1st Edition
Everyday Urban Practices in Africa Disrupting Global Norms
This book disrupts the dominant underlying international norms informing urban development strategies across African cities. International policy frameworks have created a new universal agenda for developing cities. However, these frameworks have also imposed global paradigms and discourses that are often in conflict with local urbanisms. As we approach the deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, there is need for reflection and deliberation on a post-2030 agenda.
The authors identify powerful assumptions, norms, and positionalities that obfuscate the efforts to achieve sustainable development in African cities, as well as along the North-South divide. They argue that a disruptive critique of these normative concepts, grounded in the lived African urban everyday, opens up opportunities to dismantle their assumed neutrality. Through disruption, the authors critically re-interpret the meanings of policy and the praxis of local urbanism, ultimately challenging the logic of universalising concepts underpinning implementation in the current international policy system, and asserting the need for contextualised urban policies.
The book will be of interest to scholars and students of urban studies, development planning, urban governance, human settlements, development studies, urban geography and African studies. It will also be useful for practitioners including town and regional/urban planners, urban policy consultants, and international development cooperation agencies.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Foreword
Daniel K. B. Inkoom
Preface
Carmel Rawhani, Nadine Appelhans, Marie Huchzermeyer, Basirat Oyalowo, Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane
Chapter 1
Introduction: Global Norms, Urban Africa, the Everyday, and Disruption
Marie Huchzermeyer, Nadine Appelhans, Basirat Oyalowo, Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane
Part I: Heterogeneity
Section Introduction: Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane
Chapter 2
Questioning the Urban-Centrism of the New Urban Agenda and Its Implications for African Cities
Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane
Chapter 3
Disrupting the myth of cohesion-generating public space: Contrasting narratives from Johannesburg and Berlin
Carmel Rawhani, Anna Steigemann
Chapter 4
The hybridisation of public transport in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi: Challenging inscriptions of innovation policy in bus rapid transit systems
Nadine Appelhans
Part II: Fluid Belongings
Section Introduction: Taibat Lawanson
Chapter 5
The Faulty Premise of “Leave No One Behind” in Lagos: A Focus on People Living with Disabilities
Taibat Lawanson
Chapter 6
Living Among the Dead: Disrupting Narratives on the Inclusion of the Homeless Through a Case of Public Open Space in Johannesburg
Tsepang Leuta
Chapter 7
Exploring the Potential of the Spatial Agency of Refugees and IDPs to Inform Alternative Approaches of “Protection”: Case Studies from Lagos and Berlin
Philipp Misselwitz, Rebecca Enobong Roberts
Part III: Persistence
Section Introduction: Marie Huchzermeyer
Chapter 8
Unsettling the Formal–Informal Binary: the Right to Development and Self-Determination in the Harry Gwala Settlement Trajectory in Ekurhuleni, South Africa
Marie Huchzermeyer, Kristen Kornienko
Chapter 9
Policy Transfer and the Misplaced Enabling Role of Government in Nigeria’s Housing Policy
Basirat Oyalowo
Chapter 10
The SDG Monitoring Framework Turns a Blind Eye to the Daily Realities of Lived Tenure Security in African Hybrid Land Transaction Systems: A South African Case
Avhatakali Sithagu
Part IV: Interplay
Section Introduction: Elke Beyer
Chapter 11
Local Government Autonomy, Electoral Systems and Their Implications for Social Contracts in Nigeria: An Overlooked Obstacle to SDG Implementation
Victor Onifade, Damilola Agbalajobi, Taibat Lawanson, Marie Huchzermeyer
Chapter 12
When Borders Do Not Matter: Contextualising Socio-Developmental Challenges in Urbanised Nigeria–Benin Border Communities
Deborah Bunmi Ojo, Gbemiga Bolade Faniran, Marie Huchzermeyer
Chapter 13
Transport Infrastructure as a Driver of Sustainable (Urban) Development in Africa? Critical Reflections on The Interrelations Between Sustainability Agendas and Infrastructure-Led Development through Experiences from Ethiopia
Lucas-Andrés Elsner
Chapter 14
Conclusion: Towards Realistic Global Frames That Embrace Everyday Urban Practices in Africa
Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane, Marie Huchzermeyer, Nadine Appelhans
Biography
Nadine Appelhans is a Senior Researcher at the Habitat Unit, TU Berlin, a Guest Researcher at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Scientific Coordinator of the Wits-TUB-UNILAG Urban Lab.
Carmel Rawhani is a research and implementation consultant focusing on international financial development cooperation, working from Cologne, Germany, and Guest Researcher at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Marie Huchzermeyer is a Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and is the Director of the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies in that school.
Basirat Oyalowo is a senior lecturer in Real Estate at the Oxford Brookes University. Previously she was Senior Lecturer and WITS-TUB-UNILAG Urban Lab Post doctoral fellow at University of Lagos, Nigeria.
Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane is Professor of Development Planning and Urban Studies in the University of the Witwatersrand, School of Architecture and Planning.
This is a great intellectual product. Its main premise is that everyday lived experiences are neither sufficiently noticed nor accounted for in the crafting of urban policy agendas at the global level, and this book takes a bold step toward this objective.
Daniel K. B. Inkoom, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, AAPS former Chair
Seen through the lens of the everyday in urban Africa as representing a multitude of both daily practices and realities, as well as a generative epistemic framework, this book brings together a varied set of thought-provoking contributions. Together, they call for a move beyond the “business as usual” of development by urging us to rethink the global norms that drive the global post-2015 agenda. An important read for scholars and policymakers alike.
Sylvia Croese, Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies, University of California, Irvine and editor of Localizing the SDGs in African Cities
