indeed, prompted major agents of development to consider Africa as one single entity, provided with its own specific character. To counter former colonial dependence, as well as the resulting political balkanization, international institutions and private foundations operating in Africa were asked to cope with national claims and supranational ambitions. For their part, professionals in architecture and planning started looking at transnational theories and practices, aiming at extending their action to the largest possible scale. Nonetheless, the need to spread Western technical progress enabled global experts to put theoretical assumptions and models into practice. Aligned with this renewed perspective of growth, such a novel professional challenge required reformulating, from the ground up, the postwar planning discourse – then suffering the decline of its most important institutions.19 While developing countries emerged as a privileged terrain to try out new directions in urban design and planning, professionals and technicians began elaborating models and abstract solutions that could align with the new capital-based and Western-driven order. However, the effort of applying abstract models to Africa reveals the challenges and ambiguities of the path towards modernization. On the one hand, all attempts to channel the African way of life into a predetermined course failed.The skills of the African people were set aside in the name of development, and Fathy’s claim of an evolutionary leap that would place Africa in the course of world civilizations also fell on deaf ears. On the other hand, it was not for naught: indeed, the African survey had served as a test to verify how theoretical ambitions matched with the expansion of the professional practice, especially when supranational institutions took the lead as the major agents of urban transformation and development. For the first time, experts were called to elaborate long-term and large-scale solutions that went far beyond the scale they were familiar with. Such a renovated approach drove architects to focus on topics outside their usual scope. Infrastructure became the field in which to conceive and apply the most effective mechanisms of control and growth. In this sense, the African survey, resulting from the joint work of Doxiadis and Fathy, had a pioneering role. Enabling the first ever continent-wide scheme – the Africa Transport Plan – it opened the way to new and unprecedented thinking on global planning.While its implementation partially failed, its theoretical influence was much more effective, as it displayed, for the first time, the possibility of planning a global process of growth. The African continent had substantially missed the point raised by Fathy. As a matter of fact, the developmental approach set by the agents of modernization left no space for African specificities. Nevertheless, the role of the continent was made even more relevant: Africa turned into a veritable instrument of theoretical evolution, being the first terrain on which to plan the global city of the future (Doxiadis and Papaioannou, 1974).

Notes 1 The present study stems from a Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carried out in spring 2016. It has been completed between 2017 and 2018 thanks to the irreplaceable helpfulness of the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, in the person of Mrs. Giota Pavlidou. 2 The direct correspondence between Dynapolis and the city of the future was made evident by the document’s title, “Dynapolis the City of the Future”. See Doxiadis, 1960b. 207

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3 The document included plans for Athens, Western Baghdad, Eastwick, Washington DC, Khartoum, Beirut, Caracas and Karachi. See Doxiadis, 1960b. 4 In the words of Louis Winnick, former project officer at the Ford Foundation, “no matter how engrossed in commercial activities, he (Doxiadis) made time to refine the doctrines of Ekistics; the philosopher did not permit the entrepreneur to forsake the temple for the agora”. Quoted in Bromley, 2003, p. 320. 5 Scott-Smith defined the Congress as the intellectual equivalent to the Marshall Plan. The “Future of Freedom” conference was held in Milan at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnica. Among the participants were the French sociologist Raymond Aron and the American social scientists Edward Shils and Seymour Martin Lipset. See Gilman, 2003, pp. 56–62. 6 Doxiadis was invited by the Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov, who he had met in Athens in around 1954. See Theodosis, 2015, p. 78. 7 In 1955, Doxiadis was taking the first steps into the planning market of underdeveloped countries. As referred by Sutton, then officer at the Ford Foundation, (see Sutton, 2000), Doxiadis had already been in touch with the Foundation in 1954 when he sought support for the first Pakistan housing and urban development plan. In that case, Doxiadis served as a consultant for the Harvard Development Advisory Group. 8 Doxiadis’ reasoning was well aligned to that of the other participants. Particularly relevant is the affinity to the approach of Seymour M. Lipset. See Gilman, 2003, p. 61. 9 Data, schemes and diagrams were subsequently included in the booklet titled “Dynapolis. The City of the Future” and printed for the 1960 Oslo Conference. See Doxiadis 1960b. 10 The notion of “end of ideologies” is commonly related to a doctrine of modernization theorists heralding “the victory over the vital center liberalism over the totalitarian and populist threats of left and right”. Despite that, those claiming the end of the age of ideologies “were justifying the imposition of American values and capitalist economic practices all over the world”. See Gilman, 2003, p. 57. 11 The Athens Technological Institute was asked to reconsider the entire structure of the project, and the tentative title was adapted to suit a wider audience. See Doxiadis, 1960c. 12 From a handwritten manuscript addressed to John Papaioannou and sent from Abidjan on 11 February 1961. 13 To fully express his conviction, Fathy referred to the example of Kano. See Fathy, 1961a, p. 5. 14 In the COF introductory report, Doxiadis repeatedly asked the experts to verify on field the hypothesis previously set by the research team in Athens. See Doxiadis, 1961c. 15 Fathy borrowed the expression from Alfred Sauvy, the French sociologist who coined the term Third World. See Fathy, 1961b, p. 10. 16 In his report, Fathy made explicit mention of the President of Ivory Coast, Houphouet-Boigny, who was still claiming the help of France after his country’s independence. See Fathy, 1961b, p. 3. 17 The Africa Transport Plan was directly supported by the UN Special Fund for Development, then headed by Paul Hoffman. Hoffman had previously served as the director of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), nominated by President Truman in 1948. See the correspondence between DA and the UN Special Funds. Doxiadis Archives S-D 5798; S-D 6108. 18 The document was written by Constantinos Doxiadis with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 19 The Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM), the most important institution of the Modern Movement met up for the last time in Otterlo, in 1959.The end of the CIAM marked the state of crisis of Modernism in Architecture.

References Ajami, F. (1970). The Great Powers and Africa by Waldemar Nielsen. Africa Studies Review, 13, 3: 489–492. Bromley, R. (2003).Towards Global Human Settlements: Constantinos Doxiadis as Entrepreneur, CoalitionBuilder and Visionary. In Nasr J.,Volait M. Urbanism: Imported or Exported? Native Aspirations and Foreign Plans. Chichester: Wiley-Academy: 316-340. d’Auria,V. (2016).Taming an ‘Undisciplined Discipline’. Constantinos Doxiadis and the Science of Human Settlements, OASE, 95: 8–21. Doxiadis Associates (1961a). The Spirit of Islamabad. Ekistics, 12, 73: 315–335. Doxiadis Associates (1961b). Regional Development Through Transport in Africa. Unpublished report. DOX-GA 2. Doxiadis Archives 18731. 208

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Doxiadis Associates (1962). Toward an African Transport Plan. Unpublished report. DOX-GA 3. Doxiadis Archives 23285. Doxiadis Associates (1964a). Toward an African Transport Plan. DA Bulletin 63. Doxiadis Associates (1964b). Islamabad. The New Capital of Pakistan. DA Bulletin 64. Doxiadis, C. A. (1955). Economic Progress in Underdeveloped Countries and the Rivalry of Democratic and Communist Methods. Unpublished paper presented at “The Future of Freedom, An International Conference Sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom”. Doxiadis Archives 6872. Doxiadis, C. A. (1960a). Dynapolis the City of the Future. Ekistics, 9, 51: 5–20. Doxiadis, C. A. (1960b). Dynapolis the City of the Future. Lecture at the Oslo Arkitekforening, Oslo, on March 3rd, 1960. Athens: Doxiadis Associates Consulting Engineers. Doxiadis, C. A. (1960c). An Analysis of the Scope and the Design of the Project. Unpublished report prepared for the Research Project “The City of the Future”. R-ERES 1. Doxiadis Archives 17351. Doxiadis, C. A. (1960d). Questions by the Team Members and Answers by D on the Project and its Contents. Unpublished report prepared for the Research Project “The City of the Future”. R-ERES 1. Doxiadis Archives 17351. Doxiadis, C. A. (1961a). Toward Ecumenopolis. A Different Approach to the Problem of “The City of the Future”. Unpublished report prepared for the Research Project “The City of the Future”. R-ERES 6. Doxiadis Archives 17351. Doxiadis, C. A. (1961b). Trying to Define Ecumenopolis. Unpublished report prepared for the Research Project “The City of the Future”. R-ERES 6. Doxiadis Archives 17351. Doxiadis, C. A. Papaioannou, J. G. (1974). Ecumenopolis. The Inevitable City of the Future. Athens: The Athens Center of Ekistics. Fathy, H. (1961a). Reports on Towns Visited in North and West Africa – Introduction. Unpublished report prepared for the Research Project “The City of the Future”. R-ERES 14. Doxiadis Archives 18404. Fathy, H. (1961b). Africa. Case Studies of Cities Visited. Unpublished report prepared for the Research Project “The City of the Future”. R-ERES 15 (11). Doxiadis Archives 18404. Fathy, H. (1961c). C.O.F. – Contribution to the Final Report – General Introduction. Unpublished report prepared for the Research Project “The City of the Future”. R-ERES 24 (1). Doxiadis Archives 18607. Fathy, H. (1961d). Dynapolis in Africa. Ekistics, 12, 71: 206–208. Gilman, N. (2003). Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Hein, C. (2017). The Exchange of Planning Ideas from Europe to the USA After the Second World War: Introductory Thoughts and a Call for Further Research. Planning Perspectives, 29, 2: 143–151. Khan, A. Z. (2011). Toward Sustainable Built Environment. Understanding Sustainability Prospects in a Metropolitan Framework. The Case of Islamabad. Journal Research in Architecture and Planning, 11, 2: 31–55. Mahsud, A. Z. (2005). Doxiadis’ Legacy of Urban Design: Adjusting and Amending the Model. Ekistics, 72: 1–23. Nielsen, W. (1969). The Great Powers and Africa. New York: Praeger. Provoost, M. (2006). New Towns on the Cold War Frontier. Lettre Internationale, 11. s.p. https​://ww​w.eur​ ozine​.com/​new-t​owns-​on-th​e-col​d-war​-fron​tier-​4/. Consulted on Sept. 01 2019. Pyla, P. (1994). Revising Scientific Epistemology in the Architecture: Ekistics and the Modernism in the Middle East. Unpublished Thesis for the Degree of Master of Science in Architecture Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pyla, P. (2002). Ekistics, Architecture and Environmental Politics, 1945–1976: A Prehistory of Sustainable Development. Unpublished Thesis for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture: History and Theory of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pyla, P. (2007). Hassan Fathy Revisited. Postwar Discourses on Science, Development and Vernacular Architecture. Journal of Architectural Education, 60, 3: 28–39. Sauvy, A. (1952). Trois mondes, une planète. L’Observateur, 118: 14. Schraeder, P. J. (1994). United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott-Smith, G. (2002). The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the End of Ideology and the 1955 Milan Conference: ‘Defining the Parameters of Discourse’. Journal of Contemporary History, 37, 3: 437–455. Shoshkes, R. and Adler, S. (2009). Planning for Healthy People/Healthy Places: Lessons from Mid‐twentieth Century Global Discourse. Planning Perspectives, 24, 2: 197–217. Sutton, F. (1960).The Ford Foundation’s Development Programs in Africa. African Studies Bulletin, 3, 4: 1–7. 209

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Sutton, F. (2000). The Ford Foundation’s Urban Programs Overseas: Changes and Continuities. Unpublished paper. Theodosis, L. (2015). Victory over Chaos? Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Ekistics 1945–1975. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, ETSA Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya: Barcelona. UNECA (1961a). Report on the First Session of the West-African Transport Conference (held at Monrovia, Liberia, from 23 to 27 October 1961). Unpublished report. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Archives E/CN. 14/147; E/CN. 14/ TRANSP/ WP.24. UNECA (1961b). Transport Problems in Relation to Economic Development in West Africa. Ekistics 11, 68: 506–510. Wakeman, R. (2014). Rethinking postwar planning history. Planning Perspectives, 29, 2: 153–163. Wakeman, R. (2016). Practicing Utopia. An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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14 New towns in Algeria Planned process to control the accelerated urbanization, case of Sidi Abdellah and Ali Mendjeli Nadia Chabi and Khalil Bouhadjar

14.1 Introduction Since the middle of the 20th century, the process of urbanization has accelerated rapidly in most countries, surpassing the strategies adopted by governments, particularly in developing countries.The city raises problems associated with its growth, planning, management, and so on. Indeed, the expansion of cities is a reality that imposes itself on all governments as a thorny issue requiring substantial efforts. In order to master and solve the problems linked to the city, especially those related to its growth, several countries have introduced the concept of new town. Polysemous and ambiguous, the concept of new town takes different connotations according to time and space. However, some authors like Serhir (2013, p. 1) uses the term new city “to qualify a new entity as opposed to the old one… or to appoint the new entities extra muros as opposed to ‘old cities’ within the framework of the dual structure of the Moroccan and European main cities”. For other authors, this concept can be defined in relation to their finality. According to the French law of 13 July 1983, the new cities are created “to ensure a better social, economic and human balance within the areas with a high concentration of population by providing housing and employment opportunities as well as public and private facilities” (Guirauden, 1998). Moreover, the transition from the concept of a new city (mental idea) to its implementation and its realization on the ground is a complex process. The creation of new towns, from their planning up to their management, is an arduous and difficult task because, according to Serhir (2013, p. 7), the experience shows that there is “a gap between the desired one, the possible one and the realized”. Nevertheless, to believe that the creation of a new city is the prerogative of contemporary times, it is to ignore the history of the city (Mumford, 2011). Indeed, the creation of new cities existed since the first civilizations. If at the beginning man created new cities to occupy and colonize new territories, today, he uses this concept to master, to manage the accelerated urbanization and its risks like the expansion of the urban population, disproportionate extension of the cities, the complex urban management issues confronting the conventional city, the question of urban land, and so on. The historical study of the new cities reveals that from antiquity until nowadays, the idea of creating a new town depends on a certain number of characters, which have persisted throughout their evolution. Indeed, the constancy of certain characters 211

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is noted for the creation of the new cities since the remote past. They constitute the common denominator that determines the birth of a new town. They can be summarized as follows: it is the result of a mental idea, i.e., their creation is the result of a project, lengthily cogitated or, on the contrary, conceived in precipitation; it has, in general, an established pre-plan; their creation depends on a strong decision-making power having the means (human, economic, and so on) to implement successfully its policy; the decision-makers must have the power to pursue a voluntary and ambitious policy vis-à-vis the choice to be adopted for the process of occupation or urbanization of the territory. The decision, related to the project of the creation of the new city, must be firm and voluntary. The new town can be created ex nihilo or from a sparsely inhabited nucleus. It can be a colony, a satellite town, a dormitory city, and so on. It constitutes, in fact, an outlet for colonizing faraway territories or one of the saving measures taken to relieve an old city, in particular a capital that knows problems of smothering, degradation, heckled site not permitting the urban extension, of accelerated urbanization, and so on. Moreover, according to P. Merlin and F. Choay (2005, pp. 847–848), there are four types of new cities: new cities created far from the urbanized areas for the exploitation of the mining resources.They are used for industrial purposes, for urban network balance (Soviet Union, Company towns in Canada, and so on); new capitals built away from the great agglomerations for reasons of internal policy, defensive strategy, to promote the development of the pioneer areas (Brasilia, Islamabad, and so on); new cities built close to a metropolis, without continuity, in order to decongest it, or to structure the urban area on a larger scale than that of the basic agglomeration (news towns around London and so on); new cities erected in spatial continuity with a large agglomeration. They are intended to direct and organize the development of the suburbs, while being dependent on the mother city (Heliopolis in Cairo, new cities around the Swedish cities and Dutch cities). This variation within the categorization of the new cities highlight the complexity of the idea, interpretation and therefore the role that the decision-makers and the professionals attribute to this concept. However, the label of new town was largely used in all countries all over the world. If at a special time, developed countries had used this idea or concept as an instrument of urbanization, nowadays, it is abandoned. Nevertheless, it is still largely used by developing countries. Indeed, they are experiencing an accelerated urbanization, which exceeds in its magnitude all the urban political strategies adopted and implemented by the authorities before. Under the weight of the demographic explosion and the rural migration, the process of urban growth in developing countries is generated, above all, by a high concentration of the population in the city, giving rise to new forms of settlement. Thus, massive metropolitan areas, settlements of informal housing appear around the existing urban fabric. Occupying non-constructible sites (floodplains close to rivers, mountain flanks, unstable lands, and so on), these spontaneous settlements within the form of slums or of spontaneous permanent housing generated an anarchistic growth of the urban fabric, escaping public control and defying the planning made by central and local government authorities. Therefore, these spontaneous districts constitute marginalized territories characterized by the absence of equipment and unhealthy housing, which makes their environment poor in conveniences. As Chesnais and Le Bras (1976) say The urban growth will be performed essentially for the benefit of a marginal sector, characterized by a defective housing and so on. It is about a light improvised habitat, made of traditional materials or industrial by-products assembled by the occupants themselves. The centre of the cities, on the contrary, moreover often legacy of a colonial past, corresponds rather to a Western type of habitat, modern, built into hard (steel, cement, concrete). 212

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Facing the problems generated by these informal agglomerations, some developing countries decided to take in charge the question of the spontaneous housing in particular the shanty towns.The latter are regarded as an urban wound with the negative image of misery, which they attribute to the cities. This chapter focuses on one of the adopted strategies by the government of Algeria to control the rapid growth of Algerian cities through the application of the concept of “new city”. The objective of this chapter is to provide an evaluation of this experiment, which consists in the creation of the new cities throughout the Algerian territory. These last constitute the crystallization of a voluntary policy concerning the making of the city. This planned urbanization process has been carried out according to two types of procedure: the first is a top-down approach planned in the context of town and country planning, and the second one is a bottomup approach initiated by the local authorities. This study relies on the analysis of two examples namely the new town of Sidi Abdellah and that of Ali Mendjeli. It is a question of studying this process through these two concrete examples in order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of every procedure.This method will try to identify the issues and the dysfunctions of every step in order to constitute a base of work for future research and urbanistic experiments. The results of this study represent a humble contribution to improve and prevent these issues for the future projects of new cities in Algeria. Therefore, this work is based on the analysis of official documents: decrees, law, master plans, articles, statistics, and the archival data related to the history of the Algerian city, namely iconographic tools such as maps, plans, diagrams, photos, and so on. This research is articulated into three parts. The first part presents an overview on urbanization in Algeria while addressing the last adopted policy that takes the shape of new towns. The second part consists of the study of the new city created according to the descending approach through the analysis of the example of Sidi Abdellah. It concerns the context of its programming, its planning and its realization, with the schedule of this mega project going from its conception until its realization. As for the third part, the chapter tackles the analysis of the new town Ali Mendjeli carried out according to the ascending procedure. This section studies the circumstances of its creation by the local authorities and its registration at the national level.

14.2 Urbanization in Algeria Like the majority of the developing countries, Algeria is experiencing an accelerated urbanization of its territory especially after the war of independence. After a long period of struggle, the Algerian people, who were colonized for 137 years, became master of their destiny. They had to assume the edification of the Algerian nation. Weakened by the political regime imposed by the colonial administration, Algeria was devastated by the destructive effects of colonization and the war of decolonization. Indeed, France left a bruised country carrying on its territory the deep sequels of the colonial period. The economy was subordinate and turned towards the metropolis. The state coffers were empty with the interruption of the investments and the flux of capital coming from the metropolis with the massive departure of the colonists of metropolitan origin, who made the economy of the colony work. The poverty and illiteracy rate of the indigenous population was high because of the inequalities in the distribution of wealth between dominant/dominated.The colonized territory was marked by regional imbalances between the north and the south of the country, between the city and the countryside generating an acceleration of the process of urbanization in the big cities. The crisis of housing, which continues until nowadays, changed the structure of the urban fabric. At first, the state tried to organize the Algerian city by finishing the projects initiated within the framework of the famous plan of Constantine 213

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1959. It was a question of building large urban sets in the periphery of the big cities accentuating the dysfunctions of the colonial city. However, very soon, some cities were saturated with the lack of land to urbanize paving the way for the policy of new towns.

14.3 New towns policy in Algeria After independence, the spatial growth of the Algerian cities is so rapid that it pushed back the limits of their urban perimeter. Overflowing on the agricultural bordering zones, they became land consumers. In its quest to control the urban growth and to protect the agricultural land, the Algerian state chose the policy of the new cities. Located on the southern bank of the Mediterranean, Algeria has always shared the culture of the Mediterranean basin. Due to its strategic situation, the north of its territory is turned towards Europe. The interaction of cultures means that the countries on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea influenced one another. Today, Mediterranean’s northern side developed countries export their knowledge to those on the southern shore. Bound historically to France, Algeria is attentive to what is happening in European countries as an experience. Thus, as early as 1987, the creation of new towns in the highland and southern regions is recommended in the framework of the National Territorial Development Scheme (Schéma National d’Aménagement du Territoire, SNAT). Several new town projects have been launched, notably Boughezoul and Sidi Abdellah. The government initiated these two projects following a top-down procedure. However, there are other projects that have been created by local authorities following a bottom-up approach, as is the case of the new town of Ali Mendjeli. The analysis of the SNAT makes it possible to identify the PAT1 N° 10 as the founder element of the new cities policy in Algeria. According to MATET2 and EPAVNSA3 (2009, p. 7), both instruments of regional planning, including that of Sidi Abdellah, are essential to the national strategy in order to: consolidate the existing urban structure; promote the polycentrism with a grid and the effects of synergies between territories and partners; relieve the large agglomerations and to limit the peri-urban sprawl by creating new areas of development; constitute attractive localizations for the economic activities by providing higher services and powerful sites of establishment (industries, tertiary and commercial real estate, technological sites, and so on); and develop sustainable and an attractive urban poles based on excellence functions. The new cities determined in the SNAT are divided into three categories according to the climate and relief: new towns of the first crown: control of urban growth and excellence; New towns of highlands: territory rebalancing; New towns of the South: Balance and sustainable development. Algeria is a country with a large territory and whose spatial structure is diversified. It has a littoral region formed by a coastal fringe, and a Tellian zone and another interior one, which is subdivided into two distinct entities: high plateaus and the Sahara desert.Thus, the Algerian national territory was divided into crowns according to the areas described above (see Figure 14.1).The categorization of the new cities responds to the requirements of the geographical, economic, human and climatic situation, and so on. However, in reality, this categorization is supplanted by another that relates to their procedure of creation: descending (top-down) or ascending (bottom-up).

14.4 New town created according to the descending procedure: The case of Sidi Abdellah 14.4.1 Presentation and situation of the new city Sidi Abdellah Situated at the north of Algeria, the new town of Sidi Abdellah has a strategic localization. It is 25 km in the south-west of the Algiers metropolis (see Figure 14.2). In fact, this new city was 214

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Figure 14.1 Spatial structure of the Algerian national territory. Source: Authors’ treatment, 2018.

officially created by the executive decree N° 04-275 of 5 September 2004. It covers a surface of 7,000 hectares taken from the 5 following municipalities: Mahelma, Rahmania, Zeralda, Douira, and Souidania (see Figure 14.3). The new town of Sidi Abdellah occupies a hinge position in the area of Algiers. Indeed, the territory of Sidi Abdellah is in the centre of the municipalities of Algiers with a surface of which the major part belongs to the municipality of Mahelma (more than 55%) (see Table 14.1). It

Figure 14.2 Situation of the new town Sidi Abdellah in relation to Algiers. Source: MATET, EPAVNSA, “Finalisation du Plan d’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah, Mission A – Avant-Projet: Analyse et Concepts de la Ville”, 2009, p. 10; authors’ treatment, 2017.

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Figure 14.3 Territorial extent of the new city Sidi Abdellah. Source: MATET, EPAVNSA, “Finalisation du Plan d’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah, Mission A – Avant-Projet : Analyse et Concepts de la Ville”, 2009, p. 10.

Table 14.1 Territorial extent of the new city Sidi Abdellah Municipality

Mahelma

Rahmania

Zeralda

Douera

Souidania

Total

Area (ha) Part (%)

1716.4 57.21

541.5 18.05

464.2 15.47

276.5 9.22

1.4 0.05

3,000 100

Source: MATET, EPAVNSA, “Finalisation du Plan d’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah, Mission A – Avant-Projet: Analyse et Concepts de la Ville”, 2009, p. 11.

covers a territory divided into 2 entities: 3,000 hectares reserved for the perimeter of urbanization and the fitting out; 4,000 hectares released around the surfaces considered as a perimeter of protection. In addition, this new city was programmed in the SNAT like a new urban centre. Its vocation is both to relieve the city-centre by hosting delocalized functions, and provide support for the development of new urban functions. Five specific priorities were expressed for Sidi Abdellah within the SNAT: to slow down and rebalance the littoral trend; to redeploy the populations and the activities of the urban surface of Algiers; to reinforce the attractiveness and the competitiveness of the territory; to consolidate the urban development while being based on the economy of knowledge and information; to implement innovating approaches regarding architecture and urban forms. 216

New towns in Algeria Table 14.2 Basic functions, objective and general programme of the new city Sidi Abdellah Basic functions

Objectives

General programme

Advanced technologies Training and university research Support functions Population of 200,000 inhabitants Creation of 50,000 jobs Realisation of 50,000 new dwellings Areas for housing Administrative facilities City of TIC (Cyber-park) Urban parks and university institutes Research and development centres Activity areas Hospital and health facilities Commercial, hotel and service facilities Public infrastructure networks (energy and water, telecom, roads and rail) Public facilities (urban services, local services) Waste and wastewater treatment facilities Spaces of protection around the city (uses fixed by the management plan)

Source: MATET, EPAVNSA, “Finalisation du Plan d’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah, Mission A – AvantProjet: Analyse et Concepts de la Ville”, 2009, p. 11.

The following table (see Table 14.2) summarizes the characteristics of Sidi Abdellah as defined in the creation decree of the new city.

14.4.2 Creation conditions of the new city Sidi Abdellah Algeria is one of the largest countries in Africa and its capital, the city of Algiers, suffers as most African capitals from the lack of enough close empty lands for an urbanization in the short and medium term. Responding to the needs of the inhabitants constitutes a priority for the Algerian government.The growth of the Algiers population was so significant during the last years that it caused problems for the managers and for the local authorities of the wilaya4 of Algiers. In this sense, Aliouche (2014) argues The project of the new town of Sidi Abdellah takes part in the context of an urban policy and a regional planning. This vision aims to limit the hyper human concentration in the capital, generator of difficulties of urban management (networks, equipment and circulation) and to put an end to the permanent extension of the city, often to the detriment of the best agriculture lands of the region. Algeria is known to be a country realizing projects justified all the time by the urgency of the situation of the moment. This evoked reason represents the major justification of the failures of the various great projects of development of the country. In 1994, the Minister of regional planning decided to implement five projects of new cities around Algiers (Sidi Abdellah, Bouinan, El Affroun, Sidi Amar, and Naciria) considering Sidi Abdellah as an exclusively scientific and technological new city. The programme of this new city comprises: 30,000 residences; a high 217

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technological medical city; the creation of 20,000 jobs; the reception of 1,000 PME-PMI5; a cyber-park, including schools, institutes, and companies. This programme was established within the framework of the SNAT, its content answers the requirements of the national recovery plan developed by the state since the year 2000. The objectives of this plan were defined according to a global strategy in which the process of planning and execution was determined at the national scale.

14.4.3 Planning and implementation process of the new city Sidi Abdellah Established in 2006, the National Territorial Development Scheme (Schéma National d’Aménagement du Territoire) – SNAT 2025 – is the new strategic document of reference that carries an unprecedented ambition to restore a sustainable balance between the different territorial entities and to adapt the territory to the requirements of the contemporary economy. In the case of the urban area of Algiers, its implementation is based on local and sectoral patterns such as: the Regional Territorial Development Schemes (Schémas Région aux d’Aménagement du Territoire) – SRAT – the Coastal Development Plan of Algiers (Plan d’Aménagement Côtier de l’Algérois) – PACA – the Touristic Master Development Scheme (Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement Touristique) – SDAT – and very soon the Master Development Scheme of the Metropolitan Area of Algiers (Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement de l’Aire Métropolitaine d’Alger) – SDAAM – (MATET & EPAVNSA 2009, p. 1). The strategy of the SNAT 2025 includes guidelines that rest and aim at the application of the concepts of sustainability, the rebalancing on the scale of the agglomeration, attractiveness and competitiveness. As part of this national strategy, the planning of the new city Sidi Abdellah was divided into two major phases: the first for the studies, which ended with the establishment of the Development plan (see Table 14.3); the second for the realization of this gigantic mega project, which extends until 2025 (see Table 14.4).

14.4.4 Execution process of the new city Sidi Abdellah The real implementation of the new city Sidi Abdellah is experiencing a considerable delay on the level of its second phase of realization on the ground. On the contrary, the first phase devoted to the studies and the assembly of this exceptional megaproject followed the schedule of the operation initially planned (see Table 14.5). The government mobilized all means to make the new city Sidi Abdallah a successful project, a model for the creation of future new cities. To this end, the minister explained that “Sidi Abdallah must obey to a quite elaborate architectural design which takes into account the smallest details, to constitute in the future a model of urban poles and new cities”. However, by evoking the outlines of this utopian project, the minister did not take into account the difficult economic situation of the country (Semmar, 2016). Moreover, the new cities under construction in Algeria are, in fact, only a model of dormitory cities, as Semmar (2016) points out “The gigantic cities built within the framework of the projects of construction carried out by the State are dormitories cities. And the New town of Sidi Abdellah does not escape to this rule”. Since 1994, date of the implementation of five new cities projects around Algiers, until December 2016, date of the official inauguration of the new city Sidi Abdellah, 22 years have passed.This duration puts forward two significant facts. First, the ambitions of the State were disproportionate and did not take into account the human, financial, administrative resources, the companies, and so on, allowing them to carry out these projects in time. Second, the Algerian bureaucracy is characterized by the heaviness and the lack of flexibility, making the decisions of 218

Table 14.3 Establishment’s theoretical process of the first phase “approval of the development plan of the new city Sidi Abdellah” Step 1: Launch studies and inventory

Step 2: Feasibility study of development

Start of the project Analysis of the basic survey In situ reconnaissance and data collection On-site survey and site visit Analysis of development conditions (physical, cultural, economic and social) Analysis of relevant projects and reference regulations Synthetic situation (problems, potential) Control of development conditions and definition of orientations Review of concepts and development conditions Estimation of housing demand and types of equipment to be implanted Elaboration of guidelines Preliminary studies Establishment of project benchmarks Intermediate rendering (population, activities, equipment) and consultation Project management Definition of neighbourhoods Elaboration of an alternative proposal and comparative analysis Design of the urban structure (land use, green spaces, transport systems)

Step 3: Conception of Development plan by shutters the development plan Refined development plan (zoning, equipment, regulations)

Intermediate rendering and consultation Project management

Scheme of transport Parks and green areas Environmental conservation Infrastructures Public facilities and service facilities Requalification of existing villages Priority site execution file Implementation Plan Phasing Strategy Final rendering and Offer of building plots consultation of project Financial evaluation of the project management Management and urban management plan Step 4: Validation of the Approbation of the development plan project Source: MATET, EPAVNSA, “Finalisation du Plan d’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah, Mission B – Première partie: Diagnostic environnemental & orientations urbaines”, p. 12.

Table 14.4 Theoretical process of the second phase “realization of the new town Sidi Abdellah” Phase 1: Initial phase of launching (2009–2012)

Functions to be promoted

Central and commercial polarities Advanced industrial clusters and research clusters (Cyber-park, Pharmaceutical and biotechnology cluster, ICT cluster) Localization Around the priority site and Rahmania Projected population 61,800 inhabitants cumulative population 6,800 inhabitants Basic infrastructures Primary pathways 1–1, 1–2, 1–3, 1–4, 1–5 Secondary pathways: 1–6, 1–7 Axe TCSP Planning guidelines Development of the functions with a high potential of polarization for the activities and the housing Development layout of the main road infrastructures: Magistrale Avenue as structuring axis and improvement of accessibility by primary pathways Levelling of existing villages (equipment and environment) Phase 2: Generalized development phase (2013–2015)

Functions to be promoted Localisation Projected population cumulative population (1+2)

Higher education, standard and high standard residential spaces Research clusters (Innopark and AT cluster) North of Avenue Magistrale and extreme southeast 61,500 inhabitants 123,300 inhabitants (Continued )

Basic infrastructures

Planning guidelines

Primary pathways: 1–6, 1–8,1–9 Secondary pathways: 1–4, 1–1, 1–2, 1–3, 1–8, 1–9 Axe TCSP Development of structuring Districts to attract private investors and development of living spaces in the outskirts Extension of basic urban infrastructure Development of functional complementarities between Districts

Step 3: Completion Phase (2016–2020)

Functions to be promoted Localisation Projected population cumulative population (1+2+3) Basic infrastructures

Trade, cultural, sports and health polarities and development of luxury residential Districts On the whole of the new city 77,300 inhabitants 200,600 inhabitants

Primary pathways: 1–6, 1–7, 1–8,1–9 Secondary pathways: 1–3, 1–5, 1–8, 1–9 Axe TCSP Planning guidelines Completion of structuring districts and development of relay centralities to increase real estate investments Extension of basic infrastructure throughout the city Step 4 : Urban consolidation stage (2021–2025)

(Continued )

Table 14.4 (Continued) Functions to be promoted

Localisation Projected population Final population Basic infrastructures Planning guidelines

Completion of “quality of life” functions, relaxation and recreation (Theme Park, Sports Park, Central Park) Completion of the TCSP system On the whole of the new city 200,600 inhabitants Complete rail and road network Improvement of the living environment and networking of all Districts (structuring neighbourhoods, residential districts, existing villages) around the Central Park Completion of the city’s balanced management and development system

Source: MATET, EPAVNSA, “Finalisation du Plan d’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah, Mission B –Deuxième partie: Plan d’aménagement & mise en œuvre”, pp. 167–168; authors’ treatment, 2018.

Table 14.5 Significant dates marking the process of the implementation of the new city Sidi Abdellah Dates marking the implementation of the new city Sidi Abdellah 1994

Choice of implementation of 5 projects of new cities around Algiers (Sidi Abdellah, Bouinan, El Affroun, Sidi Amar, Naciria) by the Minister of town and country planning. Mai 1997 Decision to set up a development project for a technological pole for the new city of Sidi Abdellah. September 1997 Creation of the Public Development Establishment of the New Agglomeration of Sidi Abdellah – Établissement Public d’Aménagement de l’Agglomération Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah (EPA-ANSA). April 2001 Official launch of Cyber-park created by the President of the Algerian Republic. November 2001 Installation of a joint Algerian-Korean committee. Mai 2002 Adoption of the law relating to the creation of the new cities. June 2003 Implementation of the studies by the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in the urbanistic and scientific fields. 2004 Executive decree of creation of the new city. January 2005 Handing-over of the initial development plan (Sidi Abdellah then considered as a new city exclusively scientific & technological). 2006/2008 Executive decree n 06-233 of 4 July 2006 mentioning declaration of public utility of buildings, equipment and infrastructures of the new city. Revision by the executive decree n 08-249 of August 3, 2008, with an increased surface to 2600 ha. July 2007 National and international invitation to tender for the finalization of the development plan. 2008 New status and new name for the public Establishment – Etablissement Public à caractèreIndustriel et Commercial (EPIC‐VNSA). November 2008 Starting of the studies to finalize the development plan. 11 December 2016 Official inauguration of the new city Sidi Abdellah by the president of the Republic, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. More than 10,000 residences of various formulas were attributed.

Source: Authors’ treatment, 2018.

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government difficult to execute. The slowness of the administrative bureaucracy impacts negatively in the process of planning and implementation of these new cities projects. In addition, the decisions are made in the higher spheres of the State, which do not take account of the reality on the ground, being frequently out of step with the country’s economic situation.

14.5 New town created according to the ascending procedure: Case of Ali Mendjeli Conscious of the difficulties encountered throughout the process of creation of the new cities of descending type, the local authorities of the town of Constantine decided to create the new town Ali Mendjeli without awaiting its inscription and its programming on the level of the National Territorial Development Scheme. Under the effect of the demographic growth and rural migration, the town of Constantine experiences a serious problem posed by the lack of land, which is necessary to ensure the extension of its urban fabric. Faced with the urgency of the situation, the local authorities initiated the creation of the new city Ali Mendjeli. The latter constitutes an innovation in Algeria because this project followed the ascending procedure in spite of the voluntarist policy of the state characterized by the centralization of the decisions and planning of spatial development.

14.5.1 Reasons for the creation of the new city Ali Mendjeli Eastern capital of Algeria, Constantine has always constituted an attractive urban pole. Its radiation exerts a power of attraction that exceeds the administrative limits of the wilaya. Thus, the population of Constantine’s metropolis is in a continuous growth. Constantine is built on a rocky ground subjected to several natural risks. City of bridges, its evolution through history is marked by a dynamic that affects its development, its demography, its extension and so on. As Chabi (2016, p. 88) says Having exhausted the peri-urban lands and discharged the remainder of its population onto the bordering municipalities, Constantine, the millenary town, was endowed with a new strategy which consisted in creating a new town ex nihilo … And after the saturation of the available lands inside the urban perimeter, the growth of Constantine was directed to the reserves of free land in nearby municipalities. Thus, it maintained, with its locality of urban grouping, supremacy while other urban areas became satellites. Very soon, the urbanized land in these satellites became rare, raising again the question of urban growth. The only alternative that could be imposed with strength and haste, given the gravity of the situation, was the creation of a new town ex nihilo near the mother city. With its rugged site and a scarcity of empty spaces to urbanize in the short or medium term, the solution of a new city to solve the mother city’s issues is imminent even impossible to circumvent (see Figure 14.4).

14.5.2 Evolution of the population of Constantine The city of bridges knows a very significant demographic trend imposed rather more by the rhythms of the regional mutations than by local ones. According to the ONS (National Office of Statistics), the population of the city of Constantine was 950,601 inhabitants in 2010. This number increased to reach the 1,014,194 inhabitants in 2015 with an Annual Average Global 223

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Figure 14.4 Creation conditions of the new city of Ali Mendjeli. Source: DUAC-Constantine, présentation dans le cadre de la 10ème Conférence du Conseil des Ministres de l’Habitat et de l’Urbanisme Maghrébin, “ville nouvelle Ali Mendjeli”, Février 2007, p. 6; authors’ treatment, 2018. Table 14.6 Population of the city of Constantine from 2000 to 2030 – Including previsions Period

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

2025

2030

Population TAGMA

832,155 1.3

889,211 1.34

950,601 1.34

1,014,194 1.3

1,076,200 1.19

1,131,859 1.01

1,178,048 0.8

Source: ONS, “Collection statistiques n° 116/2005, séries S: Statistiques Sociales – Projections de populations par wilaya à l’horizon 2030”, février 2005, p. 52; authors’ treatment, 2018.

Rate of Increase (TAGMA6) of 1,3 (see Table 14.6). The fact to emphasize is that in 2000 the town of Constantine had recorded the same rate of growth in spite of the significant evolution in the number of the population between 2000 and 2010. The city of Constantine is saturated because it does not have any more lands for its extension. Thus, Constantine has poured its surplus of population in zones planned and programmed locally for this purpose in particular the new town of Massinissa and that of Ali Mendjeli. However, the forecasts for the city of Constantine show that there will be a reduction in the rate of increase into 2030, which will be 0,8 despite the rise in the population of 1,178,048 inhabitants.

14.5.3 Presentation and situation of the new city Ali Mendjeli Situated in the northeast of Algeria, the new town of Ali Mendjeli is one of the first new towns created in the country. It occupies a strategic position in the eastern side since it was executed to relief Constantine city. 224

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Established ex nihilo on a virgin area, the new town Ali Mendjeli was created close to the communication channels linking El Khroub and Ain Smara. Located on Ain El Bey land, it occupies a land of low agricultural value chosen for the characteristics of its soil: good lift and stability without slippage ground (see Figure 14.5). The land on which the new city is built is not completely flat. It has gentle slopes whose gradient does not exceed 10% in some areas. The local officials chose this rocky land far from the city of Constantine to accommodate its surplus population that is constantly evolving.

14.5.4 Population of the new town Ali Mendjeli: Between prevision and reality In the preliminary studies done by the URBACO in 1994, the new city of Ali Mendjeli is split in five Districts. Each District comprises four Neighbourhoods (see Figure 14.6). It was expected that the new city would accommodate 300,000 inhabitants. Each District should contain between 30,000 and 48,000 inhabitants. Every Neighbourhood is supposed to receive 7,500–8,400 inhabitants. Such are the starting previsions established by the URBACO for the programming of this new city. After 23 years of existence, the new city Ali Mendjeli took form and accommodated the inhabitants’ surplus of Constantine. Thus, in 2017, the total population of the new city Ali Mendjeli counted 258,470 inhabitants (EAVANAM, 2017) spread over the whole of its

Figure 14.5 Situation of the new town of Ali Mendjeli in relation to Constantine city. Source: Nadia Chabi, “L’homme, l’environnement, l’urbanisme”, Thèse de doctorat, Université Mentouri Constantine, 2007, p. 577.

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Figure 14.6 The new town of Ali Mendjeli by Districts. Source: Authors’ treatment, 2018.

neighbourhoods (see Table 14.7). It should be noted that the Neighbourhood 18 includes 34,700 inhabitants, which represents 14% of the total population of this new city. Moreover, Neighbourhood N° 3 (university town) and N° 11 (military hospital) are not inhabited because they accommodate urban facilities. Currently, the southern and western extensions are under construction and consequently, they are not occupied yet (see Figure 14.7). The division into District and Neighbourhood, considering the total number of inhabitants of the new city, were respected. However,Table N° 14.7 shows that there is an imbalance on the number of inhabitants per neighbourhood. Some neighbourhoods are more populated than others. The number of inhabitants envisaged for a neighbourhood during the programming (7,500 to 8,400) is largely exceeded such as NEI. 1, NEI. 16, NEI. 18, and so on. However, in others, the number is not reached such as NEI. 12 and NEI. 15. In reality, according to the PDAU7, the population of the new city Ali Mendjeli counted 200,000 inhabitants in 2014 (DUC 2014). It reached the 400,000 inhabitants in 2015 (ONS 2015), which represents an evolution of 100% during one year considering the construction and the attribution of many dwellings. In the case of the new city Ali Mendjeli, the priority was granted to the quantity. Moreover, the number of the population was respected and even exceeded. Its population increases each 226

New towns in Algeria Table 14.7 Population of the new town Ali Mendjeli Neighbourhood

Population

NEI. 1 NEI. 2 NEI. 3 NEI. 4 NEI. 5 NEI. 5 EXT NEI. 6 NEI. 7 NEI. 8 NEI. 9 NEI. 10 NEI. 11 NEI. 12 NEI. 13 NEI. 14 NEI. 15 NEI. 16 NEI. 17 NEI. 18 NEI. 19 NEI. 20 NEI. 20 EXT SOUTH. EXT WEST. EXT TOTAL

24,855 10,490 UNIVERSITY 2,745 12,300 150 9,320 23,800 12,985 23,155 7,000 MILITARY HOSPITAL 1,280 13,110 12,500 4,000 15,000 26,810 34,970 12,500 11,500 0 0 0 258,470

Source: EAVANAM, “La ville Ali Mendjeli”, 2017, p. 13.

year under the impact of the housing crisis experienced by the mother city (Constantine). The operations of re-housing in the framework of the resorption of spontaneous housing were one of the causes of the continual demographic growth of Ali Mendjeli.

14.5.5 Planning and implementation process of the new city Ali Mendjeli The new town of Ali Mendjeli did not have a clear planned process before its execution. The position of the new town and infrastructures demonstrate that the new town was realized on the scale of the great Constantine. These linear elements, the assets of the new city, present in general a regular form. The roads that structure the Ain El Bey plateau are hierarchized according to their size and function: the east-west highway, the national road and finally a wilaya path (see Figure 14.8).The new city is grafted around the way of wilaya, which by its type poses fewer problems related to mechanical circulation. It is located near to the biggest node of the mother city, which is the airport but being far enough away from its dangers and nuisances. This new town was created to relief Constantine city, the eastern metropolis of Algeria. In fact, the dwellings were the most important concerns of the decision-makers of the city of Constantine because of the crisis of housing. That is why most of new residents of the new town Ali Mendjeli struggled during the first period of their occupation with the lack of public 227

Figure 14.7 Population’s repartition percentages in the new town Ali Mendjeli. Source: Authors’ treatment, 2018.

Figure 14.8 Assets of the new town Ali Mendjeli. Source: Nadia Chabi, “L’homme, l’environnement, l’urbanisme”, Thèse de doctorat, Université Mentouri Constantine, 2007, p. 578 ; authors’ treatment, 2017.

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Figure 14.9 New town Ali Mendjeli by Neighbourhood Unit. Source: URBACO, “Mise à niveau urgente de la ville nouvelle Ali Mendjeli”, 2011, p. 4 ; authors’ treatment, 2017.

facilities, with a disaster situation in public transportation, with unfinished projects of schools and hospitals, and so on). Nowadays, the new town of Ali Mendjeli is composed of more than twenty neighbourhoods with extensions. These extensions concern the Neighbourhood (NEI. 20extension), the southern and the western extension of the entire new town (see Figure 14.9).

14.5.6 Execution process of the new city of Ali Mendjeli The creation of the new city Ali Mendjeliis the result of the policy followed by the local authorities. It was adopted outside the national territory planning. Indeed, the Wali of Constantine decided to launch the project of Ali Mendjeli. It should be noted that initially, the local decisionmakers intended to create residential cities in order to meet the housing needs of the population of the region of Constantine. Due to the significant socio-demographic evolution of the area of Constantine, the level of the request for housing increased, imposing the inevitable solution of a new city.Thus, the new city was created within the framework of the PUD8 and was confirmed by the PDAU of Constantine. The inscription of these two operations constituted the phase of reflection and general study of the new city, which lasted from 1974 to 1988. In the 1990s, planning studies started with POS9 N°1 and with the launching of 1,501 dwellings on the level of the Neighbourhood Unit N° 6 (Unité de Voisinage N° 6). This operation 229

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was approved by the Executive Decree N° 98/83 of February 25, 1998. However, the regulatory and legal approval for the realization of this mega-project was made by the presidential decree n 2000/17 of August 5, 2000. In fact, there is a shift almost of 2 years between the realization and the executive Decree making the operation legal (see Figure 14.10). It is clear that the establishment of the first neighbourhood was carried out, during two years, in the illegality. The local authorities, somehow, put to the test the bureaucratic apparatus and the Algerian political system, which was highly centralized. Ali Mendjeli constitutes an obvious example of a city created according to the ascending procedure. Its design and its realization were hastily made. Wanting to act quickly, the local authorities circumvented the downward procedure established by central government.The process of planning, programming and realization of the latter is slow, as it requires a relatively long time for the administrative system to react. Facing the urgency of the situation, the local authorities found a solution to the problems of the urban expansion of Constantine. If it is true that the new city of Ali Mendjeli achieved the goal, which was assigned to it, through placing the surplus of population of Constantine, nevertheless, the quality of its living environment is far from meeting the needs of the population. With the number of impressive housing that it holds, it is clear that the local authorities privileged quantity instead of quality. As Chabi and Bouhadjar (2016) say The criteria that guide operational decisions cannot be reduced to financial indicators or limited to quantitative assessments. On the contrary, quality should be the priority, while the financial and managerial aspects of planning and urban redevelopment operations, land management and socio-economic analysis should also be taken into account, along with the modes of operation carried out in the public sector or the private sector.

Figure 14.10 Execution process of the new city Ali Mendjeli. Source: Authors’ treatment, 2017.

