Harare: From a European Settler "Sunshine City" to a "Zhingzhong" African City

Fifteen years after Zimbabwe’s political independence and Black majority rule, Rakodi (1995) concluded that Harare, the capital city, remained quintessentially a settler colonial city. Then, Harare had not yet experienced the full impacts of ‘neo-liberalism’ as in Nairobi or the suburbanization of office and commercial development as in Johannesburg. In view of significant political economy transformations since the 1990s, this paper aims to provide a systematic interpretation of ongoing transitions that characterise the city. Informed by a systemic spatio-temporal and historical analysis it illustrates how ongoing post 1990s foundational restructuring of the economy centred on jambanja have transformed Harare from a settler colonial to a highly informalised ‘zhingzhong’ African city

Communal land rights as state sanction and social control: a narrative

This article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved

The Political Economy of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in southern and Eastern Africa: Overview, Settings and Research Agenda

This paper attempts to set parameters for a debate and research program on the political economy of urban and peri-urban agriculture in East and Southern Africa. It argues that the political economy issues at stake revolve not only around control and access to the land resource but also have to do with competing ideas about the city and the planning process. Control and ownership of this process as well as the outcome is a political process whose content affects the nature of urban and peri-urban agriculture in the region. The range of theoretical reflections on these issues are outlined together with current development concepts that could guide future research. Reflections are made on options to the institutional location and organisation of possible regional research

Frontiers of urban control: lawlessness on the city edge and forms of clientalist statecraft in Zimbabwe

This article develops the concept of ‘urban frontier’ to explore conflicts over state regularization of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of ‘lawless’ urban frontiers and ‘illegal’ territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa’s rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars’ tendency to neglect central party-state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare’s highly politicized city-edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularization provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one-size-fits-all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa’s expanding cities

Urban property ownership and the maintenance of communal land rights in Zimbabwe

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Introducing Factor Analysis In Geography: The Geography Of Zimbabwe's Elections

A GEM article on the use and misuse of quantitative techniques to non-mathematical Geography students.Three experiences as a geography student prompted the writing of this paper. The first was exposure to the general debate on the use and misuses of quantitative techniques within the discipline. The second was observing the frustration experienced by 'non-mathematical' geography students each time quantitative techniques were introduced into geographical work, when geography was seen by them as a qualitative subject. The third was the unfortunate observation that, when introducing new topics or techniques, lecturers use remote so called 'classical' examples at the expense of more exciting and relevant local examples. This paper is an attempt to contribute on all three fronts in an effort to show how quantitative techniques may be utilized in the local context and with relevance to geographical topics