A contested African Urban Future amidst increasing New City developments

A Thought Leadership perspective by Marco Morgan

Sarah Nutall and Achille Mbembe’s Afropolis (2007) describe the city of Johannesburg as an intricate entanglement of “éclat and somberness, light and darkness, surface and underneath, metropolis intertwined with necropolis, then and now”

Johannesburg CBD (2018)

African cities present a host of paradoxes and complexities that make the city to some extent unimaginable or hard to comprehend within current planning and theoretical frameworks. An urban population that is increasing at an overwhelming pace and scale compounded with harsh living conditions, inequality and exclusion, and incompetent government administrations as well as a tormenting colonial past that ambles through our urban aspirations and practices hindering our ability to grasp or conceptualize an African urban future.

In a five-minute long promotional video for Africa’s leading large-scale real estate developer, Rendeavour it begins to unpack what they believe is the African urban future as well as positioning themselves as the Africa’s new private city builder. It begins with its opening images of satellite city and sprawling middle-class residential units before, cutting away to the Yomi Ademola, the Head of West Africa branch. With urban development projects in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo spanning 30 000 acres, Rendeavour is only one of the many foreign developers and investors that have expressed an interest in upcoming markets in Africa (Watson, 2013)

A rendering of Tatu City - A Rendeavour development in Kenya

New city developments and investment are ever increasing in Africa, taking on a particular shape or form of entirely new satellite cities built from scratch as self-contained enclaves or as city centers revitalized and upgraded. With many African governments unable to effectively respond the demands of the increasing urban populations and unsustainable growth patterns, these private-sector developments have been ushered in as ‘sensible responses’ or as promises of progress and development.

New cities developments in Africa are not entirely a new phenomenon and the idea of developing large scale, autonomous, satellite developments has been a space of conjecture and discourse driven by the lack of empirical evidence and distorted basis from which to develop and evaluate. With the ever increasing appearance of new city developments in the trajectory of the African urban future, this essay attempts to present a postcolonial-oriented perspective of the dynamics and trajectories of urbanization in Africa, so as to highlight the inconsistencies and dangers of subjective or biased extrapolations. With the recent release of the Rand Merchant Banks’ Where to Invest report 2019, it is of vital importance to assess the shortcomings of such deductions against the lived urban realities of urban Africans. Furthermore, the essay aims to explore the rationale of the new cities as solutions to the Africa’s urban crisis and as a propeller of national or regional development, to which I look deeper at the modernist vision of improvement that these ‘new cities’ might hold and the neoliberal impulse that drives these large scale satellite developments.

While there has been increased attention and criticism from academia surrounding the economic and social promise these developments hold and the orderly Utopian vision it projects as the urban African future, the staggered and hindered progress of these developments have provided little grounds to evaluate and assess the implications.

I therefore engage the local and micro case of gentrification, through the perspective of a film “Not in my neighborhood” by Kurt Orderson, to consider and deliberate possible implications new cities in Africa might yield.

Considering the enchantments of new cities and the implications of developing large greenfield developments as a means to overcome the challenges of the existing dysfunctional urban areas and the embrace of this concept by African states as a part of the solution to the African urban crisis, this essay does not attempt to present an argument to avert new cities in Africa, but rather an approach of consideration so that one can begin to imagine a sustainable and somewhat inclusive urban African future.

The RMB Where to Invest Report 2019, is an “easily digestible data and analysis” of Africa’s investment opportunities presented to companies considering investing in Africa and those already vested in the continent. The 194-page document is an accumulation of graphs and abstract imagery that presents Africa as a palatable economic banquet of opportunities. The report stresses Africa’s lack of efficient infrastructure as the biggest challenges to overcome in order to ‘do business’, but also highlights this obstacle as an opportunity for businesses involved in the development or the financing of infrastructure projects.

Celeste Fauconnier, Africa Analyst, RMB and author of the report was recently interviewed by CNBC Africa, in which she spoke of the 2019 report and some of the identified challenges facing Africa. The interview highlighted the continued economic loss due to African countries’ failure to adequately invest in or provide “efficient infrastructure” as a consequence of the limited private sector involvement. This echoed the sentiments of the report which found the challenges to infrastructure development to include ineffective governance, weak infrastructure planning and execution and unremitting corruption, with the solution residing exclusively in governments dedicated to the partnering and further reliance on the private sector to provide skill, expertise and investment into the public investment domain.

The RMB report is markedly biased towards the company’s commercial function as financer or mandated lead arranger in facilitating financing, and in doing so it places emphasis on economic growth as the primary driver of infrastructure demands, paying little attention and placed limited weight and focus on the rising urban population growth as an infrastructure demand driver.