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Thus, the making of this new city comprises insufficiencies which have a direct impact on the urban environmental quality For better governance, those responsible for city planning and management (governors, managers, politicians, architects and so on) must think about the best way to urbanize the territory and how to provide the citizens with an adequate built environment. Their projects must meet the needs and expectations of users for whom they are intended. The financing of these projects should be done following the guidelines and requirements of the state and its legislation while taking into consideration the state’s responsibilities towards consumers, taxpayers and the electorate. (Chabi and Bouhadjar, 2016)

14.6 Conclusion Today, several developing countries experience accelerated urbanization. This phenomenon has imposed large-scale urban and architectural solutions. Among these alternatives, there is that of new towns. Nevertheless, the creation of new cities is a complex process that depends on the means of the country in question: political, human, financial, and so on. It is true that the idea is seductive because it offers the illusion of solving urban growth and its control from a quantitative point of view. However, the success of such a project is often difficult. It requires serious and thoughtful study with many means at all levels. Through its recent experience of the new city, Algeria has tried to solve the problems of urban growth of its large cities by creating thoughtful living environments, designed in study offices far from the realities of the inhabitants. The experience of new towns in Algeria has shown its limits. The creation of the new city following the ascending approach in Ali Mendjeli or the descendant in Sidi Abdellah have encountered difficulties and have weaknesses and deficiencies at all levels. While the minister described the former as an urban disaster, the second tries to catch up on delays and provide a viable environment for the inhabitants to be accommodated. There are discrepancies between “being able to do” and “wanting to do”. In both cases, the results are problematic without forgetting that these projects are budgetivores. Is there another way to solve urban growth of Algerian cities? Another solution must be found that does not depend only on the will of politicians and on the centralization of decisions. In order to succeed, these large projects require that government democratize the process of creation, implementation and management, and that citizens, especially inhabitants, are engaged in the decision-making process.

Notes 1 Spatial Planning Plan (Plan d’Aménagement du Territoire). 2 Ministry of Land Development, Environment and Tourism (Ministère de l’Aménagement du Territoire, de l’Environnement et du Tourisme). 3 Sidi Abdellah New Town Public Establishment of Land Development (Etablissement Public pour l’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah). 4 The Wilaya is an administrative division of Algeria: the city and its region with territorial governmental entity. 5 Small and Medium-sized Enterprises – Small and Medium-sized Industry (In French: Petite et Moyenne Entreprise – Petite et Moyenne Industrie). 6 In French: Taux d’Accroissement Global Moyen Annuel. 7 Urban Planning and Development Master Plan (Plan Directeur d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme). 8 Master Urban Plan (Plan d’Urbanisme Directeur). 9 Land Use Plan (Plan d’Occupation des Sols). 231

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References Aliouche, Bahia (2014).“Nouvelle ville de Sidi Abdellah: un projet et des contraintes ; Des logements supplémentaires prennent la part des grands espaces tech”, article publié dans LaTribune, le 16 mars 2014, [en ligne]. http:​// www​.djaz​aires​s.com​/fr/l​atrib​une/1​04222​. Chabi, Nadia (2016). “The making of the urban Environment in Constantine”, in, C.N.Silva (eds), in “Urban Planning in North Africa”, Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group Ltd, Abingdon Oxford (UK), P 88. Chabi, Nadia & Bouhadjar, Khalil (2016). «Public Spaces in Constantine, Algeria: Between Discourse and Reality» in, C.N.Silva (eds), “Governing Urban Africa”, London (UK), Palgrave Macmillan, P 282; P 283, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95109-3_11 Chesnais, Jean-Claude & Le Bras, Hervé (1976). “Villes et bidonvilles du Tiers Monde. Structures démographiques et habitat”, In Population, 31e année, N°6, pp. 1207–1231. Etablissementd’Aménagement de la Ville de AinNehass et de Ali Mendjeli –EAVANAM (2017). “La ville Ali Mendjeli”, 2017, P 13, [unpublished report]. Guirauden, Bernard (1998). “L’âge de raison”, Urbanisme, N°301, p. 48. Ministèredel’Aménagement du Territoire, de l’Environnement et du Tourisme & Etablissement Public pour l’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah (2009). “Finalisation du Plan d’Aménagement de la Ville Nouvelle de Sidi Abdellah, Mission A – Avant-Projet: Analyse et Concepts de la Ville-”, P 7; P 1, [unpublished report]. Merlin, Pierre & Choay, Françoise (2005). “Dictionnaire de l’urbanisme et de l’aménagement”, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, pp. 847–848. Mumford, Lewis (2011). “La cité à travers l’histoire”, Agone. Semmar, Abdou (2016). “Nouvelle ville de Sidi Abdellah/Une utopie qui se transforme en -cités-dortoirs-”, article publiéle11 octobre 2016, [en ligne]. http:​//www​.alge​r ie-f​ocus.​com/2​016/1​0/nou​velle​-vill​e-de-​sidi-​ abdel​lah-u​topie​-se-t​ransf​orme-​cites​-dort​oirs/​. Serhir, Sonia (2013). “Ville nouvelle: un concept urbain en mutation », Géographie et développement au Maroc”, GéoDév.ma-, vol 1, p 1; p 7 [en ligne]. http:​//rev​ues.i​mist.​ma/in​dex.p​hp?jo​urnal​=GeoD​ev&page=issu e&op=view&path%5B%5D=63.

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15 Emergent urbanism in Angola and Mozambique Management of the unknown Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues

15.1 Introduction Impressive urbanization worldwide and the growth of main cities are central concerns today for development. This tendency has never been as compelling as it is now for scholars and policy-makers. A topical publication linking research to policy, the 2007 report of the Population Fund of the United Nations (UNFPA) – indicating the need for ‘Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth’ – was groundbreaking in this regard. Not only did it emphasize the importance of urban expansion for the modern world, it also stressed the need to address this growth with respect to the potential problems and opportunities presented thereby. As noted in the report, expanding urbanization can become either a generator of poverty or a framework for improved living conditions for millions should adequate policy and governance be applied. This thread, opened in the beginning of the millennium, is now better seconded by other important global propositions: the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals – especially goal number 11, ‘Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ – or the New Urban Agenda issued by Habitat III in 2016, and an increasing number of sectoral or regional strategies and plans. For Africa, the Economic Commission for Africa of the United Nations (UNECA), the Agenda 2036 and the African Union (AU) at several occasions also have established urban development and addressing urbanization as priorities for the coming years. UNECA views urbanization as a driver for inclusive growth and structural transformation in Africa. Modern, affordable and liveable habitats and quality basic services are priority areas set by the Agenda 2036. UN-Habitat (UNH), in turn, has developed and published extensive analysis and policy-oriented reports emphasizing the linkages between good urban governance and development (UNH, 2016). The vivacity of African cities has become widely recognized, but their ‘unruly, unpredictable, surprising, confounding’ dynamics (Pieterse & Simone, 2013:12) not only call for a flexible approach based on tendencies of the already established bigger urban centres, but also for the recognition that such dynamics take place in population centres of all sizes. New theoretical and practical tools are needed to deal with big and small emergent and transforming African cities and towns. Small municipalities are equally relevant within these urbanization concerns. Not only are their evolutions unpredictable and as yet poorly defined, they also potentially constitute 233

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new possibilities for dealing with the unstoppable urbanization worldwide in a more deconcentrated way. As such, they provide a platform for the envisaging of creative, novel development. Increasingly and more frequently, contemporary African urban settings reveal new dynamics involving the private sector and the state, and renewed features of migration and mobility, creating new urban configurations. As conditions change for communication and mobility in the more established cities and in the countryside itself, new forms of urban living have been arising, gradually attracting – voluntarily and of necessity – urban and rural migrants. With this, there have emerged new forms of urbanism, housing and economies, and new potentials for development. These new urban realities, however, are less known among scholars and policy stakeholders. One reason for this is that it is still necessary to more clearly define small emergent towns. As UNH (2014) points out, ‘many countries define small settlements of a few thousand as urban’ (22) while, in other countries, ‘rural’ areas are vibrant hubs of nearly one million inhabitants. In addition to the quantitative demographics, there are other definitional aspects that need to be further contextualized, related to the significance of the different towns and cities in various national and regional urban networks.The main consequence of these unclear definitions is that, in general, smaller emergent towns tend to fall out of the radar of urban management and policy. Emergent towns and cities, which attract urban and rural populations to new opportunities, namely in the countryside, are potentially transforming themselves into new forms of urbanism that are not always clearly addressed within urban management and policy frameworks. The challenges faced by large cities, though, are also likely to affect small ones: ‘ubiquitous urban poverty and urban slum proliferation, so characteristic of Africa’s large cities, is likely to become an even more widespread phenomenon’ (UNH, 2014:7), as secondary and smaller cities, lacking urban governance capacities, may replicate their larger counterparts. Within a context of global transformation, emergent towns thus encompass new dynamics and spatialities, new investments, as well as changing populations and mobilities, all of which require closer attention.This calls for an innovative urban approach capable of handling the arising challenges and opportunities associated with migration and mobility, shifting capital flows and economies, and special cases of urban growth and development.Worldwide, cities with fewer than one million inhabitants account for 61 per cent of the urban population (UNH, 2010:4). UNH’s report,‘The State of African Cities 2010’, pointed out that larger cities – defined as more than five million inhabitants – absorbed on average only 9 per cent of African urban growth, while intermediate-size (over one million) and smaller cities attracted the significant balance of about 57 per cent (UNH, 2010:9). UNH further indicated recently that the fastest growing urban centres are the small and medium cities with less than one million inhabitants, which account for 59 per cent of the world’s urban population and 62 per cent of the urban population in Africa (2016:9).This fact emphasizes the need for increased efforts to improve urban management and development in these type of population centres (UNH, 2010), keeping in mind that the benefits of urbanization should not be limited to large cities, but made available to small and medium towns as well (UNH, 2016:36). This chapter aims to identify and discuss the features of emergent urban trends in African contexts, particularly in instances of political and economic transition – and new opportunities appearing beyond the major cities – as currently is the case in Angola and Mozambique. Specifically, it will bring to the discussion key characteristics of newly transforming towns and some of the significant issues for policy and management thereby arising. One of the research questions it raises is how to address management and planning of small emergent towns and ‘unleash’ their potential when the larger cities capture practically all urban-focused efforts – knowledge, research, infrastructure or human resources. Another issue is how to operate in contexts where there is weak capacity to monitor urban growth and the emergence of new urban 234

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types, and not so well-known and at times conflictual processes of decentralization, as seen in Mozambique and Angola (Fauré & Udelsmann Rodrigues, 2012). The central argument is that increasingly there is a need to amplify the urban approach to include smaller emergent towns, as they are tendentially the focus of investments not only by state and private actors but also significantly by local residents, who anticipate urban futures in these transforming municipalities. Based on qualitative research conducted in Angola and in Mozambique between 2015 and 2018, in a post-war post-economic booming context, the chapter ultimately aims at contributing to understand the nature of urbanization more widely and comprehensively through casestudies. It also aims at enabling the building of a more consistent approach to urbanism – one that encompasses different types of urban forms within national urban networks as well as local dynamics of the dwellers themselves, taking into account their expectations, needs and interests. Such an approach, even if not aiming at proposing planning and management solutions, proactively anticipates urban transformation and contributes to more informed urban planning and management. The remainder of this chapter is divided into four sections, starting with an introductory brief description of the importance of world urbanization and the new urban dynamics worldwide, including new emergent towns. It then describes specific case-studies of these new emergent towns in Angola and in Mozambique, detailing first how increased post-war(s) circulation catalysed urban growth in new locations and also how new activities and opportunities accelerated urban growth, for instance in towns where natural gas is explored.The last chapter analyses more closely urban dwellers’ perspectives regarding urban transformation and growth of new towns, which in turn corroborates the need to develop new approaches to these forms of urban living.

15.2 Notable urbanization and new dynamics taking place As mentioned earlier, remarkable urbanization and the growth of main cities are central concerns today when it comes to thinking about human settlements, particularly in Africa. According to the World Bank development indicators in 2015, approximately 38 per cent of Africans are living in cities, while the rate of urban population growth for Sub-Saharan Africa is currently estimated at 4.1 per cent per annum (World Bank, 2015). In addition to the mentioned 2007 UNFPA report and substantial technical and scientific literature on urbanization, urban analyses reflecting on development have led, amongst others, to the formulation of Sustainable Development Goal 11 within the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 – ‘Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. While the goal as set does not specifically address smaller towns’ urban issues or the tendencies for urban growth in smaller municipalities, it opens up possibilities for an articulated approach to urban development. The goal is focused on the high number of urban populations worldwide and on the growth rate of cities. Moreover, it identifies large cities’ specific issues, such as slum upgrading, transport systems, human settlement planning and management, cultural and natural heritage, disasters, the environmental impact of cities, green and public spaces, and sustainable and resilient buildings in developing countries. A more integrative model of sustainable development within the United Nations’ approach, more related to territorial networks, has the objective of supporting positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning (United Nations, 2012). The urban emphasis in this construct, however, is quite general. As such, it does not bring to the fore the role and importance of small emergent urban forms. In the same sense, the New Urban Agenda of 2016, while stressing urban-rural linkages and the relevance of city extensions, does not mention directly the emergent or potentially emergent new urban locales. 235

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New migratory tendencies and mobilities shape the way new cities emerge and expand, changing the landscapes and ways of living of a significant number of people. Mobility such as that seen in Africa, which has always been an important aspect of urbanization patterns and conditions (Potts, 2010; Simone, 2011) continues to play a key role in urban processes taking place all over the world, and particularly in developing countries. While some argue that the pace of urban growth due to migration has decelerated (Potts, 2009), rural exodus is still a marked feature of this continent’s demographics, with fundamental impacts on urban settlement. Discussions on urban transformation and migration are broad, encompassing debatable definitions of cities and urban living (Simone & Pieterse, 2018 Pieterse & Simone, 2013; Simone, 2011; Lemanski, 2014) and of permanent, definitive, and circular migration and mobilities (Potts, 2013; Flahaux & De Haas, 2016). The movement of people and the transformation of urban forms are intrinsically connected, and recurring patterns have been widely described. African migrations are closely interlinked to shifting patterns of settlement and city-building (Flahaux & De Haas, 2016). Migration and urbanization constitute a key concern for policy-makers and stakeholders, while academics systematically emphasize the entanglements of migration and population expansion, often in terms of slum settlements (Beguy et al., 2010) and the correlated condition of poverty (Awumbila, 2017 Tacoli et al., 2015). Specifically, perspectives from the Global South have significantly contributed to new theoretical developments in the areas of migration and urban studies (Simone, 2011; Pieterse & Simone, 2013), and still can and should build and refine urban theory (Lemanski, 2014). Throughout history, new forms of urbanism and urban life have emerged worldwide, each with its specific characteristics. African urban transformation, in particular, has activated diverse aspects, often based within cultural, regional and economic trends (Parnell & Oldfield, 2014). While urbanization has historically been associated with ‘high-density living’ in cities, changes have been happening worldwide and ‘urban culture, society and production systems are increasingly found in rural locations’ (Tacoli et al., 2015:5; see also Potts, 2013). Urban Africa reinvents itself constantly and emerges in a variety of locations. But, despite the changing urban dynamics, urban transformation in developing countries does not necessarily imply better living. The UN Habitat’s State of African Cities report (2014) estimates that cities on this continent are now characterized by political and economic informalization, mostly as a response to inadequate municipal infrastructure (Simone, 2001). This is an issue particularly critical in places not actively included in urban planning roadmaps, such as smaller pockets of population growth. Still, what characterizes the new urban approach, transversally integrating the different types of urban forms, is the need to understand the potential of such areas for development, as well as their articulations with more traditional population centres. Within the work of international bodies, the mentioned ‘State of African Cities’ report highlights a shift in thinking towards the perception of the prospects for African cities – one that is increasingly positive. In the New Urban Agenda, the central ideas of the new urban vision focus on fostering national urban planning and planned city extensions (although in most cases referring to bigger cities).While major and well-established cities increasingly concentrate economic growth, global networks and relations, they consequently also capture and absorb significantly the efforts for urban management and governance. Emergent cities receive less of the attention and resources. Following these tendencies, Angolan and Mozambican urban plans are also focused on the major cities, namely in the capitals Luanda and Maputo. Recognition of the potentials and fragilities of urban growth has come to the fore more actively in terms of policy work in general, following global tendencies, but it still has left outside of its scope the smaller urban nuclei. From 1960 to 2015, the Angolan urban population increased from 10 per cent to 44 per cent of the total, according to the World Bank projections, and in Mozambique from five per cent to 32 236

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per cent. The Angolan Census of 2014 indicates an even higher percentage of the population comprised urban dwellers (63 per cent), while the Mozambican Institute of Statistics estimated that the urban population represented 31 per cent in 2013. Luanda and Maputo are the most important urban centres, accounting for roughly 27 per cent (near 7 million) and 8.5 per cent (around 3.5 million) of the total population, respectively (INE, 2014, 2017). With such growing urban populations, urban planning has become a key development device over the years, concentrated and focused on the capital cities, but still not sufficiently advanced. Moreover, while new migratory trends have evolved, thus far there is insufficient reflection on how such trends will likely define the urban future of both countries. Despite the nationally proclaimed need to address urbanization at a wider national level, imbalances among the capital, major cities and smaller municipalities are still very marked, leaving notable gaps in terms of resource allocation and recognition of the latter’s importance and anticipated potentials.

15.3 New emergent towns: Locating and reflecting Given the limits of urban sprawl, lessening opportunities in the main cities and the globalization of capitals and economies, in many contemporary African contexts new dynamics, involving the private sector and the state, gradually attract – voluntarily and of necessity – urban dwellers and rural migrants to new forms of settlement in the rural areas or in rapidly urbanizing smaller towns and cities (Agergaard et al. 2009; Bryceson, 2011; Bryceson & MacKinnon, 2012; Dobler, 2009).The dynamics of smaller urban settlements, however, are comparatively less documented than those of larger cities (Bryceson, 2011). Literature about secondary cities shows that such localities are insufficiently researched compared to their increased recognized prominence (Marais et al. 2016). Focusing on the structuration of smaller cities is also seen as a promising solution in some developing countries (Abou-Korin, 2014). The designation itself, focused on their size, is increasingly expanding to the importance of the interrelationships between size, function and location, which may justify the use of other terms such as ‘intermediate’ cities (idem, 3). Functions of secondary cities are often related to markets, education, retirement, tourism, agricultural processing, mining and the armed forces, as well as their utility as border posts (Satterthwaite, 2006). In South Africa some years ago, most small towns were mining towns, tourism centres or farming/agricultural towns (Nel, 2005). Further, increasingly, cities of different sizes integrate articulated urban networks within national contexts. A significant part of the research focusing on ‘new towns’ is dedicated to discussions about planned and unplanned settlement, which includes a number of studies on peripheries, boomtowns, satellite cities or suburbs. Literature about ‘boomtowns’ – ‘new’ towns are often perceived as such – increasingly integrates a critical perspective on notions of rurality and isolation of these new locations, of the non-local ownership and control that characterizes them, the spatial and temporal concentration they imply and of their economic drivers (Jacquet & Kay, 2014). Most prominently, boomtowns are no longer seen as mere results of rapid growth usually followed by bust, but as locations of possible ‘repeated waves of mini-booms and mini-busts over the course of decades’ (Jacquet & Kay, 2014:1), depending on a series of factors of which markets are central. The spontaneity of boomtowns is comparable to that of urban peripheries, as they too often emerge in ‘totally unplanned ways’ (Turner, 1968:107), although they fulfil social and economic functions when they are built (idem, p. 117). The emergence of new cities, in several cases, has led to ‘discontinued’ urban growth and development, to phases of boom and bust or to intermittent growth (Dobler, 2009; Zeller, 2009). More often than not, though, they continue to grow. New towns, as other towns, involve agglomerations of people and economic activities, on the one hand, but also ‘transforming specialised land uses and the densification of networks 237

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of interactions’ (Scott & Storper, 2015:7). These new places also ‘provide a training ground for rural-to-urban migrants, a basis for a more equitable distribution of social services, and an arena for the distribution of information, ideas, and social mobilisation’ (Duarte et al. 2015:21). Case studies across the continent provide valuable resources for a discussion and reflection on the types of dynamics for the emergence, growth, consolidation, decline and transformation of small secondary towns. On the one hand, several examples refer to the very direct correlations between, for instance, the inception of mineral explorations, their development and waning of population settlement, growth and subsequent decline (Marais et al., 2016). Some similar cases, on the other, provide a wealth of examples for discussions around these issues, as they do not result in population loss. Some cities are able to reduce their dependence on the mineral wealth and focus on other local potentials, such as regional connections like corridors, harbours, increased linkages with main cities, or expanded services such as universities, retirement facilities, housing projects for the middle classes or weekend tourism or even through more service provision to the rural areas (Marais et al., 2016). Proposals for a revised typification of small towns include, on the one hand, rural development of towns mostly based on agricultural products and services; a second type comprised coastal towns, mining towns, former ‘homeland’ towns and large rural towns, all relying on sectors other than agriculture; and a third group of small rural towns strongly driven by the tourism and hospitality sector (Toerien & Marais, 2012:11–12). For many years, the urban networks of Angola and Mozambique remained practically unchanged. Modern administrative centres concentrating large numbers of population were largely the same as those of the colonial arrangement, and there was a tendency to maintain this design. Urban residents perceive, in some cases, that the established grid changed somehow unexpectedly. As one person noted: ‘No one thought that Matola [Maputo] would grow as it did; the same tendency is to be seen in the Boane district [border area], there are now more state constructions’ (GF, 55, businesswoman, Ressano Garcia, April 2017). Unplanned new settlements are therefore normally ‘ignored’ until years after their emergence. The state often only has an indirect influence in the establishment of new settlements in the cases where they are linked to new large rural projects, namely those related to natural resources. There are also in both countries examples of wartime creations of new towns, related to forced displacements, where the state played diverse roles depending on the political interest and actual capacity to absorb migratory influx. Given the contexts of Angola and Mozambique, several combinations and successive transformations over time have been seen since the colonial period (until 1975), throughout the civil conflicts (1975–1996 and 1975–2002, in Mozambique and Angola, respectively) and in the postwar reconstruction period. Migration of people shapes the way new towns emerge, as does the initiation of certain types of catalysing ventures. Today one finds a number of interesting cases of urbanization in the rural and the urban peripheries in Angola and in Mozambique. These include towns that grow linked to circuits of people and goods, in or near borders or ports, near roads and railways – or even towns ‘moving’ closer to them – and their vibrant related trade. Also, mining cities built by large-scale firms or spontaneously attracting people seeking opportunities in this industry are quite significant. One also finds new settlements related to tourism or agriculture ventures; further, and in somewhat similar fashion, large cities’ suburbs and satellite cities can emerge in empty rural areas from scratch. Among the new urban locations, border towns, mining/extractive industries’ related towns and suburbia/satellite cities are the most salient cases of urbanization of the rural areas in Angola and Mozambique. This chapter mostly refers to border and ‘natural gas’ towns in these two countries. Some of the examples of new towns analysed in Angola and Mozambique result in increased consolidation, i.e., areas becoming more stable, lasting and structured. Stabilization and growth of border 238

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towns is related to the continued dynamism of cross-border trade but also to state investments in strategic border passages through, for instance, traffic- or customs-related parks or infrastructure and specific urban policies. The ‘natural gas’ type of towns, in turn, are mainly catalysed by private sector investments, normally large-scale ventures, that bring with them associated smaller businesses and services, generally less regulated by urbanistic state policies. This chapter looks at three important dimensions of new urban configurations: (a) public interventions in planning, (b) investments made by local urban dwellers, and (c) a resultant increasing permanency and stability of urban settlements. State intervention in emergent towns is often expected as the natural sequence of new aggregates of population. It implies the formal recognition of the urban status of places and is accompanied by a series of expected upgrades in terms of roads and accesses, provision of electricity and water, administrative offices, health posts, schools, and so on. At the level of non-institutional actors, the urban dwellers, urban permanence and stabilization gravitate around the expectations of increased investments made by the state and, to a lesser extent, the private sector. Most importantly, stabilization and permanent settlement are dependent on individual and family investments made and accumulated over time. Finally, while circulation and pluri-residence normally characterize the phases of emergence of smaller towns, its decreased intensity and the recognition of transformations taking place leading to a progressively more urban type of life reinforce the local dynamics conducive to urban consolidation and stabilization.

15.3.1 Towns accelerated by increased circulation: Ressano Garcia and Santa Clara borders Africa provides many examples of regional growth independent of state-led strategies, especially in areas historically late ruled by colonial models of regional development (Bach, 2008:178). The aspects related to urban emergence are varied and combine in unique ways in different places. Border towns, most commonly, are fostered by circulation of people and goods and by the opportunities created by this transit. Where, for instance, major road and transportation investments combine with favourable global trade conditions and local informal and even illegal business dynamics, towns like Katima Mulilo at (literally) crossroads tend to develop (Zeller, 2009). Circulation is crucial for the economic dynamism of such towns; this in turn generates attraction and agglomeration. Despite their genesis, these types of new urban configurations also can follow different paths. There is a variety of instances of ephemeral border boomtowns, less and more structured ones, others that transformed potentially temporary settlement into more durable urbanism (Scholvin & Draper, 2012). As Storeygard (2013) points out, other factors related to circulation, such as ‘transport costs, have also played a critical role in determining the growth of cities’ (1) in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly border towns. Transport corridors are particularly key in fostering urban growth in such locations, especially within projects jointly mobilizing local and national authorities, foreign aid donors and transnational investors (Zeller, 2007, 2009). Transport corridors such as the Maputo, Walvis Bay, trans-Cunene or Beira are expected to stimulate the growth of other prominent border towns in Angola and Mozambique (Duarte et al., 2015; Nugent, 2012). Only a few border posts in Angola and Mozambique are connected to high-traffic national or international roads and routes. The end of the civil conflicts and increased circulation, coupled with the possibility of freely moving within the countries and beyond, contributed to expanded interconnected regional linkages among cities and towns and their respective markets. The changes happening in border towns in both countries since the end of their respective civil wars show that there is a direct relation between the possibilities of circulation and urban 239

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evolutions.The two examples in this chapter highlight the importance of mobility to the emergence of new dynamic urban hubs, increasingly transforming into larger cities. In their origin, before gaining urban prominence at the regional level, Santa Clara and Ressano Garcia emerged as informal agglomerations of a varied range of traders, business people and their employees. In Mozambique, the traffic-intensive Ressano Garcia, at the border post of the same name, between the capital Maputo and commercially vibrant interconnected South African towns – namely Komatipoort and Nelspruit – is one example of informal growth followed by formal interventions. The town already existed in colonial times, but its expansion and attraction of larger numbers of people only started after the end of the civil war in Mozambique. This area, considered a ‘cross-border micro-region’ within the Maputo Corridor and the state-led programme of the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC), is the result not only of existing social and economic relations but also of the ‘millions of migrants’ that moved into it over the years (Söderbaum & Taylor, 2008:35). The ‘micro-region’ was in existence even during the conflicts with South Africa of the 1980s and 1990s; it has maintained itself as a migration corridor, an informal trade (mukhero) corridor and even a criminal corridor (idem, 37). Rogerson (2001) points out that: ‘[South African] Komatipoort and Ressano Garcia are twin towns that straddle the border’ and ‘with the considerable increase in the volumes of people and traffic crossing the border, new investment opportunities have emerged for retailing and tourism developments’ (340). Following increased circulation and migration to the town, state intervention and investments, aiming at better controlling the cross-border flows, have materialized into not only a reformed border post area but also a traffic park. The Road Terminal (Terminal Internacional Rodoviário), built in 2015 at “Km 4”, aimed at facilitating trade and improving the competitiveness of the Maputo Development Corridor. Further, the new urban planning for Ressano Garcia sets the stage for important restructuring of the housing grid, planning of urban spaces and interlinkages to the rest of the country and to South Africa. In Angola, new investments made at the local level in connectivity also have contributed to the growth and increased dynamism of border towns. In the (south) Cunene region, the border town of Santa Clara grew significantly after the end of the civil war (Udelsmann Rodrigues, 2010). It also benefited in 2012 from construction of a customs park aimed at facilitating the traffic and border procedures. Its strategic location also improved with reactivation of the Namibe and Lobito ports and the reconstruction of railways linking them to Zambia (an addition that will likely further improve its connectivity to the interior). As Duarte et al. (2015) note, the reactivation of the rail line within the Lobito Corridor ‘facilitated the reestablishment of commercial links between urban and rural areas and between inland and coastal areas’ and also helped develop a series of ‘intermediate trade centres’ (21). Their recent study highlights the effects of this improvement, with ‘the villages and settlements along the railway that appeared to be deserted in wartime are now bustling with small-scale trade, markets for agricultural products, and passenger activity’ (idem, 21); moreover, ‘public buildings and administrative centres are also being constructed or rehabilitated in the towns and cities along the railway line’ (idem, 29). In Rundu (Namibia)-Calai (Angola), also in the south border of Angola, ‘the establishment of a well-maintained network of highways, major and minor roads’ fostered mobility in the region and connectivity between markets and this remote area, which translated spatially in the growth of both towns (Röder et al., 2015:351). The Rundu-Calai area in Angola-Namibia reflects this intensification of commercial activities, with a ‘strong and interconnected urban growth on both sides of the river’ (Röder et al., 2015). As more interconnections are established, settlement is envisaged to increase further.The Cunene traders crossing these borders are mostly from the neighbouring province of Huíla, from Cunene and from Cuando Cubango. However, the end of the war allowed for more extended circulation with population coming from more 240

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distant provinces participating in the cross-border trade as well (Udelsmann Rodrigues, 2007). Namibia’s Oshikango, on the other side of the border – although small (only around 20,000 inhabitants) – is a town created ‘from below, through economic opportunity’ (Dobler, 2009:129) within this route. It has become a trade boomtown since the mid-1990s (1995–1996; Dobler, 2009) due to the combination of both safety during the Angolan civil conflict and accessibility to Namibian markets. Santa Clara-Oshikango witnessed impressive growth due to border-related opportunities and increased post-war ‘Angolan buying power’ (Dobler, 2009:115). Additional investments made on trading and circulation platforms, such as the customs park, contributed to the acceleration of economic growth and, with it, urbanization. The circulation hub attracted outside investments and settlement that had more impact than local initiative or natural growth (Dobler, 2009: 116). The customs park (Parque Aduaneiro de Santa Clara) and the truck park, both built in 2012, aimed at organizing the local circulation and economy as part of a significant state investment in this remote region.Together with these state and private ventures, the local government prepared a 2013–2017 plan for the province (Plano de Desenvolvimento da Província do Cunene para o Quinquénio 2013–2017), focusing on a reorganization of Santa Clara based on a new urban approach aimed at better controlling settlement resulting from intensive circulation and migration. In sum, in Angola and in Mozambique, the existence and improvement of transportation and circulation networks constitute important catalysers of economic dynamism and settlement, particularly in border towns. After the end of the wars, these were initially unplanned and informal. The state, through public investments, and at times supported by private interests, has recently played a key role in the two above-mentioned localities by establishing infrastructure related to the intensified circulation on the one hand and organizing settlements and deliberate urban planning, on the other.

15.3.2 Towns accelerated by new opportunities: ‘Natural gas cities’ Pemba and Soyo New opportunities attracting the population to certain regions, and setting the stage for urbanization, come about in various ways in Angola and Mozambique. As illustrated above, places of intensive trade often give rise to increased settlement. This applies to mineral-related towns. In these settlements, circulation and migration are steered by large-scale enterprises and small-scale mining migrants, with other migrants following the additional opportunities created by these dynamics. In Angola, colonial mining towns have been created by firms such as the Diamang, who operated in the Lundas between the early 1900s until independence (Udelsmann Rodrigues & Tavares, 2012).The company, with the support of the colonial government, determined the type of settlement in these inland areas. It fostered urbanization in the form of enclosed residential compounds for mine workers, not only to control mining activities and staff, but also to better manage the local and displaced workforce as well as the rural population settling around the mines. After independence and as the civil war started, mineral resources, particularly diamonds, became associated with the territorial competition of warring factions. These circumstances dictated the positions of conflicting sides and most particularly of settlements. The border mining town of Soyo, in the northern province of Zaire, was organized based on the large-scale oil and gas-related activities of the Angola LNG. Before this, it was a small fishing village, with a not-so-well-known reduced number of families. According to the 2014 Census, the town has reached 227,000 inhabitants. Additionally, due to its location on the fluvial/sea border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it is also in the way of intensive migratory and trading routes, a combination of conditions favourable to settlement. But all these 241

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population flows catalysed urban growth only after the establishment of the natural gas plant, the Angola LNG, and associated urban infrastructure such as the airport, in 2008. The border post, located inside the Angola LNG compound, even controls the trading and transportation activities of the Soyo municipality.The maritime police survey the circulation of the population across the Congo River separating the country from the DRC, in close articulation with the Angola LNG. Towns such as Soyo have not witnessed significant improvements in connectivity in the last years. Natural gas is transported by sea through the Kwanda Base port of the Angola LNG. However, given the accumulation of other conditions, the town has not only been attracting workers to the large-scale venture, but also has seen an influx of other populations seeking opportunities related to the town’s growth. The capital of the Zaire province, Mbanza Congo, has lost over the last several years economic and even administrative prominence to Soyo.This is demonstrated by the fact that the province administration staff is most of the time based not in Mbanza Congo but in Soyo, where there is a stronger infrastructure and services. In Mozambique, several similar cases also point to the importance of new projects being developed, and their significant contribution to population settlement and urban growth. Before independence, colonial prospecting of minerals was not significant within the territory. Consequently, no important urban centres related to this economy emerged. After independence, however, some key projects shook the local economies and settlement, particularly in the beginning of the 2000s. In the interior, the coal project in Tete is one of the most known examples of large-scale mining in the country, producing important settlement impacts (Mosca & Selemane, 2012). The project has been catalysing for decades the urban growth and economic dynamism of the area. Additionally, the development of intersections in this region further increased other economic opportunities, namely trade conducted through the Mozambique-Malawi border (linking Zobué in Mozambique to the hinterland, to Mwanza and from there to Blantyre, in Malawi). Mining activities in the northern province of Cabo Delgado in the Rovuma Basin area have gradually been attracting not only the population directly involved in the LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) projects, but also services and trades like in Soyo. Other large-scale projects, such as in the field of biofuels, are also being developed and will most likely accelerate agglomeration in the region – although many of these projects allegedly do not take into consideration issues related to urbanization or the development of social infrastructure (Nhantumbo & Salomão, 2010:39). Towns like Mocímboa da Praia or Palma – where the LNG project concentrates its logistic base and where resettlement is ongoing – and most notably Pemba, where other logistic facilities are located, have grown significantly after initiation of the gas projects. The owners of the project, Anadarko and Eni, signed a Heads of Agreement for joint development of the LNG Park in 2012; production is expected to start in 2018. Over recent years, the Mozambique Gas Development Project has been the main factor of attraction of population to the area, particularly with respect to hired specialized workers from other provinces and a variety of businesses that foresee possibilities in this region. In both countries, the establishment of projects such as those related to natural gas are then likely to attract migration and settlement; further, their combination with added favourable conditions has been responsible for the emergence of new urbanization in locations previously markedly rural. The key actors for the introduction of such accelerators are most prominently the private large-scale endeavours, although public-private partnerships have also often been established. Urban planning, in these cities, is accomplished almost entirely by the private sector: cities such as Palma and Pemba in Mozambique or Soyo in Angola are examples of cases where ‘projects bring the cities with them already and services follow them’ (interview to ARL, male 56, Pemba, April 2017). As with border towns, however, the dynamics behind the emergence of mining/extractives-based towns are intertwined with other factors and conditions as well. 242

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15.4 Urban dwellers: Expectations and realities in new towns Despite the mentioned drivers behind the emergence and growth of these border and natural gas cities, identifying the key actors of towns’ emergence and consolidation is not straightforward. Research has shown the importance of initiative and entrepreneurship, reliance on a degree of external support and the presence of talented leaders as being a successful combination (Nel, 2005). References to crucial elements of local economic development also include strong social capital that bonds together the residents of a given locality and provides skills training (Gibb, 2005). Research also has pointed out the economic drivers of the growth of small towns as being a combination of population, infrastructure, location, municipal leadership, local entrepreneurs, existent industries and local economic development (Reynolds & Antrobus, 2012:42). In other places, the development of a core activity such as tourism is perceived as the main impetus for local population growth and improvements in terms of public services, job opportunities and infrastructure (Nhantumbo & Salomão, 2010). In Angola and Mozambique, although at different paces and to varying degrees, the state is currently the leader in the building of new cities. Urban reconfigurations are linked to the capital cities and their expansion and to the construction of new resettlement neighbourhoods in rural areas, within more or less complex public-private partnership programmes (Croese, 2017; Mosca & Selemane, 2012). While new towns are hardly solely creations of the state, there are normally great expectations regarding the changes the government can bring to new towns and how places will require such interventions.As one resident observed,‘there are today gigantic villages in Mozambique, like Nanduli or Metuge.They will require state planning’ (A.R.L., male 56, Pemba, April 2017). The three essential dimensions of new urban configurations, identified in the beginning of the chapter, consist of state interventions, urban investments made by residents and growing permanency and stability of urban settlement. Urban dwellers in emergent towns have expectations regarding infrastructure and services, and state intervention is often seen as the natural sequence to both spontaneous emergence of towns such as border towns and the implantation of new urban sites such as mining towns. Accounts of residents collected in different types of new urban configurations are informative in this regard. Some people point to the fact that ‘the state is responsible for the growth of cities’ (DN, 41 male, businessmen, Soyo, April 2016) and this constitutes a central reason for migration and settlement: ‘The population goes to where the basic conditions are created’ (EC, 35 male, teacher, Santa Clara, April 2016). State intervention is seen not only in the provision of services and infrastructure but also in urban planning: ‘In Palma, the [natural gas] project has halted but all land plots are already defined, sold and ready to begin construction. This is going to be a great city’ (FD, 35 years old, Pemba, April 2017). Indications of state channelling investment towards new towns comes in the form of different types of upgrades, roads and accesses, provision of electricity and water, administrative offices, health posts, schools, and so on.The urban residents express a feeling of change in the infrastructure of cities: ‘Pemba secondary school in Bairro Cimento was made of bamboo and zinc. Now it is much better’ (IN, 19 years old, female, Pemba, April 2017); or ‘Palma already has a bank’ (AG, female, 72 years old, Pemba, April 2017). Some have witnessed the changes taking place over the years and comparisons translate the changing urban character of places: ‘Until the beginning of the 1990s, there was only one taxi in the whole city of Pemba, of the Loureiro family. Now, there is a huge amount of them’ (F, male, 41 years old, government staff, Pemba, March 2017). On the other hand, while for the urban dwellers, urban permanence and stabilization gravitate around the expectations of increased investments made by the state and the private sector, most importantly it is dependent on individual and family investments made and accumulated over time. These investments are normally materialized in housing but can also be in economic 243

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activities, in jobs and businesses. Quite often, residents in emergent towns planned for a temporary stay when they moved: ‘My plan was to come and work only for a few years, but I ended up staying, building a house and family’ (C.M., gas industry staff, male, 35 Pemba, March 2017).The house in particular signifies the actual or prospective permanency in the new towns: ‘I finished building my house in 2012; this neighbourhood was a bush before, now it is all nice houses’ (EZ, 29 male, technical staff, Soyo, April 2016). Businesses and work also have an important weight on decisions to stay in a certain location. Investments made in this sense usually have to do with specializations in the case of specific industries: ‘I started to work in this area [gas industry] and so it is more difficult to change; it is not everywhere that one finds gas-related jobs’ (FD, 35 years old, LNG technical staff, Pemba, April 2017). Other economic investments are more clearly associated with businesses that cannot be moved easily and that rely on actual or potential profits: ‘Many people invested in tourism near Pemba. The Maringanha area is today full of businesses that were not there a few years ago’ (MB, female 46, Pemba, March 2017). As years pass and investments grow and become more consolidated, the tendency for permanence – and hence to be part of the urban configuration – increases and becomes stronger: ‘I am already used to being here’ (DMK, 40 male, teacher, Santa Clara, May 2016). Finally, while circulation and pluri-residence characterize the phases of emergence of smaller towns, its decreased intensity and the recognition of transformations taking place (leading to a progressively more urban type of life) reinforce the local dynamics conducive to urban consolidation and a perception of stabilization. Especially in the first years of settlement in new towns, residents tend to go back and forth, between places where they lived before – and where most of times families remain living – and the new emergent towns: ‘I stay in town half of the time and the other half I stay in Luanda or in the off-shore platform’ (J, 29 male, technical staff, Soyo, April 2016). This circulation can involve long distances and cross-border residential living: ‘I have a job here but also in Namibia; I travel between places during the week (VCS, 40 male, priest and teacher, Santa Clara, May 2016). However, when both the infrastructural conditions and individual and family investments improve and accumulate, accounts often reveal perceptions that urban life in new towns also has improved. These changes make places in the countryside ‘become culturally more similar to large urban agglomerations’, leading to a visible ‘rural transformation’ (Berdegué et al. 2014:1), becoming truly urban in the eyes of their inhabitants. Transformation involves simultaneously physical changes in towns and also behaviours and ways of living: ‘Young people of Soyo progressed; the mentality is new’ (J, 29 male, technical staff, Soyo, April 2016); ‘Initially, Santa Clara was a market and settlement; but now it is more organized and the houses are better’ (IM, 38 female, trader, Santa Clara, May 2016); ‘Pemba changed immensely since some five years ago. So many new hotels and even a big commercial area now’ (AG, female resident, 73, Pemba, March 2017). Before the evidence of urban transformation, the chances for permanent stable settlement increase, which in turn is expressed in the expansion and stabilization of new urban realities.These processes – and most importantly their outcomes – are, however, hard to determine without deep auscultation of local trends and dynamics.

15.5 Conclusions While there is a growing interest on urban dynamics worldwide, analysis of key policy documents shows that small emergent urban cases are not yet clearly addressed. However, they also refer that small emergent towns concentrate potentials for development.There is today a variety of new urban configurations that are not sufficiently studied, particularly in terms of the dynamics of local actors, urban residents, and their articulations with private and state actors.This chapter has shown first, by analysing key policy guidelines, that increasingly there is a need to amplify 244

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the urban approach to include small emergent towns to comprehensively understand the urban questions more widely and, further, consistently build a more networked approach to urbanism at national levels. There is a clear need to include small emergent towns in urban national planning and in policy-making. Key areas for thinking about management and governance of small towns include their integration in a concerted national framework to assure balanced decentralized allocated resources and investments. Most of the time the new dynamisms of emergent towns fall behind within the national priorities, as the larger cities usually capture practically all urban focused resources – knowledge, research, infrastructure, or human resources. The analysis of information collected among new towns’ urban dwellers through case studies points to complex articulations between perceptions and expectations regarding infrastructure provided by states, the levels and significances of urban residents’ investments and the consolidation of and urban type of living. In-depth research in Angola and Mozambique’s emergent border and ‘natural gas’ towns has shown that there is still more to explore regarding the dynamics of state, private and urban dwellers types and levels of investments in urbanization.

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16 The Africanization of public space in South Africa A moment of opportunity Karina Landman

16.1 Introduction South African cities are rapidly changing in response to urbanization and migration, declining rural and urban economies and increasing inequality and insecurity. They are generally characterized by high levels of urbanization (Turok 2018, NDP 2030 2011), informality (Skinner & Watson 2018), and insecurity and violence (Brown-Mutlango & Reyes 2018). Within this context, public spaces in the country are also changing (Landman 2016a). While some public spaces reflect patterns of degradation, others embody various adaptations to existing challenges and local needs in different ways, ranging from major urban upgrading projects to small-scale survivalist or informal interventions, which is referred to as the Africanization of public space. The reaction has been twofold: while some people retreat to pseudo-public or privatized spaces, others embrace the new opportunities within urban space. This raises a number of questions about the nature and appropriateness of these changes and the emerging public spaces within changing African cities. Should these spaces only be concerned with aesthetics and formalistic design, or should they rather accommodate different functions and needs of a variety of users? This chapter focuses on the Africanization of public spaces in South Africa. As part of ongoing work on the transformation of public space in the country, we investigated the nature and use of various types of public spaces, as well as the perceptions and experiences of users and managers of these spaces. Although numerous factors where mentioned that discouraged the use of various public spaces, we were struck by the constant regularity in which insecurity and informality were raised as major concerns by public space users and managers in the city. In this chapter, I examine the transition of a number of contemporary public spaces in the City of Tshwane through patterns of degradation, mitigation and adaptation, based on multiple case studies of public spaces carried out across the country between 2014 and 2017 and interviews with urban designers and planners. In order to move towards significant transformation of public space in post-apartheid cities, the chapter argues for a more pronounced paradigm change to address signs of conflict and contestation based on contrasting visions, opposing uses and conflicting interpretations. Such a paradigm shift needs to include a reconsideration and invigoration of African Urbanism and its role in regenerative development and design of public 248

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space in South Africa, as well as an appropriate differentiation of public space in terms of users and use without being discriminative. The chapter commences with a brief background of changing South African cities, followed by a discussion of the changing form and function of public spaces and pen ultimately a call for changing paradigms of public space in the country.

16.2 Changing cities We are living in a time of profound global change (Bhan et al. 2018) and often this is dramatically experienced in cities. Cities are facing a number of persistent challenges such as urban growth, changing family patterns, an increasing number of people in informal settlements or slums, as well as a lack of service provision in many parts of the world (UN Habitat World Cities Report 2016). This is especially pronounced in developing countries or countries of the Global South, where the highest numbers of people live in informal or unplanned areas without adequate services (UN Habitat 2008). Significant urban transformation of the new century are taking place in the developing world … Informality is now seen as a generalised mode of metropolitan urbanisation … This can be linked strategically by planners to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities of the poor … recognising the ‘right to the city’. (Roy 2005:147–148) Ananda Roy, therefore, acknowledges the role of informality in changing cities and the necessity to engage with the needs and vulnerabilities of the poor. Informality is not a moment in transition as part of modernism, but a long-term state (Watson 2006). This state cannot be wished or planned away overnight. It is a means of survival and entry into the city. In addition to the persistent issues, there are also a number of emerging issues, including climate change, exclusion, inequality, rising insecurity, and international migration (UN Habitat World Cities Report 2016). Similarly to the persistent issues, these ones tends to be more severe in the Global South, while their implications often give rise to greater challenges. Cities in Africa experience three major challenges, namely overcrowding, disconnection, and high development costs. Crowded cities are packed with people but capital investment such as housing and infrastructure are lacking. Disconnected cities reflect an inefficient form that are exacerbated by low-density urban sprawl and poor transport, especially public transport. Costly cities are expensive for households, works and businesses to live in due to the nature of the urban form, degraded or inadequate infrastructure and high level of development costs. This leads to low expectations and a high investment risk (Law et al. 2017), alongside a dramatic demographic transition, which has been called ‘Africa’s Urban Revolution’ (Parnell and Peterson 2014). Some of the key conditions driving the urban revolution are chronic poverty, high levels of inequality and unemployment and ongoing war and conflict, which in turn tends to increase levels of insecurity, violence, and crime (UN Habitat 2008, Parnell and Pieterse 2014). It also promotes selective investment in a few flashy or flagship projects connected to major urban nodes or upmarket areas. The City of Tshwane is a good example. The City sees highlevel urban design of the nodes as giving the metropolitan area a competitive edge and assisting in attracting foreign and private sector investment. It is especially focused on doing so through major flagship projects that are planned for the City, linked to prominent nodes at a metropolitan-wide level, for example the Inner City Regeneration Project, Rainbow Juncture, the Hazeldene Development and Symbio City (also mentioned in the Tshwane 2030 Vision Strategy). Centurion in particular is marketed and envisioned as such a major metropolitan node 249

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with ‘major attractor projects’ – notably the African Gateway, Symbio City and the Tshwane International Conference Centre – with the Gautrain Station providing it with a significant competitive edge (Oranje and Landman 2016). In other cases, it leads to what Watson (2013) calls “African Urban Fantasies”, visions and projects for future cities that reflect the notion that Africa is rising and can produce projects comparable with the best in the world, as well as fashionable and smart cities. These new urban fantasies, however, entrench urban spatial and social inequalities at an unprecedented scale (Watson 2013:229). Therefore, while attracting foreign investment and increasing the competiveness of these cities, these types of developments are also exacerbating the stark divides present in African and South African cities, where post-apartheid cities in the country still experience challenges related to separation and spatial fragmentation. Consequently, rapidly urbanizing and expanding cities in South Africa are characterized by two contrasting trends. On the one hand, there are signs of increasing globalization and the emergence of dream projects, often giving rise to the Fortress City, characterized by privatization and exclusion. On the other hand, there is a growing tendency towards informality, which gives rise to the Survival City, characterized by informal shelter and trading. Both of these patterns have a profound effect on the transformation of public space in the country.

