On handling urban informality in southern Africa

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio-economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible

Youth in Urban governanace: Rationalities, Encounters and Interaction in Zimbabwe

No Abstract. Africa Insight Vol. 37 (3) 2007: pp. 326-34

In the service of tyranny: debating the role of planning in Zimbabwe's urban `clean-up' operation

The paper debates the role of planning in `Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order', Zimbabwe's 2005 controversial urban clean-up campaign. The discussion critically assesses two perspectives regarding the purported contribution and complicity of planning in what critics perceive to be the machinations of a regime that is internationally viewed as nefarious. This is done, first, by interrogating the role and contribution of planners and planning to the instigation and design of the operation before it was launched and, secondly, by determining the extent to which planners and planning served as the handmaiden of state repression during the operation. After weighing relevant empirical evidence on the culpability of planning, the discussion concludes that, while planning may escape the first charge, it certainly has a case to answer on the second

Slumming about: aesthetics, art and politics

Slums are categorised as having a deficit of infrastructure, income and adherence to norms and a surfeit of dirt, disease, violence and other pathologies. Slums are spaces of stigma, regardless of improvements to material or social conditions. This paper is concerned with how stigmatic representations of slums might be tackled. The paper considers how urbanists might understand the relationship between slums and aesthetics. Identifying different aesthetic registers, the paper argues that art projects can contest how aesthetics are constructed and how stigma may be challenged