Edgar Pieterse in his article “Grasping the unknown” accentuates the dangers associated with the narrow macro-demographic, economic and political trends. While reports such as the RMB Where to Invest are important, Pieterse highlights the disparaging emphasis placed on reports such as these, and the likeliness for it to evacuate more interpretive, phenomenological and relational accounts of social and cultural dynamics and psychological dispositions Pieterse presents a contrasting and far-reaching perspective which contextualizes the infrastructural afflictions of African cities and points to a trend in which all of the growth which will unfold in African cities will take the form of slum growth; a result of African governments regarding migration to cities and towns as a bad thing and therefore purposefully dissuading policy responses to address the needs urban poor and slum dwellers. This is also compounded with the decline of investment in urban infrastructure

for the urban poor, as preference for urban elites, large business and foreign companies skew investment priorities of cities as they juggle economic, household and public infrastructures.

In contrast to the RMB report, Pieterse presents a postcolonial perspective as an arresting realization to the reports’ modernization theory basis. In this article through a series of the orienting points he presents the “real African city” as marked by profound crisis of burgeoning shanty towns in which urbanites live in informal, auto-constructed, makeshift shelters and city building is attributed largely to the actors outside of state or the formal business sector.

The ‘real African city’ as a concept is characterized by a series of macro urbanization trends and dynamics which he highlights. He cogently places Africa being at the beginning of its urbanization lifespan with variances between regions, and points out that Africa’s urban transition will be twice as fast as that of the western world without access to the lucrative colonial economies and visible elements of exclusion, impoverishment and deepening inequality.

While Pieterse calls for an alternate readings of the city and layered theoretical frameworks proposing that we can begin to confront or rather accept the profound crisis, burdensome and neglected conditions of the African city and inhibit its context in our imaginings of African urban future, African governments persuaded by large scale developers remain enchanted with promise of ‘world-class cities” and its neoliberal developmental aspirations. (Roy and Ong, 2011).

The perceived need to establish world-class cities is largely driven by governments wanting highly visible projects to attract investment for political campaigning, which is accompanied by the African states desire for increased independence and competitive character (Roy and Ong 2011). These ‘vanity projects’ have no clear economic, social or spatial rationale, or coherent response to the urban growth or global economic transformation but rather reflect the enchantments and social promise and emancipatory modernity (Harvey & Knox, 2012).

New cities have taken on a distinctive form of high modernist master planned cities that are slum-free, and well-managed urban environments (Cirolia 2013).

We see similar aspirations that cater to worldclass enterprises, high-quality services and financial sectors, elite and expat residents and tourist (Watson 2013) reflected in the Gerthners article Rule by Aesthetics in which infrastructures are deemed as “world-class” and through a perceived image and aesthetics framed by the middle-class neo liberal ambitions and aspirations.

Gerthner’s paper puts forward a new theory in which he examines the role of aesthetics in city making, through an in-depth ethnographic study of contemporary Delhi and the governing ‘rule by aesthetics’, in which the authorities and community have adopted and codified the ‘world-class aesthetics’ into legislation and practice.

The preference given by governments to that of the urban elites and large business in this hierarchy of urban infrastructures indicates skewed priorities that fail to meet the pressing issues of rapid urban population growth and ailing infrastructures that the urban poor contend with. The prioritization of these vanity projects in the context of Africa rapid urban population growth will only result in land speculation, displacement and exclusion (Watson 2013), however with so many of these projects of new cities still in staggered progress or halted, empirical research regarding its implications is largely lacking.

With the increase of new city developments in Africa, and the growing interest of foreign investment from large scale real estate developers like Rendeavour, it is necessary to assess the implications or the perceived implications of such developments at a local scale. Given the fact that new city making in Africa is relatively new and lacking in empirical research, I turn to the alternative perspectives and comparisons in which ‘foreign investment’ led by the neoliberal development strategies take priority over the African urban poor or slum dwellers.

I take this particular bottom up perspective, as much of the urban African revolution narratives on the topic are led by developers or African governments enchanted with infrastructure promises of modernity and advocate for mainstream neoliberal urban growth strategies.

Kurt Orderson Not in my Neighborhood (draft) presents an adequate perspective of lived experiences of residents of Woodstock, Cape Town and their accounts in confronting developers and government in pursuit of social justice.

The opening scene of the film is of the District six families being uprooted from their homes, the scene shows the rolling wheels of bulldozers as they crash into the homes of district 6 homes. Shots of urban poor and defenseless families who are subject to destruction are shown right before the visuals shift to the Apartheid city planners as they map out the future of these families in swoops of non-discretion and account and plan the townships in South African, Cape Town.

Spatial violence and displacement are central themes of this documentary and it is important to review the implementation of the possible new city developments in Africa against this backdrop. A common challenge of new cities relates to land and tenure complexities, in which many new cities being developed are riddled with land rights issues; this entails a scattering of land owners, informal occupiers of the land or in some cases the land might be held in traditional ownerships.