16.3 Changing public spaces “As political, economic and cultural changes have given a new significance to cities, urban space is being reshaped to accommodate the new urban conditions” (Madanipour 2006:119). Public space in African cities is general lacking. Land conversions fail to allocate areas for public purposes. The focus tends to be more on private ownership, resulting in a negative impact on circulation, recreation, and environmental sustainability (Law et al. 2017). In response to many political, social, and spatial changes in post-apartheid South African cities, public spaces also reflect various changes. These changes can broadly be characterized by patterns of degradation, mitigation and adaptation.

16.3.1 Degradation The physical degradation of public spaces is characterized by litter, graffiti, broken lights and windows, and signs of vandalized infrastructure and polluted rivers. Arcadia and Springbok Parks are both located in the inner suburbs of Pretoria, close to the CBD and other major institutions such as the University of Pretoria. Arcadia Park surrounds the Pretoria Art Museum with large areas of grass and some trees. Some of the structures have broken windows, rubbish bins are overflowing with litter for days on end and the toilets are not working. During interviews with the users, people complained about those playing soccer there, leading to the destruction of the grass. In Springbok Park, the overgrown vegetation obstruct sightlines and the stream is polluted and filled with litter, causing a health risk to park users.There is a general lack of maintenance in both these parks. In other cases, recently developed parks have been vandalized and park furniture broken or stolen. In Melodi Park, located in Mamelodi on the north-eastern periphery of Pretoria, some of the children’s playing equipment have been stolen or destroyed, while rubbish is constantly dumped in the river.Very similar trends are visible in another park in MamelodiEast, called the Pienaarspoort Park. Most of the play equipment, park furniture and many of the lights are broken, while the surfaces have been burned by making fire on the ground. The grids of the barbeque facilities have been stolen and the walkways have been destroyed through the theft of the bricks used for paving. The river is also highly polluted through litter (see Figures 16.1 and 16.2). 250

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Figure 16.1 Polluted stream in Springbok Park. Source: Author.

Figure 16.2 Broken infrastructure and play equipment in the Pienaarspoort Park. Source: Author.

The public spaces are used by a variety of users for various activities, some that are considered to be contributing to social degradation. In Arcadia Park, users stated that they gather to meet friends or relax under the trees, while others play soccer. Yet, there is a general discontent with the nature of the space. Users complained about the lack of maintenance and mentioned that the space used to be beautiful, but that government had “messed things up”. They also complained 251

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about other users drinking and fighting in the park, as well as increasing drug abuse. Springbok Park, with its luscious vegetation, resting spots overlooking an inviting waterbody and sunny grass patches, is a popular setting for photographs and relaxation. However, the presence of drug dealers and users, as well as reported muggings, have deterred many users and frightened others away. In Mamelodi, the degradation of spaces, commonly attributed to the “nyaope boys”, young males consuming a street drug made of heroin, dagga (marijuana), anti-retroviral drugs, milk powder, rat poison and pool cleaner, have scared some users away, for example, grandmothers with small children and restricted the use of the spaces due to broken equipment and park furniture.

16.3.2 Mitigation In a number of public spaces, the local authority or users themselves have responded to signs of degradation through small interventions to reverse the decline or make it less severe. While the physical nature remained largely the same, the changes relate more to the use or activities occurring within the spaces. For example, in Church Square, the oldest square in the city, the installation of free Wi-Fi services drew many middle-class residents back to the space to utilize the service. Other activities include sermons by lay preachers, photographers taking pictures of people in the space and traditional dancers performing on special days. Burgers Park, also located in the CBD, was originally built as Victorian Park and still contains a number of Victorian structures and statues. While the form has changed little, the users have changed significantly. Along with the changing demographic profile of the inner city, the users of the park have changed and now includes users from all ages, a variety of income groups and mostly black, many of whom are residents of the high-rise apartment blocks in the immediate environment. In both these spaces, a new sense of ownership is developing and a notion echoed by many users that compared to the Apartheid Era where only white people were allowed to use these spaces, anyone is now welcome (see Figure 16.3).

Figure 16.3 People enjoying various activities in Burgers Park. Source: Author.

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Similar to the inner city spaces, those in the suburbs are also mitigating the creeping signs of decline. Jan Cilliers Park is located south of the CBD in a suburb called Groenkloof, with an extraordinary beautiful landscape that are well maintained and used for walking, relaxing, socializing, picnics, and parties. Although located in a former white area, the park now accommodates a range of income groups (from property owners to domestic workers) and from various backgrounds (including white, Indian, and black). Users tend to be familiar with each other but also accommodate new users. The park is not only used by the locals, but also by people coming from all over the metropolitan area to enjoy the beauty and tranquillity. However, the success of this park is seldom replicated. Jimmy Aves Park is located further east from the CBD, also in a former white area that are demographically changing. Although the space is occasionally utilized by people to walk their dogs or for children to play, the use of the space has been influenced by the re-appropriation of the southern part of the space by homeless people who live and sleep there. As a result, interviews with park users indicated that they avoid the southern part and refrain from using the park in the evening. Many users also complained about litter and empty bottles laying around. For others, the fear of crime and/or the homeless people have given rise to a complete retreat from the park (see Figure 16.4).

16.3.3 Adaptation While some spaces have degraded and others managed to mitigate patterns of decline, a number of spaces have adapted to the changing conditions in South African cities. It is possible to distinguish between four trends of adaption, namely privatization, celebration, informalization, and revitalization. In response to under management and insecurity, the private sector spearheaded the privatization of public space through excessive management and control (Landman 2016a). This takes place in two ways: through newly developed gathering spaces in shopping malls or as part

Figure 16.4 Beautiful landscaping in Jan Cilliers Park. Source: Author.

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of the gated developments. The first refers to the emergence of pseudo-public spaces linked to large shopping malls. While these spaces often try to incorporate many of the characteristics of successful traditional public spaces, they remain private property and are accessible based on people’s ability to pay, to look the part and to behave according to the set norm. CCTV cameras and security guards carefully monitor the situation for any deviations or distractions, for example in Woodlands Boulevard or Irene Village Mall (Landman 2016b). Public space or common open space is also privatized through the proliferation of various types of gated communities in cities. Most gated townhouse complexes or cluster developments include common open spaces for recreation with various types of amenities, while large gated estates include a variety of open spaces such as elaborate walkways, parks, playgrounds for children, sports facilities, golf courses, and so on. The Silver Lakes Estate, for example, includes a golf course, many small neighbourhood parks with playgrounds for children and a man-made lake next to the clubhouse. The extent of the spaces depends on the status and size of the estate and the spaces are only accessible to the residents and their visitors (see Figure 16.5). At the same time, the public sector have spear headed the development of new symbols of collective identity through the celebration of public space (Landman 2016a). The park in front of the Union Buildings, originally established to celebrate the unification of South Africa in 1901, has recently been adapted through the addition of the new monumental statue of former President Nelson Mandela. The new statue stands in the middle terrace on the central axis leading from Warrior’s Statue in the Lower Gardens up to the statue of Mercury in the forecourt and heart of the Union Buildings. New public spaces also offer a way to celebrate the new democracy and change old messages of oppression, for example Freedom Park and Lilian Ngoyi Square. This square is one of the oldest gathering spaces in the CBD and was originally established as the new market place when Church Square became too small. During Apartheid,

Figure 16.5 Landscaped common open space in Silver Lakes Estate with paved walkway, golf course and waterbody. Source: Author.

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Figure 16.6 Lilian Ngoyi Square with the new Woman’s Museum in the background. Source: Author.

it became the symbol of white supremacy and hosted the statue of the former Apartheid leader and head of state, J.G Strydom. In the post-apartheid era, it was redeveloped and renamed after one of the struggle heroes, Lilian Ngoyi. She was the first woman to be elected to the executive committee of the African National Congress and one of the leading women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956 in protest against the pass laws. Although the space serves as a reminder of democracy, the irony is that it is still not accessible to the people on the street since its opening in 2016. The new space is fenced off, the gates locked and the premises patrolled by private security guards (see Figure 16.6). Alongside the Lilian Ngoyi Square, informal traders have adapted the space in the pedestrianised street, Helen Joseph (formally known as Church Street). The movement space is characterized by many informal stalls lining the walkway, as people are utilizing the movement of hundreds of people daily to sell a few goods in order to survive. Interestingly, informal trading is occurring alongside the formal trade, as many retail establishments form the backdrop to the informal stalls. Recent studies have also pointed out that there is a mutually beneficial relationship between the large retail stores and the informal traders in the CBD. The traders often buy from the large shops and then sell individual items to the passers-by who find buying from the street traders more convenient and flexible (Ferreira 2016).The informalization of public spaces represents a means to increase the livelihood potential in South African cities with high levels of unemployment. This often occurs along busy streets or at major transport interchanges or stations, for example at the entrance to the Pienaarspoort station in Mamelodi. A number of traders are located at the entrance of the station building, while others sell their goods just outside the wall that separates the railway reserve from the surrounding community. They operate from very informal structures and are exposed and vulnerable to harsh climatic conditions and crime. In addition, many informal traders are constantly targeted by the Metropolitan Police as part of clean-up operations to rid the public spaces of crime (Feirreira 2016; De Beer 2017). This is based on perceptions of “crime and grime” and the assumption that they are linked to 255

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Figure 16.7 Pedestrianized walkway in Helen Joseph Street with informal traders. Source: Author.

criminal activities or give rise to opportunities due to their perceived link to social and physical disorder (see Figure 16.7). While certain public spaces experienced various levels of neglect, others were revitalized. The City of Tshwane (the municipality that includes Pretoria) have responded with a number of urban upgrading projects to improve the condition of the built environment in previously marginalized areas. This included projects to revitalize public space and contribute to the quality of life of many poorer people in these areas, for example the Kalefong Fitness Park in Attridgeville and the Solomon Mathlangu Square in Mamelodi. The Kalafong Fitness Park was officially opened in 2013 and developed as part of Tshwane’s “Two Parks per Ward Programme”. The aim was to enhance the image of amenities and the landscape to make the city a more attractive place and implement the vision of the Tshwane 2055 Strategy towards a more resilient, inclusive and liveable city (New Fitness Park, 2013). Safety is a key priority to achieve this. The new Solomon Mathlangu Square was officially opened in 2015 by the then Major of the City of Tshwane, Ramokgopa, who stated that the Memorial Square was upgraded to inspire, educate and offer opportunities to the local community (Solomon Mathlangu Square, 2015). The revitalization of the two spaces incorporated significant physical interventions. The Kalefong Fitness Park is located in the middle-income area in Attridgeville and includes an amphitheatre, children’s play area, outdoor fitness area with gym equipment, wall climbing and parking facilities (see Figure 16.8). Solomon Mathlangu Square is located in the centre of Mamelodi next to Tshamaya Road and opposite the Denneboom Railway Station. As part of the upgrade, it was necessary to redesign the square to offer protection from the busy road, re-orientate the statue to face the park, provide lighting around the square for safety and offer ablution facilities.The major attraction is the statue of Solomon Mathlangu, a struggle hero, who was captured and hanged as a young boy of sixteen for his role in fighting the Apartheid Government. The park is fenced off and the entrance to the park is from the pedestrian walkway on the eastern side that serves to connect the shopping mall to the north and the Denneboom Station to the 256

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Figure 16.8 Kalafong Fitness Park in Attridgeville. Source: Author.

south of the park. Ironically, however, since it has been upgraded, the park is locked by the local authority and only opened for special occasions such as music festivals due to a fear of vandalization and crime. Security guards restrict entrance to the park, closing a valuable resource to the local community. Interviews with the users of the pedestrian walkway adjacent to the square indicated a great disappointment in not being able to utilize the public space on a daily basis. Although there have been various types of adaptations in public space, significant transformation remains elusive. The Oxford Dictionary defines transformation as “a marked change in nature, form and appearance” (1999:1523). While there have been changes that relate to form or function, and therefore some initial signs of transformation, especially in the two last mentioned cases, real engagement or meaningful community interaction appears to be missing in most of these cases.Therefore, there has rarely been a marked change of all these elements at the same time that is accepted and utilized by a large variety of people in the city. This may be because many South Africans are still caught up in old paradigms of what public space should be or encompass.

16.4 Changing paradigms “There is little or no room left for a multiplicity of small narratives, or a multiplicity of alternative paradigms squirming or living side by side” (Oranje 1997:9). In the process of trying to deal with the growing diversity in the country, many South Africans have instead opted to ignore and wish it away, resounding old narratives and paradigms rather than embracing new ones. This is evident in the unfolding story of public space in South Africa where form, function and meaning continue to reflect oppositions and duality, expressed through contrasting visions, opposing uses and conflicting interpretations. Madanipour (2006) maintains that the city is continuously reshaped by not only new conditions within, but also through powerful visions of what urban space should be. The existence of contrasting visions hampers the real transformation of public space in the country. Attempts to 257

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re-imagine and shape the public spaces in the city have been hindered by the presence of different paradigms influencing the identity and nature of public space in the city. These include (1) divergent world-views of what public space is and how it links to a specific culture, whether European or African; (2) antagonistic views on how it should be modified, with the emphasis on aesthetic appearance or functional necessity; and (3) a lack of a common vision based on a shared language and understanding of the nature of public space in African cities (Landman 2016a). For many users and managers of city space, informal traders and homeless people reflect physical and social disorder and should be removed to create the perception of clean and safe cities.This leads to the sanitization of public space to create an aesthetic of order and control. De Beer points out that it lacks integrity to promote a partnership approach to urban upgrading when one of the partners are “actively policed” through various clean-up operations, as mentioned before. These types of actions “do not embrace or empower, but physically displace and emotionally humiliate informal traders in the inner city of Tshwane” (2017:262).Therefore, while there is a need for a common vision, the expression and accommodation of this vision can take many forms allowing for a multiplicity of small narratives to unfold in specific places. For example, at the Homeless Summit, a homeless participant openly called for common solutions and collaboration towards addressing homelessness and standing together against crime (Pathways out of Homelessness, 2015). Otherwise, “we run the risk of sanitising the soul from our spaces” (De Beer 2017:314). Secondly, the presence of what is considered as opposing uses also obstructs real transformation of public space and gives rise to contesting claims, ranging from the need for safe and tranquil places for recreation to bustling places of trade to ensure day-to-day survival. Therefore, while many would want to eliminate informal activities in public spaces in South Africa, there is a desperate need to use public space for survival in the form of trading or shelter (Landman 2016a). “Living in African cities is labour-intensive. It requires the mental agility to negotiate the gaps between everyday aspirations and the realities of survival” (Barac 2011:35).The challenge is to acknowledge that there are many claims for public space in the city and many interests at stake, which may lead to conflict (Gaffikin et al. 2013) and a retreat from public space to pseudopublic spaces or common spaces in gated developments. It, therefore, raises questions about management, maintenance and control of shared spaces and a suitable approach to reduce the exclusion of some and rather focus on the development of well-maintained and safe spaces for all. This remains a serious challenge in the context where newly revitalized squares are locked to reduce vandalism and destruction. Finally, the meaning of public space differs. For some it symbolized danger and created fear, while for others it contributed to tranquillity and a feeling of peace. Users of these spaces, depending on their background, preferences and expectations, experienced aversion and engagement. Given this, there are many dimensions of meaning to consider, including image, identity, local knowledge and culture. Engaging with public space in South African cities therefore necessitates the reconsideration of African urbanism and its meaning for public space. African urbanism remains a contested term and therefore it may be useful to refer to what Pieterse (2011) also calls “African urbanisms”. It is not the purpose of this chapter to offer a detailed exploration of the concept, but rather to interrogate its usefulness to conceptualize the Africanization of public space in South African cities. As mentioned earlier, African cities are characterized by high levels of informality, where the informal, ‘autoconstructed’, makeshift shelter responses house 62% of African urbanities. Therefore, “the shanty city is by and large the real African city” (Pieterse 2011:6). He continues to point out that engaging with African urbanisms thus implies an understanding of the perspectives of ordinary people living in these slums or trading on the street to survive, while simultaneously avoiding to ‘fix’ the negative social and environmental externalities of urbanization 258

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based on a specific normative position.We therefore need a more layered framework to comprehend the spatial practices in our diverse cities (Ibid.), also at the level of public space or perhaps especially at this level. There is a need to engage with everyday urbanism through an improved understanding of multiple zones of contact and the role of public space as a container of everyday urbanism (Barac 2011). A focus on African urbanism can offer a deepening interrogation of happenings in African cities at a micro level (Pieterse 2011) towards more compelling theoretical accounts of African urbanism in public space that would be more consistent with a postcolonial pragmatist philosophical stance advocated by Philippe Harrison (2006). Such a stance would embrace diversity through an engagement with multiple modernities and rationalities towards an understanding of the plural moralities that underpin contemporary life (Pieterse 2011). Therefore, public spaces in African cities should be viewed as in the process of becoming something new that is both part of and separate from Western modernity. This new imaginary may provide a conceptual opening that would allow us to think about Africa in ways that are more hopeful and positive; that acknowledge the success of Africans in constructing productive lives at a micro-scale … that work despite major structural constraints. (Harrison 2006: 323) Engaging with and finding ways to grapple with African Urbanism offers both a lens and a means to do this. Unpacking the spatial trends characterizing African urbanism provides a point of departure.These are informality, ‘greyness’, innovation and resilience. Building a planning theory in the context of African Urbanism can start to inform a new planning ideology and create opportunities for a new belief and planning system (Moonsammy 2016:415). In this light, informality in public space is not a call for concern, but rather an opportunity for new ways of doing and engaging in the city or as Stewart Brand (2010) maintains, places of innovation filled with potential. Utilizing this potential requires a turn towards regenerative development and design. While regenerative development is concerned with the desired outcome, namely the co-evolution of humans and nature, regenerative design offers the means to achieve this through co-creation and collaboration (Mang et al. 2014). In this way, local public spaces can be transformed through a focus on place, allowing for a multiplicity of small narratives to emerge and come together to develop a common vision that would embrace diversity, enhance viability through multiple exchanges and add value for humans and nature (Mang et al. 2014).This would not only facilitate a bridging of cultures (Nasser 2015) and a claiming of place (Barac 2011), but also rebuilding the capacity of systems in cities and public spaces to transform human communities into living system enablers. For example, the project Living Rooms at the Border, directed by the architect Teddy Cruz and Casa Familiar in the border town San Ysidro, Mexico, was not only considered as a new type of affordable housing, but also as whole new pattern of mixed-used development that is flexible enough to adapt to the changing needs of the community (Mang et al. 2014:20, 22). Changing public spaces, therefore, offers an opportunity for new mindsets, ideas and methods to emerge from the micro-spaces of the city and for mediators to build bridges across the divides. The players in this model are very different though and might not find the languages to understand each other.To address that, new paradigms of collaboration would call for interpreters, facilitators, healers, bridge-builders, bilingual or multilingual people that are able to help foster partnerships and collaborations that have not been formed before. (De Beer 2017:484) 259

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At the same time, it also requires a realization that working from places allows for context-specific solutions to emerge that implies different solutions and outcomes in various places (Mang et al. 2014). Consequently, there is a need to acknowledge that different spaces cater for different needs. Therefore, as society is changing, we need to expand our concepts of public space to embrace a wide range of new spaces (Carmona and Wunderlich 2012:4) and alternative ways of space making, including Africanized public spaces.

16.5 Conclusion This chapter sought to investigate the Africanization of public space in South Africa and nature and appropriateness of the changes within transforming African cities. The discussion indicated that public spaces in South African cities are changing in response to rapid urbanization, informality, and insecurity. While some experience decline and neglect, others mitigate this through small actions to curb the severity of the degradation. Therefore, in spite of the neglect, public spaces are still used, although the uses and users have often changed. Many public spaces adapted to the new urban conditions through privatization, celebration, informalization, or revitalization. Some of these interventions often give rise to increasing contestation and conflict, for example, the privatization of spaces that are considered exclusionary or the informalization, which are considered disorderly. The tension is created through growing opposition and duality in terms of contrasting visions, opposing uses and conflicting interpretations of the changes occurring in public space. Parnell and Pieterse (2014: 15) maintain that the way Africa’s Urban Revolution is navigated will depend on how well the forces of change are understood and taken up. This chapter shows that these forces are also playing out at the micro level and within various types of public spaces. Therefore, by understanding the changes within public spaces and working towards or allowing appropriate responses, can offer a way to positively and pro-actively deal with some of the most pressing needs in rapidly changing cities. Given this, the Africanization of many public spaces in the country is not necessarily a call for concern but rather an illustration that public spaces have different purposes. This transition should rather be considered as a moment of opportunity for more context-specific urban development and design based on changing paradigms towards regenerative public space instead of imitating visions from outside Africa. Such a paradigm shift needs to build on concepts such as African Urbanism to embrace the local and its diversity within, and work from place to cocreate opportunities for exchanging value and enhancing viability to be able to deal with the changing conditions in South African and more broadly, African cities. This will allow multiple small narratives to unfold and set the stage for the healing and co-evolution of humans and nature towards more thriving environments for all. Coming to terms with the Africanization of public space, however, does not imply ignoring the transition thereof. In order to move towards more regenerative spaces, there is need for all stakeholders, including the creators, managers and users to take responsibility for the evolutionary change. Urban planners and designers need to realize that different groups seek different types of spaces. This does not suggest segregated spaces, but an enunciation of particular use or purpose to reflect the motivations, decision-making structures and requirements, including appropriate social welfare programmes, of those who are trying to operate in the Survival City, as well as those escaping to the Fortress City through adequate management and maintenance. At the same time, users need to take responsibility for their environments, how they use and take care of it. For it is only through co-creation and collaboration that the pathways to co-evolution can emerge. 260

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Acknowledgements The financial assistance (Grant no. 81213) of the National Research Foundation (NRF) towards the research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors and cannot be attributed to the NRF. The author would also like to thank the following students from UP for assistance with data collection in the various case study areas: Trisha Bezuidenhout, Nompumelo Maditse, Kundani Makakavhule, Kgomotso Malope, Siphiwe Masango, Samukeliswe Ngcobo, Mapuleni Ndlovu, Thuli Ndlovu, Nthabiseng Makomene, and Liandra Raats.

References Barac, M. (2011). Place resists: Grounding African urban order in an age of global change, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 37(1): 24–42. Bhan, G., Srinivas, S. & Watson, V. (2018). Introduction. In G. Bhan, S. Srinivas & V. Watson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South, pp. 1–22. London: Routledge. Brand, S. (2010). Whole Earth Discipline. London: Atlantic Books. Brown-Luthango, M. & Reyes, E. (2018). Urban upgrading to reduce violence in informal settlements:The case of violence prevention through urban upgrading (VPUU) in Monwabisi Park, Cape Town, South Africa, in Bhan, Srinivas & Watson (eds). The Routledge Companion to Planning in the South, London: Routledge, pp. 298–309. Carmona, M. & Wunderlich, F. M. (2012). Capital Spaces:The Multiple Complex Public Spaces of a Global City. London: Routledge. De Beer, S. (2017). Mother bird hovering over the city: Space, spirituality and a community-based urban praxis. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pretoria. Ferreira, A. (2016). Exploring the meaning of functional and response diversity in the urban context. Unpublished masters thesis, University of Pretoria. Gaffikin, F., Mceldowney, M. & Sterrett, K. (2013). Creating shared public space in the contested city: The role of urban design. Journal of Urban Design, 15(4): 493–513. Harrison, P. (2006). On the edge of reason: Planning and urban futures in Africa, Urban Studies, 43(2): 319–335. Landman, K. (2016a). Shopping malls with quasi-public spaces in Pretoria: Neo-traditional consumption space or controlled village commons? South African Journal of Town and Regional Planning, 69: 20–32. Landman, K. (2016b). The transformation of urban space in South Africa and the role of urban design, Urban Design International, 21, 78–92. Law, S.V., Henderson, J.V. & Venables, A.J. (2017). Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World. Washington: World Bank Group. Madanipour, A. (2006). Roles and challenges of urban design. Journal of Urban Design, 11(2): 173–193. Mang, P., Haggart, B. & Regenesis. (2014). Regenerative Development and Design: A Framework for Evolving Sustainability. Hoboken: Wiley & Sons. Moonsammy, S.T. (2016). An insider-outsider exploration of planning knowledges, roles, uses and construction in a post 1994 metropolitan setting: Ethekwini Municipality, Unpublished Doctoral thesis, University of Pretoria. Nasser, N. (2015). Bridging Cultures: A Guide to Social Innovation in Cosmopolitan Cities. Markham: 10-10-10 Publishing. National Development Plan: Vision for 2030. (2011). Developed by the national commission of South Africa, http:​//www​.npco​nline​.co.z​a/med​ialib​/down​loads​/home​/NPC%​20Nat​ional​%20De​velop​ment%​20Pla​ n%20V​ision​%2020​30%20​-lo-r​es.pd​f. New Fitness Park (2013). Tshwane Service Publication, http:​//www​.serv​icepu​blica​tion.​co.za​/arti​cles/​ new-f​itnes​s-par​k-940​7.htm​l. Oranje, M. (1997). The language game of South African urban and regional planning: A cognitive mapping from the past into the future, Unpublished PhD thesis, Town and Regional Planning, University of Pretoria, Pretoria. Oranje, M. & Landman, K. (2015). Nodal Narratives in the City of Tshwane: Readings, Reflections and Recommendations for Better Stories for All. Research Paper commissioned by and prepared for the City of Tshwane. 261

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17 Missed the stop? Incremental upgrading or waiting for housing in Buffalo City1 Gerhard Kienast

17.1 Introduction Despite one of the most ambitious housing policies on earth, South Africa has failed to overcome its informal settlement challenge. Although there are progressive funding mechanisms and national programme support, upgrading regularly results in ‘redevelopment’, de-densification, and the disruption of shack dweller communities. Based on a complex case study from the country’s seventh most populous municipality, the chapter seeks to explain the reasons for the troubled coexistence of two contradictory approaches towards informal settlement upgrading. It is based on interviews with politicians, planning and housing officials at local and provincial levels, consultants, housing contractors, as well as shack dwellers; the analysis of plans, budgets, and parliamentary hearings; aerial photographs; newspaper articles; and site visits. Its second section recaps key literature on the evolution of South African housing policy and its bearing on informal settlement upgrading.The third section sets out basic facts about Buffalo City, its geography, demographics and housing stock. The fourth section retraces local housing policy and its stance on informality since the incorporation of Buffalo City in the year 2000. The fifth section dissects systemic problems with regard to these projects, which are more aptly described as rollover development. The sixth section presents an alternative approach towards informal settlements upgrading, which was concretized in a municipal policy and a set of plans. The seventh section discusses institutional, political and economic reasons for the failed introduction of incremental upgrading.

17.2 The significance of informal settlement upgrading in South African housing policy Ever since the first democratic elections in 1994, South African housing policy focused on state-subsidized housing for households beneath certain income thresholds. As civic organizations supporting the African National Congress (ANC) rejected sites-and-service schemes and a mass rental programme was considered too difficult to finance and manage, the ruling party committed to provide freehold tenure of detached dwelling units (Charlton & Kihato 2006).Yet, the poverty reduction effect of mass housing production was undermined by serious 263

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shortcomings: poor communities had little say in the design and building processes; and the majority of subsidies were “ploughed into poorly located, standardised, dormitory developments” (Huchzermeyer 2001:311). For a long time, the reality of squatting was not acknowledged and the government had no clear strategy how to deal with it. Thus, informal settlement intervention occurred through mechanisms designed for greenfield development and “in situ upgrading” became synonymous with “the replacement of squatter settlements with individual capital subsidy products” (ibid.:324). While there have been some examples of informal settlement upgrading with more intensive community consultation (Charlton 2006), in most cases upgrading was carried out through a “rollover” approach, resulting in fully standardized layouts. Faced with growing demand and a slowdown of housing delivery, with its 2004 “Breaking New Ground” policy, government vowed to move “from housing to integrated sustainable human settlements” (DoH 2004). The policy introduced a new line of funding for the upgrading of informal settlements, which allowed for incremental, area-based interventions that could benefit all inhabitants, not only households which meet individual subsidy qualification criteria. The Upgrading Informal Settlements Programme (UISP) can pay for land acquisition, land rehabilitation, interim engineering services, as well as social and economic facilities. It also avails funding for community empowerment and involvement in the layout planning process (DHS 2009, Part 3 (4)).Yet, while the UISP was lauded for making “many advances towards achieving the reduction of poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion” (Huchzermeyer 2006:58), it did not constitute a clear break from earlier policy as it “treats individual freehold ownership as the ultimate end state of the upgrading” (ibid.:56). Despite the progressive policy, the vast majority of pilot projects have used UISP funds to undertake green-field relocation. Incremental solutions had little traction among government practitioners fixated on conventional, quantitative housing delivery. Reasons included “limited experience with in situ upgrading and concern that such methods can be human resource intensive and complex”; a “persistent narrow view that a sustainable human settlement project is primarily about housing“ and a lack of experienced project managers able to handle complex projects (Cities Alliance 2009:5). However, more than a decade after the first democratic elections, the urban poor ran out of patience. Before the 2009 elections, South Africa experienced an unprecedented wave of protests that was attributed to the lack of basic service delivery and a failure of local government (Alexander 2010; von Holdt et al. 2011). At the same time, the World Financial Crisis caused the loss of 500,000 jobs and a steep decline of tax revenue. In this context, the existing subsidy programme was put into question. According to a 2011 estimate, the ambition to catch up with the backlog of 2.2 million units would cost more than R300 billion (at the time approximately €30 billion), a figure described by the Financial and Fiscal Commission (2011: 15) as “not remotely within the fiscal capacity of the state”. Against this back-drop, the South African government pledged to “upgrade 400,000 households in well-located informal settlements with access to basic services and secure tenure” until the 2014 elections (The Presidency 2010: 14). To support this goal, an advisory project sponsored by the Cities Alliance was converted into a permanent National Upgrading Support Programme (NUSP), which is supposed to provide technical assistance, design, and implement training programmes, to develop and maintain a community of practice. Initially aiming at 49 municipalities, NUSP has taken on the challenge to “overcome the prevailing orthodoxy of state-subsidised provision and greenfield site development” (ibid.:17f.). According to the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, 447,780 households have benefitted from informal settlements upgrading between 2010 and 2014 (DPME 2014:8) but due to government’s vague definitions, this figure requires a lot of qualification. According to an independent evaluation of the right to adequate housing in South Africa, it 264

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remained “unclear exactly what has been achieved through ‘upgrading’, which can include anything from a connection to mains electricity to the provision of improved sanitation or roads” (Dawson/McLaren 2014:67). This was confirmed by an official evaluation, which concluded that the reported figure also includes housing units, which have been created by rollover developments, on greenfield sites and in rural areas (DHS 2014:56). NUSP had to operate under very difficult circumstances. For several years, the nationwide programme was run by 1.5 contracted consultants. For a long time, the department did not authorize its capacity-building course. When NUSP had permission to train local government, it could only run two-day workshops instead of ten-day courses. NUSP had also underestimated the difficulties in finding appropriate consultants from the private sector and NGOs who are able to take stock and elaborate upgrading plans (ibid.:76f.). Despite all these difficulties, NUSP has laid the foundation for the in situ upgrading of informal settlements in South Africa. The Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) for the 2014–2019 period – set up after another ANC win in national elections – confirmed the outcome approach and updated its targets. This time the Department of Human Settlements is tasked to create 1.5 million “housing opportunities” (DPME 2014:8). When considering the resistance against in situ upgrading within the administration and the false labelling of its reporting, one cannot help doubting the relevance of these new targets. However, the fact that “upgrading” has now been defined more precisely than in the previous period should limit the scope for misappropriation. This chapter embarks on a complex case study of one of South Africa’s major cities in order to show how the recent shifts of national housing and upgrading policy have translated into local practice. It tries to explain why local actors have been unable to leave the beaten track although the former head of NUSP regards the city’s upgrading strategy and plans as “some of the most progressive work that has been done in the country” (interview conducted 18.06.2015).

17.3 Buffalo City: A low-growth, high-inequality environment Buffalo City Municipality (BCM) was formed in 2000 when the transitional local councils of East London and King William’s Town merged with rural hinterlands (see Figure 17.1). The municipality includes significant parts of the former homeland Ciskei: its former capital Bhisho, which is now the provincial capital of the Eastern Cape; as well as townships such as Mdantsane, Zwelitsha, and Dimbaza, which mainly house black people who had been banished from the cities by the apartheid government (Christopher 1997). Between 2001 and 2011, when Buffalo City acquired metropolitan municipality status, its population grew from less than 705,000 to 755,000 inhabitants. Although population growth in Buffalo City has been well below the national average (0.69% compared to 1.44%; StatsSA 2011), the incidence of households living in informal settlements is significantly higher than in other metropolitan municipalities (17% compared to the average 12% for all metros; StatsSA 2013 cited by Graham et al. 2014:12). During the Census 2011, 38,894 households living in informal dwellings, 10,896 households in backyard shacks, and 10,157 traditional dwellings were counted (Graham et al. 2014:11). Many land invasions date back to the second half of the 1980s when the apartheid government lost control of black housing areas. The highest concentration of informal structures can be found only 5 km away from the East London CBD, in Duncan Village, whose population had grown from 17,000 in 1984 to approximately 80,000 in 1990 (Bank 2011:92). By the mid-2000s, the municipality counted almost 15,000 freestanding shacks in the area and another 3,400 shacks in the backyards of old council housing (BCM 2009a:25). The second major cluster of informal housing formed in Mdantsane. Despite being located at more than 20-km distance from the centre of East London, by the mid-1990s the number of self-built structures 265

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Figure 17.1 Buffalo City Population Density. Source: SACN 2011, cited by Turok 2013:177. “King William’s Town”, “Duncan Village” and “Reeston” added by the author.

there was estimated to be 7,800 (Setplan/Ninham Shand 1998: App.2:3). Almost the same number of informal dwellings was counted 15 years later (BCMM 2013a:22). Other important concentrations of shacks emerged near the upmarket eastern suburbs of Beacon Bay and Gonubie; and on the western fringe of East London (see Figures 17.1–17.4). Compared to the major metropolitan areas, Buffalo City shows “very low income levels, high unemployment and very low in-migration” (Cross 2013:265). In 2011, the official unemployment rate stood at 35.1% and youth unemployment at 45.1% (StatsSA 2011:17). Nevertheless, East London still attracts immigrants from the rural hinterland and internal migrants from the interior of the municipality. Slow population growth may indicate that the city is only a “stepping stone” for migrants on the way to Cape Town or Johannesburg (Graham et al., 2014:11). Although the provincial Department of Human Settlements and the municipality have built housing for the poor, since the last census, new squatters have emerged and some of the existing informal settlements have grown. According to the Community Survey 2016, the percentage of dwellings described as informal has grown to 24.9% (BCMM 2017:35). In March 2018, a municipal planner asserted that there are “more and more” land invasions and estimated that the number of informal settlements within the urban edge might have already risen to 180 (interview conducted 14.03.2018).

17.4 Municipal planning and interventions for the improvement of precarious housing conditions Buffalo City’s first Integrated Development Plan (IDP) adopted in 2002 described the “rapid movement of people to urban areas and resultant explosive growth and multiplication of overcrowded, unsafe and unhealthy informal settlements” as one of the municipality’s major challenges (BCM 2002a). The Spatial Development Framework (SDF; BCM 2003a) and the 266

Figure 17.2 Duncan Village: The largest and most dense cluster of informal settlements in Buffalo City, with approximately 15,000 shacks close to the city centre. Source: Photo by Kienast.

Figure 17.3 Mdantsane buffer strip: Shacks on the fringe of the apartheid era township Mdantsane, at approximately 20 km distance from East London. Source: Photo by Kienast.

Gerhard Kienast

Figure 17.4 Nompumelelo: Clusters of shacks attached to a post-apartheid low-income housing development near the affluent suburb of Beacon Bay. Source: Photo by Kienast.

Housing Policy (BCM 2003b) included sections that were appreciative of self-help housing. Buffalo City Municipality (BCM) said it wanted to avoid “physically, socially and culturally disruptive” re-development schemes (BCM 2003b:15) but the municipality was unable to develop viable alternatives. While it intended to conduct “a detailed study of urban informal settlements with feasibility assessments for upgrading to be completed by end 2005”, the municipality continued to pursue massive housing delivery, chasing the enormous target of “more than 5,000 units per annum by end 2004” (ibid.:59).

17.4.1  Buffalo City’s housing policy under the paradigm of de-densification In the first years of its existence, Buffalo City was bound by earlier plans and projects, which had been adopted by its predecessors, namely the Special Integrated Presidential Project for Duncan Village (SIPP), the Mdantsane/Potsdam Development Plan of 1998 and the Mdantsane East London Development Corridor Plan (MELD) of 1999. The MELD Corridor Plan (ELTLC 1999) provided a comprehensive vision for the fragmented urban space between town and township, but was not able to redirect private investment into the area. By defining train stations in no-man’s land as “major nodes”, the plan provided justification for massive housing construction between Mdantsane and East London.2 Although land adjacent to the railway line did not attract any commercial investment, the area south of the railway line, known as Reeston became Buffalo City’s main recipient of low-income housing. Starting with emergency housing for the victims of the Duncan Village floods of 2002, Reeston, an area characterized by deep valleys and steep slopes, has gradually been developed with standard subsidized single-family homes and will eventually accommodate 9,000 households. Although three distributor roads connect the new neighbourhoods to the MELD corridor, due to the difficult topography and the almost total lack of amenities and commercial activities, they are even more dependent on the core city than the apartheid era township. As people living far from the 268

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Figure 17.5 Reeston Phase 3 (“New Life”): State-subsidized housing sprawl. Source: Photo by Kienast.

corridor have to pay two minibuses on their way to town, Reeston is a poverty trap for inhabitants who cannot even afford to travel where they may find work (see Figure 17.5). The Duncan Village Local Spatial Development Framework (DVLSDF), which was elaborated between late 2003 and early 2008, provided further justification for housing construction at the periphery. According to various planners involved, the cumbersome evolution of the DVLSDF was mainly due to local political conflicts (interviews conducted 28–29 May and 10 June 2015). A more holistic perspective – the creation of multifunctional social infrastructure, the promotion of economic activities and a strategy which would “keep as many people in Duncan Village as possible” (Kay 2005:84) – was lost on the way. The final plan focused on the construction of 20,000 housing units, of which only a fraction was supposed to be built in Duncan Village itself (BCM 2009a). Since even pilot projects comprising a few hundred semidetached and rowhousing units have become a fiasco (Jeske Thompson 2016), almost 15 years after the start of the Duncan Village Redevelopment Initiative, its main “achievement” seems to be the removal of an unknown number of households to Reeston.

17.4.2 The provision of interim services According to the 2001 Census, 22% of households in Buffalo City did not have access to a basic level of service with regard to water; 29% had no access to “basic sanitation”; 37% had no electricity for lighting; 29% were not reached by weekly refuse removal (BCM 2007: 76).To address these challenges, the BCM Water Services Development Plan of 2002 (WSDP) developed a “prioritised basic services backlog programme”. “Recognised informal settlements” were supposed to be provided with prepaid standpipes and either “ventilated improved pit latrines” (VIP) or communal toilets (BCM 2002b: 161). The results of the Community Survey of 2007 (see Table 17.1) suggest that Buffalo City made great progress with regard to basic water supply (+20%), which seems to have been achieved through a quick rollout of communal standpipes. At the same time, only 3,851 households achieved access to basic sanitation (probably people moving into new-built formal housing). 269

Gerhard Kienast Table 17.1 Household access to basic services 2001 Water (access to piped water in dwelling/ yard or within 200m) Sanitation (flush toilet, septic tank, chemical toilet, VIP) Electricity (for lighting) Refuse removal (1 × week)

Households with access % of households Households with access % of households Households with access % of households Households with access % of households

148,894 78% 135,672 71% 122,872 63% 136,316 71%

2007 204,151 98% 139,523 67% 154,877 74% 147,487 70%

Difference 55,257 20% 3,851 -4% 32,005 11% 11,171 -1%

Source: Census 2001, cited in BCM 2007:76; Community Survey 2007, quoted in BCM 2009b:78; last column: own calculation.

Thus, living conditions in the informal areas of Buffalo City remained appalling. This was especially true for Duncan Village where people relied on public toilets from the apartheid era and the so-called bucket system. Even if the redevelopment plan had been followed to the letter, many inhabitants would have had to wait a decade before they got a house.Yet, no interim measures were put in place. In May 2009, a study by the Eastern Cape NGO Coalition showed that, on average, 333 shack dwellers had to share one public toilet (Daily Dispatch, 19 May and 27 May 2009). In the next financial years, Buffalo City provided movable ablution blocks (BCM 2010:45; BCMM 2012a:59). Yet, according to activist media, lack of maintenance and security are the order of the day (Mbi 2015). It is thus no wonder that service delivery protests have become a common feature in the area (Mukwedeya 2016). The other main concern is the lack of access to energy, which forces shack dwellers to use paraffin for light and heating or embark on illegal connections. Both practices are highly problematic as shack fires and electrocutions destroy many assets and claim many lives. According to Bank (2011:216), the Buffalo City council “refused to electrify the shack areas (even as an interim measure)”. In the financial year 2009/10, 75,000 households were not connected to the electrical grid and the administration reported a dramatic increase of illegal electrical connections. Therefore, the council took a decision to pilot the electrification of informal dwellings in Duncan Village (BCM 2010:41).Yet, as the municipality depended on co-funding from national government, the electrification of shacks only started in earnest in 2013/14. Since then, Buffalo City has provided several thousand informal settlers with electricity. However, as shack dwellers used new street lighting as a point of departure for more illegal connections (BCMM 2015a:90f.), the future of these programmes is still uncertain, while the “backlog” remains huge.

17.4.3  Coming to grips with the persistence of shacks Despite the construction and handing over of more than 5,000 housing units in Reeston, the number of shacks in Duncan Village seems to have stayed the same (see Figure 17.6). In late 2016, the current portfolio councillor for human settlements explained: we planned for the redevelopment of Duncan Village […] but the challenge is the influx. […] there is land invasion, which is the crisis in the whole metro. […] As human settlements we are doing our job as per the mandate but we still have no control measures to stop people re-building shacks. (recorded 16.11.2016) 270

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Figure 17.6 Duncan Village (2013): Persistence of shacks despite twenty years of postapartheid housing policy. Source: Photo by BCMM.

In reaction to Minister Sisulu’s call for the “eradication of informal settlements”, in 2007 Buffalo City adopted a Land Management Policy, which pledged to eliminate “significant and high priority informal settlements by 2014” [emphasis added] while the remainder would be removed “as appropriate land and housing becomes available”. The development of new informal settlements was supposed to be prevented and existing settlements should be hindered to grow “in an uncontrolled manner” (BCMM 2011:91).The application of these principles required a detailed assessment and categorization of informal settlements, which had already been called for in 2003 (see above). Over the years, Buffalo City commissioned three studies to collect data and classify informal settlements inside the urban edge (BCM 2009a; BCMM 2012b; BCMM 2013a). It seems that those outside the urban edge have never been studied in a comprehensive manner. The 2013 Spatial Development Framework (SDF) reported a total of 154 settlements within the urban edge containing 40,365 shacks and a population of approximately 155,080 (BCMM 2013b:79). Of these, 41 settlements comprising almost 13,000 dwellings were earmarked for “full relocation”; 58 settlements consisting of more than 15,000 dwellings for “partial relocation & partial in situ upgrading” while only 39 settlements with little more than 2,500 dwellings were deemed fit for “full in-situ upgrading” (BCMM 2015b:46). Since only a fraction of the settlements was considered suitable for upgrading, municipal planners calculated that approximately 2,000 hectares of land would be needed to accommodate the dwellers (BCMM 2013b:79). The SDF included a list of 30 settlements that were recommended for “formalisation” (ibid.:84), a methodology that uses individual housing subsidies.

17.4.4  Winning laurels for rollover upgrading The most prominent example of this practice in Buffalo City is Second Creek.The state-subsidized housing development completed in 2014/2015 dealt with an illegal settlement on the fringe of a municipal landfill. The settlement had already emerged around the year 1990 and had grown to encompass approximately 300 dwellings. It was only prioritized after national TV coverage had 271

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Figure 17.7 Second Creek: Award-winning redevelopment project in walking distance from the East London CBD. Source: Photo by Kienast.

highlighted the environmental hazards and the human tragedy of the garbage collectors (Manyathi 2014). The project included the rehabilitation of the dumpsite, the construction of 265 standard houses on 150 m² plots and the provision of basic services. As the area is just 3 km away from East London’s CBD and borders on a lower-middle class neighbourhood with a primary school, it is better integrated than many other state-subsidized housing areas. However, the only social and economic infrastructure in Second Creek are products of self-organization: a crèche and so-called spaza shops that are operating from transport containers.Thus, it is rather ironic that Second Creek received the national housing award in the category “Best Informal Settlement Upgrade”(see Figure 17.7). A site visit and conversations with beneficiaries confirmed that former garbage collectors have benefitted from the public investment. However, since the dumpsite is closed and waste is now disposed of at a regional facility, many of them struggle to make a living. Less than a year after the beneficiaries moved in, and despite government’s eight-year moratorium on the transfer of subsidized housing, there was already talk about people sub-letting their homes. Besides the high risk of downward raiding in an attractive location, it is questionable whether Second Creek should be seen as best practice as the development occupies approximately three times the space of the original squatter. Obviously, this approach is not replicable in other, more densely settled areas and there are neither enough funds nor land nor organizational capacity to convert all of Buffalo City’s informal settlements in this manner.

17.5 Formalization of informal settlements in all sorts of troubles In order to speed up the “in situ upgrading” of informal settlements, more than a dozen areas were combined into clusters and in the second half of 2013, each cluster tendered as one collective project (see Figure 17.8). The first cluster combined five areas between the apartheid era 272

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Figure 17.8 Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality: Informal settlements under redevelopment. Source: Cartography by J.T. Wongnam, G.P. Kienast.

township of Mdantsane and the suburban railway line. This so-called “buffer-strip” was initially kept free from buildings but was later invaded. The second cluster combined nine squatter settlements, which had emerged on the fringes of Mdantsane. The third cluster comprised Fynbos and Ndancama, informal extensions of the Buffalo Flats and Scenery Park townships. In all these projects, like in Second Creek, BCMM pursued formalization through rollover development, aiming at regular layouts with stands and houses of equal size. The three clusters should accommodate fully serviced houses for approximately 3,800 households currently living in shacks. Those who wanted to benefit needed to register with the housing administration and, at least in 273

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principle, those who did not qualify for housing subsidies – e.g., single people without depen­ dants or households earning above R3,500 – had to leave. Yet, the clustering of projects and the turnkey contractor approach were not able to speed up the upgrading as expected. By March 2016, contractors were still busy with the installation of internal services (BCMM 2016:29). Delays were caused by insufficient project preparation, incompetent contractors and opportunistic behaviour by shack dwellers but, arguably, the sum of the problems puts planning and upgrading methods as such into question.

