Mobility and the Governance of Urban Space in Southern, Central and Eastern African Cities (2008-2010; Institute of Research for Development; Chaire Croisée Programme; Loren Landau & Aurelia Segatti)

Within the next fifteen years, the majority of Africans will live in cities. The result of failing rural economies, global economic integration and international migration, the growth of the continent’s urban centres are generating new social configuration and patterns of power, authority and belonging. With decentralisation, local authorities will formally gain new resources and authority over urban spaces, potentially challenging the dominance of national governments in policymaking and regulation. But as they become formally empowered, globalisation and regional integration will insinuate them into supra-local processes, including human mobility, over which they may have little influence. Although urbanisation and urban politics attract considerable attention elsewhere in the world, Africanist urban scholarship tends to overlook migration and human mobility. When scholars do address such themes, they are typically through the lenses of demography, national policy, or human rights protection. This project addresses these gaps by exploring the politics of spatial redistribution of people and power in six African cities: Johannesburg, Cape Town, Maputo, Lubumbashi, Nairobi, and Kinshasa.

Building on previous work conducted by the Forced Migration Studies Programme and its partners, this two-year initiative includes three overlapping phases.

• Policy and Demographic Overview: Intended to reveal the spatial redistribution of populations and official responses to human mobility, the project begins with a review of existing demographic data and policy documents at national and subnational levels.
• Conceptualising migration and urban governance: Through interviews with local officials and using organisational sociology, the project will build on its demographic and policy review by revealing how local government officials understand and approach human mobility.
• Reconfiguration of Regulation and Power: Recognising the often significant disjunctures between policy and practice, this project’s third phase will identify actual existing processes of spatial regulation and governance using intensive observation and ethnographic techniques to study local bureaucracies and the development of contestation repertoires among policy recipients.

Project Partner:

• UMR Développement et societies (UR IRD 201), Paris, Programmes Migrations et territoires & Mobiltés, Politiques urbaines et développement

The project focuses on the following key issues:

• Local Policy Formation and Implementation; Policy Transfers
• Advocacy Coalition Frameworks and Networks: a Comparison of Migration and other Sectors of Public Intervention
• Claiming Rights: Organisation and Discourses
• Discourses of Exclusion: Comparative Analysis of Host Community Attitudes and Practice (could potentially focus on violence).
• Activating Entitlements and Exclusion: Local Government Policies on Migration and Immigration (SA or Regionally)
• Routes – Determining Routes and Expectation of Onward Movement – 3 City Comparison
• Globalisation and Urban African Diasporas – Patterns of Connections and Belonging among Study Cities