In some cases of new cities in Africa, projects are stalled for years due to disagreement amongst land owners. In the film, we are introduced to Sharief Alexander, who tells his story about the owner of his home, whom he has not met during his three decades of rent, coming to inspect the house in order to put it on the market. He explains that difficulty in being able to buy the house or accessing the finance. Eviction or resettlement mechanisms are largely inefficient and inconsiderate of the poor, however developments favoring the elite are often fast-tracked and national laws and regulations bypassed in support, even at the expense of the poor. In the case of Marietta Monagee and Kenneth Brown as seen in the latter part of the film, who have been displaced and moved to the underdeveloped and poor managed Blkkiesdorp without compensation, we see a how families lose a generational assets and source of livelihood, as well as the disruption of social networks and livelihood sources. Although speculative, these are symptoms of neoliberal growth strategies and developments as seen in new cities.

Early in the film we are introduced to Kent Lingeveldt as he stands in front of Woodstock Exchange, a “regenerated” building, reminiscing a time when he was tenant before being asked to vacate the premises along with many if not all tenants, not due to the lack of ability to pay the rent, but primary due fact that the as they didn’t match the “look and feel” of the new development. Kent uses the story of “golden plate” , a family owned business that operated in that space for years before being asked to leave because they weren’t ‘cool’ enough.

The Woodstock Exchange development on Albert Road in Woodstock

This shows the callous nature of the developer and of the development. Kent also explains the change that leans to European feel and the welcoming of “white faces”. He points out that the developers are looking for a face of color in their space and are explicit about their market being white.

These incidents, which took place in the suburb of Woodstock in Cape Town, shed light on the possible implications of the private urban investors who are often likely to exacerbate social spatial segregation.

While new cities are promoted as inclusive spaces, mixed use enclaves, in reality they are characterized by their supply and demand, security and exclusion. They take on the form of remote fenced-off developments dedicated to certain groups of the population based on status and wealth. If we are to learn anything from the gentrification of Woodstock as presented by Kurt Orderson, the clustering of groups based on wealth and status lessens the likeliness of social interaction and social mobility.

While in the film we don’t hear directly from the developer, instead we are privy to the perspective of the government official and political head, City of Cape Town’s Belinda Walker, who dismisses the pain and anguish inflicted through gentrification as a necessary step towards a ‘controlled and orderly city’, free from the messiness of democratic politics. She offers an unfavorable perspective that frames those instigating and profiting in the process of gentrification as saviors and rescuers in the revival and renewal of the urban fabric. Similarly, this favored perspective is also seen in new city developments; in which they are prioritized in terms of services over the existent urban fabric (Cirolia 2013)

Marco speaks to urban regeneration programmes in the North of Cape Town, South Africa

The RMB report sits on top of pile of alluring documents produced by African states inviting large scale real estate developments and post-crisis global financial capital to find new spatial fixes (Watson 2013). While new cities in are firmly placed in our African urban future amidst the slum growth prophesied by Edgar Pieterse, this essay proposes that we acknowledge dangers of presenting Africa in narrow frame of demographics, economics and political trends, as it poses a threat to the spatiality of the city and the ingredients for the production of locality.

The desire create new world class cities persist and African governments campaign for vanity projects or generic social promises that new cities retain despite the deteriorating circumstances and constant deferral to deliver, the persistence of this promise is related back to visceral response or disposition or as Harvey and Knox describe as an “enchantment”. While this enchantment or modernist ambitions linger over African cities, this essay calls for a level of consideration, one that acknowledges the future trends of Africa and critically assesses developments, and adopting a creative approach to the future of African cities.

References:

Watson, V. (2014). African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares? Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 215–231. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247813513705

Nuttall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe. “Afropolis: From Johannesburg.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 1, 2007, pp. 281–288. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25501689.

Pieterse, Edgar. (2011). Grasping the unknowable: Coming to grips with African urbanisms. Social Dynamics. 37. 5-23. 10.1080/02533952.2011.569994.

HENTSCHEL, C. (2012), Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (eds.) 2011: Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Malden, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (Studies in Urban and Social Change).. Int J Urban Reg Res, 36: 1353-1355. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01216_2.x

Penny Harvey & Hannah Knox (2012) The Enchantments of Infrastructure, Mobilities, 7:4, 521-536, DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.718935

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria (2017) Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi, by D. Asher Ghertner, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40:4, 921-922, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1379226

Rand Merchant Bank (2019), Where to invest in Africa

Cirolia, L. R. (2013). (W)Escaping the Challenges of the City: a Critique of Cape Town’s

Proposed Satellite Town. Urban Forum, 25(3), 295–312. doi:10.1007/s12132-013-9212-2

Not in my Neighborhood. Documentary. Directed by Kurt Orderson, 2017.