17.5.1 Insufficient project preparation or unsatisfiable requirements? In Dacawa and Masibulele, two shack settlements included in the first Mdantsane cluster, the provincial department had not approved General Plans before the cluster went out for tender. Thus, the municipality was forced to renegotiate its contract with the contractor and, due to the delays, by October 2016 it had already incurred an additional cost of R1.6m (Daily Dispatch, 10 October 2016). In Velwano, another shack settlement belonging to the Mdantsane buffer-strip cluster, upgrading threatened to fail due to a conflict between two communities, who both laid claims to the houses under construction. As soon as the first houses became ready for occupation, inhabitants of former railway worker hostels in Nkompeni claimed to have title deeds to the land in question (Daily Dispatch, 13 April 2015). As the municipality was unable to resolve the conflict, houses were vandalized before anyone could move in (Daily Dispatch, 29 May 2015). In January 2016, contractors told informal settlers from Velwano “to dismantle their shacks and move elsewhere because they needed the space to continue with the housing development”. Despite the vandalism, shack dwellers were desperate to move into the new houses but were forced out by the municipality (Daily Dispatch, 20.01.2016). In October 2016, the matter was still not resolved. In fact, it had gotten worse as 113 of the 145 houses were vandalized (Daily Dispatch, 10.10.2016). In Fynbos and Ndancama, construction was delayed by a different kind of community conflict. Despite a sharp reduction of plot sizes compared to housing projects carried out in Mdantsane and Reeston, the approved layouts could only accommodate a fraction of the people who expected to benefit from the development. In the Ndancama area alone, three different squatter communities (Polar Park, Ndlovini, and Ekutheni) had legitimate claims to receive houses. When funding for the project was secured, the housing administration, through mediation of the ward councillor, negotiated a compromise in which each group would receive a certain number of houses (Daily Dispatch, 05 August 2015). In Fynbos 1 “the approved general plan can only accommodate 211 houses whereas the total number of beneficiaries is 461” and only 200 temporary shelters were provided.The remaining 250 families refused to move and thus prevented the contractor from starting his work. Combined with massive rains and a violent taxi strike, the blockade of the construction site has delayed project implementation for more than a year.To add insult to injury, contracts allowed the construction companies to bill the municipality an additional R12 million for the extension (Daily Dispatch, 24 October 2016; see Figure 17.9). All three cases presented could be framed in terms of insufficient project preparation and in each case contractual penalties have inflated project costs. As incomplete as these case studies may be, they point at a lack of cooperation between government departments (between municipality and province; between planners and officials responsible for housing; and land administration), which can also be observed in greenfield development.Yet, they also show that procedures established for housing construction on empty sites cannot simply be replicated in informal settlements upgrading. 274

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Figure 17.9 Ndancama: Low-income housing development for shack dwellers after temporary relocation. Source: Photo by Kienast.

General Plans ‘seal’ the layout and determine the number of stands that can be developed. Before they are sent for approval, extensive community participation should have taken place. As, in most cases, rollover upgrades using a standard plot size can only accommodate a part of the existing population, local authorities would have to negotiate a strong consensus around the selection criteria for housing allocation before any project goes out to tender.The decision about ‘who is allowed to stay’ and ‘who will have to move’ is intertwined with the individual eligibility for state subsidies. While eligibility criteria are supposed to make sure that land and subsidies are given to those who need them most, the fact that upgrading is coupled with free housing raises the stakes and makes it more susceptible to political interference. Given the high rate of poverty and unemployment, an upgrading strategy that only benefits a tiny portion of those in need is likely to run into conflict.

17.5.2 Incompetent contractors or mission impossible? Despite all the problems, by the time of writing, the construction sites on the Mdantsane bufferstrip (“Cluster 1”) and those between Buffalo Flats and Scenery Park (“Cluster 3”) were nearing completion. Meanwhile, the upgrading of the scattered infill sites bundled for “Cluster 2” has utterly failed. Early in 2015, residents of several informal settlements that are part of this cluster were moved to temporary relocation areas but, before the year was over, construction sites came to a standstill. In September 2015, construction workers went on strike, complaining that the piece rate they were paid by sub-contractors was a pittance (GroundUp 17.09.2015). At the same time, the upgrading of the “Cluster 2” areas was affected by a knock-on effect from another low-income housing project, where some of the shack dwellers were supposed to be settled. When housing construction in a greenfield area known as Mdantsane CC ground to a halt due to issues of quality and workers not being paid, relocation from the “Cluster 2” areas got stuck as well (Daily Dispatch 01 July 2015; 12 May 2016). The building freeze provoked angry protests by more than 100 residents from different areas of Mdantsane burning tires and blocking roads to and from the township (Daily Dispatch 26 275

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May 2016). After renegotiations and new building contracts, two-and-a-half years after residents of the Walter Sisulu settlement made way for the housing project, most houses were still at foundation level and only 30 units had doors and windows. In Daluxolo, another area belonging to the same cluster, a school girl was raped and two dead bodies were found inside unfinished houses. According to a BCMM spokesperson, there had been disputes between contractors, and in July 2017, the contract was once more deferred to the municipal legal department (Daily Dispatch 10 July 2017). Because of these tragedies, Cluster 2 is probably the most striking example for the failure of informal settlement upgrading through wholesale construction contracts. Instead of providing decent homes, the upgrading project has torn informal neighbourhoods apart and condemned shack dwellers to a life of uncertainty as they wait for years in temporary relocation areas without knowing if they may ever get a proper house. The reports about sub-contractors paying starvation wages also revealed scandalous conditions in the construction industry and raised questions whether corruption was involved in the award of contracts (Daily Dispatch 10 July 2017). At a different level, however, one should discuss whether the job that was advertised – from the removal of informal structures to the construction of new units – should even be put out for tender. Can one expect a construction company to build houses on marginal land, according to national standards, pay decent wages and still make a reasonable profit when being remunerated based on the subsidy quantum defined by the national department? – Construction companies depend on economies of scale to make an entrepreneurial profit and need reliability to plan the deployment of machinery and labourers. Workflows developed for massive greenfield development can only be applied to the upgrading of small informal settlements if those are treated like a clean slate. If municipalities try to outsource the risks stemming from insufficient project preparation, unresolved questions – like general plans without approval or inconclusive “beneficiary registration” – tend to come back like a boomerang.

17.5.3 Opportunistic behaviour by shack dwellers or a race that can’t be won? Because of all the holdups, the provision of low-income housing has been much slower than expected. According to BCMM’s annual reports, between 2007 and 2012 the average number of state-subsidized houses built per year was 1,438 (CS Consulting/Afesis-corplan 2014:8). Despite all the efforts, in the following years, the output of the municipal Directorate of Human Settlements followed a downward trend. In 2015/2016, the directorate only completed 936 top structures and 1,153 internal services (BCMM 2017:15). This is far below the original annual production target of 5,000 housing units of the 2003 Housing Sector Plan, which has repeatedly been lowered. Already in 2014, consultants contracted under NUSP’s technical support facility concluded that it would take more than 50 years to build houses for the backlog and future need (CS Consulting/Afesis-corplan 2014:8). Even in areas where upgrading is considered successful, the municipality is not out of trouble. In Ilinge, shack dwellers earmarked to receive so-called RDP houses resisted municipal workers who demolished their shacks and confiscated building material.When new houses were handed over, the City Mayor addressed the crowd and pleaded: We don’t want to see new shacks here.We don’t want people to leave their new houses and rent them out. After crying for years for new houses we don’t want you to sell these houses 276

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[…] That is discouraging to government because we don’t see the difference. We see new RDP houses in numbers but the shacks don’t end. We are chasing a moving target. (Daily Dispatch, 05 August 2015; see Figure 17.10) Like the above-cited interview with the portfolio councillor, the words of the mayor show a political elite that is overwhelmed by demand and helpless in the face of a constituency which does not play by its rules. For one of Buffalo City’s senior planners, this is a logical outcome of the economic malaise: This house is a handout of R70-80,000 [referring to the subsidy quantum government made available for housing construction]. If you are living in a shack, you are going to say, ‘thank you very much! I’ll have the R80,000. In fact, I’ll take 40 and I move back into a shack because with 40 I can do something for a while’ – Even if it is to pay for medicine, for [anti]retrovirals or whatever. (recorded 29 May 2015) In a city with an official unemployment rate of 35.1% (StatsSa 2011:17) and an enormous housing shortage, the award of a house must feel like a win in the lottery. Yet, it may provide only short relief. Robins (2002) and Cross (2006) pointed out long ago that, even when provided for free, formal housing might be unaffordable for the poor due to service charges, social expectations and the increased living costs of a suburban lifestyle. Since the early 2000s, government has introduced indigent policies for households with very low incomes that provide free access to energy, water and sanitation, refuse removal and exemptions from property rates. Despite all these services, some poor households seem to prefer to convert their house into cash than to actually live in it (Bank et al., 2010:52).

Figure 17.10 Redevelopment of the Mdantsane bufferstrip. Source: Photo by Kienast.

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Apart from the question whether government can afford to provide every poor household with state-subsidized housing, the practitioners interviewed for this research were uncertain whether it should even try to do so.While the current formalization approach constitutes a huge improvement in the quality of life for those who receive a well-built state-subsidized house with a water-borne toilet and electricity in the area where they once squatted, it does not provide a viable solution for a massive housing shortage. Given the number of households on the municipal housing needs register and the annual housing production, the rollover development of informal settlements produces windfalls for a few while condemning the majority of the urban poor to remain indefinitely on a waiting list. Against this backdrop, an alternative strategy for informal settlements upgrading was drafted.

17.6 Regularization: Ambition and reality of an alternative approach towards informal settlements upgrading While Buffalo City has managed to provide many shack dwellers with access to water, during the first decade of the municipality’s existence, not much was done to reduce the sanitation backlog and the provision of informal settlements with electricity remained anathema (see Section 17.4.2). Despite the low rate of housing construction, the municipality pledged that “informal households within the urban edge will be provided with services via the housing backlog eradication programme” and reiterated the “current objective […] to eradicate this backlog by 2014” (BCM 2010:48). Local policy only changed after a countrywide wave of community protest and subsequent adjustments of national housing priorities (see Section 17.2). In 2012, the BCMM council passed a resolution calling for the electrification of informal settlements. In 2013, the municipality introduced the concept of “regularisation”, where the municipality “provides assistance in the form of basic services, access to emergency vehicles, tenure security and an address to informal settlements” (quoted by CS Consulting/Afesis-corplan 2014:9). In the same year, BCMM used funding provided by the National Upgrading Support Programme (NUSP) to commission an Informal Settlement Upgrading Policy and Strategy (short: upgrading policy).

17.6.1 Basic tenets of the BCMM Informal Settlement Upgrading Policy and Strategy The upgrading policy was drafted by a consortium formed by a former director of the municipality (now working as a private consultant) and Afesis-corplan, an NGO with more than two decades of experience in supporting housing projects and community-based organizations. Based on the observation that the municipality would need more than 50 years to get rid of its housing deficit, the service providers recommended a change of approach. While they did not speak out against the construction of state-subsidized housing, they cautioned against “formalizing too quickly”, and promoted an expansion of the “regularisation” approach. Above all else, BCMM should “provide a package of basic services to all informal settlements; [and] accommodate alternative land tenure arrangements” (CS Consulting/Afesis-corplan 2014: 32;9). At an institutional level, the upgrading policy defined five urgent interventions: 1. The introduction of a new category of land use management, called incremental settlement areas, which would create the legal basis for concrete upgrading measures; 2. A locally administered system of land tenure that would recognize shack dwellers’ citizen rights and their right to stay put, without constituting individual rights to property; 3. Planning and development measures oriented by basic needs, including the installation of communal ablution facilities, emergency access, footpaths and storm-water channels, collection points for garbage, street lighting as well 278

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Figure 17.11 Promotional video for Buffalo City upgrading strategy. Source: Afesis-corplan, 2014.

as individual electricity connections; 4. Support programmes for the improvement of education, health and employment of the informal settlers; 5. The coordination of incremental upgrading interventions (ibid.:34; see Figure 17.11). Contrary to the Housing Code, which focuses on the granting of individual freehold titles at the end of the upgrading process (see Section 17.2 and DHS 2009), the methodology proposed for BCMM already stipulates some recognition of occupation early on and underlines the necessity to continue to support “on-going development” (CS Consulting/Afesis-corplan 2014:7f.). Although the upgrading policy makes a clear commitment to in situ upgrading, it does not assume that each household can stay where it is. It requires informal settlements to be classified using four concepts that are easy to communicate: where roads, water and sanitation can be provided without moving existing structures, these can “stay” (1). Where a minor displacement of structures is sufficient, without anyone having to leave the area, people will “shift” (2). Areas that can only be provided with roads and infrastructure after an adjustment of plot boundaries are labelled “two step” (3): inhabitants have to move to temporary relocation areas and stay there until the land is consolidated and internal services have been created. A permanent “move” (4) is expected of those who live on land that is deemed unsuitable for permanent settlement, because it is “too steep, close to a river, on top of water or sewer mains, under power lines, within future road reserves, or on land that is earmarked for some other land use”. In such cases, the municipality is required to find and prepare alternative land and to arrange for people’s resettlement (ibid.:9). In order to cover all 154 areas which the municipality had identified within a foreseeable timeframe, the municipality would have to budget for and implement a new round of interventions each year. In the first group of settlements, which had already been planned for, basic infrastructure would be put in place, while plans for the second group of settlements are drawn up, and so on until, at the end of a six-year period, each area would have had experienced some kind of upgrading (ibid.:7ff.). 279

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Figure 17.12 Trenches as self-organized infrastructure for storm-water management in Phola Park (Scenery Park/East London). Source: Photo by Kienast.

In its section on funding sources, the upgrading policy lists more than twenty different grants and government programmes the municipality could access in order to fund the upgrading of informal settlements (ibid.:62ff.) and proposes a multi-sectoral approach. The authors assumed that incremental upgrading requires buy-in from all directorates of the municipality, including planning, land administration, the various infrastructure departments and municipal services as well as the Enterprise Project Management Office, a new institution created to plan and monitor spending on national grants. They recommended the creation of an “incremental settlement coordinating committee” made up of “upgrading champions” from each department and expected a programme manager based in the municipal human settlements directorate to take the lead in driving the programme (CS Consulting/Afesis-corplan 2014:50–60; see Figure 17.12).

17.6.2  The participatory elaboration of upgrading plans The 32 settlements that were selected for the elaboration of upgrading plans included some areas that are located quite centrally (like Eluxolweni and New Rest in Duncan Village) and others at the periphery (e.g., a small settlement in Dimbaza in the north-western hinterland). The majority of the settlements are within or adjacent to the biggest township, Mdantsane. The size of the areas varies between small communities of only 30–40 households and large settlements like Amalinda Forest and Cambridge Location, each with more than 1,000 structures. Altogether more than 7,000 households were supposed to benefit from the process (see Figure 17.13). The stocktaking included the compilation of technical data (environmental assessments, descriptions of property and land use as well as currently existing infrastructure and services). In workshops and transect walks guided by inhabitants, information on physical assets, facilities, social assets and forms of tenure was compiled. Additionally, the consortium collected socioeconomic data based on a randomly selected 10% sample. In order to develop plans with a participatory methodology within short time, the planners held joined workshops for several 280

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Figure 17.13 Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality: Informal settlements earmarked for incremental upgrading. Source: Cartography by J.T. Wongnam, G.P. Kienast.

areas. In each cluster, three workshops took place.The facilitators invited between four and eight community representatives, representatives of the local ward committee, the relevant ward councillors and community development workers.Workshops were based on the concept of asset-based community development, which has its origin in Canadian cooperatives and adult education3. The second workshop included a rudimentary form of participatory budgeting where community representatives were asked to prioritize interventions within a limited budget. They were also required to identify activities that the communities could undertake while waiting for upgrading measures of the municipality to set in, and to form committees, which would take responsibility for the different activities. Draft upgrading plans combined community input and technical expertise. In the third workshop, facilitators prompted participants to comment on draft plans and explained which additional actions needed to be taken to 281

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make sure that plans would be approved and to monitor their implementation (CS Consulting 2015a:9).

17.6.3 Results of the planning exercise: Investment plans and long-term perspectives In transect walks and community situation analyses, the professional team compiled information about current infrastructure and services; the existing facilities in neighbouring areas such as schools, clinics and community halls; and social assets like churches and sports clubs, which operate in the settlement. The exercise showed that the areas possess a variety of social assets (from taverns to early childhood development centres). Most settlements also seemed to have a committee, which regulates land tenure and mediates conflicts. The socioeconomic study confirmed a very low average income but showed that not all shack dwellers are indigent. In half of the settlements the sample included households with incomes above R3,500. In four areas, they made up more than 10% of the sample. In conventional redevelopment projects, these few households with economic stability would probably be driven out. In two-thirds of the settlements, the majority stated they would prefer to be upgraded where they are, while in nine areas the majority preferred to “be moved and upgraded elsewhere” (synopsis carried out by the author, based on reports produced by CS Consulting in 2015). According to a Community Liaison Officer cited by Eglin (2016:41), the participatory planning process was well received by the participants: When communities started participating in the upgrading workshop series they did not really understand what upgrading was all about. As they followed the workshops they started to appreciate more what upgrading could achieve. […] They now know how their community can be developed. […] They know they must not just rely on the ward councillor and committee but they need to also take responsibility for seeing that development happens in their communities. Communities don’t trust anyone these days who tells them that some development is going to happen as they have been lied to too often in the past where promises were not kept. For each area, social facilitators and community representatives developed a vision, along with a list of additional facilities that people deemed necessary “to make the settlement more habitable while [… inhabitants] wait for future relocation or upgrading” (CS Consulting 2015a:37). Based on community input and the general upgrading policy, the technical team proposed an “upgrading path” for each settlement. Each plan included a series of maps (see Figure 17.14), a list of facilities to be created, and the costing for each of these interventions. The upgrading plans suggested spending approximately R16,100 (€1,125) per family (synopsis carried out by the author, based on reports produced by CS Consulting in 2015). More than half of the budget (R 9,000 per household) was allocated to electrification. The second priority was the creation of roads, footpaths and storm-water drainage. Sanitation only ranked third in terms of monetary allocations, partly because only communal toilets were planned and partly because most settlements already had some installations. Although previous studies had recommended the areas for “in situ upgrading”, the professional team commissioned by the National Upgrading Support Programme did not find them easy to deal with. According to their assessment, only 8 of the 32 settlements matched the less conflictual stay and shift categories. Ten settlements were recommended for a two-step approach (i.e., shack dwellers would have to leave and could only return after infrastructure had been put in 282

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Figure 17.14 Example of an intervention map produced in result of participatory planning workshops. Source: CS Consulting, 2015a.

place). Ten settlements would have to move completely. Four settlements fell into more than one category, i.e., parts of the area were classified as suitable for in-situ upgrading and others not.

17.6.4 Stuck in the starting block: The meagre outcomes of the upgrading policy Initially it seemed as if the NUSP-sponsored policy and plans might really introduce a “policy shift”. Buffalo City’s Built Environment Performance Plan (BEPP)4 for the financial year 2015/2016 explained that “in-situ upgrading presents a greater opportunity to protect existing social and economic networks by allowing households to remain on site, and overtime incrementally upgrade the settlement”. However, when comparing the cost analysis for the “NUSP supported informal settlements” with the budgets for the three clusters under redevelopment (see Section 17.5), there could be no doubt, which of the two strategies carried more weight (BCMM 2015b:48ff.;54ff.).Yet, even the reduced budget for upgrading areas soon fell by the wayside. According to a municipal official, the upgrading policy was adopted by council in 2015, but due to an intervention by the municipal manager, the individual plans with their respective budgets were only “noted” (interview conducted 14.11.2016). Thus, the policy had not much bearing on municipal practice. This becomes evident when looking at the five “priority interventions” the policy had called for. As a step towards implementation, Buffalo City has added an “incremental settlement zone” as a new land-use category to its zoning scheme. It also defined “shelter” as a “structure that does not comply with building regulations” (e-mail correspondence with city planner, 19 March 2018). How these changes will affect licensing practice and investment is too early to tell. Meanwhile, the “locally administered land tenure system” had found no support as such forms of tenure continue to be associated with “old-order rights” and “traditional African rules” (BCMM 2015c:397) and are not considered as milestones on a path of incremental upgrading. 283

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As Section 17.4.2 has shown, the municipal infrastructure departments already provide interim services and have increased their output (e.g., in terms of communal ablution facilities and individual electricity connections). However, according to Eglin (2016:43), “these activities are actually happening […] independently of anything that was discussed in the participatory planning process”. In March 2018, this still seemed to hold true. Only one of the five communities contacted by the author reported any public investment (see Figure 17.15). There was no evidence of improvement of education, health or the employment of the informal settlers. Hence, it seems safe to say that the upgrading policy has failed to initiate and coordinate incremental upgrading and had no tangible impact on the lives of shack dwellers.

17.7 Reasons for the failed introduction of incremental upgrading policy Although the municipal manager who prevented a council vote on the upgrading plans (see Section 17.6.4) and the acting head of the human settlements department were suspended in October 2015 (Daily Dispatch 9 and 30 October 2015), nothing has changed in terms of policy implementation. Newspaper reports, municipal documents and interviews point at institutional, political and economic impediments to implementation. In the following, the author describes five obstacles. For incremental upgrading to happen all of them need to be tackled.

17.7.1  Inappropriateness of the institutional architecture According to the closeout report of the consultants who developed the upgrading policy and plans, in the “short to medium term”, implementation should be monitored by the planning department. In the “medium to long term” responsibility would be handed over to a programme manager for informal settlements upgrading within the human settlements department

Figure 17.15 Electrification of informal settlements in Slovo Park/Mdantsane. Source: Photo by Kienast.

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(CS Consulting 2015b:22; CS Consulting/Afesis-corplan 2014:57). As of July 2018, this position had not even been advertised. This has left the planning department in an awkward position: it was supposed to kick-start implementation, engage with other parts of the municipal administration and report to local communities (CS Consulting 2015b:23ff.). As these activities were far beyond his conventional tasks and there was no clear political mandate, the responsible official did not feel to be in a position to carry them out (interview 14.11.2016). Even when the position of the upgrading manager will be filled, given the record of the human settlements department (see Sections 17.4 and 17.5) and its lack of involvement in the upgrading agenda, it is questionable whether it can successfully lead such a multi-sectoral programme.

17.7.2  Lack of a political champion for incremental upgrading The elaboration of the NUSP-sponsored upgrading policy and plans was supervised by the municipal directorate of development planning and the responsible portfolio councillor acted as a political champion (CS Consulting 2015b:19). While one can argue that the planning department is the natural home for such a spatial planning exercise, due to the highly compartmentalized and politicized nature of the administration, it could not get much buy-in from other sectors needed for implementation. Interviews conducted with senior human settlements managers (28 May 2015 and 14 November 2016) and the new portfolio councillor for human settlements who took office in August 2016 (16 November 2016) confirmed the continuous focus on housing and redevelopment. As the planning portfolio councillor was replaced twice during one year, the upgrading policy seems to have lost all political support in the municipality (interview with planning official, 18 November 2016).

17.7.3 Destabilizing effects of the public housing complex While the upgrading policy and plans were developed, the BCMM council was not in the shape to reach consensus about far-reaching changes to housing policy or the institutional setup of the municipality. Different factions of the ANC council majority were engaged in a fierce power struggle, with the mayor and the municipal manager on different sides of the fray. The issues that divided the council included the deviation of funds for the memorial services of Nelson Mandela (Daily Dispatch, 09 May 2015), the procurement of a major housing contract and attempts by regional party structures to influence the selection of a new head of the municipal human settlements department (Daily Dispatch, 06 December 2014). Conflicts are fuelled by the emergence of a party-state patronage system where housing allocation plays a central role (Mukwedeya 2016). In Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality (NMMM) a forensic investigation by the national Department of Cooperative Governance found that a syndicate within the housing department had manipulated procurement processes for years (Olver 2016). When political paralysis threatened the ANC’s prospects in the 2016 local government elections, within two weeks’ time, the ruling party replaced the political leadership in both NMMM and BCMM (Daily Dispatch 03 June 2015). Pithouse (2010:51) observed that housing projects are “highly likely to be captured and distorted by party networks at every level from the allocation of contracts to build houses through to the provision of materials, the allocation of labouring jobs and the allocation of houses”. While shifting resources from rollover redevelopment to incremental upgrading certainly would not end all these problems, due to smaller lots and wider gains it may take away opportunities for patronage and enrichment.Yet, those who benefit from clientelist networks cannot be expected to remove a system that has brought them into power. 285

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17.7.4 Lack of support for incremental upgrading from national and provincial government As Buffalo City has not achieved the required level of accreditation for autonomous administration of national housing programmes (DHS 2012), it needs to apply to the province if it wants to make use of UISP funding. Upgrading plans and policies are procured at national level, are supervised by municipal planners and the actual work is done by private consultants.Thus, there is not much to do for the provincial department except for the assessment of grant applications.Yet, due to the political and institutional problems discussed above, the relevant application has never been made. How did the National Upgrading Support Programme react to the lack of implementation of the plans it had sponsored? As the NUSP directorate has always been severely understaffed (DHS 2014:76), it struggled to spend its budget (Dawson/McLaren 2014:34). In late 2016, the directorate was temporarily reduced to one staff member. While NUSP was unable to provide support for institution building or effectively lobby local decision-makers for the new approach, it could only push for the elaboration of more policies and plans. The adoption of ambitious upgrading targets (see Section 17.2) has infused the idea of incremental improvement with the quantitative logic of the public housing sector. As the national Department of Human Settlements now has to report on a quarterly basis on the number of households provided “with access to secure tenure rights and basic services”, one can assume that it puts some pressure on provinces to produce these figures and, in turn, provinces may do the same with municipalities.

17.7.5 Limited buy-in and insufficient mobilization of shack dweller communities Another reason for the lack of progress with regard to upgrading plans is the lack of pressure from the communities who are supposed to benefit. In a context of ubiquitous need, deferred delivery and an insurgent citizenship, which regularly uses the smoke of burning tyres to alert political leaders to the urgency of their problems (von Holdt et al. 2011), it could not be expected that things fall into place without a fight. According to their own accounts, social facilitators consistently emphasized the responsibility of the communities and their representatives to push for implementation. Existing community structures such as the area committees were supposed to “regularly arrange follow up meetings with municipal officials” and use ward committees and the municipal integrated development planning process to monitor progress (Eglin 2016:41). Interviews with members of ten of the 32 communities conducted by the author gave the impression that, by and large, this advice was followed. Two years after the last planning workshop, a group of informal settlers wrote a letter to all three levels of government, expressing disappointment and demanding that the agreed plan would finally be carried out (interview conducted 20 November 2016). Yet, compared to the sustained and often violent protests by communities that were promised housing (Mukwedeya/Ndhlovu 2017), the action taken by communities earmarked for incremental upgrading was sporadic and far less militant. It seems that, due to the institutional vacuum, the communities have never received a proper feedback from the municipality and not even community representatives who took part in the planning workshops have received copies of the plans they helped develop (focus group interview with representatives of seven settlements conducted 17 November 2016). This lack of follow-up has invalidated the consultation and steps towards community development that took place before. This seems tragic since the workshops offered community members an opportunity that is rare in the South African context. While, even today, the plans and budgets could be put to use, the momentum that existed in early 2015 was lost. 286

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17.8 Conclusions More than two decades after the advent of democracy, Buffalo City continues to build lowincome housing in areas that appear like extensions of the apartheid era township of Mdantsane. Due to their low density, lack of social infrastructure and remoteness, the built environments created tend to impoverish rather than to empower the urban poor. Since 2010, informal settlements upgrading has received a growing share of housing subsidies and gradually shifted housing production from “greenfield” to “brownfield” development. However, interventions do not follow the incremental approach proposed by the UISP or the municipality’s own upgrading policy. Instead of coordinating the installation of interim services, which could benefit a large number of shack dwellers in a short period, the Buffalo City human settlements department is still focused on projects that apply a “turn-key” approach to informal settlements. Granted, the redevelopment of “buffer strip” and “infill” settlements has produced some positive results. After all, approximately 3,500 households who used to live in shacks have been provided with fully serviced houses in relatively well-integrated locations where they used to squat. However, this kind of formalization takes too long and is unable to make a dent in Buffalo City’s large housing and services backlog. While the municipality has done too little to reach upgrading targets, it seems to get away with it, because neither the provincial nor the national Department of Human Settlements seem to be too critical about how targets are reached. The municipal engineering departments provide interim services to informal areas.Yet, they do not use the upgrading plans commissioned by NUSP for the spatial targeting of their investment. If this doesn’t change, plans and budgets that were produced in a participatory manner will have been for nothing. If each department continues to roll out services in an uncoordinated manner, they will not create synergy and the chance to initiate incremental improvement may be lost. Uncoordinated delivery also makes it difficult to track progress. Having realized that the current subsidy model is unsustainable and unable to meet housing demand, Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu mooted the introduction of a ‘cutoff date’ that would end the provision of free housing to young South Africans and prioritize those above 60 years of age (Sisulu 2014). The draft White Paper for the Development of Human Settlements Legislation suggests that, in the future, household heads between the ages of 18 and 59 with an income below R3,500 will be supported via sites-and-service schemes instead (DHS 2015:41). While it remains unclear when these rules will actually be adopted, one can assume that they carry great political risk for the ruling party, which has won many elections thanks to its housing promises. Although the ANC still managed to win 62.2% in the 2014 national elections, in the 2016 local government elections, it has lost control over Johannesburg,Tshwane (Pretoria) and Nelson Mandela Metro (Port Elizabeth) to its biggest rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA). In Buffalo City, in spite of almost a decade of fierce factional battles, the ANC has managed to hold on to a council majority. However, political turmoil had a very negative effect on the municipality’s efficiency in service delivery, its ability to retain skilled staff, to adapt to new challenges and to implement new policies. This is especially true with regard to the public housing sector, which is dominated by projects that had been “in the pipeline” for many years and – as the examples in this chapter have shown – is constantly in crisis mode. According to its last annual report,“the municipality was inculcated by Provincial Department of Human Settlements to discontinue registration of new beneficiaries citing a bottleneck of approved beneficiaries that have not been provided with houses” (BCMM 2017:15).The decree to stop beneficiary registration is a notice to quit the longstanding commitment to provide all 287

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indigent households with state-subsidized housing. Arguably, it makes it even more urgent to implement alternative strategies of informal settlements upgrading and managed land settlement (Eglin/Kenyon 2016). Buffalo City has ‘missed the stop’ for conventional housing and redevelopment projects, and wasted several years, which it could have used to swing in on the alternative path the upgrading policy had suggested.While Buffalo City is not the only South African city which faces this challenge, due to its high incidence of informal settlements it is a critical case for the necessary adjustment of South African land and housing policies.

Notes 1 Research for this chapter was made possible by funding received from the School of Architecture, Urban and Landscape Planning of the University of Kassel and the German Research Foundation (dfg). 2 Such a development had already been proposed at the end of the 1980s (Reintges 1992) but had initially been ruled out due to the unfavourable topography of the area. 3 See www.abcdinstitute.org/ and http://www.coady.stfx.ca/ 4 In order to remain eligible for conditional grants, every year metropolitan municipalities have to submit a BEPP to the National Treasury.

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18 Framing power in co-production engagements in Kampala City, Uganda Gilbert Siame and Wilma S. Nchito

18.1 Introduction Planning in the global South has been subjected to many debates which have established that there is an urgent need to rethink the ways planning is practised. These calls for new ways of doing planning are based on realities of deep difference, weak states, increasing urban informality, and rapid urbanization of poverty and inequality. At the centre of the critiques is the need to understand the workings of power in planning and how this could be channelled to ensure alternative and productive state–society engagements and relations (Watson, 2014). This chapter aims to conceptualize the workings of power and how the co-production process embodies mechanisms to ensure collaboration and low-level conflict in settlement interventions in global South cities. The chapter addresses the research question: how do co-production engagements in Kampala challenge the consensualist approaches to planning in the cities of the South? In many African cities, as is the case elsewhere in the global South, power and urban governance “encompasses multiple sites where practices of governance are exercised and contested, (and) a variety of players, various layers of relations and a broad range of practices of governance that may involve various modes of power, as well as different scale” are found (Lindell, 2008:1880). There are diverse networks of power and governance in these cities. In many cases, the state does not necessarily hold a sovereign position in these networks but can steer them. The workings of power and how it has shaped state-society engagement outcomes in conditions of the urban global South remains not well understood and documented. An important argument underlying this chapter is that planning as a professional field is socially constructed and is inevitably shaped by the contexts of power. Understanding the workings of power is essential because under very poor socio-economic circumstances and conditions of deprivation in much of the global South cities, it is inevitable that poor households and state agencies ‘step outside of the law’ and formal governance systems and structures are over stretched to create an extra-legal planning environment. Chatterjee (2004) indicates that in terms of existing planning legislations and planning institutions, the concept of public participation is either minimal or entirely absent and there are few formal channels which poor communities can use to communicate their needs. This chapter explores the initiatives and outcome of community efforts to subvert dominant colonial inspired 291

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planning practices to introduce a new form of sate-society engagement through co-production. Co-production is a process through which urban poor communities working with civic movements use tools to jointly undertake settlement interventions that shift power relations to benefit residents of informal settlements and communities. The chapter advances an argument that participatory governance (Swapan, 2013; 2016) in cities of the global South is possible if communities in informal settlements organize themselves to destabilize manipulative and undemocratic practices of the state, become propositional in creating an inclusive urban future and emphasize on partnership-based settlement interventions. The chapter uses primary data generated using a case study method based on a phronesis approach (Flyvbjerg, 2004). Thus, the method was designed to generate qualitative data that depicts a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal of co-production of the urban by various actors in Kampala. Having provided introduction in this section, the remainder of this chapter is divided into five sections. The second section provides literature review on power and co-production. The third section presents the methods and materials used in this chapter and fourth section presents the findings. The chapter then uses the findings to speak back to literature and indicates new concepts and theory strands in the fields of urban governance, and power in planning.The following section provides an analysis of literature on the treatment of power in planning.

18.2 The unfinished business of power in planning Friedmann (2008) argues that planning practices need to be adapted to real-world constraints regarding scale, complexity, and time. The global South presents a unique moment in time and history and planning needs to be attuned to that unique context, the context of diversity, changing governance dynamics, rapid urbanization and a young population. Global South means far more than a geographical South: “It references an entire history of colonialism, neoimperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy and access to resources are maintained; and opens new possibilities in politics and social science” (Dados and Connell, 2012:13). Thus, the functioning of the state in Southern contexts can be different from Western liberal and economically advanced regions, and the one-size-fits-all theories of urbanism and urban planning are challenged by the everyday state practices. In conditions of extreme inequality and deprivation, it is unlikely that actors would reach consensus on matters that concern resource distribution and management. Thus, consensus-seeking planning theories such as communicative and collaborative planning (Healey, 1997; 2003; Innes, 1995, and Forester, 1992) remain largely impractical in the global South cities. Rather than requiring the reaching of consensus to validate the rationality of actions, planning needs to direct attention to the conflictual nature of policy-making and planning, and emphasize the political judgement, moral vision and emotional sensitivities that planners require within the context of social diversity (Watson, 2006). Foucault’s concept of real-life rationality shows how choices are actually constructed and defended within particular constructs of power. Nancy Fraser (1981:276) maintains “Foucault’s argument which demonstrates that modern power is ‘capillary’ in that it operates at the lowest extremities of the social body in everyday social practices”. Based on what Foucault (1984; 1990) terms “micro-tactics and practices” (Fraser, 1981:277), which comprise everyday life in modern society, Foucault analyses “power as ‘flowing’ at every level of society.” Therefore, planning theorists need to “focus their attention on more micro-political planning practices and localised conflicts” and difference, rather than context-less metanarratives (Flyvbjerg & Richardson, 2002:10). There is need for a better understanding of how people live daily, the social values of the populations and how power flows in these aspects of everyday urbanisms. The tools of co-production seem 292

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better positioned to initiate new insights on global South urbanisms and outline the configurations of power. The chapter extends Foucauldian ideas of power to conceptualize power relations in planning interventions in post-colonial urban conditions in the global South.The chapter argues that power is not the possession of some groups or institutions (Foucault, 1980; Kelly & Foucault, 1994). Rather, it is diffused through society, and circulates between people, who exercise and are subjected to power. According to Allen (2004), power is all-encompassing, ubiquitous and pervasive in society. Consequently, it has no obvious location(s) and no centres. Domination and resistance are conceived as hybrid and mutually constituted phenomena, where the one carries “a trace of the other that contaminates or subverts it” (Lindell, 2008:1880; Sharp et al., 2000). In the South, the multiplicity of power sources and power flows (conduits of social power) shapes the relations within and between society and the state, making the engagements fluid, multiple, complex, conflicted, and sometimes informal.

18.3 Nature of co-production Co-production as an alternative approach to city planning, state-society engagement and governance has been used in practice by many Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) (Satterthwaite, et al., 2015b) in the global South.This section examines the use of co-production concepts and strategies by citizen groups and social movement organizations to enable individual members and their associations to secure “effective relations with state institutions” that address both immediate basic needs and enable them to negotiate for greater benefits and address power imbalance during relations (Mitlin, 2008:339; Boonyabancha & Mitlin, 2012). This section reviews the concept of co-production – state and citizens working together – as a grassroots strategy to secure political influence and access to resources and services. Co-production channels power to reposition the often-weak individuals and groups to claim their space, cease opportunities to assert their roles in the governance of spaces and resources (Watson, 2014). The idea of co-production emerged in different contexts and from different intellectual traditions. Ostrom (1996:1073), based his discourse on co-production in Public Administration and Political Science, and New Institutional Economics, considered co-production as “the process through which inputs used to produce a good or service is contributed by individuals who are not in the same organisation”. This is what Watson (2014) has called the old version of co-production and Mitlin (2008) has described co-production by civic movements or NGOs as grassroots or citizen-led co-production. Ostrom’s ideas of co-production are fundamentally different from the way grassroots movements define and practice co-production in the cities of the South. As discussed in the following sub-section, the difference is clear in the ways civic movements engage with the idea of power, mobilization and objectives of the engagements.

18.4 Power relations in co-production processes In many citizen-led co-production engagements, conflict and the role of power are acknowledged and multiple strategies are adopted to promote outcomes that favour the urban poor. State-society relations are distinguished as they involve different kinds of strategies of expressing power, they involve – conflict, cooperation, and boycotts – all meant to push for a pro-poor urban agenda. As such, citizen-led co-production involves ‘negotiating’ with, or putting pressure on, the state so that local groups (in this case members of grassroots movements and pro-poor organizations working in urban development environments in the global South) can be directly involved in the design, management and implementation of intervention programmes. Mitlin 293

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(2008) argues that co-production by networked movements is different from standard ‘participation’ or ‘partnership’ arrangements. As opposed to Ostrom’s position on co-production as a state-orchestrated cost reduction project, Mitlin (2008) argues that the interpretation and practice of co-production strengthens citizen mobilization and so provides a platform for a wider civic and political engagement and reforms in the way state agencies function (Albrechts, 2012). This implies that co-production by grassroots movements is more of a social movement strategy that is designed to empower communities to achieve strategic gains for themselves, a thing, we argue has potential to engender robust urban transformation. Mitlin (2008:347) explains citizen-led co-production within a broader struggle for choice, self-determination and meso-level political relations in which citizens both seek an engagement with the state and also are oriented towards selfmanagement and local control over local provision in areas related to community development needs and aspirations. She defines coproduction as a political process that citizens engage with to secure changes in their relations with government and state agencies in addition to improvement of basic services. Mitlin (2008) recognizes the role of power and conflict, state functionality and the structure of society in shaping the relationship between the state and the urban poor. She argues “the nature of groups arising from a grassroots co-production process offer particular benefits to the poor, extending political practice through drawing in new groups and persuading the state to respond positively” (2008:353). While collaborative and communicative planning approaches do not give sufficient treatment to power (within state and communities, and the encounter of the two), co-production is about management of power and conflict to advance and protect the interests of citizens. Co-production challenges the dominant power of the state and seeks to shift power towards communities. Drawing on examples from civic movements and participation discourses of the urban poor in planning in Bolivia, Brazil and South Africa, Miraftab (2009:34) argues that through persistent counter-hegemonic practices, the movements expose and upset or destabilize the normalized relations of dominance (‘war of positions’). The sites of power are multiple (Lindell, 2008) and shifting, as are the sites for counter-hegemonic movements. Thus, co-production encourages conflict and collaboration. Co-production can be related to the arguments by Holston (2008), as having the capabilities that both produce stability in power relations and destabilize them. In the following sections, we discuss the tools in co-production that are used to mobilize, empower and structure communities to be able to engage with the state in multiple ways.

18.5 Strategies of organizing influence in communities The civic movement such as Slum Dwellers International (SDI) believe that the core form of organizing the urban poor should involve tools that bring people together.Thus, savings for daily needs and long-term life demands are designed to collect people and mobilize them around big picture community development issues. The famous phrase in the activities of the SDI across the over 36 countries is: ‘we do not collect money, we collect people’1. In all cases of co-production, there is encouragement for these groups to aggregate and form a critical mass at community, city level and nationally. Savings practices are said to enable grassroots organizations to develop units, to work together, to trust each other with finance and information and to establish settlementlevel priorities for development and neighbourhood improvements (Watson, 2014). Savings also provide the opportunity to build collectives necessary for engaging with the state systems 294

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(Mitlin et al., 2011). Mitlin (2008:356) emphasizes that savings through “federating is a critical link whereby local groups are drawn into processes that both emphasise their solidarity with one another and create a political union able to negotiate directly with the state”. Savings mobilize power and channel it towards a common good. Savings create a platform for state-society engagements as the community is seen to be a strong force that cannot be ignored in urban development affairs in many parts of the global South. The second strategy involves learning exchanges to lean about the city and explore innovations based on daily life experiences. The movements consider learning exchange activities as basis for empowerment and building confidence among slum dwellers to engage with the tools and systems of the state. This process helps to ensure that knowledge about cities and development ideas come from the urban poor and are not imposed on them by professionals (Sheela et al., 2012). It is argued that this kind of unbounded learning, rooted at this level, consolidates individual and collective confidence among informal settlement residents in their own capacities (McFarlane, 2006) and this creates potential for effective participation necessary for achieving inclusive planning and service delivery. Writing about SDI activities in India, McFarlane (2011:69) refers to these exchanges as “trans-local urban learning assemblages” of materials, practices, designs, knowledge, personal stories, and local histories, with the notion of assemblage placing an emphasis on urban learning and alignment between the social and material at different sites. These networks become essential and useful in shaping what the city essentially becomes. Thus, tool of learning exchanges frames power in the form of knowledge, public speaking, and allows community members and state agents to learn and unlearn unproductive practices. Furthermore, to promote new ways of generating information and knowledge about cities and human settlements, community residents, with the support of NGO technical experts, lead the implementation of comprehensive settlement and city-wide community surveys and mapping to create knowledge about cities and communities, and recommend settlement interventions.This approach claims to challenge the established epistemologies of contemporary ways of knowing and equips the urban poor with powerful tools to challenge state power. Communitymanaged enumerations (surveys) and maps create the information base needed for mobilization, negotiation, and delivery of houses and services (Watson, 2014; 2012). Chatterjee & Mehta (2007) argue that the articulation of power and knowledge in practices of government manifests in technologies of mapping and enumeration by which society makes itself visible to the state, accessible, reliable, and confident in urban interventions. Enumerations and mapping serve as a way of mobilizing community influence and channelling it to challenge wrong data and impractical values held by the state, negotiate a less disruptive change process and spreads power and responsibility to various actors in partnerships.This creates new types of social collectiveness which shifts power relations between the state and society and determines new course of settlement upgrades and urban development activities (Mitlin, 2008). In this way, knowledge serves to change power dynamics and leads to communities gaining more control over the process of urban development. The urban poor are reported to exercise power through self-enumerations and mapping and manage to present themselves as an indisputable and valuable stakeholder in urban development (Chatterjee & Mehta, 2007; Satterthwaite et al., 2015a; 2015b; Mitlin, 2014). Appadurai (2012:640) describes enumerations as “tools for group formation” and power mobilization, in the sense that they allow the creation of an “abstraction” that can have social and moral significance in the minds of community members. Enumerations make the invisible visible in urban governance and in decision-making. The strengthening of the networks though the mentioned co-production tools and strategies is important, because mass organizations pre-empt conflict due to their scale and encourage or pressurise governments to negotiate. The conflict of rationalities may not be removed (state and 295

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communities may still have very different values and ambitions) but the state (planners) may be persuaded to consider pragmatic solutions to community needs. The tools of co-production serve as the medium to express power from the grassroots which in turn enables city networks to take on an alternative approach to the ‘contentious politics’, highlighted by Charles Tilly’s work on social movements, and the totality of engagement between citizens and the state.The SDI and other examples of organizations facilitating co-production in the cities of the global South state their central goal is to seek productive partnerships (collaborative and conflicted), in which they can work together to address, for example, infrastructure deficiencies in cities and communities. In the following section, we present the methods and materials used in this chapter.

18.6 Methodological approach and materials This study has sought to study the ‘everyday’ in urban intervention practices and planning in Kampala City. The study focused on governance dynamics, power relations and expressions of urbanisms – identity, material deprivations and privilege, politics, accountability, and leadership among others in Kampala. This study used the case study approach, as recommended by Yiftachel and Huxley (2000:911) who call upon planning theoreticians and practitioners to critically examine planning practices -using cases- (Flyvbjerg, 2004). We approached this study as a phronesis inquiry (Flyvbjerg, 2004) which seeks to get close to ‘realpolitik’ and real rationality that characterizes studies of power (Flyvbjerg, 1998) and values in planning. The study used a phronesis approach and applied Flyvbjerg’s (2004:5) recommendation that “power in planning needs to be studied as ‘techne’, as a craft and art, and as an activity that is concrete, variable, and contextdependent”. The objective of techne is application of technical knowledge and skills according to a pragmatic instrumental rationality, what Foucault calls “a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal” (Foucault 1984:255). The study used the City of Kampala as a case and then chose three divisions namely: Kampala Central, Nakawa and Kawempe Divisions as sub-cases as units of analysis.We selected Kinawataka and Mbuya settlement sites in the Nakawa division sub-case, Kisenyi I, II, and III settlement sites in the Kampala Central division sub-case and Bwaise (Kalimali and the surrounding areas) settlement sites in the Kawempe division sub-case. Our first point of contact during fieldwork was through email to the Director of ACTogether. ACTogether is local non-governmental organization that works with the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda (NSDFU) to promote and implement co-production activities in Uganda.The Director assigned the following departmental heads: water and sanitation; Profiling, Enumeration, Mapping; Savings and Livelihoods, Design (Engineer); and Administration and Documentation. After meeting the heads of Departments, the Head of the ACTogether Water and Sanitation Department was recommended by the group to be the researcher’s official research assistant in Kampala. Then, based on review of documents process, we identified and listed all the relevant stakeholders and specific officers (positions) as participants in the interview process. The list of all organizations and officers we had identified was discussed with the research assistant who later added other names, especially at community level, in the three sub-cases. The research participants consented to being identified by either their names or position. In the following section, we present the findings.

