Making Africa Urban: The transcalar politics of large-scale urban development

ongoing

This project will investigate how urban futures are made through different global circuits and in turn shape key transnational processes: geopolitics, development and private investment, through a close focus on the transnational actors and decision-making processes involved in large-scale developments and interventions in selected African cities. The research will produce: new theoretical perspectives on urban politics and policy-relevant understandings of state capacity and land value capture in urban development. The project brings to fruition the applicant’s agenda-setting post-colonial critique in urban studies (2006, Ordinary Cities, Routledge), practically worked through in her recent innovations in comparative urbanism (forthcoming, Comparative Urbanism, Sage). This research will bring forward original empirical findings and develop further the innovative comparative methods tested in a recent esrc funded project. It will contribute theorizations of the new territories of global urban politics, starting in African contexts. Engagements with residents, stakeholders, policy makers and practitioners will build understanding of how better urban outcomes might be secured. The project compares three transnational circuits and nine cases of urban development in three cities (Accra, Dar es Salaam, Lilongwe) where all three circuits have a strong presence, and which encompass a range of levels of urbanization and economic development. Focussing on transnationalised urban development processes and the widely spread phenomenon of large scale urban developments will provide a basis to work against the neglect and exceptionalism of African experiences within urban studies, an important motivation for this project. The research seeks to build African based research capacity in urban studies and includes African based collaborators and early career scholars in the research team.