Convenor(s)
Spire Amandine / Laboratoire CESSMA Université Paris Diderot
Morange Marianne / Laboratoire CESSMA Université Paris Diderot
This panel focuses on the analysis of urban experiences regarding their links with mobilizations for a more just spatial and social order, a form of “right to the city”. In Africa, the urban condition is characterized among other things by the modalities of economic insertion within informal activities, by the construction of local governments in the process of decentralization, by the weight of rural-urban mobility’s and the various anchorages linked, by the difficulty of intra-urban daily mobility and by the importance of subaltern identities without citizenship recognition. We consider that this urban condition informs us on how struggles start and how the demand for one’s rights is expressed in the frame of political action. Therefore, this panel aims at exploring the urban specificity of African mobilisation and resistances, not only because they take place inside the urban space, but mostly because they are the product of a specific urban condition. For example, how will this condition influence the feeling of legitimacy regarding a mobilisation, as well as the capacity to denounce injustice, the choice to make a struggle visible or invisible, by imposing it through daily practices? These issues will be explored by contributors based on empirical case studies, observed on various urban fields and analyzed on different scales (from the smaller plot to the urban area as a whole).
Droit à la ville, conditions et expériences citadines d’Afrique subsaharienne
Ce panel porte sur l’analyse des expériences citadines dans leurs liens aux mobilisations pour revendiquer un ordre social et spatial urbain plus juste, une forme de « droit à la ville ». Dans les contextes africains, la condition citadine est marquée notamment par les modes d’insertion dans les activités économiques dites informelles, la construction des gouvernements locaux dans les processus de décentralisation, la prégnance des mobilités alternantes et les ancrages multiples qui s’y construisent, la difficulté des mobilités quotidiennes, l’importance des identités subalternes sans reconnaissance de citoyenneté. On considère que cette condition citadine informe sur la manière dont se déclenchent des luttes et se formulent la revendication de droits dans des actions politiques. Il s’agit donc d’explorer la spécificité urbaine des mobilisations et des résistances africaines, non pas en tant qu’elles se déroulent seulement dans l’espace urbain, mais en tant qu’elles sont le produit d’une condition citadine spécifique. Comment cette condition influe-t-elle sur le sentiment de légitimité à se mobiliser, sur la capacité à dénoncer l’injustice, sur le choix de visibiliser une lutte ou de l’invisibiliser en l’imposant par la routine des pratiques quotidiennes ? Ces questions seront explorées par les contributeurs à travers des études de cas empiriques, prises sur des terrains urbains variés, considérés à plusieurs échelles (de la parcelle à l’ensemble de l’agglomération).
Rich Dorman Sara / School of Social and Political Science University of Edinburgh
We have not made anybody homeless’: Urban development, citizenship, and the Zimbabwean state
In May and June 2005, thousands of Zimbabweans were brutally displaced from urban areas. But ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ was not simply an unpredictable ‘tsunami,’ rather it reflected long-held prejudices and assumptions about city life and urban residents in Zimbabwe. The regulation and control of urban areas was an integral part of the construction of Zimbabwean citizenship because it created areas which were not homes, and political institutions upon which people could not make claims. To see Murambatsvina as simply a politically expedient move against ‘trouble-makers’ is to miss the deep resonance of the political rhetoric, and the ways it was embedded in the state. The clearances revealed a long-standing set of policies designed to regulate and control urban life, forming part of a broader crisis of the post-colonial developmental state, generated not just by the internalisation of the Rhodesian, modernist world-view, but its imbrication with the local understandings and political imperatives.
Leiria Viegas Silvia / Faculty of Archictecture, University of Lisbon
Luanda, (un-)Predictable City? governance and urban and housing transformation: paradigms of intervention and resistances in the new millennium
The research approaches the current production of housing space in Luanda, in a scenario of peace, autocratic and neo-liberal, in regards to the process of that space production administrated by government and social agent entities, in need, that are resistant to public intervention.