18.7 Co-production processes and relations in Kampala This section presents the findings on co-production engagements, relations, and outcomes in Kampala. Relations of co-production focused on communities achieving the objectives of official recognition and service provision in informal settlements, improvements in living 296

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conditions and achieving official recognition of the positive role of residents of informal settlements in transforming informal settlements of Kampala. Co-production in Kampala dates to 2002 when the Minister responsible for housing and urban development in Uganda requested SDI to visit Uganda and help government mobilize people living in informal settlements to facilitate partnership-based and productive settlement interventions. Reports on the history of the Partnership and urban planning in Uganda indicate that this was a period when the influence of opposition political parties in Kampala was rapidly rising, and the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the President were exploring every opportunity to control the capital city – Kampala. Some research participants argued that the Minister reached out to SDI to ensure improved relations between communities and the central government2. The co-production tools of enumerations, mapping, exchange visits and savings served as means of redirecting state-society and power relations throughout the entire process of interventions in Kampala. Towards the end of 2002, the SDI team, led by the former (now late) global SDI President, Mr Jockin Arputham, with Federation members from South Africa and India, visited Kampala to introduce co-production in Kampala. During this visit, the first agreement was signed to create ‘new spaces’ and initiatives for the state and the people in informal settlements to co-produce infrastructural services and knowledge about slums in Kampala. New spaces involved creating community planning platforms that included increased use of Local Council structures at urban village levels for community residents living in slums, and Kampala City Council (KCC) and now Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), to jointly solve community problems3. This required local government structures to work with the Federation to form community organizing and development structures through savings schemes, production of maps and enumeration reports and promote learning to facilitate new initiatives for settlement transformations and improved relations between communities and the various layers of the state. In the Kisenyi I, II, and III, local leaders were among the first members of the saving groups, forming the Kisenyi Federation network. A network entails a group of savings at settlement scale working together to strengthen the SDI principles and practices.This process facilitated the first ever recognition and use of SDI methodologies and approaches to co-produce infrastructural services, data, and information and improve governance of communities. The use of savings, exchange activities, enumerations provided a practical methodological tool for engaging with socially fractured society and state in Kampala. In all the co-production activities, KCCA assigned the office of the Community Development officer (CDO), and community-based municipal staff, called Parish Administrators, to closely work with the Federation during enumerations. Possibly because of the influence and pressure from central government, KCC linked but politically controlled by NRM Local Council One (LC One) leaders and introduced the Federation and its practices to households in Kampala Central, Kawempe, and Nakawa regions. LC 1 are community-based local governance structures which are custodians of state authority at community level and they oversee land transactions, service delivery, security, public health, infrastructure development among others. The ruling NRM party and opposition political parties had to ‘work together’ on all co-production projects in these areas. The LC 1 leaders have assumed key leadership positions in the Federation and have always played a key role in sustaining Federation activities in Kampala. These leaders know how to straddle between state and community spaces and structures to advance the interests of the Federation and achieve improvements in state-society relations and service delivery. The Federation implemented the enumeration activity and produced the reports for decision-making and service delivery. The enumeration report for the Kisenyi network was used by Ministry of Lands and Housing, KCC and the Federation to initiate early upgrade activities in Kisenyi. This marked a shift from top-down to community-led and Partnership-based approaches in the way Kampala was understood and settlements improved. 297

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The Kisenyi enumeration was the first to specifically target on documentation of slums and was useful for partners to understand the significance of community-led data collection in understanding slums in Kampala. The processes assisted government and stakeholders to appreciate the depth and extent of development challenges affecting Kisenyi network in particular and other slum communities in the City. Later, these reports served as guiding instruments for settlement recognition and interventions by both the state and Community residents4. The Partners believed that a blind person cannot lead another blind person. You need to bring the partners to a certain level where all of them can begin to appreciate and understand Kampala’s urban situation. The state needs to appreciate the circumstances and dreams of the people in the slums while residents should appreciate the position of government. Thus, enumerations, profiling and mapping activities became very crucial in determining the extent of the challenge and collectively define a better future for all5. Later, with ACTogether as a lead organization, the Partnership worked to introduce savings schemes as a means to mobilize the community to grow the Federation for more coproduction engagements. During the formation of saving groups, while the Federation was the major actor, KCCA did encourage its lower structures at community level to support and to be active savers. Savings groups mean low level structures of the Federation, or the NSDFU, to which mobilized and networked community residents belong and practice SDI practices. In Kisenyi, formation of savings groups was always preceded by profiling and enumerations as a basis for understanding the community before engaging in any co-production initiative. Mobilization through savings formed what many respondents referred to as the lifeline of the Partnership in Kampala. Between 2007 and 2012, savings provided the logic for community mobilization and organization as well as for the basis for allegiance by community residents to the Partnership. ACTogether encourages and supports urban poor communities to get organised around Savings and loan schemes. The philosophy behind the savings in Kampala has been about self-determination and self-management6. The other activity that characterizes co-production in Kampala is the implementation of local and international exchange activities7. The Partnership needed to learn from experienced cities from within East Africa and globally. Initially, it was hard for partners to understand what co-production was all about. The methodology was new and difficult to comprehend among the partners. The partners had to implement a series of exchange activities in-country and internationally to share and learn how others had been working and succeeding. As such, the Partnership has since 2003 used exchange programmes to transform the practices of the state and communities from that which work against informal communities to that which seek to materially transform communities and make them better. The learning exchanges programmes have been focusing on gaining knowledge and the know-how in various co-production activities such as partnership building, savings, enumerations, service delivery, housing, land access, and tenure issues, and alternative building technologies. The Federation used exchange programmes to build rapport and solidify their relationships with state officials including top politicians. For example, in 2004, leaders from the Federation, a structural engineer from ACTogether, and a structural engineer and planner from KCC and Ministry for Works went to Kenya and Tanzania to specifically learn about the use of alternative building technologies for the purposes of applying such knowledge in the construction of the inaugural water and sanitation project in Kisenyi. After an exchange on alternative building materials, the Ministry for Works became one of the negotiators and advocates for KCC to allow the use of alternative building materials to construct water and sanitation facilities in Kampala. As such ACTogether and the Federation used the exchange creatively to convince state technical staff to allow the use of construction technologies and materials produced by the Federation8. 298

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In addition, local exchange activities have been used to promote learning from new and old Federation groups within Uganda. As such, the Federation’s activities in the Kisenyi network proved to be a good learning centre for other groups in the Kampala Central, Nakawa and Kawempe divisions (local exchange visits and intra-city learning).The research participants from the Federation argue that the principle aim of doing exchange activities is to empower people who mostly have not gone to school to understand and implement in line with government plans, what they desire to achieve for their households and communities. Many respondents explained that the Federation had many members, especially women, who had no formal education, but who possessed a strong desire to learn and live productive lives. Based on content in reports such as the 17th SDI East African Hub report9, it is evident that through exchange programmes, people participate in activities to ensure cross-breeding of ideas, cross-learning and innovation on all themes that the Partnership has been engaging in. A major governance initiative in co-production activities by the Partners in Kampala included the drafting and signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between KCCA, Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Urban Development (MLHUD) and the Federation in 2013. The MoU cemented the tripartite relationship and sought to enhance the role of coproduction initiatives through innovative service delivery and governance activities for Kampala. Through the MoU, Municipal Development Forums (MDFs) were introduced in Kampala in 2013. The MDFs were drafted in the Forums Charter where the partners are expected to hold one City-wide MDF per year at KCCA. MDFs have been implemented as a strategy for enhancing co-production relations and outcomes and introduce new governance spaces that incorporate all voices. The Federation sees forums as a way of projecting a more strategic and stronger voice from the communities to the authorities and partners. The Ministry sees forums as a mechanism for promoting dialogue on all complex city challenges such as land tenure systems, transport system, economic development, poverty reduction, and gender equality among others. KCCA has not taken a decisive position on the ownership of the forums but has been keen to host all division and City Forums to promote dialogue in the City.Through forums, the Partnership has managed to deal with some complex land matters. The Forums at all levels of society in Kampala have filled the gap where state-society engagement has been fractured and battered over the years. The forums have created a new window of hope in the area of governance where all stakeholders and the local leaders interface with the authorities. MDFs have presented to the Partnership an opportunity to accelerate change in the slums. Issues of compensation for land that is used for communal services have been addressed in the forums and now, the Partnership is not spending as much on projects10. Urban Forums have emerged as engagement spaces where slum dwellers, entrepreneurs, landlords, tenants, academia, municipal officials, politicians and generally the public have been engaging in public discussions to rethink and re-engage with the future we want for Kampala11. We have continued to use MDFs as a strategy for Partnership building. The forums have been used for deliberative decision-making processes, a space where people come to express themselves in terms of service delivery. In the forums, we agreed that the all Partnership-based projects should be more accountable to community residents. As such, the local Federation structures have been providing procurement services to many Partnership projects. Players are accountable right to the people who are directly impacted by the projects. Working within the MoU, the community was empowered to provide community procurement services, certify project delivery and recommend payment of the players concerned12. Differences, low-level conflicts, and diversity of ideas are always part of all co-production engagements and relations in Kampala. For instance, in some cases, KCCA has never agreed to endorse some settlements on land that the state considers is illegally occupied by community 299

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residents. Up until now, land ownership and user rights-related conflicts between the City government and the Federation have continued to create disputes between the Federation, KCCA, and the MLHUD. KCCA has continued to evict residents and Federation members who trade or settle on land owned by private individuals and organizations. The Federation has continued to oppose all manner of evictions using profiling, enumerations and mapping of all slums in Kampala. The enumerations have provided details on the dangers faced by people living in the slums of Kampala, used to build leadership at community level and have been useful for arranging less violent engagements between state and society. In short, the Federation has used co-production tools to resist the forceful and disruptive interventions of the state. The Federation has opted to silently protest the evictions by staying away from meetings to codify and approve eviction plans and policies, lobby departments within KACCA especially the Gender and Production Department to avoid evictions. Further, while there was a high-level initial political support through the Minister’s office in the early days of the Federation, the institutions, planning laws, and policies have not changed to recognize the ‘national political shifts’ in dealing with informal settlements in the City. Many respondents recounted that the technocrats were not receptive to the proposals and found it hard to actualize what the Federation wanted to achieve in the early days. Many respondents from ACTogether and the Federation recounted that initially KCC was not driven by the need to provide services for the people, especially in informal settlements, but rather on maintaining a grip on power and control. Divisions were visible within the Partnership as the Federation argued that KCC was not helpful during the early days of the Federation especially when it came to physical projects and services delivery There was no municipal and legal institutional realignment, and funding was not increased to accommodate the need to fund projects and activities initiated by the Partnership. Mobilized and enumerated communities came up with numerous proposals to improve water and sanitation, housing, security, public spaces, and health among other aspects. It was also reported by the research participants that during the first phase of co-production in Kampala, KCC was using conventional approaches to city planning and development control using existing laws at the time and financing frameworks. This created opportunities for ‘hold-ups’ in the newly formed Partnership, leading to early low-level conflicts in the federation–state relations during settlement upgrading.The co-production tools enabled communities in Kampala to create lowlevel conflicts meant disturb and displace the conventional ways of settlement interventions. In addition, evictions of people from some informal settlements continued. As such, while being members of the Partnership, state agencies were operating in two spheres, the Partnership sphere and the old state sphere. However, while the national political arm of the state (ruling party) sought peaceful and positive engagements with residents of informal settlements, policies, laws, financing and local government system continue to lag.This created sustained conflicts between the Federation and state13. In response to the state’s failure to respond to people’s expectations, the Federation produced reports to communicate the frustrations, complaints and anger that people in slums had against the state. The residents also resisted evictions by speaking vocally and strongly against the state oscillating positions on how to deal with slums. Complaints and engagements to resist evictions were directed at the Mayor’s office.They complained that efforts from the community were not being matched with support from government. When ACTogether was formed in 2006 to support the Federation, tensions arose because the Federation leaders and members saw themselves as official SDI representatives in Uganda. During the time, the Federation was responsible for mobilizing communities to support coproduction initiatives. As such, the Federation leaders were individuals with real power and 300

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influence who had direct control over Partnership resources and projects. Some NGO representatives recounted that when ACTogether was trying to put in place systems for promoting accountability, transparency and sustainability, such as demanding project and financial reports, the Federation leaders reacted negatively and demanded greater decision-making space. In Kisenyi III, conflicts have continued until now, as the Federation has continued to object to ACTogether’s involvement in the management of the first water and sanitation facility. We have more experience than the NGO. We existed first, and we could implement projects without them. So, the Federation knows exactly what it is supposed to do to transform slums in Kampala. We have the decision-making mechanisms and capacity. We do not need to be told what to do by anybody, including ACTogether14. Other challenges affecting the Federation include the elite capture of saving groups by some local leadership. In most cases, the chairman, secretary and the treasure do sign for the registration of the group but later, like one group in Lubaga division, some leaders ‘owned’ the group and the other members found it hard to continue with federating. The three top leaders, involving the chairperson, secretary and treasurer, in the groups sometimes form a clique and manipulate other savers, thereby causing frustration and abandonment. The Partnership promotes community-based decision-making but does not go down to the groups to solve their problems, as they believe that this will make achieving the goal of truly empowering the groups for self-determination futile. No partner at higher-level structures has legal powers to participate in either the selection or removal of group leaders.This is, rather, a competency reserved for the group members.This Federation practice has continued to frustrate the Ministry as they believe ACTogether and Federation NEC members are ultimately responsible for the various alleged abuses seen in and by the Federation at all levels15: we have challenges in leadership style of the Federation. For example, we want to see clear transfer of power and responsibility within the Federation leadership ranks from local to national levels. ACTogether seems unclear on the way Federation leaders are chosen, they are not clear on accountability issues. It is common to see leaders abuse the funds for the groups because there seems to be no clear and strict mechanism to force them to account and be transparent to the group members. Some leaders over stay and learn the tricks of bad leadership.16 In the following section, we use the findings to ‘talk back’ to literature and provide some conceptual and theoretical innovations on power relations and its configurations in co-production processes.

18.8 Analysis of the manifestations and framings of power in co-production processes This section uses the findings to ‘speak back’ to literature to interpret the findings and make conceptual meaning of the relations of power in co-production processes in Kampala.The chapter follows the requirements of the case study method (Yin, 1994; 2003; 2009; Flyvbjerg, 2001; 2004; 2006; 2011; Stake, 2006) to use the case study findings to ‘talk back to theory’. This section addresses aspects of power as a dominant structuring principle in the relationship between the state and communities/ACTogether. Firstly, we think that there is nothing peaceful about urban life and that tensions, conflicts (Kiefer & Ranganathan, 2018) and conflicting rationalities (Watson, 2003) characterize urban interventions and state society relations. For people in informal settlements in the global South, assuming that the state or society will always naturally 301

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do good for the sake of doing good is an over ambitious proposition (Robins et al., 2008). The chapter argues that better understanding of the nature of the state, society and power configurations should move away “from normative convictions” and be based on everyday experiences in particular social, “cultural and historical contexts” (Robins, et al., 2008:1069).The chapter urges for an exploration of different forms of contemporary negotiations structuring citizenship and society and the relations between the two. The chapter argues that power and power relations are structured by the ‘everyday’ aspects of urban life and that tools that seek to understand and characterize these ‘everyday aspects’ could frame power and its micro-operations at the local scale in the cities.

18.9 Configuring power in co-production tools and processes The findings indicate that co-production as an alternative planning approach in the cities of the South is about collaboration and low-level conflicts. It is about appreciating deep difference (Watson, 2006), conflicting rationalities (Watson, 2003), and alternative forms of citizenship and the state (Robins, et al., 2008). Evidence from the Kampala show that with the aim of advancing community interests, the urban poor communities adopt various strategies and oscillating positions in relation to the position and approach taken by the state.The findings in Kampala indicate that the urban poor have used the survey, data, the map in the same way government does, to put forward their development agenda, defend their interests and transform themselves into a quantifiable population and to create documentary proof that they exist as a “collective that can speak back to government in its own language” and sometimes, their own terms (Chatterjee and Mehta, 2007:143; Watson, 2014). Findings show in co-production relations and processes, urban poor residents consolidate their power through social communal, and or personal networks that are structured by shared life experiences, knowledge, and knowledge types which give them a clear edge on how to convince the state and other actors to shift from conventional and disruptive ways of settlement interventions (Mitlin, 2008). The process and outcome of knowledge generation or learning the city from below (Bradlow, 2015) are based on co-production tools and signal the usefulness of experiential knowledge in shifting positionalities of the state and challenging dominant planning approaches in precarious urban conditions of the South.The role of knowledge is central in changing power relations between the state and society and in determining the course of settlement upgrades and urban development activities. The co-production tools have the ability to configure new power relations, package them and deploy them to engender community-driven settlement and city-wide transformation and institutional change. The findings further points to the need to rethink the idea of citizenship and the state when dealing with settlement interventions in the cities of the South.The relationship between ‘the citizen’ and ‘the state’ in many global South cities seldom resembles dominant normative discourses on state–society relations in the mainstream planning literature. Collaborative planning lays the emphasis on consensus-building, mediated negotiations, constructing shared discourse, and strengthening institutional capacity (Harrison, 2006; Healey, 1997; 2003; Innes, 1995). According to Watson (2002:31), key elements of consensualism are the faith it has in “civil society as a source of democracy and as a vehicle for placing more pressure on the state to act more responsively”. Consensus-seeking planning theories such as communicative and collaborative planning (Healey, 1997; 2003; Innes, 1995, and Forester, 1992) remain largely impractical in many countries, especially in the global South, because the functioning of the state and the role of civil society in contemporary urban society are fundamentally different. The Kampala case shows that actual urban governance in the South involves various layers of contested relations those between the state and civil groups as well as those within and between civil groups 302

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(Lindell, 2008). Thus, decisions are not always made based on mutual discourses, shared rationality and indifference to urban materialisms in deprived urban conditions. In Kampala, the continued cases of violent evictions, contestations about MDFs, and a lag in municipal budgets and legal instruments indicate that communicative rationality is too ambitious for the urban conditions of the South and that alternative forms of expressing power from below to either collaborate or resist interventions are better positioned to achieve inclusive change in the cities of the South. The Kampala case shows that co-production tools do not aim for consensus, but rather to empower the grassroots populations with knowledge and information, capacity to speak truth to power (electoral and professional), and build local, regional and international networks that can stand up together to state power (Mitlin, 2008). Further, this chapter benefits from the use of Foucauldian conceptualization of power as “capillary”, (denoting power is everywhere and in everyone) “micro-practices” (Fraser, 1981:272) (power is as present in the most apparently trivial details and relations of everyday life as it is in corporate suites) and is appropriate to distil and analyse the complex fluid nature of co-production. Foucault enables us to understand the role of power very finely as anchored in the multiplicity of social practices and the ‘politics of everyday life’ in co-production engagements. Given that power can be positive or negative and is always present, this chapter argues that both instances of conflicts and collaborations should be interpreted as successes in co-production engagements. During co-production relations, the tools mobilize community voices, create opportunities for dissenting views from below and provide possibilities for a better understanding of the politics of everyday life in the South. In the Kampala case, when community knowledge is disputed, evictions by the state continue, legal and funding instruments of planning remain unchanged, meetings to discuss eviction policy get boycotted by the Federation, then we realized that communities are getting stronger and better in terms of democracy and participatory governance. Methodologically, the Kampala case demonstrates the importance of the call by call by Corbridge, et al. (2005) and Flyvbjeg (2004) for a nuanced analysis and understanding of various ways people encounter the state as ‘a citizen, client and/or subject’ in post-colonial cities. The case shows that understanding global South cities need to be based on dynamics of global South urbanisms and how urbanisms are governed. “Theorising the entangled geographies of state and society in postcolonial society” (Corbridge et al., 2005: 19) opens up analysis to narratives and spaces for manoeuvre, agency and negotiation in postcolonial urban contexts (Das and Poole, 2004). In the global South, ‘urban governance’ encompasses multiple sites where practices of governance are exercised and contested, displaying a variety of players, various layers of relations and a broad range of practices of governance with various modes of power at different scales (Lindell, 2008). In Kampala, we see use of knowledge acquired through co-production tools to engage with the state, challenge the positions of the state, propose alternative approaches and processes to settlement interventions and to improve urban governance. Armed with information and data acquired through use of co-production tools, communities and/or citizens straddle ‘civil society’ and ‘state’ spaces to protect their interests. On the other hand, civil society suffers from internal conflicts, divides, abuse and corruption.These characteristics of civil society and society weaken the capacity of civic movements to protect and defend the interest of ‘society’. Civil groups, just like the state, engage in activities of self-pursuit and loses credibility, opens itself up to criticism, and becomes a subject of attack by the state. In Kampala, the records of abuse of the savings, feuds and contestations over management of savings, leadership tenure and accountability and mandate struggles between the Federation and ACTogether indicate that civil society is never a monolithic entity, just as the state. As such, it is evident that the state and civic movements need capacity building and constant monitoring. The fractured state, multiple societies and materialistic identities in global South cities challenge Habermas’ idea of ‘better argument’ 303

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to shape communicative action and collaboration in Kampala as elsewhere in the South. Intrastate and intra-community relations, and the interface between state and society are usually sites for contestation and exclusion in the field of planning in the South. The state and civil society create and engage in governmentalities (Roy, 2009) as neither the state nor society unilaterally offer conditions necessary for inclusive and deliberative discourse to shape service delivery and settlement interventions in Kampala.

18.10 The utopia of consensualism and the destabilizing role of co-production tools While published cases of co-production show that a degree of collaboration can be achieved between state and communities, it is also possible for conflict to emerge and for communities and NGOs to resort to using conflict and resistance as a strategy to put pressure on the state. Planning that will make a positive difference in the lives of the urban poor does not belong to the past, it belongs to the future. The future of inclusive and pro-poor planning will depend on discourses that show appreciation of diversity; focused around the concerns of multiple daily living conditions and emphasize on performance, and not conformance. Swapan (2013; 2016) argues that participatory governance demands a construction of new relationships between ordinary citizens and the institutions, especially the local government which affect their lives. Participatory governance “aims to assure inclusion, equity and fairness through increased citizen participation as well as to exhibit high level accountability and transparency in the urban management system” (Swapan, 2013:82). In Kampala, while co-production tools of savings, enumerations and exchange visits seek to create a formidable and reasonably ‘united’ community that can engage productively with the state, it should be noted that low-level conflicts are ever present. In Kampala, disagreements around land access and tenure security, rates of development and modalities of co-financing of development programmes are a common feature. The co-production tools create new spaces for urban poor to proactively participate in governing their affairs, assert their voices and destabilize manipulative state practices. Low-level conflict in the co-production process in Kampala has occurred but has not taken the form of violence and ‘insurgency’ (Holston, 2008). Communities in Kampala are more inclined to covert resistance such boycotting meetings to destabilize plans of government on evictions, force government to recognize more informal settlements and improve service delivery.This approach appears to take a form that is closer to the ideas of Asef Bayat in the context of the Middle East (Bayat, 2010; Perera, 2016). Bayat argues that instead of waiting for an uncertain revolution, many people in this region are more likely to support a non-violent approach to reform based on strongly organized social movements. Bayat calls this the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’, we call this ‘silent insurgency’. The Federation also follows a strategy of SDI which is anti-violence17. The majority of the members are women18, and therefore there is a need to protect the rights of women to participate by ensuring that destabilizing practices of civil society are cognizant of diversity of and within society. Co-production tools never seek to create a monolithic society and state, but rather seek to promote productive engagements based on everyday urbanisms and realities which include appreciation of difference, diversity and history.

18.11 Conclusion This chapter has analysed the configurations and framings of power in Kampala which are organized and operationalized within the framework of co-production. The chapter drew on the ideas of phronesis and techne to do an in-depth analysis of power, values and rationalities 304

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as well as technical knowledge and skills deployed by stakeholders on the coalface of planning and service delivery in urban slums. By so doing, the chapter extends the understanding of state, society and power using pragmatic instrumental rationality, what Foucault calls “a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal” (Foucault 1984:255). Co-production is a complicated state-society engagement approach involving use of collaboration and conflicts to secure gains for community. Sometimes, the state also sees gains to be made through co-production: the approach creates spaces for the state to engage with the often-divided residents in informal settlements, and can increase its political support in an area largely controlled by the political opposition. It also provides opportunities for communities to resist and reject disempowering and manipulative state policies.This chapter has shown that membership movements and networks, seeking to improve living conditions in many cities and regions of the South, have their capabilities hampered by intra-organization divisions often caused by the need to control resources. Thus, the chapter concludes that it is impractical to assume that power is absent or can be put to one side when state and society interact to plan, provide services and promote participatory governance. The chapter provides arguments that co-production, which repositions planning as a collaborative and conflicted process, may be a more realistic way to inform planning processes and outcomes for cities of the South.

Notes 1 http:​//www​.ACTo​gethe​rug.o​rg/in​dex.p​hp/fe​ature​s/sav​ings,​ 08/05/16. 2 Interview, Silver Michael Owere, ACTogether Official, 15 October 2015. 3 Interview, Municipal Development Forum (MDF) President, Kampala Central, 12 October 2015. 4 Interview, Mr. Hassan Kiberu, (National Chair, NSDFU), 13 October 2015. 5 Interview, Mr. Samuel Mapala, (Country Team Leader, Cities Alliance), 14 October 2015. 6 Personal Interview, Sara Nandodu, (National Leader, NSDFU), 6 February 2016. 7 http:​//ACT​ogeth​erug.​org/i​ndex.​php/f​eatur​es/ex​chang​e, 10 May 2016 8 Personal Interview, Mr. Waiswa Kakaile, (Engineer, ACTogether), 8 February 2016. 9 file:​///C:​/User​s/Adm​inist​rator​/Down​loads​/17th​%20E.​A%20H​UB%20​REPOR​T.pdf​/15 May 2016. 10 Interview, Mr Silver Owere, (official, ACTogether), 13 October 2015. 11 Interview, Kampala Central Division Forum President, 4 February 2016. 12 Personal Interview, Mr Denis Obote, (Information Technologist, MLHUD), 16 February 2016. 13 Interview, Federation Treasurer, Kisenyi Network-NSDFU, 10 October 2015. 14 Interview, Mr. Waiswa Kakaile, (Engineer, ACTogether), 27 April 2016. 15 Interview, Mr. Hassan Kiberu, (National Chairman, NSDFU), 13 October 2015. 16 Interview, Stephen Bogere, (Senior Sociologist, MLHUD), 15 February 2016. 17 http:​//www​.ids.​ac.uk​/news​/mili​taris​tic-r​espon​ses-t​o-urb​an-vi​olenc​e-don​-t-wo​rk-ne​w-fil​m-fro​m-slu​ m-dwe​llers​-argu​es, accessed 1/12/2016. 18 Uganda is politically divided, and when there are political divisions in Kampala these can erupt in violent conflict.

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19 Power-shifts in the organizational landscapes of transport provision The introduction of BRT in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam Nadine Appelhans and Sabine Baumgart

19.1 Introduction Drawing on the case of Jakarta, Doreen Lee describes how “traffic provides the temporal infrastructure that governs the flow of living and leisure, and the patterning of individual desires and struggles by creating a sensation of ‘being traffic’” (Lee 2015: 234). However, the creators and users of transport systems in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam do not share this conceptual view on traffic and the transport systems of their cities. Instead, transport in African cities is frequently described as inadequate. In Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, passengers, transport providers, and regulating institutions have unanimously deemed the respective cities’ complex transport systems as unfit to serve the population’s own desires and struggles in their current state (see Klopp 2011; Ka’bange et al. 2014; Rizzo 2014; Behrens et al. 2016a). During interviews, transport professionals from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were more specific and mentioned cost, road safety, speed, reliability, and emissions as the main criteria in their negative evaluation of the existing transport system. Positive aspects of reach and flexibility could not compensate to improve the overall impression. Transport is regarded as too inconvenient, unsafe, and too inefficient to keep up with the population growth and to meet ecological standards (ibid.). Following this line of argumentation, international donors have recently made funding available to a number of African cities (UN Habitat 2017; ITDP 2016; Rizzo 2014; Wood 2015) to implement “mass rapid transit systems” (MRT). These are technical responses to the congestion and pollution, such as light-rail, bus rapid transit (BRT), and cable cars. There is little discussion, however, on the underlying normatives that these systems embody. At the same time, there is insufficient reflection about which qualities are engrained in the systems they seek to replace.While examples of functioning public transport on other continents are often arguably based on financing and tariff systems of infrastructural solidarity and an ubiquitous approach of networked city ideals (see Cesafsky 2017), it seems that these principles are not easily replicable in the African urban context with MRT technology. It has been argued that the MRT systems do not adhere to these principles (Rizzo 2014). The stereotyped local transport systems in place have only recently been made the subject of scientific study aiming to establish differentiated accounts of their practice and identify reliabilities in the prevailing systems (Behrens et al. 2016b). 308

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However, the evident interlinks between the providers of different modes of transport have so far mostly been framed as competing formal and informal systems. This chapter seeks to overcome binary descriptions of transport systems in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam by framing the relations of existing local transport provision as “heterarchies”. The chapter further outlines how the international policy transfer of MRT systems is expected to have a re-configuring impact on the organizational landscape of transport providers in the locations where they are introduced. This chapter will discuss the sets of values pursued by the multiple actors rolling-out MRT technologies over those of existing rationales. The chapter raises the question of which qualities urban transport in African cities should embody and how this needs to be reflected in the organizational landscape of transport providers. The research took a case study approach commonly applied in planning research. It has most coherently been described as a methodology by Yin (2009). The methodology consisted of the following steps: 1. Literature review and data review on transport provision at the selected case study sites Nairobi and Dar es Salaam to identify modes of transport, transport providers, decisionmakers, and current policies. 2. 21 semi-structured interviews with key informants to substantiate the motives and interests of different stakeholder groups in transport provision in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The interviewees included experts from municipalities, national ministries, local and international development organizations, members of transport associations, local residents, political representatives, academics and transport professionals. 3. On-site research on the contextual impact of BRT in Dar es Salaam and site visits to proposed corridors in Nairobi. Data were collected in the form of maps and questionnaires for passengers. 4. Data analysis for the identification and description of inherent rationales of transport provision and its interrelations. The analytical framework is based on work on the concept of “heterarchy”. 5. A focus group discussion with stakeholders from transport provision and planning in Dar es Salaam to verify the preliminary results. Data were collected during various visits to both cities between March 2016 and October 2017. Following the introduction, the chapter is divided into five further parts as follows. Section two gives a short introduction into the transport situation in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam until the point of decision for MRT systems. Section three explains how these constellations can be framed as heterarchies to overcome binary descriptions of formal and informal, or public and private transport provision. Part Four presents data from the literature review and fieldwork on the impact of the introduction of MRT at the case study sites. The fifth section explains how in theory the observed power-shifts regarding the organizational landscape can be understood as calls for hierarchy that actively aim to re-configure the field of transport provision. Section six concludes by laying out which properties of the heterarchical organization are at stake in the process.

19.2 Organizational landscapes of transport provision in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam before MRT Until recently, transport provision in most African cities was not in the hands of a single authority, but rather organized as a system of many. In this chapter, we therefore refer to the multitude of transport providers, their practices, relations, and their institutions as the 309

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“organisational landscape of transport provision”. These landscapes differ between locations, as the modes, specific breakdown between modes, mobility practices, and institutions for the provision of transport are path dependent. The following sections will give brief descriptions of the landscapes of transport provision found in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam before the decision to introduce MRT. The transport systems of both cities are mainly road based and directed towards serving the monocentric city structure of their respective cities. The road systems are organized in a radial fashion, but lack ring connections. Combined with synchronized working hours of nine to five in the CBDs, congestion on the main arteries of both cities in the rush hours is the norm, commonly complained about by car users as a time-consuming burden. The conditions for transport provision are rather adverse. Dar es Salaam has to deal with frequent flooding and Nairobi with inundations after seasonal rains, which affect bus depots and accessibility of stops and routes. Both cities have vast proportions of the population without regular incomes; these people cannot afford high fares or increases in transport fares and require facilities for the transportation of goods. Data on the modal splits of the two cities come from different sources with different collection procedures, so it is difficult to compare the exact numbers and categories presented in the following.

19.2.1 The organizational landscape of transport provision in Nairobi Nairobi suffers under heavy traffic that causes poor air quality and severe congestion on a daily basis.Transport issues therefore have political priority.The Integrated Urban Development Master Plan (NIUPLAN) for Nairobi, set up in 2014, is meant to address these issues in its sectoral plan on transport. In addition, the city has formulated a Non-motorized Transport Policy, which newly tends to the needs of pedestrians and cyclists. In contrast to the policy formulations, individual car ownership is sharply increasing in Nairobi (Aligula et al. 2005: 126). With approximately 20% of Nairobi households owning cars in 2004 (Aligula et al. 2005), car ownership is still something of a status symbol for the upperand middle-class, as virtually none of the slum households have a car (Salon and Gulyani 2010: 642).This is also reflected in the predominance of non-motorized transport, which is the cheapest means of transport available. The share of non-motorized transport in Nairobi was estimated at 49% in 2004 (Aligula et al. 2005: 126). Thereby a majority of the population walks, only a small number of cyclists are found in Nairobi today. According to Aligula et al. (2005: 126), citing the Urban Public Transport survey from 2004, the share of formal public transport in Nairobi declined from 36% in 1994 to only 3.5% in 2004. This is due to the fact that the Kenya Bus Service (KBS) was not able to keep up with the competition of rival bus companies and growing informal transport providers, despite the monopoly on passenger transportation granted to the company by the Municipality of Nairobi in the early 1930s (Howe and Bryceson 2000; wa Mungai 2006: 56). With the minibus system locally named “matatus” taking over the bulk of passenger transport, public transport (formal and informal) accounted for 36% of traffic volume, but moved 78% of passengers (Aligula et al. 2005: 126).Today the National Transport and Safety Authority regulates the matatus, which have to be organized in cooperatives called SACCOS (Klopp and Mitullah 2016: 86; Behrens et al. 2016a: 81). Routes are registered; however, hiring matatus as a taxi service is also possible. The fares are generally standardized and are paid in cash. Matatus are privately owned, yet there is a mix of ownership models. Reformed regulation determines that a minimum of 30 serviceable vehicles are required for a co-operative to be formed; the aim is to make individual proprietors liable for their operative business (Behrens et al. 2016a: 81). 310

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A new but rather successful development in transport provision are the motorcycle taxis that promise to navigate through the gaps of traffic congestion and appeal to time-restricted urban professionals travelling in the downtown area.Their presence in the CBD has been highly debated and they have been repeatedly banned from operating downtown. Similar disputes on legitimacy arose with the arrival of the Uber taxis, which were identified as an immediate threat to the business of licenced taxis. While Uber offers metering through its app, the licenced taxis were used to negotiating (and dictating) their fares with the passengers individually. Shifts of especially young users to Uber and the huge business success of the company in Nairobi were therefore met with violent attacks on their cars by taxi drivers. The Bajaj or tuc-tuc meanwhile only runs on one line in Nairobi and has no particular significance in urban transport. A commuter train runs infrequently and connects residential areas of the suburbs with the inner city.

19.2.2 The organizational landscape of transport provision in Dar es Salaam Dar es Salaam as the largest city and business capital of Tanzania also struggles with severe congestion, particularly at peak hours. Thereby, transport in Tanzania is regulated by a multitude of formal institutions. There is a strong focus on road construction and management, which is divided between national and local roads. Responsibility for these roads is split between the Ministry of Works, Transport and Communications (MoWTC) and the Tanzania National Roads Agency (TANROADS) that administer the national roads, and the municipalities that are responsible for local roads. The Surface and Marine Transport Authority (SUMATRA), which was established in 2001 (Parliamentary Act No.9 of 2001), is responsible for the regulation of public transport. They monitor the various transport providers regarding quality of service and compliance to legal regulations. Traffic management is in the hands of the police. The most common way to travel in Dar es Salaam was found to be by dala-dala, a minibus system providing 61% of all trips (JICA 2008 cited in Behrens et al. 2016a). The number of vehicles is unknown and is estimated between 7,000 dala-dalas (Ka’bange et al. 2014: 178) and even 6,000 unlicensed buses and 4,500 licensed buses (DCC 2008).They are organized in a single cooperative named the Dar es Salaam Commuter Bus Owners Association (DARCOBOA), which represents the dala-dala owners’ interests.The vehicles are licensed to run on fixed routes, on which stops can be requested by passengers. There are, however, unlicensed vehicles and registered dala-dalas that operate off their designated routes. In Dar es Salaam, there is also little enforcement regarding the maximum passenger number and travellers frequently stand in overloaded dala-dalas. With almost 26% of all trips, walking is the second most common mode of transport in Dar es Salaam. It is the cheapest mode of transport, yet not sufficiently considered in transport policies (Lukenangula 2017). Private transportation is not particularly common in Dar es Salaam, although car ownership is on the rise. Also the use of taxis is not usual. As well as licensed and unlicensed taxis, Uber has entered the scene as a transport provider in Dar es Salaam, but unlike in Nairobi it is not able to offer competitive prices. Although it was not named explicitly in the survey, the bajaj or tuc-tuc is an increasingly important mode of transport in Dar es Salaam and is particularly popular with women. The vehicles are privately owned, by the drivers or by individuals holding a number of vehicles to profit from the revenues. The bajajis stand at their regular pick-up points and organize themselves in informal, but closed groups to protect their point of operation. Like the motorcycle taxis, that are also increasingly popular, they have informal status – which may explain why they were not included in the survey. Authorities have 311

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begun to impose regulations, such as compulsory helmets and signal vests, yet the general stance on these transport modes remains undecided. The bajaj and the boda-boda motorcycle-taxis have been banned in the CBD due to their bad reputation. Bicycles make up less than 1.5% of all trips according to the survey (JICA 2008 cited in Behrens et al. 2016a). The highly diverse organizational landscape of the transport provision in Dar es Salaam has been described as fragmented, characterized by conflicting opinions and prone to disagreement over measures (see Magina and Appelhans, forthcoming). Further, there are unsolved questions of responsibility between vertical and horizontal levels of government and departmental disciplines (ibid.). Despite this varied specialization between the institutions involved, there is currently no co-ordinating body to manage Dar es Salaam’s urban transport issues and endeavours. However, it is the governance voids in this set-up that allow for the flexible, decentralized, and self-regulated forms of transport provision that currently dominate the city’s urban transport.

19.3 Transport provision in heterarchic institutional constellations The diversity of actors and stakeholders in the transport provision of informal and decentral modes of transport in combination with the variety of formal regulatory institutions, leads to a variety of aims, business models, passenger bases, fare systems, employment, and standards in both locations. Within the resulting diverse organizational landscape of public transport provision in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the different formal and informal modes of transport provision cannot be reduced to functioning as recipients and senders in a binary hierarchical order. Informal and formal transport provision, instead, has to be understood as being part of a larger multi-dimensional and dynamic landscape. This counters descriptions of transport planning as a decidedly hierarchical system, according to which, for example, Nairobi’s transport is described as historically authoritarian (see Klopp 2011).While an authoritarian stance might be attributed to certain formal institutions, the relations of the various institutions of colonial, traditional and needs-based transport providers in Nairobi, as well as in Dar es Salaam, are not simply those of coercion and control. There are rather separate but linked authorities within formal institutions and so-called “paratransit” providers.The fields of competence of these transport providers overlap and are nonetheless competing spheres of authority. The ecology of the transport sector can, accordingly, best be described as one of the competing normative orders and polycentric (formal and informal) institutions. This has been framed by the theoretical concept of “heterarchies” (Stark 1999, Grabher 2001). This concept originally comes from the natural sciences and has previously been used to describe events, but also more permanent institutional set-ups in the creative industry (see Grabher 2001; Spelthann and Haunschild 2011; Grabher and Thiel 2014). In contrast to other conceptual descriptions of institutional engagement, the notion of heterarchy can describe the adaptability of a system for collaborative and heterogenic practices within spatial proximity (Grabher 2001: 354 f.). According to Grabher (2001: 353) diversity and rivalry are two main characteristics of heterarchies. Rather than forming a static institutional framework, heterarchies tend to produce a mix of organizational forms which are engaged in a dynamic of rivalry (Grabher 2001: 353). However, the heterarchies share self-prescribing rules and protocols and collaborate in the form of projects (ibid.), while they are further characterized by “ambiguities, redundancies and loose coupling” within the system (Grabher and Thiel 2014: 529). Heterarchies are able to reflect on the appropriateness of the underlying assumptions of their own organizational behaviour (Grabher 2001: 354). Describing the transport systems of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam allows the interlinks and collaborations that exist between formal and informal actors in transport provision to emerge, 312

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rather than continuing the suggestion of separate formal (or public) and informal (or paratransit) systems. The concept allows depiction of the dynamics of the transport systems that change continuously – dependent on political and administrative decisions, regulative enforcement or economic rationales and also on climate conditions. Overcoming the formal/informal binary allows description of the system to go beyond divisive categories, emphasizing the fluid connections between modes that can be of changing formal and informal nature. The concept allows powershifts within the system of transport provision to be described. Essentially, such a viewpoint can also be a starting point for integrative transport planning that considers the multitude of modes used and aims to draw up multi- and inter-modal transport concepts. The following section will demonstrate that such contextual considerations were not taken into consideration during BRT introduction.

19.4 BRT: Power-shifts through transformative transport technology BRT is (to be) newly introduced to Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, in the heterarchic settings described above (see fig. 19). Appelhans and Baumgart (forthcoming), based on data from the same research project, describe how the introduction of BRT into the urban contexts can be framed as an international policy transfer. In both cities, the decision has been made not to upgrade the existing transport system, but rather to implement a “backbone” transport system in the shape of the BRT. While Nairobi is still in the planning and preparation stage, in Dar es Salaam the first rapid transit corridor is already in operation. The introduction of mass rapid transit systems (MRT) is meant to address rising passenger volumes in the rapidly growing cities. BRT is not seen as part of the existing system of provision, but rather as a transformative technology (Sengers and Raven 2015). Yet, introducing BRT means not only installing a technical system, but involves a new set of actors entering the field of transport provision, leading to shifts of power. Thereby, public transport is commonly described as contributing to social cohesion by improving mobility of the wider public and increasing accessibility to facilities across the urban area (see Cesafsky 2017). But, to secure its technological success and returns on investment, BRT must dominate over persisting transport systems (Sengers and Raven 2015), which compromises aims regarding the public good. This also has consequences for the way in which public transport is organized and hence the configurations in the landscapes of transport provision in the respective sites of implementation. This section describes how transport providers in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam struggle(d) with the introduction of the bus rapid transit systems during the process of implementation, its impact on power-relations and the underlying normative implications. The BRT sees itself as an alternative to cars (ITDP 02.10.18). It therefore has to be understood as a commuter system, targeting a particular population group: those in employment.This may be an increasing proportion of the population in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the system can also be assumed to have a performative effect in establishing and enhancing such working arrangements and suit the political economy agenda. However, this does not reflect the reality of a large part of the population living from irregular forms of income generation. How the introduction of the BRT has unfolded in the institutional contexts of the two cities so far is described in the following.

19.4.1 Authority in transport provision in Nairobi with BRT: Outlook In Nairobi, plans for large-scale mass rapid transport in the form of a bus rapid transit system (BRT) are going through the political decision-making process. In order to implement the 313

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Figure 19.1 NaMATA as an umbrella organization for integrated transport planning in Nairobi. Source: Authors’ own elaboration.

plans for the BRT system, the institutional structure governing transport provision will be changed. A new agency, the “Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority” (NaMATA), has been founded. The introduction of such an agency can be expected to impact strongly on the organizational structure of transport provision in Nairobi (see Figure 19.1). NaMATA will bundle responsibilities formerly held by the KURA and is able to operate across Nairobi and the neighbouring counties of Kajiado, Muranga, Kiambu, and Machakos. According to the city council, NaMATA will implement “programs and policies in strengthening public transport in order to lay down strategies for improving traffic flow and increase economic efficiency” (Nairobi City County Government 16 October 2015). The structure of the agency is modelled on the example of Lagos, where a BRT system was implemented and is operational under the authority of the “LaMATA” (ibid.). While it seems that the political decision to introduce a bus rapid transit system has been taken, so far competing interests between the informal sector (matatus and motorcycle taxis, but also non-motorized transport) and MRT requirements have not been openly negotiated. As Klopp and Mitullah (2016) phrase it: “The policy dialogue around paratransit in Nairobi tends to be confined to attempts at punitive paratransit regulation”. As the examples of practice in Cape Town and Dar es Salaam have displayed, the installation of a BRT system is in competition with the interests of minibus service provision, irrespective of whether this has been formalized or not. While the two examples mentioned eventually incorporated negotiations with minibus-operators in the implementation process, in Nairobi there have so far been no negotiations with the matatu SACCOs to assign them feeder-routes or grant them shares in the MRT operation business. While technical and administrative planners know of the need for negotiation, the SACCOs are not fully aware of the projected changes and the impacts they have to expect. Negotiations concerning compensation for existing business opportunities would be viable for both SACCOs interviewed in the course of this research. Everyday practices of mobility are still largely serviced by informal transport providers.While the introduction of MRT signifies a shift away from investment in road-bound individual transportation towards a political commitment towards public transport systems, at this point in time it is still unclear whether a BRT system will be implemented in Nairobi. 314

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19.4.2 Authority in transport provision in Dar es Salaam with BRT After the first proposal was made in 2003, planning for the so-called “DART” (Dar es Salaam Rapid Transit), a BRT system for Dar es Salaam, eventually began in 2009 (Ka’bange et al. 2014: 180). The decision itself was undertaken in something of a black-box, where high-ranking officials took advice from a prominent consultant and decided in favour of the BRT system, thereby heading up technological development in the transport sector on the sub-continent as the first sub-Saharan African city to introduce BRT. Financing of the DART was secured by a $150 million loan from the World Bank to the Tanzanian government (Rizzo 2014: 257). In order to coordinate the project, the Dar es Salaam Rapid Transit Agency (also referred to as DART) was installed as a government agency to plan the project, manage construction and oversee operations (see Figure 19.2). The construction of phase I began in 2012, and regular operation of the BRT corridor between Kivukoni and Morogoro Road began in March 2016. The work includes the rebuilding and doubling in width of Dar es Salaam’s main artery roads in six phases, with a construction of 137 km of new road network, 18 terminals, and 228 stations in total (K’abange et al. 2014: 180; Rizzo 2014: 257). Once the BRT was operational, dala-dalas and bajajis were no longer allowed to enter the corridors, which were then made exclusive to BRT as a mode of public transport. All other forms of public transport – formal and informal – are banned on BRT corridors. It is estimated that 48 dala-dala routes with 1500 vehicles were taken out of operation on the first BRT corridor (Ka’bange et al. 2014: 180). Instead, firms interested in operating buses on the corridors were to bid in international tenders. The daladalas were to turn to SUMATRA, if they were interested in receiving licences for operating on the new feeder routes for the BRT system (Ka’bange et al. 2014: 180). However, in the timespan between completion of construction of the first corridor and the start of operations, the dala-dala owners managed to occupy the route to claim participation in the revenues on their former route. They were given shares in the DART system and DARCOBOA is now running the BRT system on an interim basis. DARCOBOA is working towards establishing itself as a permanent operator, although this would not comply with the funding conditions of the World Bank that require an international tender for each corridor.

Figure 19.2 DART Agency as a coordinating body to further the interests of rapid transit in Dar es Salaam. Source: Authors’ own elaboration.

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19.5 Field configurations through BRT In review, it becomes evident that the introduction of a BRT in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam intentionally induced power-shifts within the field of transport provision. In both cases, the description of the organizational landscape of transport provision indicates a shift of power away from many formal and informal institutions towards a single coordinating body accountable to government. Existing transport systems were initially not included in planning BRT and expected to make way for the new system. The field of actors was to be re-aligned to proceed with the BRT projects. Viewed from an institutional perspective, this can be understood as a deliberate re-configuration of the organizational landscape to shift authority to state institutions and international organizations. In Nairobi, introducing a new hierarchy level with NaMATA will concentrate decision-making executive and monitoring power away from several institutions into the hands of a single body, which will oversee the entire current organizational network of traffic provision and is given authority by the Ministry of Transport. In Dar es Salaam, the DART Agency has been authorized to facilitate BRT provision according to the funding conditions of the World Bank on behalf of the government. The organizational landscape of transport provision is hence transformed by BRT introduction in both cities. It will induce a re-alignment of formal and informal institutions from their heterarchical arrangement towards a (more) hierarchical ordering of the transport sector. Additionally, the MRT systems seek to introduce a network of public transport governing bodies to increase state control. Thereby decision-making in the transport planning process cannot be considered transparent and the actors setting up the demands (donors) are not accountable to the citizens. Informal transport provision and the small-scale entrepreneurship behind it are thereby marginalized. However, the case of Dar es Salaam shows that such one-sided re-organization endeavours will be met by counteraction from those whose interests are at stake. Dala-dala owners and their associations were not involved in decision-making for the BRT and are only now being considered as stakeholders, after they threatened to sabotage the system by occupying the BRT infrastructure. In Nairobi, the plan for the routes has been negotiated without sufficient engagement of the matatu SACCOS. Here, the contravening economic interests of politically organized matatu owners combined with their strong labour force and the libertarian attitude of boda-boda operators will assumedly secure them a place in transport provision alongside MRT. The introduction of a BRT will probably not be able to eradicate these competing SACCOS, but will shift the balance in the transport provision equilibrium. The new NaMATA agency will hence be crucial in managing the roles in this process. The agency needs to acknowledge that it is being inserted into a heterarchical system, which it will re-configure, but in which it needs to integrate the existing key organizations, even if with revised roles. Unlike projects with a fixed time period, MRT comes as an innovation implementation, which is phased but not explicitly limited in its timeframe and extent. Despite the claims that it is in the public interest, participation in the MRT planning process is highly selective. MRT exempts itself from “regular” transport planning, which is transformative but open-ended, by presenting itself as a “project”. This is conceptually questionable and creates an exceptionalism which prevents systematic stakeholder participation in decision-making concerning these systems. This does not resemble integrated planning procedures requiring reconciliation and deliberation of Interests. At the same time, the funding for MRT is typically linked to a set of demands to which the cities receiving the loans have to commit in order to qualify for the funding. Therefore, BRT implementation avoids classical transport planning, in which conflicting interests would be systematically negotiated and prioritized. 316

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19.6 Conclusion The aims regarding improving the reach, accessibility, and flexibility of the transport system in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam serve to justify a reorganization of the current heterarchic organization of the transport sector and to introduce MRT systems. Despite the opaque situation regarding the information base on which the decision for this technology was made by the respective municipalities, the introduction of BRT in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam is justified by promising improvements regarding travel time, increase of employment, inter-firm trade, air quality, road safety, and individual welfare for commuters. These aims might actually be achieved and the reorganization of responsibilities for public transport in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam might be beneficial in improving capacity, safety and pollution levels of the transport system. However, this ignores the point that the inherent potentials and capacities of a heterarchic transport system are being disregarded and not put to use. Thereby, the qualities of existing local transport systems, such as walkability, flexibility (and thus climate adaptability), accessibility, lower fares, and larger reach and transport possibilities for load-carrying passengers are a resource of heterarchical transport provision. This is particularly important, as the cities are characterized by a large informal economy and have vast areas of small-scale urban structures that cannot be serviced by MRT systems. On these grounds, the MRT systems will eventually have to be accountable not only to the donors, but rather to the taxpayers funding the project based on their transport experience (cf. Carolini 2017). The questions of distributional justice of infrastructure delivery, accessibility to and through the transport system, as well as accountability to all groups of citizens, clearly remain challenges in democratic forms of transport planning. Here, the current conceptualization of transport as “public transport” and “paratransit” sectors suggest a rift between two systems of provision. While it has already been argued that this is not actually the case and hybrid transport systems hold the potential to cover the wider range of transport needs in African cities, framing the transport system as a heterarchic constellation can also conceptually overcome the rift. The framework can help to uncover the qualities and dynamics of relations between various types of transport-providing institutions. To actually change the approaches of transport planning in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, however, the municipalities and state institutions need to increase their bargaining power to resist the “packaged” offers of transport provision from the international donors that bind financing to the choice of a specific technology. Instead, coherent transport policy covering all the transport modes, including integration with other sectoral plans, needs to set the frame for assessment of the suitability of transport measures appropriate to the urban context characterized by morphology, socio-economic settings, and actor constellations. The aims formulated need to be the result of an even-handed negotiation and prioritization of aims, rather than decisions made in the interests of a particular transport mode. With the help of a systematic description of the organizational landscape of transport provision, transport planning can selectively build on existing systems and identify possibilities for synergies between public transport, paratransit, and MRT institutions and for upgrading strategies for the existing systems using local resources. In the interest of the passengers, a diverse and flexible hybrid transport system, gradually moving towards improvement could then be the distinct aim in Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam with regard to transport provision as an integrated component of sustainable urban development.

Acknowledgement The results presented in this chapter were produced as part of the research project “Translating the networked city: adaptation and creativity in urban infrastructures in Africa” conducted at TU 317

Nadine Appelhans and Sabine Baumgart

Dortmund University, Faculty of Spatial Planning, Urban and Regional Planning Department funded under the Special Priority Programme SPP 1448 “Adaptation and Creativity in Africa” by the German Research Foundation 2015–2017.

References Aligula, Eric M.; Abiero-Gariy, Zachary; Mutua, John; Mutua, Fredrick; Osengo, Charles; Olela, Reuben (2005). Urban Public Transport Patterns in Kenya: A Case Study of Nairobi City. Appelhans, Nadine; Baumgart, Sabine (forthcoming). Bus Rapid Transit: Innovation in the Contexts of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In Monstadt, Jochen; de Bercegol, Rémi and Bon Bérénice: Translating the Networked City: Emerging Infrastructures in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. London: Routledge. Behrens, Roger; McCormick, Dorothy; Orero, Risper; Ommeh, Marilyn (2016a). Improving Paratransit Service: Lessons from inter-city matatu cooperatives in Kenya. Transport Policy 53: 79–88. Behrens, Roger; McCormick, Dorothy; Mfinanga, David (eds) (2016b). Paratransit in African Cities. Operations, Regulation and Reform. London: Routledge. Carolini, Gabriella Y. (2017). Sisyphean Dilemmas of Development: Contrasting Urban Infrastructure and Fiscal Policy Trends in Maputo, Mozambique. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41 (1): 126–144. Cesafsky, Laura (2017). How to Mend a Fragmented City: A Critique of ‘Infrastructural Solidarity’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41 (1): 145–161. Dar es Salaam City Council (DCC) (2008). Dar es Salaam Transport Policy and System Development Master Plan. Transport Planning and Development. Technical Report 2. Grabher, Gernot (2001). Ecologies of Creativity: The Village, the Group and the Heterarchic Organisation of the British Advertising Industry. Environment & Planning A 33 (2): 351–374. Grabher, Gernot;Thiel, Joachim (2014). Coping with a Self-Induced Shock.The Heterarchic Organization of the London Olympic Games 2012. Social Sciences 3 (4): 527–548. Howe, John; Bryceson, Deborah (2000). Poverty and Urban Transport in East Africa: Review of Research and Dutch Donor Experience. Edited by World Bank. International Institute for Infrastructural, Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering, checked on 11.5.2015. ITDP (2016). Public Transport. https​://ww​w.itd​p.org​/what​-we-d​o/pub​lic-t​ransp​ort/ Accessed on 29.12.16. ITDP (2018). Public Transport. http:​//afr​ica.i​tdp.o​rg/wh​at-we​-do/p​ublic​-tran​sport​/ Accessed on 02.10.18. Ka’bange, Abdi; Mfinanga, David; Hema, Edwin (2014). Paradoxes of Establishing Mass Rapid Transit Systems in African Cities – A Case of Dar es Salaam Rapid Transit (DART) System, Tanzania. Research in Transportation Economics 48: 176–183. Klopp, Jaqueline (2011). Towards a Political Economy of Transportation Policy and Practice in Nairobi. Urban Forum 23: 1–21. Klopp, Jacqueline M.; Mitullah, Winnie (2016). Politics, Policy and Paratransit. In Behrens, Roger; McCormick, Dorothy and Mfinanga, David (eds). Paratransit in African Cities. Operations, Regulation and Reform. London: Routledge: 79-99. Lee, Doreen (2015). Absolute Traffic. Infrastructural Aptitude in Urban Indonesia. In International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39 (2): 234–250. Lukenangula, John (2017). Walkability in Rapidly Growing Cities in Developing Countries: The Case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Dortmund: TU Dortmund University, Faculty of Spatial Planning. Magina, Fredrick Bwire; Appelhans, Nadine (forthcoming). Integrative urban and transport planning in Dar es Salaam. Nairobi City County Government (2015). County Government Plans to Adopt a Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority. Available online at http:​//www​.nair​obi.g​o.ke/​home/​news/​new-b​log-e​ntry-​ page-​20/, updated on 10.16.2015. Rizzo, Matteo (2014). The Political Economy of an Urban Megaproject: The Bus Rapid Transit Project in Tanzania. African Affairs 114 (455): 249–270. Salon, Deborah; Gulyani, Sumila (2010). Mobility, Poverty, and Gender. Travel ‘Choices’ of Slum Residents in Nairobi, Kenya. In Transport Reviews 30 (5): 641–657. Sengers, Frans; Raven, Rob (2015). Toward a Spatial Perspective on Niche Development: The Case of Bus Rapid Transit. In Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 17: 166–182. 318

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Stark, David (1999). Heterarchy: Distributing Authority and Organizing Diversity. In J. H. Clippinger (Ed.). The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass: 153-180. Spelthann, Volker; Haunschild, Axel (2011). Organizational Creativity in Heterarchies: The Case of VFX Production. In Creativity and Innovation Management 20 (2): 100–107. UN Habitat (2017). Urban Themes: Mobility. Available online at https​://un​habit​at.or​g/urb​an-th​emes/​ mobil​ity/,​checked on 7.19.2017. wa Mungai, Mbugua; Samper, David A. (2006). “No Mercy, No Remorse”: Personal Experience Narratives about Public Passenger Transportation in Nairobi, Kenya. In Africa Today 52 (3): 51–81. Wood, Astrid (2015). Multiple Temporalities of Policy Circulation. Gradual, Repetitive and Delayed Processes of BRT Adoption in South African Cities. In International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies 39 (3): 568–580. Yin, Robert (2009). Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 4th edn Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.

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20 Informality, urban transport infrastructure, and the lessons of history in Accra, Ghana Jennifer Hart

20.1 Introduction The streets of Accra are filled with cars, rendered immobile by persistent traffic congestion that has grown steadily over the last two decades. The growing number of cars on the road is, by many measures, a sign of good things – increased wealth, disposal income, and strong trade balances. Private cars only began increasing in number in the late 1980s and one still rarely saw extreme congestion on Ghanaian streets as late as 2005. Today, the high number of vehicles on the road unquestionably causes problems – accidents, pollution, road damage, and congestion. However, in this chapter I argue that contemporary debates about who has the right to the road and how the city can best deal with its increasing congestion problem echoes similar debates about the meaning of automobility in the first half of the 20th century. In other words, even if the increased number of vehicles on the road is a recent phenomenon, the importance attached to private car ownership in the city is not new. Of course, private car owners – who represented the city’s elite class and thus had the greatest access to legislative bodies like the Accra Town Council – have long played an outsized role in determining road traffic regulation in Ghana. But, more importantly, it’s also not new that most of the city’s residents do not own their own cars. Instead, the majority of Accra residents travel in trotros, which are rooted in a long history of indigenous mobility politics that provide instructive lessons for contemporary planners and policy-makers1. Too often we dismiss these forms of transportation as “informal” and paint them with a global brush – they are the same as car rapides, dala dala, matatu, combi, or the many other types of transportation found throughout the African continent and throughout the global South2. In categorizing this transit system as “informal”, we end up playing into stereotypes and assumptions about how the system functions rather than looking more deeply at what it can tell us about the values and practices of mobility in a city like Accra.This chapter argues that we should pay more serious attention to technologies like the trotro and the cultures of mobility and spatiality that the trotro represents not only because it is a form of grassroots development but also because the story of its emergence and growth provides important lessons for the present. In particular, this chapter employs ethnographic fieldwork, media analysis, and archival research to explore the interconnected historical, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of debates 320

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about infrastructural planning and public transportation in contemporary Accra. Through an analysis of the implementation of the BRT system in Accra, the chapter aims to place these modernist interventions into historical and cultural perspective in order to reframe the way that we think about spatial planning and infrastructural development in cities of the global South. In doing so, it draws on a growing body of scholarship at the intersection of the history of technology, science and technology studies, mobility studies, the anthropology of infrastructure, and critical urban planning. The remainder of this chapter is divided into 6 sections.The first section places debates about BRT within the longer history of urbanization and transport practice in Ghana, paying particular attention to the experiences and mobility cultures of drivers and passengers who are involved in the trotro system. The second section explores the role of public transportation and the BRT system in policy debates about how best to shape Accra into a “modern city”. The third section details the limitations and challenges of the implementation of BRT in Accra. The fourth section compares the debates over BRT with historical examples of colonial-era transport planning initiatives in order to highlight some of the limitations of conventional planning models. The fifth section suggests new analytical approaches to transport planning, informed by the critical urban theory of “southern urbanisms”. The conclusion suggests alternative models for addressing Accra’s traffic situation, which place the trotro at the centre of development models and rethink what infrastructure might look like in the modern city.

20.2 Visions of “Modernity”: Mobility and Infrastructure in contemporary Accra Much like cities elsewhere on the continent, Accra has experienced rapid growth over the past fifty years. With a population of 2.5 million in 2011, Accra is expected to reach 4.2 million by 2020 (Urban Lab Ghana 2018).This growth is manifested in a much denser urban core: in 1960, density levels were 36 persons per hectare; in 2007, density levels were almost 141 persons per hectare (Ofeng-Ababio and Agyemang 2012: 151). However, much of the city’s growth has taken the form of sprawl into once peri-urban areas. As Ofeng-Ababio and Agyemang note, the city tripled in size between 1991 and 2007, spilling over the boundaries of the Greater Accra Region into the Central and Eastern Regions (Ofeng-Ababio and Agyemang 2012: 150).3 While the population of Accra increased by 50% between 1985 and 2000, its land area increased by 153% (Deweerdt 2016). This rapid pace of urban expansion means that former exurbs such as Madina, Adenta, Haatso, and Ashaiman have been functionally incorporated into the spatial planning and socioeconomic networks of metropolitan Accra, even if they are governed as independent municipalities. Urban residents and government officials have also increasingly looked for new land to expand the municipal boundaries. People who work in central Accra often live as far away as Dodowah or Nsawam – areas that would have been considered well beyond the boundaries of the city fifteen years ago, relatively disconnected from the social, cultural, and economic life of the capital. While much of this expansion has been driven by citizen initiative outside of the formal planning mechanisms of the municipal government, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly is now seeking to actively steer this expansion, calling for new plans to build an Accra extension into the Ningo-Prampram District to the east that would support 1–1.5 million people (Urban Lab Ghana 2018). Unsurprisingly, then, some of the most urgent and contentious conversations in the city centre on the ability to move. Every day some 1.6 million passengers travel into the Central Business District, and countless others travel through the neighbourhoods and suburbs of the sprawling metropolis. Most of those trips (84%) utilize various forms of public transportation 321

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(Ofeng-Ababio 2012: 149). While taxis are perhaps the most visible to the person on the street, the majority of urban residents (56%) travel in mini-buses, known in Accra as trotros.4 Like similar jitney-style bus services found throughout the global South, trotros operate within a loosely regulated system. However, in contrast to the matatu system in Kenya or the combi system in South Africa, where gangs, mafia, government officials and big businessmen control a large portion of the vehicle fleet (Mutongi 2006), most vehicle owners in Accra have only one trotro. Through much of the 20th century, vehicle ownership and entrepreneurial autonomy was a real possibility for drivers who saved carefully, and the kind of economic security of driving work positioned drivers as aspirational cosmopolitans and respectable modern men (Hart 2016: 95–120)5. While limited credit facilities and low profit margins make it difficult for drivers to own their own vehicles today, many young apprentices still aspire to become owner-operators (Hart 2016: 21–22). However, in practice, many drivers today do not own their own vehicles, driving instead for a vehicle owner, paying a portion of the monthly profits as a form of rent (or what drivers call their “six”). Even if they do not own their vehicle outright, drivers often view the relative autonomy of driving work as a form of “entrepreneurial mobility”. Drivers determine their routes, care for and license their vehicles, and apprentice young men as “mates” to help in trotro work (Hart 2016: 67–71; Hart 2014; see Figure 20.1). Through their vehicles, drivers are connected to a much larger network of skill, expertise, cultural expression, and economic exchange. Ghanaian fabricators transform used 15-passenger vans imported from Europe and Asia. Mechanics and “fitters” scour scrap yards around the city, adapting recycled spare parts to keep vehicles operational. Through the skill and creativity of local engineers and artists, these hollowed-out vans are “tropicalized” and “baptized into the system” (Verrips and Meyer 2001). Welded metal and plywood seats are installed to maximize

Figure 20.1 “Only Your Tithes Can Help You”, Accra Tema Station. Source: Jennifer Hart, 25 May 2009.

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Figure 20.2 “Life Without Jesus is Useless”, Accra. Source: Jennifer Hart, 14 April 2009.

the number of passengers, while “car decorations” bring colour and personality to the trotro through trinkets and stickers on the inside and outside of the vehicle. While Accra’s trotros do not exhibit the elaborate interior, sophisticated electronics, and vivid exterior famously associated with matatus in Kenya (Mutongi 2017), the decoration of a trotro speaks to the lived realities and aspirations of the mobile public. Drivers display slogans – or what they call “inscriptions” – on the back of their vehicles as a way to identify themselves with urban imaginaries and the realities of city life (see Figure 20.2). In communicating aspirational forms of self-fashioning, warding off judgement and jealousy, and bemoaning the difficulties and challenges of contemporary urban life, drivers’ slogans form what Ato Quayson terms “the expressive archives of urban realities” (2014: 129; Feld 2012: 166–167)”.The hardships facing drivers in contemporary Accra, signalled through these slogans, are “signs of the times” (Quayson 2010) – expressions of a precarious reality they share with passengers, who often embrace and popularize slogans like “No Time to Die” and “One Man, No Chop” as a “philosophy of the street” (Lewis 1998; Quayson 2014: 144)”. Drivers and passengers experience a shared understanding of the city – its failed infrastructure and economic struggle but also the aspirations and promise of a brighter future around the corner for the hard-working or the lucky. Echoing what Charles Piot describes as “nostalgia for the future”, these urban realities exist at the intersection of the privation of neoliberal economics, government corruption, and the aspirational bricolage and creativity of urban residents who seek to create the city they deserve in the midst of the city they were given (Piot, 2010: 3). Despite, or rather because of, their relatively autonomous role in shaping and regulating public transport infrastructure in Accra, trotro drivers can respond to the needs of their passengers in the ever-changing city – redirecting routes, creating new service lines, providing new kinds of service – because they share community. They constitute a form of infrastructure that is the “totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities” (Larkin 2008: 6). In the process, these trotro drivers make urban mobility possible for a large swath of Accra’s population, positioning themselves as urban denizens through their participation in this defining feature of city life. In 323

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doing so, they provide the infrastructure of possibility for Accra residents in ways that municipal and national governments have failed to do. Passengers consistently choose trotros over taxis or other forms of government transport, motivated overwhelmingly by considerations of affordability, availability, and accessibility. However, the conditions of that urban mobility are far from glamorous (Abane 2011: 319). Rusted vehicles, cramped spaces, dusty lorry parks, and stifling car exhaust make commuting difficult for everyone involved. In continuing to choose trotros despite these conditions and the availability of more comfortable alternatives, passengers highlight the limits of formal sector alternatives and the utility of trotros (Abane 2011: 319). Drivers, who continue to invest in the trotro sector, are constrained by the same economic, social, and spatial processes as their passengers.This popular form of public transportation, in other words, signals the much broader social, cultural, and economic realities of city life. Historically, trotros – and motor vehicles more broadly – have been associated with a form of mobility and urbanity that marked Accra residents as independent, aspirational, cosmopolitan, and modern. In the first half of the 20th century, young men and boys often defied their parents to pursue driver training, placing them on an alternative path to respectability and prosperity. Rural residents saw drivers and their vehicles as symbols of the sophistication and worldliness associated with city life, providing pathways into the city. Market women established close relationships with drivers, who connected them to a vibrant network of circulation and exchange on local, regional, national, and global levels (Clark 1995). Women viewed drivers as desirable mates – prosperous, stable, and cool. In the mid-20th century, motor vehicles like the trotro, which facilitated new forms of urban mobility through the lens of Ghanaian practices of technological achievement and entrepreneurial values, were a symbol of Ghana’s embrace of global modernity and local creativity. Today, however, city life is often more about the immobility of urban residents. Commuters crowd the city’s streets and highways as early as 6am. Public transport users in trotros and taxis sit beside private cars – the teeming masses rendered immobile in their efforts to reach the city. Car exhaust mingles with the radiating heat from the road and the smell of cooked food for sale in traffic jams, lorry parks, and roadsides. The sounds of honking horns and the calls of roadside hawkers punctuate the dull roar of engines and the music of car sound systems. If automobility democratized technological movement and aspirational modernity, immobility brings its own forms of egalitarianism. Everyone waits together, sleeping, shopping, eating, talking, and checking their phones (see Figure 20.3). To beat the traffic and make it to work on time, some people have taken to leaving for work at 4am, only to hit rush hour again on their way home (Weiss 2016). Ghanaian websites and social media groups are replete with stories and complaints about the traffic. A 2011 article by Sammy Osei of CitiFM described living in the suburb of Adenta as “absolute hell”: “The thought of going back to Adenta after a tiring working day scares me to death; more frustrating is the idea if you don’t have a car. Can you imagine? – most people living in this community have to sacrifice at least one hour of their normal sleep just to dodge the extremely maddening traffic jam on the main Adenta-Accra road”. Other Adenta residents echoed his sentiments in the comments section – the dream of living in Adenta’s “serene vicinity” was destroyed by the realities of traffic. While Osei hoped that the trials and tribulations of traveling between Adenta and Accra would be alleviated by the construction of a new road linking Adenta to the city, this corridor remains highly congested during peak traffic times (Osei 2011). Osei is certainly not alone in his concern. More recently, M. Delali Quarshie identified 6 of the most congested roads in the city: the Accra-Tema Motorway, Airport Junction, LapazN1-Dzorwulu, Madina-Legon-Shiashie, Novotel-Accra Tema Station-Accra Central, and 324

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Figure 20.3 Accra Traffic. Source: Jennifer Hart, 14 July 2018.

Circle-Achimota-Dome. Quarshie uses similarly explosive language to describe these 6 routes – “unbelievable hell” and “hell on earth” that would make you “suicidal” or “boil with rage” (Quarshie 2018) – language that is echoed in the posts and comment threads of the popular Facebook group Trotro Diaries, where public transport users vent their frustrations about their transport experiences (Odoom 2018). These areas of the city have little else in common aside from their traffic congestion. They include a major highway with few feeder roads, suburban commuter routes, central market zones, and the busy central business district (Quarshie 2018). As President Nana Akuffo Addo recently noted, “I fear that one of these days one more car will join the madness on the roads in Accra, and our city will be completely gridlocked” (Nyabor 2018). It does appear that, at least during the morning and evening traffic, the city is basically at a standstill. In many ways, traffic congestion is not particularly new in Accra, but it has grown commensurate with the country’s rapid urbanization and the increase of private cars on the country’s aging road infrastructure since the implementation of trade liberalization in the 1980s brought a new stream of more accessible new and used vehicles into the country (Chalfin 2010). Hawkers strategically positioned alongside roads and within lorry parks have seized on this idle time in traffic as a business opportunity, targeting customers in waiting vehicles (Klaeger 2012). This image of contrasts – a road crowded with private cars, petty traders walking on the sides of the 325

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roads and down the centre lanes, carrying their wares on their heads, selling goods through the windows of waiting vehicles – is perhaps the best representation of the tension at the heart of Accra’s growth. While the opportunities of the city have brought wealth for a growing group of people, a much larger portion of the population find themselves unable to reasonably manage the risk and precarity of urban poverty. And yet, the promise of the city continues to draw people from Ghana’s rural hinterlands. Congestion has increased significantly over the last ten years as more people find their way into the city. The dramatic increase in population, coupled with a growth in private car ownership has overburdened a road system that has changed little since the intensive investment in road construction under Gov. Gordon Guggisberg in the 1920s and the development of a colonial plan for Accra in the late 1930s and 1940s (Hart 2016: 48–49; Quayson 2014: 82).6 Narrow lanes, obstruction by pedestrians and roadside traders, and poor road quality all limit traffic flow in peak traffic periods (6:30am–10:00am and 4pm–8pm) (Harriet, Poku, & Emmanuel 2013; Mensah, Annan, & Andoh-Baidoo 2014). Particularly, in the oldest parts of the city, residential and commercial buildings are constructed right up to the edge of the narrow, colonial-era roads. Even in newer settlements, construction has consistently outpaced the capacity of the city’s planning and public works offices. Consequently, these settlements leave little room for road expansion. In areas where municipalities and the national government have attempted large-scale road construction and infrastructural re-development, such as the stretch of Legon Road that runs from the Tetteh Quarshie interchange through the suburbs of Legon, Madina, and Adenta, those living or working along the roadside experienced significant demolition and reconstruction.

20.3 Planning a “modern” city: Infrastructural imaginations and the model city Congested traffic conditions are more than just an inconvenience and frustration. Residents like Osei lose valuable time and energy stuck in traffic. Recent studies argue that congestion on the road from Kwame Nkrumah Circle to Madina results in at least 2 additional hours of travel time to cover a distance of only 13 km (Mensah, Anna, & Andoh-Baidoo 2014). Residents traveling along other major corridors spend between 35 and 73 minutes per day in transit due to traffic congestion. Over the course of a year, those hours accumulate – as many as 862 hours sitting in traffic (or some $1,095 in labour) (Ofeng-Ababio & Agyemang 2012: 155). If we think of this extended travel time as “wasted”, we ignore the various economic adaptations that have emerged to utilize this time.While sitting in traffic might seem inherently unproductive to observers and passengers, immobility is productive in a Foucauldian sense – producing and reproducing social and economic relationships and networks (in this case between hawkers and passengers) even in the context of seeming disorder or dysfunction (Foucault 1991: 202; Chabal & Daloz 1999). However, as Osei and other passengers make clear, this traffic does place mental, physical, and temporal strain on immobile citizens. Drivers, likewise, find that congestion cuts into their profits, undermining the productivity and profitability of their work. Studies in Kumasi show that drivers lose approximately 20% of their anticipated profits due to traffic congestion (Harriet, Poku, & Emmanuel 2013: 233). On a national level, Jonathan Annan’s research argues that traffic constitutes 10.5% of the country’s GDP, and traffic congestion constitutes 8.5% of GDP (Ibrahim 2018). In their proposed solutions for this persistent crisis of urban immobility, government officials and planners consistently invoke a vision of a “modern city”. Former President John Dramani Mahama argued that “one of the major drawbacks to the development of Accra as a modern city was that 326

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it lacked a proper public transport system” (Boadu 2016).Trotros had been moving the city’s population for more than fifty years, but the small-scale, decentralized nature of the trotro system does not seem to fit policy models of “modern transit”. As transport planners from the Institute for Transport and Development Planning argue, This model is no longer appropriate if African cities are truly to become competitive on the world’s stage. […] These cities, crowded with people and cars and growing quickly and unchecked, are now transforming their industries by implementing modern mass transit – a service called bus rapid transit (BRT). (Gauthier & Weinstock 2010: 318) For some, the model of a “modern city” with “modern transportation” is an end in itself. For others, like current President Nana Akuffo-Addo, Accra’s transportation system is part of a project to improve the country’s broader transport infrastructure. If it is easier to move between the country’s rural, peri-urban, and urban areas, Akuffo-Addo reasons, perhaps people will be less likely to come to Accra (Ibrahim 2018).Transport systems such as the BRT, then, are designed to simultaneously help rapidly urbanizing cities better cope with their growing numbers and slow the rate of urbanization more broadly. Accra’s most recent commitment to Bus Rapid Transit grew out of the 2008 National Transport Policy document, which aimed to create “an integrated, efficient, cost-effective and sustainable transportation system responsive to the needs of society, supporting growth and poverty reduction and capable of establishing and maintaining Ghana as a transportation hub of West Africa” (Anane 2008: i). This policy, which was part of the government’s Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (2003), highlighted “the importance of transport services and infrastructure in enabling economic growth and poverty reduction” (Okoye, Sands & Debrah 2010: 11). Supported by the World Bank, l’Agence Francaise de Developpement, and the Global Environment Facility, the 5-year (2008–2012), $95 million Ghana Urban Transport Project (GUTP) sought to reform public transport services and infrastructure in Ghana’s cities (Okoye, Sands & Debrah 2010: 11). In particular, the GUTP sought to build a pilot BRT corridor on the Mallam Road, connecting Amasaman with the city’s Central Business District (CBD). Original plans called for a segregated right-of-way along a portion of the route, as well as modern bus stations and terminals, automated electronic ticketing systems, regularly timed trips, and high-quality bus service (including air conditioning and Wi-Fi) (Okoye, Sands & Debrah 2010: 13; Accra Bus Rapid Transit System 2008). The implementation proposal for BRT also included new regulatory frameworks for the transport sector and driver training (Bus Rapid Transit Systems 2017). The ultimate goal was a form of public-private partnership, with drivers and vehicle owners pooling resources to purchase vehicles, operating with government oversight of infrastructure and services (Okoye, Sands, & Debrah 2010). Ten years later, construction on the pilot project as well as the other 4 BRT corridors has been completed, and the newly dubbed Aayalolo Bus Service is operating along some routes (Ibrahim 2016) (see Figure 20.4)7. The Swedish company Scania, which was originally only contracted to provide buses for the new service, now has an expanded role developing ticketing systems and driver training schemes in Accra in ways that have directly shaped the end-product (Bus Rapid Transit Systems 2017).The first 85 vehicles took to the road in September 2016.The remaining 160 buses reportedly sat idle for a year or more while officials with the Department of Urban Roads and the Greater Accra Passenger Transport Executive (GAPTE) made arrangements on other routes (Adogla-Bessa 2017). The system is currently operating from three terminals, connecting Achimota, Amasaman, and Ofankor with the Tudu terminal in the Central Business District. The country’s three major transport unions – GPRTU, Co-Operative, and 327

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Figure 20.4 Aayalolo Bus Stop, Pokuase, Accra. Source: Jennifer Hart, 4 July 2018.

PROTOA – have formed offshoot companies to run services on these routes (Admin 2016; Aayalolo 2018). 600 drivers are using a simulator as part of training exercises at the recentlyfounded National Driver Academy, including 73 female drivers who have received particular attention from the Ghanaian press (Appiah-Osei & Larbie 2017). This training, which draws on high-profile experts like Miss Taxi Ghana’s Esenam Nyador, is a partnership between the National Driver Academy, Safe Drive Innovations, and Scania Bus Rapid Transit, designed to improve safety on the roads but also to cultivate a culture of high-quality service among drivers (Appiah-Osei & Larbie 2017). In utilizing advanced technological training and explicitly recruiting women – who do have a history of driving in the country but who are not traditionally associated with the transportation sector – GAPTE and its partners further highlight the “modernity” and progressiveness of this system. Other publicized initiatives like air conditioning, USB charging ports, Wi-Fi service, and an “IT infrastructure that allows us to have an automated fare collection system” on board of buses is intended to attract middle-class residents who might otherwise use private cars (Gyamera 2016). As MP Kwabena Okyere Darko Mensah noted, We are asking that all the buses be fitted with air conditioning – especially the BRT ones – because the target is car owners.You don’t expect people to park their air conditioned cars 328

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and ride in non-air conditioned buses. […] It’s not going to happen. So [if there is not air conditioning] we won’t save the space we want to save. […] They told us that there was air conditioning on the buses, there were USB sockets, and Wi-Fi. […] Because that is very modern, and we have to do it once and for all. (Mensah 2016)

20.4 The Limits of “complete systems”: Popular logics and spatial realities While Scania, GAPTE, the AMA, and other partners have highlighted what they perceive to be successes in the implementation of BRT, public response has been more ambivalent. After ten years of construction, drivers and passengers have grown impatient with the road construction, which further exacerbated traffic congestion and raised questions about the appropriation of funds. For many Accra residents, the inefficiencies of this project echo earlier failed plans, symbolized by an entire fleet of buses sitting unused in a parking lot. Public criticism increased as the buses were opened for testing in 2016. Early test operations used unlicensed and unregistered vehicles, and the GAPTE CEO Sampson Gyamera admitted that the system wasn’t “Bus Rapid Transit” after all – without dedicated lanes it failed to meet the basic criteria for an effective BRT system. Instead, he argued, it was a “quality bus system” which would improve the quality of the service by providing passengers with more information and a new ticketing system (Gyamera 2016; Adogla-Bessa 2016).While journalists raised questions about whether these “quality buses” were more like “glorified trotros” (Adogla-Bessa 2017), traffic engineer Mahama Abdullai publicly denounced the system as a joke that was not well thought-through (Taylor 2017). Passengers also don’t seem to be using the system (see Figure 20.5). Eight months after the Aayalolo system began operations, it was still not making a profit (Taylor 2017). Passengers interviewed by Citi Business News said that the BRT system was inconvenient: “I do not always use the route the buses use. In addition, the card system is complicated for me considering the kind of work I do and the inconveniences I am likely to face if my credit gets exhausted” (Arthur 2018). Other passengers saw the regular bus stops as a waste of time and struggled with errors in the fare system and the limited routes of the network. Apparently air conditioning, Wi-Fi, and cheaper fares are not enough to convince regular trotro passengers to embrace the new service. Commuters continue to make calculated mobility decisions based on the same factors that Abane observed in 2011. By seriously addressing only the most marginal of passenger considerations – the service experience – BRT appears to be yet one more in a series of failed transport interventions. These public concerns reflect larger, systemic contradictions at the core of the BRT project – contradictions that the BRT and its predecessors have consistently failed to address. Scania’s Fredrik Morsing argues that “What they need is a complete solution” – something Scania claims to provide (Bus Rapid Transit-System 2019). This language of a “complete solution” resonates with government rhetoric that casts the BRT system as an efficient piece of infrastructural planning. Scania’s package deal provides not only vehicles, but also driver training and IT services, working closely with government through consultancies designed to get the project up and running8. In practice, however, by focusing development only on main corridors, the system still fails to grapple with the realities of urban sprawl and spatial segregation that structure the mobility needs of most urban residents. In other words, the system doesn’t go far enough to fundamentally change the mobility practices of urban residents because it does not address the spatial realities of the city. In its incompleteness, the Aayalolo bus system seems more like the unpopular Metro Mass Transit (MMT) system, now popularly known as the “Kufuor bus”. 329

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Figure 20.5 An Aayalolo Bus Runs Empty. Source: Jennifer Hart, 4 July 2018.

Introduced under former President John Kufuor, MMT also claimed to offer a transition to a more modern, functional bus rapid transit system that would transform urban mobility in the capital (Yobo 2013).While MMT buses continue to operate in Accra and are often cheaper than alternative transport systems, many Accra residents prefer trotros for their speed and accessibility. Passenger response to the Aayalolo bus, then, should not be a surprise. At its base, this failure to respond to basic, documented passenger need highlights the degree to which planners failed to fully understand the existing transport cultures, values, systems, and practices of the city. In the rush to construct a “modern” transport system, BRT advocates targeted trotros as the primary cause of the city’s congestion and a target for reform. By labelling trotros as part of the “informal sector”, policy-makers and planners effectively excluded trotro drivers and passengers from their visions of a modern Accra. Advocates signal this decontextualization of model-based planning through the passive voice rampant in planning documents and policy analysis. By including “stakeholders” in the process of deliberation, planning, and implementation, advocates for the Accra BRT project seemed to take a huge step forward towards truly participatory planning. Drivers’ unions, in particular, were encouraged to form corporations and invest in the new buses, and driver representatives like Al Haji Tetteh, former chairman of the Accra branch of the GPRTU participated in trips to Brazil and South Africa to view existing model 330

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BRT projects (Okoye, Sands & Debrah 2010). However, as I conducted interviews in lorry parks during this same period of stakeholder consultation in 2009, drivers spoke quite freely to me about their concerns with the process and their reservations about whether Al Haji Tetteh truly represented the interests of drivers – a concern that reflects some of the dysfunctional internal politics of the union, but which had serious implications for drivers who are directly affected by the outcome of the project. Furthermore, until the GPRTU had a clearer sense of the proposed project, drivers had been instructed not to work with or speak to government officials or other policy-makers directly about the BRT. By 2009, with funding already obtained, BRT already seemed like a foregone conclusion anyway. By committing to the BRT model at such an early stage, policy-makers missed an opportunity to engage drivers in more productive conversations about ways to address the city’s congestion problems. This process is echoed in much of the language used in planning documents and policy analysis. Parliamentary representatives like Kwabena Okyere Darko Mensah framed the BRT as a partnership with the private sector trotro drivers to increase public transport capacity and decrease congestion. Mensah argued that, in the eyes of Parliamentarians, the BRT had always been an integral part of the trotro system. Trotro drivers were encouraged to invest in these buses, buying shares as part of “their express service”. “This is going to be theirs”, he argued, “so when you declare your profits, it’s going to be for trotro owners” (Mensah 2016). However, scholarly analysis and policy documents drafted throughout this period consistently categorize trotro drivers as part of the “informal economy”, an illegitimate and ineffective form of transport and a primary impediment to transport sector reform and “formal sector” growth.

20.5 History lessons: Development failures and the limits of modernist visions From a policy perspective, this BRT project seems to be the latest in an ongoing process of development in the transport sector, connected to precursors like the Road Sector Development Programme (2003–2007) and the Road Infrastructure Project (2003–2009). Like these broader infrastructure projects, BRT projects in places as diverse as Accra, Ghana; Cape Town, South Africa; and Detroit, Michigan, are based on a set of centralized principles (dedicated lanes, automated ticketing, and so on), retrofitted to different urban environments. Inspired by initial success in Curitiba, Brazil, BRT now seems to be the favoured project of transport planners, development consultants, international financial institutions, and bilateral donors. As such, it sits at the core of an omnibus of planning and development policies that constitute the prepackaged model of the 21st century “modern city”. The rhetoric of infrastructural modernism and the “modern city” is not new in Accra. The Town Councils Ordinance of 1894 and its legislative successors established a system of direct taxation in Accra expressly for the purposes of funding infrastructure works to modernize the capital city. In constructing new, elite neighbourhoods like Victoriaborg and infrastructures of trade and transport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonial officials and Town Council members sought to assert the physical presence and control of the British in Accra while also reinforcing their vision of a modern, segregated city (Parker 2000: 201; Quayson 2014: 74).9 Early British efforts to remake the city were thwarted by indigenous Ga populations who exerted significant social, cultural, political, and economic control over land in the city. Ga residents resisted British efforts to decongest the town. Such resettlement plans violated indigenous Ga spatial practices, which imbued land with spiritual significance. However, when an earthquake in 1939 destroyed large parts of the city, British officials used the disaster to finally realize their visions, rebuilding the destroyed houses of the city in new, modern suburbs. New 331

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residential spaces reinforced the modernist aims and segregationist principles of the British colonial project, concentrating Africans in particular neighbourhoods with smaller plots and inferior housing stock and infrastructure. The small houses in African neighbourhoods like Adabraka provided a stark contrast to the large estates and bungalows of the European quarters of Ridge and Victoriaborg. In redeveloping Accra, British officials sought to finally institute the modernist grid plan and infrastructural systems they valued, getting ahead of the curve in organizing and regulating the growing city. Policies of residential segregation and centralized infrastructural development sought to control African urban residents by controlling their use of space. Mobility and transport infrastructure were critical tools of infrastructural power. In rural areas, the colonial government built railways cutting through production zones, which would centralize control over the flow of cash crops in the hands of European merchants while undercutting the power of African farmers and traders (Hart 2016). In cities, the municipal bus system sought to control the movement of people. Inaugurated in 1927, the municipal bus ran along the city’s largest streets, connecting residents in the newly built suburbs with their workplaces in the centre of the city. The new bus system motivated new kinds of spatial and social debates in the city. Bus lay-byes, bus shelters, and lorry parks divided city streets and city space into regular, organized distances and raised new questions about visibility and safety in the city (Hart, forthcoming 2020). Passengers stood in queues at bus stops, boarded British-style buses, and bought tickets from uniformed conductors at established prices. The history of Accra’s municipal bus system parallels, in many ways, the more recent development of Accra’s BRT system. Much like the BRT advocates today, “Town Council members assumed that passengers would prefer the slick cosmopolitanism and technological sophistication of new, imported buses and that drivers would value the economic stability of waged employment in the “formal” sector” (Hart, forthcoming 2020). In doing so, British officials ignored the lived reality and daily practice of the city’s most mobile populations. While many drivers did seek salaried employment in the municipal bus system or other forms of “company work”, they did so often as a means to an end, saving their salaries to purchase new vehicles and start an entrepreneurial transport business. Market women, who travelled frequently, carrying their goods between their home and the market, also found the new buses to be a poor fit for their economic interests. Evenly spaced bus stops, transport corridors, and modern buses made it difficult to transport goods – traders who did not live along a major road would need to carry their goods to a bus stop, adding additional expense and effort to their journey, and buses rarely had enough space for their goods. By the mid-1930s, highly mobile passengers like market women began seeking out alternative arrangements, getting rides on the mammy lorries that were passing through the city on their way to the central market (see Figure 20.6). In the eyes of colonial administrators, drivers who picked up passengers on the roadside engaged in a form of urban piracy. British officials agonized for nearly a decade over what they termed “pirate passenger lorries”. In stopping along the roadside to pick up passengers and blurring the regulatory boundaries between goods and passenger transport, these lorry drivers not only took business away from the municipal bus system but they also undermined British visions of modern order (Hart, forthcoming 2020). Official response to the actions of these entrepreneurial drivers echoes strongly in contemporary debates about the BRT.The Accra Municipal Omnibus Services Bye-Law of 1927 forbid other vehicles from plying for passenger hire along streets covered by the municipal buses10.The police established a Motor Traffic Unit, which imposed fines on drivers who engaged in practices such as stopping along the roadside, which were criticized for impeding the flow of traffic and competing with the municipal buses. These regulations effectively criminalized a large 332

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Figure 20.6 Mammy Trucks. Source: George Alhassan, 18 July 1968, Photographic Archive, Information Services Department, Ministry of Information. R/R/9175/13.

and productive segment of the city’s mobile population. In doing so, British officials and Town Council members sought to reinforce their image of a modern city. The model of a modernist city became a spatial articulation of colonialism and its civilizing mission in cities like Accra – imposing visions of the city as part of a set of universal values without ever trying to understand local cultures, values, and practices attached to mobility and space11.The British also ignored the ways in which their own policies of residential segregation and longer histories of urban settlement produced an uneven distribution of the purported benefits of modernism across the city. Fewer roads were built in African settlements, meaning that African residents often had to walk farther to reach a bus stop than the city’s European residents who rarely used the bus service. And in a city where only a small percentage of residents worked in the formal sector, infrastructure like the municipal bus system failed to account for – or intentionally marginalized – the needs of the city’s vibrant entrepreneurial economies. Colonial regulatory efforts failed to stem the growth of these mobility practices.The drivers of “pirate passenger lorries” inspired the new, entrepreneurial trotro system of the 1950s, which built on the same understandings of the needs of the mobile, passenger-public. While the colonial language of piracy might seem like an exaggerated response today, the real effect of that framing – regulation and criminalization in order to protect the interests of government plans and infrastructural development – shares a great deal with contemporary debates about the “informal economy”, invoked by BRT advocates. Keith Hart originally used the term “informal economy” to refer to the range of self-employment, which Ghanaians pursued as a way to supplement the weak wage labour sector. While some of these activities were widely recognized as illicit or illegal, many of them merely fell outside of the “formal sector” of wage labour and thus were more difficult to account for in economic surveys. Hart’s exploration of 333

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the informal economy was intended to highlight the vibrant, but unrecognized economies of African cities like Accra (Hart 1973).Today, however, planners, development experts, and policymakers frequently mobilize the label of informality as a way to critique of local practice. Like piracy, these “informal” activities are cast as impediments to the successful implementation of formal sector reforms, the cause of all problems in the city, and a stain on the urban landscape. This newer mobilization of “informality” maps a form of Eurocentrism onto Hart’s original framework, while failing to acknowledge or address the underlying systemic spatial and economic inequalities that shape these practices. As the policy analysis and planning documents associated with the BRT make clear, stubborn insistence on the universal goodness, efficiency, and efficacy of BRT undermines the broader goal of improving the city’s transport infrastructure and addressing the pressing problems of traffic congestion. As part of the “informal economy”, trotros are an easy target of reform. However, they are not by any reasonable measure the primary source of increased traffic and congestion on Accra’s streets. Trotros account for as little as 35% of vehicular traffic in the city; however, they carry approximately 85% of the city’s mobile residents. Private cars and taxis, rather, “take up the majority of the space on the road but carry far fewer passengers” (Okoye, Sands & Debrah 2010:12). In targeting trotros, BRT advocates and policy analysts generalize the history of trotros, lumping them together with other forms of paratransit across the continent and throughout the global South. Brendan Finn reproduces a narrative that is echoed throughout other publications touting the benefits of BRT in Accra: During the colonial era and in the subsequent civilian and military governments through the early 1970s, the core urban public transport in Ghanaian cities was provided by the city enterprises, and in the late 1960s consolidated into a single state-owned enterprise known as OSA (Omnibus Services Authority). OSA provided large-and medium-sized bus services in the main cities such as Accra, Kumasi, Tamale, and also operated services in smaller cities as well as inter-city bus operations. By the mid-1970s, OSA entered a period of financial difficult, and then entered a classic spiral of deterioration, loss of business, and collapse of both capacity and market. By 2000, OSA was bankrupt and had effectively ceased operations, although it did have some residual facilities. Minibuses and shared-taxis took over the market vacated by OSA, and became firmly established throughout the country. (Finn 2008: 121) This narrative, in which trotros emerge only to fill in the gaps left by the collapse of formal sector bus services, oversimplifies the collapse of these bus systems and misrepresents the origins of the trotro. OSA and other formal-sector services indeed struggled throughout the second half of the 20th century, as they sought to continue operations in the face of spare parts shortages and worsening road conditions, exacerbated by thirty years of broad-based economic decline in Ghana. However, well before OSA’s consolidation in the 1960s, the Accra Town Council of the 1940s had largely abandoned the notion that any municipal bus system would be able to generate sufficient revenue to fund a “complete and comprehensive general transportation system”.12 Town Council members acknowledged this fiscal and political reality in the context of an urban spatial and economic inequality that they themselves planned and implemented. The persistence of pirate passenger lorries and the emergence of trotros a little more than a decade later – even at a time when the municipal bus service was the most comprehensive and effective – suggest that the aspirations of modernist visions could not adequately account for the realities of those urban inequalities. Contemporary critiques of the trotro system invoke the chaos of “stop-on-a-dime passenger mentality” and decentralized services as an indicator of the “informality” of the system. 334

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However, where these practices occur, they are the exception rather than the rule. The early histories of trotros and serious observation of contemporary practice highlights the degree to which trotro drivers built on the model of the existing bus system, introducing new kinds of vehicles and expanding its network to meet the needs of passengers and respond to the seemingly constant changes of the growing city. In dismissing the trotro system as a response to the failures of the formal sector, these analysts not only misunderstand the histories and cultures of mobility, spatiality, and economy that gave rise to the trotro system, but they also risk reproducing the mistakes of British colonial administrators and exacerbating the existing inequalities, violence, and marginalization of the city’s residents. BRT advocacy, in other words, feels strikingly similar to the development colonialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries – neocolonialism cloaked in the language of modernism and technological development.