Following the scientific and structural thoughts of Lefebvre, Harvey, Castells, Foucault, Wallerstein and Sousa Santos, the investigation seeks to identify the motivation, tools, and socio-spatial impacts within these two differentiated modes of the production of habitable space.
The historical context of Luanda and its reflection on the actual promotion of public housing, including present-day tools and two paradigmatic examples of marketable promotion (city of Kilamba) and re-housing (project of Panguila), guide the contours of spatial production of the public sector.
The reflection on the resistance to politics and public housing practices, through the analysis of forced evictions (musseque Iraq-Bagdad), of militant resistance to the mentioned practices (association SOS Habitat) and resettlement and reallocation in distinct temporal contexts (neighborhoods 27 de Março and Alto do Liro, Lobito), looks to recognize the transformation of the habitable space by groups with limited resources.
The research concludes that, when the political decision-makers integrate the messages from the resistance, the impacts of the practices of housing and urban governance contribute to the “right to the city”.
Geuder Jacob / Centre for African Studies Basel
Portraying the Right to the City – Representations of urban protests in YouTube-Videos
Few months before May 1968 in Paris, Henri Lefebvre wrote his essay “The Right to the City”. Since then neo-liberal politics have tightened their grip on urban spaces and investments in urban assets have become spots for global financial speculations. Thus it comes at no surprise, that many of today’s political resistances are not only staged in urban environments such as Tahir or Taksim Square, but denounce the “Right to the City” as “cry and demand”. At the same time, since two decades technological innovations like Computers, Smartphones and the Internet exert profound impacts on urban spaces, on everyday-life as well as political forms of organization.
My research project “Images of Movements” sets in here: What does the increasing overlap of urban and digital spaces mean for struggles over the Right to the City? The claim is that audiovisual representations that are made public online, deeply influence today’s repertoires and organization of protests. YouTube as the biggest worldwide supplier of online videos plays a crucial role in the representation of protests. The paper will present the findings of a first step of analysis of this research project: How does YouTube function as a dispositif for the presentation of videos of protests that claim the Right to the City? By explaining the dispositif of YouTube it should be made clear, what after all may stay (in)visible and attention is being produced.
Fournet-Guérin Catherine / Université de Reims
The “Wake up Madagascar” Action Group: international media Action or claiming a Right to the City? On the Various Scales of collective Mobilisation
The “Wake up Madagascar” Action Group: international media Action or claiming a Right to the City? On the Various Scales of collective Mobilisation
Chauvin Maïlys / LAM-IEP-Bordeaux
Des citadinités empêchées aux citadinités de la reconquête en situation de retour d’exil à Zanzibar
Le tournant des indépendances en Afrique s’est fréquemment traduit par une rupture en terme de pratiques et d’accès à la ville pour les citadins d’Afrique dans le cadre de la mise en place de régime autoritaire. A Zanzibar, la révolution puis la mise en place de la République Populaire de Zanzibar et de la République Unie de Tanzanie se traduisent, en quelques années, par le surgissement d’une violence inédite privant les habitants de leurs vies citadines et la capitale de son rôle de pivot international. Assassinats et disparitions, viols, démolition et confiscation des logements, rationnements conduisent de nombreux citadins à s’enfuir à l’étranger. Aujourd’hui, on assiste au retour d’une partie des membres de la diaspora post-révolutionnnaire zanzibarie dont les routes, les rythmes et les objets invitent à interroger une dialectique encore peu traitée aujourd’hui, celle des citadinités empêchées mais en reconquête dans le cadre des retours d’exil. Cette proposition suggère d’élargir le débat sur le droit à la ville à l’analyse du rôle des nouvelles pratiques que ces citadins « absents » en cours de ré-appropriation des lieux développent aux côtés de ceux qui sont restés, dans la recomposition des pratiques, des mémoires et des discours citadins et nationalistes. Cette « (re)-prise » de la ville passerait par une ré-appropriation des lieux de sociabilités, par une remise en circulation des mémoires citadines de la violence contestant le paysage mémoriel institutionnalisé.