20.6 Southern urbanisms: Towards a critical urban planning practice The process of BRT adoption and implementation in Accra and elsewhere on the continent is far from exceptional. Rather, it is rooted in the model-based practice of much conventional urban planning, which, even after the widespread embrace of “participatory planning”, continues to conduct research to fit models rather than developing plans based on grassroots consultation and unique place-based design. Urban studies scholars in the global south, however, have spent much of the last decade engaged in a critical and public-facing project of articulating “southern urbanisms”. As such, urbanism from the global south reframes conventional assumptions at the centre of urban studies and urban planning in highly provocative ways, which have real consequences for urban residents and speak directly to some of the challenges surrounding Accra’s BRT project. As Seth Schindler argues,“some of the very aspects that make Southern cities distinctive have remained illegible to urban scholars and this has fuelled considerable confusion over the extent to which cities in the South constitute a ‘type’ of human settlement” (2017: 2). This illegibility is rooted in the universalizing claims of planning models and urban theory, which are often generalized from the West (Murray 2017). Cities in the global South are shaped by what Teresa Caldeira calls “peripheral urbanization”: modes of the production of space that “(a) operate with a specific temporality and agency, (b) engage transversally with official logics, (c) generate new modes of politics, and (d) create highly unequal and heterogeneous cities” (Caldeira 2017: 1; Bhan 2017: 6). But those spaces are not produced through process alone. Instead, as Parnell and Pieterse argue, cities in the global South are “large, fairly well-resourced places that nevertheless have very large concentrations of chronically poor people who are institutionally excluded from the government support structures that are necessary for their well-being” (Parnell and Pieterse 2010: 147; Bhan 2017: 6). Systems and processes, in other words, are peopled and empowered in important ways. In this context, it should not be surprising that Accra’s urban public is both sceptical about the benefits of BRT and highly passionate about issues of infrastructure and mobility. As highly social forms of technology and mobility, motor transport infrastructures often serve as “the material articulations of imagination, ideology, and social life” (Anand 2011; Harvey & Knox 2015: 5) and “the built forms around which publics thicken” (de Boeck 2012; Harvey & Knox 2015: 5). But it is not the mere technology of the motor vehicle that provokes such passions. Jitney services like the trotro, which grow and adapt in response to the everchanging needs of a growing city, highlight the degree to which the flexibility of interaction is central to not only the experience of city life but the shaping of city space – what AbdouMaliq Simone calls “people as infrastructure” (Simone 2004: 407; Bhan 2017: 6). In trying to erase the trotro system and implant new forms of mobility infrastructure, BRT advocates and planners ignore not only the historical, cultural, and economic importance of the 335

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trotro in the life of the city but also the social and political realities of spatial marginalization, inequality, and systemic violence. As Gautam Bhan writes of the informal settlements (basti) in Delhi: “to look at the basti from within planning theory or practice is to tell a tale of exception. To look at planning from the basti is to tell a tale of the fiction of the rule” (Bhan 2016: 34-35; Bhan 2017: 6). Instead, Bhan and others encourage us to approach theorizing and planning about southern cities “looking from rather than looking at” (Bhan 2017: 6). In doing so, it becomes clear that trotros succeed where the BRT fails because they come from and respond to the needs of the people. In moving people through spatialized inequality, they allow (to some degree) for people to experience the city on their own terms. These technological and infrastructural cultures are political acts and cultural statements about who owns the city. BRT seeks to reinforce modernist visions of the city, which are historically connected to the practices of spatial violence, residential segregation, and economic inequality closely associated with British colonial governance. By transgressing the assumptions of these modernist plans, trotros should drive us not to condemn urban residents and seek to regulate their behaviour to bring about new mobility cultures but rather to think again about what their insistent practice is telling us. These sorts of critiques do not mean that we give up in trying to improve the city. Accra residents – drivers and passengers alike – are demanding change that would address the crisis of congestion. Southern urbanisms do, however, reframe our practice.“Looking from rather than looking at” requires a new approach to planning, policy, and development work, which moves away from the decontextualized, universalizing models that encourage us to view infrastructure and technology like the BRT in abstract terms, but instead embraces ethnographic and historical research of systems like the trotro in order to understand the specificities of spatial culture and urban life.

20.7 Conclusion: “Looking from” the lorry park to craft grassroots planning visions The trotro system in its current incarnation is not without its flaws. Contemporary conditions are the function of government policy that could be changed to render the sector more profitable and effective. Indeed, as Gauthier and Weinstock argue, “low profit margins resulting from the existing business model mean that there is little opportunity for these small business owners to flourish” (2010: 317–318). Some of the conditions that make trotro work difficult are structural – Ghana’s weak labour markets drive young men and women to the city looking for work. More recent economic growth seems to have little effect on the city’s poorer residents, many of whom often lack the education, skills, collateral, and connections to take advantage of new opportunities in the oil and technology industries or the service sector13. With few other alternatives, young men in particular have flooded the trotro sector, increasing competition and decreasing the profitability of trotro work. However, access to credit facilities, hire-purchase arrangements, and infrastructural upgrading could significantly improve both the conditions of driving work and the experiences of passengers. In recent years, I have begun interviewing drivers, asking them to identify problems with the industry and suggest possible solutions. Some of those solutions – access to credit facilities, the reintroduction of a hire-purchase system, and government subsidies for new vehicle purchase – highlight both their own struggles to make their businesses more profitable and their attempts to respond to passenger complaints about the safety and comfort of the vehicles. Suggestions to remake the lorry parks involve not only paving areas that are often uneven dirt plots but also building permanent facilities for traders who operate in the market, offices for drivers’ unions, banking facilities for drivers and other lorry park workers, a health clinic, and a school where drivers and mates could learn or improve skills in reading, writing, and mathematics during their 336

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“down time” waiting to load.Whereas the BRT system’s main aim is to reshape the behaviour of drivers to improve passenger experience, drivers’ own suggestions rethink the space of the lorry park as a place to learn and create community with multiple layers of potential effect. Likewise, young artists and entrepreneurs in Accra are reimagining the trotro itself as a space for cultural creativity. The collaborative Instagram project “This Trotro Life” seeks to highlight the experiences of drivers and mates, using photographs and short text to shift the public conversation about trotros (Odzenma, Kwadwo, & Hart 2018).Volunteers in the TrotroVibes project team up with international NGOs like World Reader, which seek to encourage literacy, joining trotros with guitars and drums to share songs and spoken word poetry and encourage passengers to use the time stuck in traffic for education (Kumi and Botchwey 2017). And, while trotro drivers have historically invested less in jazzing up the inside of their vehicles than their matatu colleagues in Kenya, companies like Trotro.TV are seeking to fill the gap, installing televisions in vehicles throughout the trotro system to “deliver end users a combination of factual information, entertainment and advertisements during their daily journeys” (What We Do 2017). For Trotro.TV, the trotro is a space of untapped potential: These vehicles spend their working days in the busiest parts of the city reaching a concentrated and varied captive audience. Research shows that over 70% of Ghanaians use trotro on their daily journey to school, work & shopping, making us the perfect medium for you to communicate with them. (What We Do 2017) Drivers and passengers, then, are engaged in what is effectively a rebranding of the trotro system within the social, cultural, and economic context of the city. Their suggestions may not be modernist but they are certainly modern. Recognizing and investing in these systems – taking them seriously rather than dismissing them as failed or informal – is the beginning of a process through which we come to terms with the complicated histories of modernism and modernization and begin to reimagine city space and urban life. These lessons have consequence for cities like Accra, but they also have the potential to reshape our understanding of the increasing challenges in cities of the global North, which are facing their own crumbling infrastructures, shrinking investments, and growing inequality.

Notes 1 Trotros are locally owned minibuses, often operated by small owner-operators or as part of small-scale transport enterprises. Trotros are the most accessible and comprehensive form of mass transportation in the country. 2 These types of vehicles function in similar ways to trotros, though the cultures and practices associated with these vehicles obviously vary according to historical and cultural context – car rapides (Senegal), dala dala (Tanzania), matatu (Kenya), combi (South Africa). 3 In 30 years, Accra “grew from a city with a radius of 10 km to a continuous, urban agglomeration that stretches over 60 km along the coastline” (Urban Lab Ghana 2018). 4 These statistics were collected in 2012. It is entirely likely that the proportions have shifted in the last several years. However, the general proportions are likely to remain more or less the same. In other words, the majority of the population today continues to travel in public transport and ride in trotros (Ofeng-Ababio and Agyemang 2012: 149). 5 As Quayson argues, “By the late 1950s, the motor vehicle had already become a key emblem of modernization and was featured in one way or another in newspaper advertising campaigns to publicize items as varied as shoes, vodka, toothpaste, bicycles, and airline travel. Moving on in life was connected to all these products, but overdetermining every element of progressive modernity was access to or ownership of good motorized transport” (Quayson 2014: 131). 337

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6 In fact, the first postcolonial plan for Accra (Accra: A Plan for the Town), released by the Nkrumah government as a statement about the future of the capital of Africa’s newest country in 1958, was changed only slightly from the 1944 plan for the British colonial information put forward by Maxwell Fry and which had informed the Town and Country Ordinance of 1945. Renewed activity within the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) is dedicated not to a newly formulated plan that seeks to decolonize city infrastructure and think about what a modern African city might look like, but rather to finally realizing the 1944/58 plan. 7 See information for the Aayalolo system on their website: http://origin8gh.com/ayalolo/. 8 This does and should raise serious questions that are beyond the scope of this chapter, but which merit serious consideration. A private company that is profiting from the proposed system cannot also be consulting on issues of policy without encountering conflicts of interest. 9 PRAAD-NAG (Accra) CSO 14/1/271 1938-39 Land at Salaga Market required for a lorry park-ownership of. 10 PRAAD: NAG (Accra) CSO 17/1/172 1943–1944 bus services legislation regarding. 11 As Martin Murray argues, this impulse runs through most of urban theory and urban studies – and the related field of urban planning – throughout the 20th century (Murray 2017). 12 PRAAD: NAG (Accra) CSO 17/1/172 1943–1944 bus services legislation regarding 13 There are obvious exceptions to this, of course. In particular, a growing number of Accra’s youth population are finding success through internet, mobile phone, and social media technologies. The most infamous examples of that success are illicit – the practices of sakawa boys who use “juju” to meet people on the internet and scam them out of money. However, young people are also pursuing more legitimate technological opportunities, developing mobile apps and creating community and marketing opportunities by using social media in new ways.

References “Aayalolo Services and Stops.” (2018). Greater Accra Passenger Transport Executive. Accessed February 17, 2018. http://origin8gh.com/ayalolo/services/. “Accra Bus Rapid Transit System.” (2018). FAM Architekti Info. 2008. Accessed February 17, 2018. http:​// www​.fama​rchit​ekti.​cz/pr​oject​/37/a​ccra-​bus-r​apid-​trans​it-sy​stem.​ Abane, Albert (2011). “Travel Behavior in Ghana: Empirical Observations from Four Metropolitan Areas.” Journal of Transport Geography 19(2): 313–322. Admin (2016). “Introduction of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in the Greater Accra Region.” Ghanaian Times. September 28, 2016. Accessed February 17, 2018. http:​//www​.ghan​aiant​imes.​com.g​h/int​roduc​tion-​ of-bu​s-rap​id-tr​ansit​-brt-​in-th​e-gre​ater-​accra​-regi​on/. Adogla-Bessa, Delali (2017). “Aayalolo to Begin Trips from Adenta with 45 Buses.” CitiOnline. October 12, 2017. Accessed February 17, 2018. http:​//cit​ifmon​line.​com/2​017/1​0/12/​aayal​olo-t​o-beg​in-tr​ips-f​ rom-a​denta​-with​-45-b​uses/​. Adogla-Bessa, Delali (2016). “No Dedicated Lanes for ‘BRT’, It’s Now Quality Bus System.” September 27, 2016. Accessed February 18, 2018. CitiFMOnline. http:​//cit​ifmon​line.​com/2​016/0​9/27/​no-de​dicat​ ed-la​nes-f​or-br​t-its​-now-​quali​ty-bu​s-sys​tem/. Anand, Nikhil (2011). “Pressure:The Politechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai.” Cultural Anthropology 26(4): 542–564. Anane. Richard W. (2008). “Forward.” In National Transport Policy. Transport Sector Ministries: Government of Ghana. Appiah-Osei, Elsie & Samira Larbie (2017). “Female Drivers Undergo Simulator Training.” Ghana News Agency. October 19, 2017. Accessed February 17, 2018. http:​//www​.ghan​anews​agenc​y.org​/soci​al/fe​ male-​drive​rs-un​dergo​-simu​lator​-trai​ning-​12379​6. Arthur, Anita (2018). “Accra commuters dump Aayololo buses for trotro”. February 15, 2017. Accessed February 17, 2018. CitiFMOnline. http:​//cit​ifmon​line.​com/2​017/0​2/15/​accra​-comm​uters​-dump​-ayal​ olo-b​uses-​for-t​rotro​-audi​o/. Bhan, Gautam (2017). “Locating Ourselves: The South as an Ethos of Inquiry.” In Gautam Bhan, Smita Srinivas & Vanessa Watson (eds) The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South. New York: Routledge: 5-8 Bhan, Gautam (2016). In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship, and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 338

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Boadu, Kwame Asare (2016). “BRT will Revolutionize Public Transport in Accra.” Graphic Online. June 23, 2016. Accessed February 8, 2018. https​://ww​w.gra​phic.​com.g​h/new​s/gen​eral-​news/​brt-w​ill-r​evolu​ tioni​se-pu​blic-​trans​port-​in-ac​cra.h​tml. “Bus Rapid Transit-Systems: Improving Everyday Life in Accra.” (2017). Scania Global. 2017. Accessed February 8, 2018. https​://ww​w.sca​nia.c​om/gl​obal/​en/ho​me/ex​perie​nce-s​cania​/feat​ures/​bus-r​apid-​ trans​it-sy​stems​-in-g​hana.​html.​ Bus Rapid Transit-Systems (2019) Scania Global. https​://ww​w.sca​nia.c​om/gl​obal/​en/ho​me/ex​perie​nce-s​ cania​/feat​ures/​bus-r​apid-​trans​it-sy​stems​-in-g​hana.​html.​ Caldeira, Teresa (2017). “Peripheral Urbanization: Autoconstruction, Transversal Logics, and Politics in Cities of the Global South.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(1): 3–20. Chabal, Patrick & Jean-Pascal Daloz (1999). Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chalfin, Brenda (2010). Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Gracia (1995). Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation Among West African Market Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Boeck, Filip (2012). “Infrastructure: Commentary from Filip de Boeck,” Curated Collections, Cultural Anthropology Online, November 26, 2012 http://production.culanth.org/ curat​ed_co​llect​ions/​11-in​ frast​ructu​re/di​scuss​ions/​7-inf​rastr​uctur​e-com​menta​ry-fr​om-fi​lip-d​e-boe​ck. Deweerdt, Sarah (2016). “Mobility: The Urban Downshift.” Nature 531(7594): S52–S53. Feld, Steven (2012). Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Finn, Brendan (2008). “Market Role and Regulation of Extensive Urban Minibus Services as Large Bus Service is Restored – Case Studies from Ghana, Georgia and Kazakhstan.” Research in Transportation Economics. 22(1): 118–125. Foucault, Michel (1991). Discipline and Punish:The Birth of a Prison. London: Penguin Books. Gauthier, Aimee & Anne Weinstock (2010). “Africa: Transforming Paratransit into BRT.” Built Environment 36(3): 317–327. Gyamera, Sampson (2016). Interviewed by Elton Brobbey. July 13, 2016. Joy News Online. https​://ww​ w.myj​oyonl​ine.c​om/ne​ws/20​16/ju​ly-12​th/ay​alolo​-bus-​rapid​-tran​sit-t​akes-​off-i​n-sep​tembe​r.php​. Harriet, Takyi, Kofi Poku, & Anin Kwabena Emmanuel (2013). “An Assessment of Traffic Congestion and Its Effect on Productivity in Urban Ghana”. International Journal of Business and Social Science 4(3): 225–234. Hart, Jennifer (2014). “Motor Transportation, Trade Unionism, and the Culture of Work in Colonial Ghana.” International Review of Social History 59: 185–209. Hart, Jennifer (2020, Forthcoming). “Of Pirate Drivers and Honking Horns: Mobility, Authority, and Urban Planning in Late-Colonial Accra.” Technology and Culture. 61(2). Hart, Jennifer (2016). Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hart, Keith (1973). “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 11(1): 61–89. Harvey, Penny & Hannah Knox (2015), Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ibrahim, Abubakar (2018). “Akuffo-Addo Fed Up with Accra’s Traffic Jam; Promises Improvement.” JoyOnline. February 8, 2018. Accessed February 14, 2018. https​://ww​w.myj​oyonl​ine.c​om/ne​ws/20​18/ fe​bruar​y-8th​/akuf​o-add​o-fed​-up-w​ith-a​ccra-​traff​ic-ja​ms-pr​omise​s-imp​rovem​ents.​php. Ibrahim, Abubakar (2016). “Ayalolo Bus Rapid Transit Takes Off in September.” JoyOnline. July 12, 2016. Accessed February 8, 2018. https​://ww​w.myj​oyonl​ine.c​om/ne​ws/20​16/ju​ly-12​th/ay​alolo​-bus-​rapid​ -tran​sit-t​akes-​off-i​n-sep​tembe​r.php​. Klaeger, Gabriel (2012). “Rush and Relax: The Rhythms and Speeds of Touting Perishable Goods on a Ghanaian Roadside.” Mobilities 7(4): 537–554. Kumi, William DuBois & Joseph Botchwey (2017). World Reader Headquarters, North Ridge, Accra, Ghana. Interview by Author. July 7, 2017. Larkin, Brian (2008). Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lewis, George H. (1998). “The Philosophy of the Street in Ghana: Mammy Wagons and their Mottos – A Research Note”. The Journal of Popular Culture 32(1): 165–171. 339

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Mensah, John, Jonathan Annan & Francis Andoh-Baidoo (2014). “Assessing the Impact of Vehicular Traffic on Energy Demand in the Accra Metropolis”. Journal of Management Policy and Practice 15(4): 127–136. Mensah, Kwabena Okyere Darko (2016). Interviewed by Elton Brobbey. July 13, 2016. Joy News Online. https​://ww​w.myj​oyonl​ine.c​om/ne​ws/20​16/ju​ly-12​th/ay​alolo​-bus-​rapid​-tran​sit-t​akes-​off-i​n-sep​ tembe​r.php​. Murray, Martin J. (2017). The Urbanism of Exception:The Dynamics of Global City Building in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mutongi, Kenda (2017). Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mutongi, Kenda (2006). “Thugs or Entrepreneurs? Perceptions of Matatu Operators in Nairobi, 1970 to the Present.” Africa 76(4): 549–568. Nyabor, Jonas (2018). “Traffic Jams, Overcrowding Making Accra Unattractive – Nana Addo.” CitiFM. February 8, 2018. Accessed February 22, 2018. http:​//cit​ifmon​line.​com/2​018/0​2/08/​traff​ic-ja​ms-ov​ ercro​wding​-maki​ng-ac​cra-u​nattr​activ​e-nan​a-add​o/. Odoom, Yaw (2018). “Trotro Diaries.” Facebook. 2013. Accessed March 5, 2018. https://www.facebook. com/trotrodiaries/. Odzenma, Nii, Nana Osei Kwadwo & Jennifer Hart (2018). “This Trotro Life.” Instagram. Accessed March 5, 2018. https​://ww​w.ins​tagra​m.com​/this​trotr​olife​/. Ofeng-Ababio, Martin & Ernest Agyemang (2012).“Virtue out of Necessity?: Urbanization, Urban Growth and Okada Services in Accra, Ghana.” Journal of Geography and Geology 4(1): 148–162. Okoye, Victoria, Jahmal Sands & C. Asamoah Debrah (2010). The Accra Pilot Bus-Rapid Transit Project: Transport-Land Use Research Study. Millenium Cities Initiative, Columbia University; Accra Metropolitan Assembly, October 2010. Osei, Sammy (2011). “The Hell of Living at Adenta.” GhanaWeb. June 22, 2011. Accessed February 14, 2018. https​://ww​w.gha​naweb​.com/​Ghana​HomeP​age/N​ewsAr​chive​/The-​Hell-​of-li​ving-​at-Ad​enta-​ 21170​9. Parker, John (2000). Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Parnell, Susan & Edgar Pieterse (2010).“The ‘Right to the City’: Institutional Imperatives of a Developmental State.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1): 146–162. Piot, Charles (2010). Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quarshie, M. (2018). “The 7 Worst Traffic Areas in Accra that We Just Can’t Escape.” Yen. 2017. Accessed February 14, 2018. https​://ye​n.com​.gh/8​3263-​the-w​orst-​traff​ic-pr​one-a​reas-​accra​-life​-hell​.html​ #8326​3. Quayson, Ato (2010). “Signs of the Times: Discourse Ecologies and Street Life on Oxford St., Accra,” City and Society 22(1): 72–96. Quayson, Ato (2014). Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schindler, Seth (2017). “Towards a New Paradigm of Southern Urbanism.” City 1–18. Simone, AbdouMaliq (2004). “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16(3): 407–429. Taylor, Mildred Europa (2017). “Road Engineer says ‘Aayalolo’ bus service is a joke.” May 7, 2017. Accessed February 18, 2017. Pulse.com.gh. http:​//www​.puls​e.com​.gh/n​ews/q​ualit​y-bus​-syst​em-ro​ad-en​ginee​ r-say​s-aay​alolo​-bus-​servi​ce-is​-a-jo​ke-id​69466​88.ht​ml. “Urban Lab Ghana.” (2018). Creative Industries Fund NL. Accessed January 18, 2018. http:​//sti​muler​ingsf​ onds.​nl/en​/gran​ts_is​sued/​urban​_lab_​ghana​/3724​/. Verrips, Jojada & Birgit Meyer (2001). “Kwaku’s Car: The Struggles and Stories of a Ghanaian LongDistance Taxi Driver.” In Daniel Miller (ed). Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, pp. 153–184. Weiss, Brennan (2016). “Gridlock in West Africa: Accra’s Troubled Attempts to Tackle Its Traffic Crisis.” The Guardian November 11, 2016. Accessed February 14, 2018. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ci​ties/​ 2016/​nov/1​1/gri​dlock​-west​-afri​ca-ac​cra-t​roubl​ed-at​tempt​s-tac​kle-t​raffi​c-cri​sis. “What We Do.” Trotro.TV. 2017. Accessed March 5, 2018. http://trotro.tv/what-we-do/. Yobo, Eric (2013). “The Politics of Public Transportation in Ghana: The Case of Metro Mass Transit Limited.” MPhil Thesis (University of Ghana).

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21 Moroccan towns Nourishing urban spaces Heide Studer

21.1 Introduction How can nourishing urban spaces be part of contemporary urban life? Urban food production is the focus of the following considerations, and a variety of existing practices and how they are changing in the urbanization process will be discussed. The urban food question is gaining in importance in international debates on urban space, in the global South as well as in the global North (c. f. De Zeeuw & Drechsel 2015; Morgan 2015; Müller 2011; Smit 2016). As urban spaces and populations increase, questions of food accessibility, food sovereignty, and environmental aspects of urban agriculture increasingly gain importance. For the well-to-do, urban food production can be a question of health and for the poorer sections of the population it contributes to food security.The phrase “nourishing urban space” covers food issues and environmental and recreational aspects of the places of food production. Given that a considerable percentage of the urban population lives in towns and small cities (Bell & Jayne 2009)1, this chapter will explore the issues based on the example of towns in Morocco. Today, 60% of Moroccans live in urban agglomerations (Chouiki 2017, p. 33) and the country has a growing urban population. Chouiki states that whereas population growth in the big cities has been slowing down in recent years, the populations of small and medium cities and towns have been growing at a higher rate (Chouiki 2017, p. 30). As a result, smaller urban agglomerations are becoming important sites for research and urban planning. Even though a number of urban agriculture initiatives have been set up in cities such as Casablanca, Meknes, or Rabat (Giseke et al. 2015; Valette & Philifert 2014), the topic of urban agriculture is still largely outside the focus of planning discourse and practice. What Wiskerke (2015) states about the urban food question in general, also applies to Morocco: One reason why food has never been a prominent issue on the urban agenda is rooted in the persistent dichotomy between urban and rural policy. Food is often seen as part of the realm of agriculture and hence as belonging to rural policy. (p. 4) Analysis of documents related to planning and agriculture and interviews with experts led Valette and Philifert (2014) to conclude that in Morocco urban and rural issues were seen as 341

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separate areas. Therefore, urban development does not automatically incorporate food production. Agricultural issues may be taken into account where there is very fertile soil, irrigated land, and market-oriented production agriculture. In Morocco, there is little appreciation or official recognition of the role of agriculture in food security and subsistence, or of its environmental contribution in an urban context (Valette & Philifert 2014). The German-funded bi-national research, carried out between 2005 and 2014, on urban agriculture in growing city regions, aimed to integrate urban agriculture as part of contemporary urban space (Giseke et al. 2015), selected Casablanca as an example of a megacity in the global South, so as to understand the relationship between the urban and the rural and to search for synergies to ensure greater resource efficiency and to develop innovative integrating strategies. Using global discourse on urban agriculture, the team set up pilot projects to discover new forms of agriculture, directed towards food production, recycling economies and tourism. In general, there seem to be no integrative approaches in Morocco that could be compared to the continuous productive urban landscape (CPUL) city concept that has been developed for the European Union. The CPUL concept promotes multifunctional urban open spaces to be used for urban agriculture, recreation, commercial activities, ecological purposes, and environmentally friendly mobility (Bohn & Viljoen 2011). This chapter explores the rich heritage and remarkable continuity of practice in (urban) agriculture and livestock farming in two exemplary African towns. There, the aim is to go beyond the dichotomy of the urban and the rural and to overcome the frequent marginalization of food production when it is set within the context of fast urban growth. This chapter proposes to conceptualize urban agriculture and livestock farming as important urban economic practices, especially for poorer parts of town dwellers. However, in order to survive, food production has to undergo transformation processes. Thus, in order to develop and maintain contemporary practices, urban planning approaches need to be aware of the importance of food production and the multiple functions of the productive land within the urban perimeter. Urban planning is thus a crucial factor not only to secure land resources, but also to introduce hygiene standards and to meet new recreational demands. The research questions addressed in this chapter are directed towards food production and its transformations in the context of growing urban agglomerations. What kind of practices of agriculture and animal husbandry persist? Who are the players engaging in urban food practices? And what are obstacles and opportunities they encounter? This research is based on fieldwork carried out in Morocco in the past few years. The methods employed comprise a variety of qualitative methods including participant observation and informal interviews with town dwellers working in food production, semi-structured interviews with representatives (town representatives; associations, and cooperatives in the case of Tinghir) and field mapping in the case of Kasba Tadla. The enquiries were complemented by a discussion with town representatives in Kasba Tadla and a discussion with representatives of the Federation of Associations in the Todgha valley. The fieldwork is supplemented by an analysis of relevant literature and local documents and exchanges with key informants. A triangulation approach was used to compare the diverse data in order to better understand the practices of urban food production and their conditions in the context of urban growth. The discussion will start with a short introduction of the two towns and their practices of food production including references to historical, social, and climatic aspects. Processes of transformation which are urban context driven are elaborated, ranging from the distribution, organization, and significance of work in a food production context to the controversial issue of animal husbandry in urban agglomerations. Then, various different local protagonists of urban food production and their position in negotiations regarding land and resources are introduced. The 342

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case study reveals sources of friction between urban growth and food production, particularly concerning questions of hygiene and land use. At the same time, the urban context can provide new opportunities, such as a greater number of local customers, and new responsibilities, such as recreational or environmental tasks. The chapter proposes to develop contemporary urban planning solutions which combine urban growth with locally based urban food production.

21.2 The two towns This case study focuses on the issue of urban agriculture in two towns in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains: Kasba Tadla in the North and Tinghir in the South2. Both towns are old market places and they have undergone a considerable urbanization process, beginning in the first third of the 20th century, under the French protectorate (De Haas & El Ghanjou 2000, pp. 10–15; Studer 2011, pp. 47–49).Today, their population number is between 40,000 and 50,000 inhabitants (RGPH 2014). Both towns are regional centres for administration, education, and health services as well as centres of commerce, including big weekly markets3. However, they differ in terms of climate, landscape, local history, and their practices of food production.

21.2.1 Kasba Tadla4 Kasba Tadla is located on the eastern edge of the fertile Tadla plain which is known for its agricultural products, especially vegetables.The intensive cultivation of fields irrigated by water from the river Um Rbic began at the time of the French protectorate. At 500 m above sea level and north of the Atlas mountain range, Kasba Tadla’s climate is semi-arid with rainfall in winter and dry, hot summers. The town lies on non-irrigated land, mainly on the eastern side of the river. Its food production is based on rain-fed agriculture and the dominant crops are cereals and peas. Rain-fed agriculture is usually a male task. Some families keep livestock, including breeding and fattening sheep, cattle, goats, and chickens as well as the production of milk and eggs. Pasture and shelters can be found within and outside the urban perimeter, often in a context of town quarters of informal origin. In town rabbits are kept, as well as bees for the production of honey (though to a minor extent). Kasba Tadla has a few gardens where herbs, fruits, and vegetables are grown, and some fruit trees such as mulberry or orange trees grow in public space. Both men and women are involved in gardening and the keeping of livestock. Many products are consumed by the families themselves, and surplus production, especially cereals and straw (in years when there is enough rainfall), livestock, eggs, and milk products are sold to neighbours or to local traders or taken to market. From a historical perspective, Kasba Tadla is a small fortress town founded in the 17th century. Land use was connected to semi-nomadic tribes with herds of animals who grew cereals on land with common usage rights. Until today, village communities’ communal land is an important basis for food production. Private land ownership and the cultivation of rented land are also widespread. Informal land use within the urban perimeter is clearly an issue, especially as pasture and for small-scale gardening.

21.2.2 Tinghir5 At 1,300 m above sea level, Tinghir is the biggest settlement in the 30km-long Todgha river oasis and is famous for its nearby tourist attractions, especially the gorges where mountains and the oasis meet. Although the climate south of the Atlas Mountains is arid, the river fed by 343

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rainwater and meltwater from the mountains provides water for the oasis fields of Tinghir all year round. The town is situated close to the main bridge over the river oasis. The oasis fields are free of dwellings and they are used to grow alfalfa, cereal, maize, fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Work in the oasis is gendered: men till the ground, irrigate the fields and take care of the palm trees, women weed and cut fodder for the animals. Gardening is also done on contemporary housing lots. Livestock kept in Tinghir includes sheep, cattle, donkeys, mules, goats, chickens, and rabbits. It is mainly women who are in charge of the animals which are kept in the courtyards of the town-houses, as grazing is fairly scarce. Apiculture (beekeeping) is carried out in mobile structures at the edges of the oasis. Tinghir’s food production is mostly directed towards family supply and small-scale sale. One village/town quarter decided to set up a new market – oriented project on the outskirts of the town6: they divided their communal land7, searched for new water supplies and planted palm trees on the irrigated fields. Most of the small fields belong to members of local families. The ownership of land in the oasis is connected to irrigation water shares. Many families use the fields themselves, other owners hand them over to sharecroppers, and some rent the fields out. Due to the network of irrigation channels, property structures, and narrow paths, the oasis fields are worked by hand. Transport of manure and crops is done mostly on foot, or using donkeys, bicycles, and motor cycles. Especially after inundations, a considerable amount of physical labour is necessary to clear the fields. The maintenance of the main channels is a communal task of the oasis farmers who have water rights. Nowadays, the channel system and the distribution of water that used to be organized by taqbilt-s (Tamazight, the local Berber language: “village community”) are organized by NGOs. The urban perimeter of Tinghir is composed of several former villages8 of the sedentary population of the Todgha oasis. During the past few decades, new quarters developed along the main road from Ouarzazate to Errachidia, as well as along the borders of the oasis, excluding the inundation zones with the fertile oasis fields. Figure 21.1 gives an impression of the lower level of the oasis fields, with new houses in the background.

21.3 Transformations of food production in the urban context Urban growth and changing working conditions have led to transformation processes within agriculture and animal husbandry in both towns.

21.3.1 Fields of change Kasba Tadla and Tinghir are both growing urban centres and the borders of the urban municipalities were extended during past decades to include neighbouring settlements and land. This in turn has changed the status of the duwar-s (Arabic: “village”) and igherm-s (Tamazight: “fortified village”) and their surrounding land into urban hay-s (Arabic: “urban quarter”). In the context of the growing urban centres, food production as an economic practice is losing its central role and significance within the town and the families of the towns. Nowadays, not all families in hay-s are engaged in farming and in addition, food production is often one of several sources of income within these families. Urban development tends to affect the distances that people need to travel every day, in a number of ways, as urban expansion changes distances between cultivated land and dwelling places: for example, in Kasba Tadla, many of the farmers who provided land for urban extensions have plenty of non-irrigated fields. But if they keep cattle, they might have to walk longer 344

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Figure 21.1 A view of fields in the Todgha oasis in the vicinity of new concrete houses. Source: tilia 2016.

distances to their fields to collect fodder. In contrast, development areas have a starting phase of urban fallow, which provides additional land for grazing – especially for sheep – close to town. Another factor is the change in the distribution of work. In Tinghir, the cultivation of the fields and the maintenance of the channel system necessitate hard physical labour. In the historical context, due to strong hierarchies in oases9, less influential ethnic groups, but also poorer parts of the population were obliged to bear a bigger workload (De Haas 2003, pp. 244, 249). Access to education and work outside the local agricultural sector has led to a diversification of economic practices and have changed these social hierarchies. In their research in the 1990s, De Haas and El Ghanjou (2000) observed a “strong disaffection” in the younger generation towards traditional agriculture in the Todgha oasis.The researchers connected this with improved education and an orientation towards material success and migration and point out that agriculture has become the task of women, of men of the older generation and of the very poor. This in turn brings with it a perceptible change towards crops which are less labour-intensive, e. g. from cereals to alfalfa and from dates to fruit trees.10 Women are very present in the oasis as they are responsible for the majority of daily tasks in the oasis fields and tasks connected to animal husbandry (De Haas & El Ghanjou 2000, pp. 55–69, 72). Interviews in 2018 indicate that women of the older generation sustain the cultivation of the oasis – young educated women tend not to become involved with fieldwork and animal husbandry. To a large extent hard physical work such as digging or the maintenance of the channel system, is done by paid workers. These changes indicate that urban food production is in a state of transformation. De Haas (2001) also documented a decline of influence of customary institutions in oases: The incongruity between the ‘inherited’ physical structures and institutions on the one hand and fundamentally altered social and economic structures on the other is important when trying to explain the crisis of traditional water extraction and irrigation systems, 345

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especially if the latter are labour-intensive. The ancient institutions are increasingly losing the effective power to enforce common law, and, for instance, to punish ‘free riding’ peasants who refuse to contribute to the collective maintenance of the irrigation system. (De Haas 2001, p. 21) Around the turn of the millennium, the organization of common tasks in the Todgha oasis began to be taken over by NGOs. De Haas describes the start of this development in the 1990s and points out the importance of donors and their preference for officially registered associations (De Haas 2003, pp. 364ff ). Also, Bel Yazid (2016) highlights the factor of financial support, as international and state institutions tend to prefer NGOs as local project partners. In Kasba Tadla, there have been fewer changes in responsibilities so far. The jamaca-s (Arabic: “assembly”, in this case of village representatives) are in charge of the allocation of the fields of the village community. In some villages, they had a final partition of communal land for agricultural purposes several decades ago, and – the land changed status to private property. In other cases, every 10 years there is an allocation of equal parts of land for every married male in the village community11. The cultivation of the fields itself is organized by an appointed male member of the extended family. Furthermore, the work in the fields is organized (although not necessarily done) by the family itself. And contrary to De Haas and El Ghanjou’s (2000) findings for the Todgha oasis, my research in Kasba Tadla showed no indication that the young generation was not interested in farming. In 2018/2019, the Moroccan state has started to privatize communal land on a national level (c. f. Ministère de l’Intérieur 2019). All males and females belonging to the lineages of the village communities are registered, the land is surveyed and will be distributed among the members. This process will endow shares to both sexes12 and all age groups and leave its marks on Moroccan food production. It will provide property rights to children, women, young men, and bachelors who have been disregarded in the allocation and alter hierarchies within families and village communities. Mahdi (2014) discusses another aspect. He states that communal land is seen as a land reserve for neoliberal concentration processes in Moroccan agriculture and privatization is a part of land grabbing processes. The near future will show how these changes will affect urban food production and food security. If money is available, mechanization usually takes place: the large fields in Kasba Tadla allow fieldwork such as ploughing, harvesting and threshing to be done with the help of tractors and harvesters. In Tinghir, mechanization includes threshing but it focuses mainly on the water regime, where the water shares can be supplemented by motor pumping. Pumped water can be bought, tractors, harvesters or threshing machines can be rented and workers can be hired, often on a short-term basis. In addition, migration is an important factor13. Many of the migrants living in Moroccan cities, Europe and the Middle East send and invest remittances, which raise family incomes, provide modern housing and the opportunity to invest in small enterprises as well as in mechanization of food production. This in turn has an effect on the social status of the migrants and of their families.

21.3.2 Controversial practices In the urban context, animal husbandry is a controversial issue. In Tinghir and the neighbouring igherm-s animals have been an integral part of oasis agriculture for centuries. Historically, livestock was kept within the fortified villages, on the ground floor of the dwellings, in small courtyards (with smaller animals also being kept on roof terraces)14. It is still customary today to use 346

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Figure 21.2 A zrib at the edge of a town quarter in Kasba Tadla. Source: Heide Studer 2018.

their manure to fertilize the fields. The animals are kept in byres next to the houses and except for donkeys and mules, they are not taken out. In Kasba Tadla, especially in town quarters with informal roots, some families keep livestock – some in stables close to their house and courtyards, in garages, on roof terraces or newly-built and not-yet inhabited houses. Others make use of enclosures on the margins of the settlement, and this can be traced back in history – as the name of the historic town centre of Kasba Tadla is zrib (Arabic: “enclosure”). Figure 21.2 shows a contemporary zrib and some sheep in vicinity of fallow land close to the river and in front of an urban quarter with concrete houses. Sheep and goats in particular, tend to graze on urban fallow land and on inundation zones along the river. In Morocco, loi n° 12–90 (French: “Law no. 12-90”) regulates the zoning and construction in urban agglomerations. Animal husbandry in urban areas is not mentioned or forbidden, as long as it does not cause any hygiene or health problems for the inhabitants. In Tinghir, on the one hand, livestock is seen as an integral part of oasis economy. On the other hand, the planning administration does not consider subsistence economy, agriculture, and animal husbandry to be a forward-looking urban practice, even though within the urban perimeter nearly 500ha of land are cultivated and livestock includes around 2000 sheep and 1000 cows (Agence de Développement Social 2010, pp. 40, 43). In Kasba Tadla, the majority of the animal husbandry practices are marginalized, because, as town representatives pointed out, livestock should not be kept within the urban perimeter. Such attitudes, echoed by other countries in the global North and the global South, make it difficult to adapt animal husbandry practices to the urban context (Grace, Lindahl, Correa, Kakkar 2015). Building on international experience, Grace et al. (2015) recommend to improve the keeping of urban livestock, using the existing situation as a basis.They perceive a comeback of animal husbandry in urban agglomerations, and see attitudes and policies gradually becoming more positive. Maybe, in the future existing animal husbandry practices will be perceived as part of urban economy in Morocco, too. 347

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21.3.3 Various players How urban food production is practiced, where it can take place and if it is accepted as an urban practice is negotiated between different players. In the context of growing urban centres, individual land owners may profit considerably if they sell development land. For farmers in Kasba Tadla, this is connected with a loss of fields. This is not the case in Tinghir, as oasis fields are situated within inundation areas which are kept free of buildings and recent agricultural extensions are situated at the very edge of town. Organizational structures such as village assemblies or NGOs such as water or development associations are more powerful players. If their members are united, those organizations can be partners in development processes (c.f. Benidir 2012; Studer 2016; Bel Yazid 2016). They can negotiate conditions for their members with state authorities, municipalities or development companies. A jamaca is an organization of a (former) village, an assembly of elected male representatives of family lineages whereas associations represent members, e.g., land owners of one or several villages. In Kasba Tadla, jamaca-s were important partners of the municipality in the urbanization process in recent years. For example, one jamaca negotiated for better infrastructure for their town quarters with tribal roots, to compensate for the loss of their fields. In Tinghir, NGOs act as intermediaries between farmers and other players and they have become influential in local politics as well15. When it comes to funding, e. g., for the modernization of the channel system, the recent agricultural extension of the hay Afanour or the renovation of the old igherm Tinghir, local NGOs cooperate with local and state authorities and international partners. With regards to food production issues, new forms of common, market-oriented production and marketing have been started. Activities in Tinghir comprise cooperatives for couscous, dates, milk production, and apiculture, some of these being introduced by international partners, such as the French agricultural agency FERT (Bel Yazid 2016; FERT 2016, pp. 10, 19), whereas others have been started by locals. Time will tell which of these will be successful. Some groups working in urban food production are marginalized in these negotiation processes: not only are women not always equally represented in organizations, in the jamaca they are excluded altogether, because of their sex. Landowners with little land tend to have less influence, in NGOs too.Workers who do not own their land or have land rights are not represented by the organizations. In some cases, NGOs actively focus on women or agricultural workers as target groups (c. f. Bel Yazid 2016, FAD 2018). Local inhabitants involved in informal agricultural and animal husbandry practices perform these as long as possible and wherever they find a place or an opportunity to do so. These informal practices are particularly important in the daily life of the poorer section of the population, and are an essential part of the activities they undertake to make a living. Since they do not have a strong voice in urbanization processes, their power is based in their daily food practices and these can demand a great flexibility.

21.4 Sources of frictions and opportunities On the one hand, the case study reveals several areas of friction related to urban growth and issues of food production. And on the other hand, the closeness to an urban centre brings with it new perspectives, especially in terms of potential customers and environmental issues.

21.4.1 Questions of hygiene and land The towns and their surroundings have long provided resources for urban development and food production. Nevertheless, there are some areas of friction. 348

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The keeping of livestock within densely populated urban quarters can lead to problems of hygiene and to water pollution. In Kasba Tadla, according to town representatives, the keeping of livestock within the urban perimeter is not allowed. In Tinghir, the authorities turn a blind eye to the presence of livestock in town. As a consequence, this sector of food production is not recognized as a frequent urban economic practice, which in turn makes it impossible to develop solutions to simultaneously address hygiene issues and the protection of water and urban livestock, which would be necessary to secure appropriate production conditions within the urban context in the long term. In both towns, in line with national regulations, development plans16 include space for traffic, dwellings, commerce, and recreation: they do not consider subsistence issues such as animal husbandry or gardening. Space for agriculture is situated separately, outside of town, or in the case of Tinghir, as “food culture – any construction is prohibited” (Zone vivrière – interdite à la construction, French) in frequently inundated areas. In Tinghir, there is an additional aspect: “Nouvelle Tinghir”, the recently started big development project, is situated at a distance of several kilometres from the oasis, meaning that those working in food production have long distances to travel. One further aspect is the use of inundation areas. As mentioned, they are not subject to housing development. In Tinghir they are a central food production area and in Kasba Tadla they are crucial for small-scale grazing within the town. In the urban context, inundation areas and their green spaces have become important recreation zones – for the local population and for tourists. Areas of friction between food production and recreation can occur, as shown by a concept for a recreation area to be built along the riverside in Kasba Tadla discussed in 2014. It included a new big dam to change the water level in the vicinity of the historic town centre in order to form a lake surrounded by promenades and park areas. The concept did not take into consideration the existing subsistence practices, ranging from grazing and gardening to washing and baking of bread in outdoor clay ovens. In the Todgha oasis, the danger of inundations will be reduced in any case, as construction works for a new dam in the mountains started in 2017. The aim is to protect the valley against the frequent inundations and to gain water for irrigation. This will affect the uses of the oasis territory. There will be better conditions for agriculture, that much seems certain. However, it is difficult to predict whether the safer situation will lead to building projects within the oasis.

21.4.2 New customers and tasks The urban context, with its markets and shops and its greater number of consumers can provide new opportunities, especially the possibility to locally sell products, such as plants for gardens, herbs, vegetables, fruit, cereals, couscous, milk, butter, eggs, honey, or meat. A further aspect concerns the new users of the cultivated land in urban centres. In addition to the production of food, the land has a new function as recreation area for the urban population or for tourists. In Tinghir, locals and tourists take walks in the green oasis and the oasis paths can also be used for bicycle tours to neighbouring villages or towards the gorges. In Kasba Tadla, locals take walks to the fields nearby to enjoy nature – especially on weekends in springtime. Male joggers and female walkers train on paths and streets along the riverside and the fields. Moreover, in recent years, environmental issues have gained increased importance in the perception of the inhabitants of the Todgha oasis, an aspect promoted by local NGOs, in cooperation with national and international partners (Benidir 2012; Bel Yazid, 2016). There are projects for environmental education in school, to teach the children about the nature of the oasis and its cultivation. Frequently, tourist groups arrive and listen to guides describing and explaining the life of the oasis. Furthermore, efforts to conserve the nature of the oasis can be seen, e. g. the biodiversity, 349

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the cultivation of date palms or the maintenance of the channel system. Lately, the idea of a regional park has been under discussion, including the surrounding landscape with its different climate zones and a diverse nature, in order to give the region a new development impulse17.

21.5 Conclusion Overall, the findings indicate that Kasba Tadla and Tinghir can be considered as towns which incorporate nourishing spaces. At the same time, the urban context has transformed food production. Agriculture and the keeping of livestock have lost their central role within the towns’ economies. Nevertheless, the majority of fertile land is cultivated and the harvest is part of subsistence practices of families with local roots.The keeping of livestock and small-scale gardening are food production practices which are also available to people without land rights or property although these practices may be informal. All these local production practices contribute to food security. Surplus production is sold in the urban context and increases family incomes. In Tinghir, the cooperatives strive towards new market-oriented forms, and the next few years will show if they will become established as a part of local food production. Although it is difficult to determine the economic impact of urban food production in exact figures, the case study shows that it makes a definite contribution to the towns’ economies. Besides functioning as a place of food production, the cultivated landscape has become an important green space for the inhabitants of the towns and in the case of Tinghir for tourists as well. Cultivated land contributes to a better urban microclimate and it is important as a place for recreation, physical activity, and environmental education. At the same time, urban development processes tend to marginalize urban food production and to undervalue its positive effects on urban life. In particular, subsistence production cannot withstand urban development processes. In both towns, inundation zones which are not suitable for permanent housing, are crucial for the continuation of food production within the urban perimeter. Also, fields of rain fed agriculture in the vicinity of the towns tend to be treated as land reserves for future development. As long as the farmers have enough land, they can keep up their food production as well as financial profit from the changeover from cultivated land to urban development zones. Nourishing urban spaces have the potential to combine urban growth with food security and the protection of fertile soil, water and the environment, an innovative perspective that could be developed further by the planning authorities working together with the local people. In the two towns, the study showed that there is existing cooperation between local and state authorities and local organizations of farmers. Such organizations can be village assemblies, as in the case of Kasba Tadla, or NGOs as in the case of Tinghir. As pointed out by Valette and Philifert (2014), to bridge the gap between planning and agriculture cooperation is crucial for finding locally based contemporary solutions. As the two examples show, conditions of food production can vary considerably. Nevertheless, in both cases, an effort towards contemporary urban livestock keeping could be a crucial support for continued urban food production. Approaches integrating a broad variety of players are especially important for food security and for the poorer sectors of the population. Research carried out by De Haas and El Ghanjou (2000, p. 72) in Tinghir indicates that food production is very much the responsibility of the poorer members of society and of women, neither group being broadly represented in local organizations dealing with development and agriculture. Growing towns such as Kasba Tadla and Tinghir have a rich heritage of food production. Acknowledgement of this treasure could be a step towards a contemporary urban food production in Morocco. In these places, it is not necessary to reinvent urban agriculture as it is in the 350

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megacity context (Giseke et al. 2015). Existing practices could be evaluated, adapted to urban conditions and developed as good practice for sustainable food production and urban growth. The data from Morocco indicate that there is a lack of serious support for urban agriculture and animal husbandry in expanding urban agglomerations. This is due to the perception of food production as a remnant of historical, rural practices and an underestimation of subsistence practices and small scale production. Whereas in fact, international data (e. g., Grace, Lindahl, Correa, Kakkar 2015; Moustier & Renting 2015) confirm the findings in the two towns and emphasize the importance of food production in urban contexts. In order to bridge the dichotomy of urban and rural, and to integrate food production as a contemporary practice, a change of attitudes is crucial. And this is crucial not only in the fields of politics and administration, but also within young and educated segments of the population of the towns and small and medium-sized cities. This is a necessary precondition for developing innovative contemporary forms of urban agriculture and animal husbandry and for opening up new opportunities for subsistence and new markets and it also has the potential to provide a healthy environment and to preserve natural resources within urban agglomerations. Planning approaches integrating food production and its manifold inputs to urban livelihoods can be an innovative input to future urban Africa.

Notes 1 Bell & Jayne point out that 40–45% of urban dwellers worldwide live in cities and towns with a population of less than 100,000 inhabitants (Bell & Jayne 2009) 2 The case study is based on research carried out by the author in Kasba Tadla between 2009 and 2011 in connection with her PhD studies at the University of Vienna and as a lecturer on interdisciplinary field trips to Kasba Tadla (2014), and Tinghir (2016 and 2018). I would like to thank my colleagues Wolfgang Kraus, Mohammed Mayoussi and Ahmed Skounti, my students at the University of Vienna, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences/Vienna, the Université Sultan Moulay Slimane/ Beni Mellal and the Institut Nationale de Sciences de l’Archéologie et de Patrimoine/Rabat and the informants in KasbaTadla and Tinghir. 3 The weekly markets are important for the supply of the towns and their surroundings – all kinds of goods for daily use and periodical needs can be sold and purchased.The weekly markets in Tinghir and Kasba Tadla – especially the live animal markets – are of regional importance. 4 c. f. Studer, 2011, fieldwork in 2014 5 c. f. De Haas & El Ghanjou, 2000 and De Haas 2003 (chapter 8 pp. 241–304), Agence de Développement Social 2010 (pp. 40–44) – supplemented by the author‘s research in 2016 and 2018 6 Afanour started the discussion about the distribution of its communal land in 1989. In 2003 every member of the village families received building lots and a piece of “desert,” whereby women recieved half of the parts of men. They set up an association to seek funding and water, organise the distribution of water, provide machines and palm trees for the new 80 ha agricultural extension. As a next step, they plan to organise the marketing and sales of the dates they grow (Ansghir, 2018). 7 Each village community of the Todgha oasis claims non irrigated communal land in the vicinity of their settlement and oasis fields, without having a written contract. In the past few decades, all the communities went through the process of privatizing of this communal land to obtain building lots, in some cases also to obtain fields. 8 In the second half of the 20th century, since the political situation had become more stable, the majority of the villagers of the Todgha oasis moved out of their clay houses within the fortified villages and erected new concrete houses on former communal land in the vicinity to the old village. Nowadays, only very few families live in fortified villages: most of them domestic migrants to the oasis.The former village of Tinghir is still inhabited in parts, and restauration has been started, as it is considered to be cultural heritage. 9 Hierarchies in the region’s oases have been complex, building on descendence, religion, and ethnic groups, see c. f. Jaques-Meunié (1958).

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10 On the issue of date production, interviews with local experts confirmed that not only is the labour factor important, but in addition, the desease bayoud is a factor in the decrease in the number of palm trees. Furthermore, the climate and the date quality are not favourable for market-oriented date production. Also, according to De Haas and El Ghanjou (2000, pp. 61f), the state and the number of date palms in the Todgha valley decreased in the 1990s. The photographs in Popp and El Fasskaoui (2017) give an impression of the decrease in the number of palm trees from around 1960 to the 2010s (see p. 59ff). During the last few years, this development has begun to revert, and newly planted palm trees can be seen around Tinghir. And 2009 saw the start of a development project for palm groves in the region’s oases(ORMVAO 2014), which may have contributed to this turnabout. 11 The allocation of land for housing purposes is also decided by the jamaca-s and is explained in more detail in Studer (2016). 12 Starting in 2007, there have been empowerment processes of women focused on their right to participate in processes of privatization of communal land (Berriane 2015). 13 For more information on migration issues in the Todgha oasis, see De Haas and El Ghanjou (2000), pp. 23–35 and 70–74, De Haas (2003) and for a wider context, see De Haas (2001). 14 This information is based on a local man’s explanation in 2016 in his old family house in Tinghir in 2016 and on the floor plan of a house in the Ksar Tinghir in the Oasis Museum in Tinjdad. 15 The Todgha valley is marked by a great number and a rich variety of NGOs reaching from water associations, social, educational or sports associations to professional ones. In spring 2018, the local federation FAD represented 143 associations; in interviews additional associations were mentioned, which are not part of the FAD. 16 see Plan d’aménagement de Kasba Tadla 2001, Plan d’aménagement de la commune urbaine de Tinghir et une partie de sa zone peripherique 2015 and loi n° 12–90, which does not include a mixed cathegory for agriculture/animal husbandry and dwellings; On the other hand, it determines categories with dominant use - differing uses are not forbidden. 17 C. f. Several contributions at the International Forum on Gorges of the World“ conference held in Tinghir in April 2018

References Agence de Développement Social (2010). Diagnostic territorial participatif de la commune urbaine de Tinghir. Ansghir, Brahim (2018). Interviews with the former president of the Association Afanour pour le développement in spring 2018. Bell, D. & Jayne, M. (2009). Small Cities? Towards a Research Agenda. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (3): 683–699. Bel Yazid, M. (2016). Interviews with the representative of the association for dvelopment MQOURN in Tinghir and the union of the water associations of the Todgha UAUEA in spring 2016. Benidir, M. (2012). Courtage collectif en développement et réseaux associatifs dans la region Drâa – Tafilalet. Asinag – Revue de l’IRCAM, 7: 31–56. Berriane, Y. (2015) Inclure les “n’ayonts pas droit”: Terres collectives et inégatités de genre en Maroc. L’Année du Maghreb, 13/2015–2, pp. 61–78. Bohn, K. & Viljoen, A. (2011). Produktive Stadtlandschaft. Über ungewöhnliche Verbindungen von Stadt und Ernährung. In: Müller, C. (ed.) Urban Gardening. Über die Rückkehr der Gärten in die Stadt. München: oekom, pp. 150–159. Chouiki, M. (2017). Un siècle d’urbanisme. Le devenir de la ville marocaine. Paris: L’Harmattan. Dahir n° 1-92-31 du 17 juin 1992, loi n° 12-90 relative à l‘urbanisme. https​://ra​bat.e​regul​ation​s.org​/medi​ a/Loi​%2012​-90%2​0Urba​nisme​.pdf, downloaded 23.6.2018. De Haas, H. & El Ghanjou, H. (2000). General Introduction to the Todgha Valley. Population, Migration, Agricultural Development. IMAROM Working Paper 5. De Haas, H. (2001). Migration and Agricultural Transformations in the oases of Morocco and Tunisia. Utrecht: KNAG. De Haas, H. (2003). Migration and Development in Southern Morocco. The Disparate Socio-Economic Impacts of Out-Migration in the Todgha Oasis Valley. Nijmegen: Dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen. De Zeeuw, H. & Drechsel, P. (eds) (2015). Cities and Agriculture. Developing Resilient Urban Food Systems. London: Routledge.

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FAD – Féderation des Associations de Développement de Tinghir, meeting on 5.5.2018. FERT – Rapport d’activité 2016, https​://ww​w.fer​t.fr/​rappo​rt-da​ctivi​te-20​16/, downloaded 15.2.2018. Giseke, U., Gerster-Bentaya, M., Helten, F., Kraume, M., Scherer, D., Spars, G., Amraoui, F., Adidi, A., Berdouz, S., Chlaida, M., Mansour, M., & Mdafai, M. (eds) (2015). Urban Agriculture for growing City Regions. Connecting Urban-Rural Spheres in Casablanca. London: Routledge. Grace, D., Lindahl, J., Correa, M. & Kakkar, M. (2015). ‘Urban Livestock Keeping’. In: De Zeeuw, H. Drechsel, P. (eds) Cities and Agriculture. Developing resilient urban food systems. London: Routledge, pp. 255–284. International Forum on Gorges of the World, conference in Tinghir, April 27–29 2018, www.figm.ma downloaded 25.6.2018. Jaques-Meunié, D. (1958). Hiérarchie sociale au Maroc présaharien. Hésperis, 1er–2e Trimestres: 240–269. Mahdi, M. (2014) Devenir du foncier agricole au Maroc. Un cas d’accaparement des terres. In: New Medit 4/2014. Ministère de l’Intérieur (2019). Données generales sur les collectivités ethniques et les terres collectives, http:​//www​.terr​escol​lecti​ves.m​a/Res​ource​s/Doc​s/Pub​licat​ions/​lance​ment-​donne​es-ge​neral​es.pd​f , downloaded 10.7.2019. Morgan, K. (2015). Nourishing City: The Rise of the Urban Food Question in the Global North. Urban Studies 52 (8): 1379–1394. Moustier, P. & Renting, H. (2015). Urban Agriculture and Short Chain Food Marketing in Developing Countries. In: De Zeeuw, H. Drechsel, P. (eds) Cities and Agriculture. Developing Resilient Urban Food Systems. London: Routledge, pp. 121–138. Müller, C. (ed.) (2011). Urban Gardening. Über die Rückkehr der Gärten in die Stadt. München: oekom. ORMVAO – Office Régional de Mise en Valeur Agricole d’Ouarzazate (2014). Exercice 2014, Bilan des realisations physiques, http:​//www​.ormv​a-oua​rzaza​te.ma​/file​admin​/medi​as/ra​pport​s/rap​ports​_acti​vites​/ Resu​me_en​_fran​cais_​Rappo​rt_de​_gest​ion_O​RMVAO​_2014​.pdf, downloaded 11.04.2016. Population légale des régions, provinces, préfectures, municipatités, arrondissements et communes du Royaume d’après les résultats du RGPH 2014 (2015). https​://rg​ph201​4.hcp​.ma/d​ownlo​ads/P​ublic​ ation​s-RGP​H-201​4_t18​649.h​tml, downloaded 5.2.2018. Plan d’aménagement de Kasba Tadla 2001. Plan d’aménagement de la commune urbaine de Tinghir et une partie de sa zone périphérique 2015. Popp, H. & El Fasskaoui, B. (2017). The road of the Kasbahs – past and present. On the trails of Werner Wrage in Southern Morocco. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag. Smit, W. (2016). Urban Governance and Urban Food Systems in Africa: Examining the Linkages. Cities 58: 80–86. Studer, H. (2011). Stadt aushandeln. Raumherstellung von Mädchen und Frauen am Beispiel von Kasba Tadla/ Marokko.Vienna: Dissertation, Universität Wien. Studer, H. (2016). Urban Practices and Planning. A Moroccan Case Study. In: Silva, C. N. (ed.) Governing Urban Africa, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 333–347. Valette, E. & Philifert, P. (2014) L’agriculture urbaine: un imposé des politiques publiques marocaines? Géocarrefour 89 (1–2): 75–83. Wiskerke, J. (2015). Urban Food Systems. In: De Zeeuw, H. & Drechsel, P. (eds) Cities and Agriculture. Developing Resilient Urban Food Systems. London: Routledge, pp. 1–25.

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22 Planning for less planning Supporting informal food systems in Nairobi Andrea M. Brown

22.1 Introduction There is a disconnection between, on the one hand, a longstanding multilevel governance focus on rural food security and, on the other, an increasing crisis of urban hunger in Africa. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the pressing need to recognize and respond to rising urban food insecurity and point to some policy options available to achieve this, illustrated by the case of Nairobi, Kenya. This chapter argues that the central area in need of policy attention is the urban informal sector, with increased attention on food access and nutrient utilization, as opposed to dominant food security approaches, which instead emphasize increasing food production. In Nairobi, food security, along with the lack of attention to its urban dimensions, is further compromised by overlapping and sometimes contradictory policy and legislation from different administrative bodies and levels of governance relating to the informal sector. The city’s low-income residents rely on informal strategies to cope with and creatively respond to uncertain food access: the informal sector, and in particular the informal food retail sector, is crucially important.While some of these informal strategies should be supported by the municipal government of Nairobi, adding new layers of legislation would further complicate food system governance and have weak potential for implementation. Ultimately this chapter has three recommendations: (1) prioritizing urban food security, as distinct from rural food security and urban poverty, (2) reducing projects and policies focused exclusively on productivist approaches, most notably urban agriculture, and (3) simplifying existing processes so residents can access protections in place and enhance existing strategies of expanding food access located in the informal sector. These recommendations do not provide a long-term solution for Nairobi’s growing food access crisis, but are necessary first steps for recognizing it and responding. This research draws on a city-wide household food security survey of 1,434 Nairobi households, conducted by the Hungry Cities Partnership and the University of Nairobi in July 2015. This survey randomly selected twenty-three administrative sub-locations spread across Nairobi, where sampled households were randomly selected. A full report of this survey has been published by Sam Owuor (2018). In tandem with this survey, this author carried out qualitative interviews of respondents in nine of these locations, ranging from very poor informal settlements to high income suburbs. This chapter begins by unpacking the crucial relationship 354

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between urbanization and hunger in contemporary Africa. Then, the failure of global governance actors to respond to urban hunger is addressed, noting the importance of this for policy action in Kenya. Next, current urban food governance strategies in Nairobi are assessed, with attention to cash transfers, urban agriculture, and the informal food sector. Recommendations and conclusions follow.

22.2 Urbanization and food security Africa is the fastest urbanizing region in the world. By 2030, Africa’s population will be more urban than rural, marking a seismic transformation in a region long characterized by rural poverty experienced by populations mostly engaged in smallholder farming. In Kenya today, 90% of the poorest, those in the bottom 40% of the income distribution, live in rural areas. Rural poverty not only persists, indeed it is the paramount driver of urbanization. But a massive transformation is underway. Kenya’s urbanization rate is at 4.3%. Currently, just 27% of the population is urban; this will reach 50% over the next twenty years, and Nairobi’s population is doubling each decade. Sixty per cent of Nairobi’s population currently live in slums, where upwards of two-thirds of residents live below the poverty line. From a food security perspective, the implications of this are stark: half of all children in Nairobi are malnourished, significantly higher than the national rate of one-third (Faye et al., 2011). This shift, rapid urbanization combined with widening inequality, has profound implications for low income Africans. Urbanization in Africa is fundamentally an “urbanization of poverty” (Ravallian, 2001), and is marked by growing slums and seemingly insurmountable challenges for urban infrastructure and resource distribution. Historically, urbanization has been linked to a rise in living standards; in African cities however inequality is increasing and for most urban residents urbanization means overcrowded settlements, overloaded infrastructure, high levels of economic uncertainty, and hunger. Slum upgrading initiatives are a limited tool for addressing hunger among the urban poor, and need to be combined with additional policy targeting urban food security. Urban agriculture (UA) may be part of a larger response, but evidence thus far in Africa that it improves food security among the poor is disappointing (Crush, Hovorka, and Tevera, 2011; Cohen and Garrett, 2010; Ellis and Sumberg 1998; Frayne, McCordic and Shilomboleni, 2014; Webb, 2011). Poverty in an urban setting is experienced differently from that in rural settings: most evident when examined through the lens of food security. Food insecurity, characterized by hunger, malnutrition, poor dietary diversity, childhood wasting and stunting, and diseases associated with all of the above, is increasing in tandem with urbanization (Crush, 2016; Popkin, 2014; Satterthwaite, 2008). The urban poor spend the bulk of their incomes on food, which must be purchased on the open economy. Employment is informal, variable and uncertain, incomes are low, food spikes are frequent; food insecurity is alarmingly high in Nairobi by all measures. Rural strategies of food security, such as subsistence farming, seed savings, owning livestock, cooperative farming, seasonal migration, and wage labour, are not easily transferable to urban slums. In Nairobi, if you don’t have cash you cannot access food short of some informal strategies, many directly tied to informal food retail. Also of growing concern in urban centres is stability, impacted by price spikes and political unrest, for example around elections, and nutrition, as urban diets shift towards more processed foods and supermarkets take on a bigger food provisioning role. Food insecurity is highest for women, the elderly, orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), unemployed, sick, disabled, recent migrants, those who have many children, and those who face unanticipated costs. These vulnerable populations are over represented in slum communities. 355

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22.3 Global framing and urban food security governance At the global level, there is growing awareness of the importance of urbanization and food security. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identify both as goals, whereas neither was independently prioritized in the Millennium Development Goals. Separating food security from poverty is a major achievement of the SDGs. However, urban food security is not reflected in either of these goals. This is unsurprising, as “with few exceptions, food insecurity in the Global South has been sidelined in urban research and policy-making over the last decade” (Crush, 2016). Global framing and agenda setting is important, as this inserts itself into Kenya’s national priorities, most notably with the new National Urban Policy, as well as Kenya’s Vision 2030, which serves as the central policy directive framework, as well as the nation’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan (PRSP), and the National Food and Nutrition Security Policy. Kenyan policy of course reflects Kenyan priorities, but major policy innovations are typically externally funded, and in the case of PRSPs collaboratively designed; the influence of globally approved priorities is strong. In turn, these national policies shape the priorities and scope of municipal governance. SDGs and other agendas driven by large multilateral institutions also impact international development actors, like Oxfam, the Hunger Project, and the Gates Foundation, coordinating priorities and responses to specific areas, and these organizations influence what local NGOs and CBOs do, given their own dependence on donor funding. Despite calls and some progress with greater country ownership and participatory development, development remains driven by globally set agendas in economically dependent nations like Kenya. The SDGs do not address urban food security through Goal 2, End Hunger, or Goal 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, and this gap is mirrored with limited attention to urban food security in Kenyan national and municipal policy. Correcting this involves not simply transferring our rural knowledge of and strategies to address food insecurity because, as discussed, the drivers and lived experience of urban food insecurity are substantively different from those of rural food insecurity. The most marked differences relate to the ways access, utilization, and stability play out in urban settings.“Food security exists when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996). The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) further elaborates on four pillars. Food availability: the availability of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, supplied through domestic production (including food aid). Food access: access by individuals to adequate resources (entitlements) for acquiring appropriate foods for a nutritious diet. Entitlements are defined as the set of all commodity bundles over which a person can establish command given the legal, political, economic and social arrangements of the community in which they live (including traditional rights such as access to common resources). Utilization: utilization of food through adequate diet, clean water, sanitation and health care to reach a state of nutritional well-being where all physiological needs are met. This brings out the importance of non-food inputs in food security. Stability: to be food-secure a population, household or individual must have access to adequate food at all times. They should not risk losing access to food as a consequence of sudden shocks (e.g., an economic or climate crisis) or cyclical events (e.g., seasonal food insecurity). The concept of stability can therefore refer to the availability and access dimensions of food security (FAO, 2006). Food security policy and research remains dominated by not only a rural focus, but by predominately availability productivist focus, typically addressed by attempts to increase agricultural output. Concerns about climate change and population density have further centred attention on increasing agricultural output, for example with strategies like that of the Alliance for a Green 356

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Revolution in Africa (AGRA). SDG 2, Zero Hunger, has five targets. Although one points to the need to protect against food price volatility, which disproportionately impacts urban consumers, the other targets identified all relate to the rural agricultural sector. These strategies respond overwhelmingly to the availability pillar of food security, less so to stability and not at all to utilization or access, crucial elements for urban food security. SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, has seven targets, which range from slum upgrading to improved transportation, disaster preparedness, cultural protection, rural-urban links, and improved urban planning capacity. Poverty is central to many of these targets, but food access is not mentioned, despite alarmingly high levels of urban malnutrition and food being the largest expenditure for poor urban residents. Some of these targets have potential to address urban hunger, but as this is not a stated goal this outcome is uncertain and will not be measured.

22.4 Nairobi’s urban food security governance and policy There are many policy tools available to address urban food security. Not all are necessarily appropriate for the case of Nairobi, but these might include: microcredit, food banks, school food programmes, a wide range of educational initiatives, employment programmes, targeted cash transfers (conditional or unconditional), urban agriculture, and support for informal food sectors. The municipality would best manage some of these, others through partnerships with communities, CBOs, and donors. Useful strategies could be adopted from existing urban food security policies in South Africa and Latin America. This chapter briefly addresses social protection through cash transfers and urban agriculture, because these have been proposed and adopted in limited fashion in Nairobi to date. Its main focus however relates to the informal sector, which is the primary means by which those who are food insecure manage this insecurity. Kenya has four central national policy documents that address and frame food security and/or urbanization: National Urban Policy, National Food and Nutrition Policy, National Social Protection Policy, and Vision 2030. As noted above, major national policy initiatives in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, are designed with significant input from international actors. This is of course true for PRSPs, such as Vision 2030, which must be approved by the IMF.This is also the case for other policies that have donor support for their development and that utilize expertise from International Organizations like the United Nations and common affiliates such as Cities International or The Hunger Project. Oftentimes policies may be initiated by international organizations themselves – national urban policies across Africa, where the UN has taken a lead role, are a good example of this. It is unsurprising then, that urban hunger, not yet part of a global governance agenda, is not reflected in Kenya’s national policies either. However, some initiatives led by the national government, and in partnership with international donors, do have the potential to positively respond to urban hunger. The two most evident are cash transfers and urban agriculture. The following three sections describe and assess current legislation, policy, programmes, and practices relating to cash transfers, urban agriculture, and the informal food sector.

22.4.1 Social protection: Cash transfers Kenya’s constitution commits the government to providing social security to those unable to support themselves and their dependents (Republic of Kenya, 2010). Kenya’s 2011 National Social Protection Policy defines social protection as: Policies and actions, including legislative measures, that enhance the capacity of and opportunities for the poor and vulnerable to improve and sustain their lives, livelihoods, and welfare, that enable income-earners and their dependants to 357

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maintain a reasonable level of income through decent work, and that ensure access to affordable healthcare, social security, and social assistance. This policy seeks to progressively expand social security coverage (Republic of Kenya, 2011a) but currently social security coverage fails to reach the majority of Kenya’s poor and food insecure, particularly in urban centres. While the government finances just over half of Kenya’s social protection, 88% of this government social protection spending is allocated to the civil service pension. Just 22% of this government spending is on safety nets, primarily to cash transfer programmes. Development partner support covers an additional 22% of total social protection funding, supporting safety nets, primarily through relief and recovery programmes (Republic of Kenya 2012). Kenya’s social protection spending is increasing, but is low by international standards. The Government of Kenya operates four targeted unconditional social cash transfer programmes, covering approximately 600,000 beneficiary households. These transfers account for 25% of all social protection spending. The largest of these is the Orphans and Vulnerable Children Cash Transfer Programme (OVC-CT), but there are also the Older Persons Cash Transfer Programme (OPCT), the Persons with Severe Disabilities Cash Transfer Programme (PWSD-CT) and the Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP).The HSNP supports populations in arid Northern Kenya. The Urban Food Subsidy Cash Transfer (UFS-CT) was an additional pilot cash transfer programme, operating only in Mombasa, which has now been discontinued. OVC are the central target group for Kenya’s social cash transfers. The unconditional cash transfer programme for OVCs provides approximately $20 USD to recipient households every 60 days. It is administered by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development and is Kenya’s largest social protection programme, reaching 170,000 households as of January 2014 (Kilburn, 2016). The programme defines OVCs as children under 18 who have lost one or both parents, or who have one or more parent or caregiver who is chronically ill. This group is increasing in numbers, largely as a consequence of HIV/AIDS. Cash transfers to OVC promote school attendance and health service use, but are also central to supporting food security. However, the majority of the estimated 2.6 million OVC in Kenya do not receive this cash transfer or other support services (Lee et al., 2014). Social protection tools were introduced to address urban food security following the 2007– 2008 food crisis. In January 2009, the government declared the food crisis a national disaster, estimating that 9.5 million Kenyans were at risk of starvation, with 4.1 of these from urban informal settlements (Mohanty, 2013).While the government’s response at this time was to focus on vulnerable groups in the semi-arid northern region of the country, with the Hunger Safety Net Programme, Oxfam GB and Concern Worldwide moved to target urban residents with a 3-year cash-transfer and skills development project in the Mukuru and Korogocho informal settlements of Nairobi. This was a targeted cash transfer programme, with the central group of beneficiaries OVCs and their caregivers, the elderly, and people with HIV/AIDS and other terminal diseases. Cash transfers of 1,500Ksh per month ($12.50 USD) were provided through mobile money transfers (MPESA). This project saw substantive improvements in household food security for recipients (Mohanty, 2013) and in 2011, the government institutionalized Oxfam’s cash transfer design in the Urban Food Subsidy Programme (UFSP). The UFS-CT operated only in Mombasa, providing 10,200 households with 2,000 Ksh every 2 months. The government initially planned to expand the UFS-CT to populations in Nairobi and Kisumu, (Republic of Kenya, nd) but this programme has now been discontinued (Oxford Policy Management, nd). Given the success of pilots and the overwhelming evidence linking improved nutritional outcomes with cash transfers and the comparative low cost of this initiative, this is disappointing, but reflects the difficult prioritizing of pro-poor spending with 358

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limited resources, enormous need in multiple regions of the nation, and low recognition of the rising magnitude of the urban food crisis. A continued failure to recognize and prioritize growing urban food security is reflected in this cancelation.

22.4.2 Urban agriculture The role of urban agriculture (UA) in supporting urban food security in Kenya is currently negligible, despite numerous initiatives over the past two decades. While support for urban and peri-urban agriculture is warranted, a growing body of empirical research indicates that in the African context there is little evidence for claims that UA increases food access or incomes for the urban poor (Crush, Hovorka, and Tevera, 2011; Cohen and Garrett, 2010, 477; Ellis and Sumberg, 1998; Frayne, McCordic and Shilomboleni, 2014,Webb, 2011), and this research holds for urban Kenya as well. For example, Foeken and Owuor’s (2008) research on farming as livelihood strategy for the urban poor in Nakuru, Kenya, found that the urban poor were underrepresented in urban farming households, lacking access to land and capital. UA contributes to urban food supply but not necessarily incomes or food access among the urban poor.The almost exclusive focus on UA as a strategy to address urban food security reflects the primary focus on availability, on increasing production, in food security research and policy. In Nairobi, the largest government initiated UA programme to date, involving sack gardens in Kibera and Mathere slums, had a promising start but eventually funding was cut short and the projects were not independently sustainable. Part of the problem is linked to ongoing issues of corruption with government led programming, but in addition, few slum residents are interested or engaged in urban agriculture despite more than a decade of donor and government initiatives to develop this sector. Space, time, security, financial factors, and access to land are all cited as reasons slum residents discount this as a viable activity for them. In 2015, the Nairobi City County Urban Agriculture Promotion and Regulation Bill was passed. This bylaw seeks to develop urban agriculture for both subsistence and commercial purposes and facilitate job creation in this sector. The Act promises to expand access to agricultural extension services and regulate key areas associated with agriculture, especially around food safety. The impacts of this bylaw cannot be assessed this early into its adoption, but its passage marks a sharp departure from earlier bylaws which prohibited most urban agriculture and urban livestock from common and public properties. However, the evidence of a strategy for increasing food security for the urban poor, not only in Nairobi but also across Africa is weak at best. UA is well established in Nairobi as a whole, with 20% of residents growing some food (Lee-Smith, 2010). Livestock, including goats, sheep, chickens, dairy cows, and rabbits are reared throughout the city. While studies show a positive correlation with food security and urban agriculture (Ayaga et al., 2004; Dominguez-Salas et al., 2016), for those in slums, land access is a central obstacle to subsistence gardening. “The primary obstacle to growing food in Nairobi is land availability” (Owuor, 2018). Private land for urban agriculture is concentrated among higher income households, individual yields are small (van der Lans et al., 2012), and the likelihood of owning livestock increases with income (Daminguez-Salas et al., 2016).The ability to participate in UA is limited for those in slums, due to their lack of capital to invest in seeds, livestock, and fertilizers, irrigation, theft vulnerabilities, and time constraints, and most importantly, access to land. Sack gardening has been touted as a promising strategy for expanding urban agriculture among the most food insecure, and in Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera, has been linked to supporting food security (Gallaher et al., 2013a). However, in this study comparing households with and without sack gardens, the improvements in food security were marginal at best, with slight 359

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improvements in consumption of leafy greens and subjective experiences. “Overall, however, the dominant picture that emerged is the extremely high levels of food insecurity experienced by both groups of households” (Owuor et al., 2017). Further, high levels of toxicity and environmental contaminants were found in slum-based urban agriculture (Gallaher et al., 2013b), raising additional concerns for expanding this kind of farming.

22.4.3 Nairobi’s informal food economy Kenya has the highest rate of informal sector employment in East Africa, absorbing 77.9 of the working population (Business Daily, 2015). In cities in the Global South, informal employment is the dominant means for both livelihoods and food provisioning (Skinner and Haysom, 2017). Nairobi’s informal food economy is growing in importance (Owuor, 2018). In the wake of rapid urbanization and population increases, the formal sector – the state and the private sectors – do not have the capacity to provide sufficient employment. While frequently viewed as an illegal and undesirable alternative to formal sector employment, in Nairobi as elsewhere, the informal sector is critical to food security for the urban poor. Formal and informal sectors are not isolated from one another, but are rather closely linked by trade and exchanges between them (Skinner and Haysom, 2017). As the largest urban employer, the informal sector has a direct connection to food access, providing jobs, income and affordable nutritious food for millions. The informal food sector, as a sub-set of the informal sector, makes important contributions to food security for retailers and consumers. In Nairobi’s city core, there are an estimated 1,300 informal food venders (Nairobi Central Business District Association, 2004). In Kenya’s dairy industry alone, the informal dairy sector generates 70% of the 40,000 jobs in dairy marketing and processing (Blackmore et al., 2015). In Nairobi, the leading income generating activity for low-income women is selling fruit and vegetables (Amenya, 2007). Negative associations with the informal food economy overlap with those levelled against informal trading more generally. These include: aesthetic concerns around street vending, often contrasted with ‘modernist’ urban planning agendas; vulnerability of workers in the absence of legal protections and rights; and perceived unfair advantages associated with tax avoidance and regulatory exemptions. In addition, the informal food sector is often linked to food safety concerns, related to food storage and preparation, and in the case of urban agriculture potentially toxic growing areas (Lagerkvist et al., 2013a and 2013b; Robinson and Yoshida, 2016). However, for informal food retailers, the sector provides income and food, and thus a more consistent level of food access in contrast to non-food retail. The biggest distinction of urban food insecurity compared with rural food insecurity is the greater reliance on the cash economy; food access is typically higher in rural contexts where there is subsistence agriculture. Urban food retailers, such as rural food producers, are not totally reliant on day-to-day cash.The exception to this is informal livestock owners, because low-income retailers tend to sell rather than consume animal-source foods (Smith et al., 2013). The food retail sector frequently relies on rural food producer connections. For recent urban migrants, this allows for easy entry into the urban labour market and potentially supports urban and rural households. This can facilitate cyclical migration between urban and rural areas, and create more flexibility for different family members to live in different locations (Mberu et al., 2013). These rural links support important risk-coping migratory strategies (Amendah, 2014). The majority of Nairobi’s food purchases are from informal food vendors (Tshirley et al., 2010); more than 80% of consumer food purchased in Nairobi is purchased in the informal food sector (Tshirley et al., 2004). In Kenya’s informal food retail system, goods traded include: fruit and vegetables (31.2%), cooked foods and snacks (19%), and cereals and grains (5.5%) 360

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(UN-Habitat, 2006). In addition, there is significant informal trade in dairy, eggs and meat. The urban poor in particular rely on this sector for several key reasons which directly support food security: it provides food close to where they live and work; credit and barter are often available; small quantities can be purchased; and many items are sold more cheaply (Neven et al., 2006, Ouma, 2010). Strong community relationships and supports are also associated with informal work, particularly for women (Lyons and Snoxell, 2005) and members of shared ethnic groups (Macharia, 1988). Thus there are significant food security advantages for retailers and consumers in the informal food sector. In Nairobi’s slum settlements, Gulyani and Talukdar’s (2010) sample of 1,755 households showed that although households who owned microenterprises were more likely to be poor, microenterprise ownership decreased poverty and the longer a microenterprise was in operation the less likely the household was to be poor. Notably, those in the food sector were the least likely to be poor. Operating an informal microenterprise is a way for new urban residents, migrants from rural poverty but also refugees and women in particular, to become economically active without formal education and skills. This sector is critical to the economic advancement and food security of growing numbers of residents. It is important to note that the informal food sector is neither isolated from or in direct competition with the formal food sector, despite its frequent portrayal as such. There is broad overlap and mutual dependence of formal and informal economies in Nairobi, described aptly by Rasmussen (2012), in reference to the matutu transportation sector, as “inside the system, but outside the law”. In Nairobi, considerable amounts of food in formal and informal sectors originate from the same wholesalers and producers, themselves a mix of formal and informal (Vorley, 2013). This overlap contributes to ambiguity in Kenya with identifying economic activities as purely formal or informal (Amenya, 2007). Some informal sector products are purchased from the formal sector and then re-sold in smaller quantities. Some produce and meat may not meet the standards or other criteria of formal sector retailers, for example cheaper cuts of meat, foodstuff associated with minority group dietary preferences, and surplus produce. Informal retail of these goods supports formal and informal producers. Although Nairobi’s regulatory environment of the informal sector creates barriers for informal traders, the informal sector is not illegal. At the national level, there was even once official support for creating an ‘enabling environment’ for informal trade beginning in the 1980s under the Moi government (Njeru and Njoka, 1998; Hope, 2012). However, supportive policy language at the national level never translated into legislation or implementation (Fraser et al., 2014) and recent language in Kenya’s Vision 2030 frames the urban informal sector exclusively as a problem, identifying the informal sector in terms of tax evasion, market distortions, and the site of social and environmental risks (Republic of Kenya, 2011b). Further, regulatory barriers are high. These include: duplicate licensing systems at national and local levels of government, corruption, and long wait times (UN-Habitat, 2006). In addition, regulatory requirements for many small informal traders are unrealistic financially, given very small earnings. Governance of the informal sector is primarily rooted in statues, bylaws and regulations, which are used by local authorities to control and restrict street vending. Multiple and overlapping sources of legislation including: the Local Government Act, the Physical Planning Act, the Land Act, the Trade Licensing Act, the Public Health Act, and the Employment Act, have all been used to restrict informal trading (Owuor et al., 2017). In 2012 the Micro and Small Enterprises Act was introduced in order to control the informal sector with the goal of formalization. City by-laws are used to remove informal vendors from streets, although these by-laws do not ban hawking: “many vendor would readily regularise their informal activities, but are prevented from doing so as much by complex regulations as by lack of support or repressive action by public authorities” (UN-Habitat, 2006). 361

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The city’s goal of restricting vending to market areas as much as possible has merit on grounds of providing government taxable revenue, greater scope to regulate around food safety, and freeing up congested thoroughfares for cars and pedestrians, the reality is that markets cannot accommodate all of the street venders in Nairobi. As a consequence, “poor venders, with no market space left to trade in, take to the streets, are assaulted by police, arrested, oppressed by taxes, fines, and persistently harassed” (Linehan, 2015).

22.5 Recommendations Three central recommendations are made here: prioritize urban food security as distinct from rural food security and urban poverty, reduce projects and policies focused exclusively on urban agriculture, and simplify existing processes so residents can access protections in place and enhance strategies of expanding food access located in the informal sector. These recommendations do not provide a long-term solution for Nairobi’s growing food access crisis, but are necessary first steps for recognizing and addressing it. International donors and institutions need to prioritize urban food security as distinct from rural food security and urban poverty. This will have a direct impact on national level policy in African nations who develop budgetary priorities with multilateral support and respond to signals from donors. This is not a guarantee municipal policies will be developed, but may help direct budgetary resources in this direction. Municipally driven urban food policy is being created in cities globally, for example in South Africa and Latin America. Municipal governments have proven to be the best lead actors, but in low income nations international support remains crucial for promoting effective policy. In addition, central national policies should clearly indicate prioritization of this agenda with attention to funding it, as part of PRSP, Social Protection, and National Food Security support. Kenya’s current strong opposition to informality, as expressed in Vision 2030, is alarming and should be reversed. There is a need to reduce a conflation of urban food security projects with urban agriculture. Nairobi should follow the lead of other cities in creating an urban food security strategy, one that moves beyond goals of simply increasing food production and availability. The central barriers to urban food security relate to cost. What this strategy includes can be determined in consultation with local communities and potentially interested donors. Slum upgrading with Cities International involves some local consultation, but within very narrow parameters (Mitra et al., 2017). As food is the central expenditure of the urban poor, it needs to be considered in tandem with this process. While UA may have a role, at present there is scant evidence that in the context of urban slums it is sustainable or meets its stated goals. The challenge is not simply the creation of new policy, but to work towards identifying regulatory obstacles in place, particularly with the informal sector. Biases towards the informal sector based on inaccurate and misplaced aesthetic preferences need to be actively challenged. As a preliminary step to addressing urban food security, it makes sense to plan to plan less. In designing initiatives to support urban food security, it is important to consider what is already in place that can be highlighted and perhaps modified or measured. A successful pilot targeted cash transfer has already been developed with Oxfam. Slum upgrading is underway and many components can be tweaked to consider food security. Other existing social protection tools can be scaled up or adapted to an urban context. The regulatory environment around informal retailing and provisioning is unduly complex and inconsistently applied. City authorities and residents need to know what the rules are and they should be altered or expanded in light of social inclusion and food security criteria, rather than aesthetic modernist preferences and biases. 362

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22.6 Conclusion Food security in urban settings has distinct drivers and needs different responses than those recognized by conventional governance frameworks. As shown by this case study of Nairobi, food security is not only distinct from poverty, but urban food security is distinct from rural food security. The first step to responding to the growing needs of the urban food insecure is recognition of this from global and local policy-makers. In Nairobi small steps can be taken as part of an initial response; existing programmes and activities can be supported once urban food security is established as a priority. Because urban food security relies so heavily on access, as opposed to availability, increasing production through urban agriculture has marginal impact for those living in informal settlements. Rather than expanding such productivist responses, social protection in the form of cash transfers and supporting the informal food sector emerge as more promising focus areas.While universal cash transfers are not economically feasible, there is good evidence to support urban transfers for orphans and vulnerable children in Nairobi. Informal food market participation is the central strategy employed by the urban food insecure, and there is considerable scope for this to be better supported, most directly by removing barriers based on aesthetics or which fail to recognize the importance of this sector for the city’s most vulnerable.

Acknowledgement This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) under the International Partnerships for Sustainable Societies (IPaSS) Programme as part of the Hungry Cities Partnership and by the Tshepo Institute for Studies in Contemporary Africa (TISCA).

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Index

Africa Transport Plan 204, 206–7 African architecture 5, 19, 177, 187 African urbanism 248, 258–60 Africanization 6, 7, 248, 258, 260 architects 2, 54, 151, 157, 177–8, 180–3, 187, 193, 207, 231 Berlin Conference/Conference of Berlin 4, 92, 108 British colonial rule 5 British Ultimatum 92, 108 bus rapid transit (BRT) 8, 308, 313–14, 327–30 capital cities 6, 134, 237, 243 caravan trade 30, 32 Catholic church 24, 144 centralization 2, 5, 10, 34–5, 39, 41, 43, 46, 56, 110, 120, 125–7, 129, 131–6, 138–41, 164, 235 Charter of Athens 5, 177–9, 182–3, 185, 187–8 Charter of Habitat 178, 182–3, 188 chieftaincy 17 CIAM 5, 6, 40, 177–88 cities in Africa 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 249 citizen participation 125, 135, 304 civil war 4, 90, 101, 240–1 co-creation 7, 259–60 Colonial Act 4, 120 colonial empire 3, 4, 46, 91, 118, 181 colonial officials 17, 110, 331 colonial rule 2, 3, 15, 25, 181, 198 colonial settlements 4 colonialism 15, 95, 118, 292, 333, 335 colonization 3–4, 15, 23, 25, 35, 37, 40, 42, 44–5, 47–52, 55–8, 61–2, 65, 70, 72, 90–8, 100–1, 104, 108, 134, 204, 213

commune 32, 69 compounds 15, 18, 20–2, 24–5, 241 countryside 47, 203, 213, 234, 244 decolonization of knowledge 9, 10 decolonized 6, 8 de-concentration 5, 35, 128, 132–3, 139–40 developing countries 125, 207, 211–13, 231, 235–7, 249 Diamang 4, 107, 109–20, 241 diseases 20, 78, 82–3, 85–7, 115, 179, 185, 355, 358 downtown 38, 87, 311 Dynapolis 194–8, 200–5 Ecumenopolis 205–6 emergent towns 7, 234–6, 238, 243–5 engineers 51, 64, 112, 149, 152, 322 Estado Novo 90, 95, 102, 104, 107 explorers 2, 17, 21 food (in)security 1, 8, 9, 168, 341–2, 346, 350, 354–7, 359–63 forestation 79, 80 formalization 272–3, 278, 287, 361 French protectorate (of Morocco) 3, 45–6, 48, 181, 183, 343 Frontier settlement 3 gated communities 254 Global South 7, 34, 163, 236, 249, 291–3, 295–6, 301–3, 320–2, 334–5, 341–2, 347, 356, 360 harbour 1, 2, 3, 46, 62, 65, 69–70, 76 health risks 3, 82 homeless 253, 258 housing policies 7, 115, 263, 288

367

Index

human settlement 2, 25, 45, 125–7, 129–30, 133–5, 139–41, 165, 168, 203, 235, 264, 266, 270, 280, 284–7, 295, 335 indigenous 2, 4, 14, 40, 54, 77, 82–6, 92–4, 96–7, 99, 107, 110, 115, 117–18, 185, 188, 201, 213, 320, 331 indigenous neighbourhood 82, 85 indigenous planning 15 informal housing 2, 5, 7, 8, 212, 265 informality 162, 165, 167, 173, 248–50, 258–60, 263, 291, 334, 362 informalization 236, 253, 255, 259–60 kinship system 17, 21 land surveyors 149, 151 local elites 3 local governance 2, 5, 125, 133, 297 local self-government 1, 125–33, 136–40 Lusophone African countries 126–7, 135 malaria 83, 85 mass rapid transit 8, 308, 313 master plan 30, 38, 41, 136, 310 mega project 213, 218 metropole 3, 46, 51 metropolitan area 218, 249, 253, 314 migration 1, 3, 7, 30, 55, 83, 118, 206, 212, 223–4, 234, 236, 238, 240–3, 247, 249, 266, 345–6, 355, 360 mining cities 4, 238 mining industry 2, 76, 151 mining towns 237–8, 241, 243 missionaries 17, 21, 23–4 mitigation and adaptation 248, 250, 252 mobility 7–8, 86, 163, 166, 234, 236, 240, 310, 313–14, 320, 321–4, 329–31, 333, 335–6, 342 Modernist 3, 8, 9, 44, 151, 321, 332–4, 336–7, 360, 362 multicultural 77, 167 multiracial 77, 81, 86 native communities 58 natural resources 8, 46, 91, 96, 101, 238, 351 neo-colonialism 90, 101, 335 New Towns 6, 7, 211, 213–14, 224, 231, 235, 237, 238, 243–5 participatory governance 7, 292, 303–5 planners 1, 2, 5, 8, 69, 70, 149–50, 152–9, 162–8, 171, 173–4, 177, 180, 187, 193, 248, 260, 269, 271, 274, 277, 280, 285, 292, 314, 320, 326–7, 330–1, 334–5 planning competencies 167–8 planning cultures 1, 2 368

planning curriculum 154, 162, 167 planning ideas 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 108 planning ideology 70, 259 planning laws 10, 136, 138, 300 planning legislation 9, 151, 153 planning profession 2, 5, 149–56, 158, 162–6, 168–70, 173 plots 20, 35, 38, 69, 104, 243, 272, 331, 336 political devolution 139 post-apartheid 5, 156, 248, 250, 255 post-colonial 2, 4, 6, 9, 127, 131, 181–2, 204, 259, 293, 303 post-independence 1, 4, 5, 6, 128, 134, 136, 139 pre-colonial 2, 30, 34, 37, 42 property rights 10, 95, 346 protected areas 136, 138 public health 79, 83–5, 87, 111, 297, 361 public spaces 6, 7, 58, 78, 80–2, 238, 248–56, 258–60, 300 racial segregation 3, 77, 86–7, 114, 151, 184, 185 rapid urbanization 1, 30, 260, 291–2, 325, 355, 360 rationalism 6, 188 real estate 35, 76, 214 regenerative 248, 259–60 registered planners 149, 154, 156–8, 173–4 resilience 149–51, 153, 155, 158–9, 167, 259 rural development 1, 3, 44–6, 52, 55, 58, 154, 169–70, 238 rural landscape 45, 47, 51, 53, 56 rural settlement 2, 4, 5 rural settlements 55, 58 sanitation 2, 3, 18, 38, 42, 77–80, 82, 84–6, 110–11, 119, 265, 269, 277–9, 282, 296, 298, 300–1, 356 savanna 15, 18–9 savanna town 15 SDGs 168, 356 second world war 3, 45, 181, 195 settlement pattern 17, 19, 21, 25 settlers 22, 44–58, 86, 95, 97, 270, 274, 279, 284, 286 slums 1, 54, 185, 212, 249, 258, 297–301, 305, 355, 359, 362 smallpox and plague 83, 85 social exclusion 1, 264 social segregation 38, 45, 84–5 Southern urbanisms 321, 335–6 spatial planning 3, 41, 125–6, 129, 131, 133, 136–7, 139, 153–6, 162, 171, 285, 321 spatial planning system(s) 1, 5, 7, 125–7, 129, 131, 134–6, 138, 139, 141 stakeholders 10, 34–5, 41, 69, 129, 137, 163, 169, 234, 236, 260, 296, 298–9, 305, 309, 312, 316, 330

Index

sultanate 30–1, 34, 37, 39–40, 42 sustainable development 8, 10, 100, 153, 162, 165, 167–9, 214, 233, 235, 356 transport modes 8, 312, 317 transport planning 8, 312–13, 316–17, 321 universality 6, 188 urban and regional planning 44, 50, 149, 152–6, 158, 162, 164–5, 168–70, 173–4 urban designers 7, 180, 182, 248 urban fantasies 250 urban food systems 2, 5, 8

urban form 2, 179, 249 urban governance 1–3, 5, 125–6, 129, 233–4, 291–2, 295, 302–3 urban hunger 9, 355, 357 urban morphology 30, 32, 34 urban policy 6–7, 35, 217 urban transport 1, 2, 5, 8, 309, 311, 312, 320, 327 urbanity 16, 24–5, 324 village 2, 15, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26, 36, 77, 81, 91, 97, 111, 116, 118, 177, 186, 241, 254, 265, 297, 343, 344, 345–6, 348, 350 white colonization 4, 94–5, 101

369