Living the urban periphery: an introduction to the introduction

This book builds on the burgeoning interest in urban peripheries, suburbs and frontiers: the spaces in which much contemporary global population growth is being made. While the megacities of Asia and Latin America and their varied forms of spatial expansion have spawned a substantial literature, the literature on African urbanisms (particularly beyond the central city itself) is still nascent. Such areas are often viewed as a geographic extension of the dynamics of marginality, informality and unplanned urbanisation that characterise African cities in general. Where African urban peripheries are considered in their own right, the literature often focuses on specific challenges associated with urban sprawl and peri-urban development, such as transport, informal construction and infrastructure deficits, or traditional land systems and land use change. This book takes up the challenge of examining African urban peripheries holistically, not just as spaces on the city edge but as new socio-economic environments that give rise to distinct patterns and dilemmas of urban life.

We argue that these urban peripheries cannot adequately be understood from a bird’s-eye perspective that views them primarily as products of urban expansion; rather, they are formed by a number of distinct logics enacted by states, private developers, households and communities. Moreover, while these logics are identifiable in the way different urban peripheries are evolving, this is only half of the picture. Since the evolution of these places is often contingent and unpredictable, we also need to dig deep into the experience of life in the periphery to understand these urban formations and their implications. Living the urban periphery therefore employs a dual focus on logics of the periphery and experiences of the periphery, and how these intersect (and diverge) on the ground. It argues that this dual lens provides novel insights, illustrating how urban peripheries are spaces in which dynamism and stagnation can co-exist in ways that cannot be captured by dominant ideas about either surburbanism or marginality.

We explore these dynamics through the experiences of city-regions in two strategically selected countries – Ethiopia and South Africa – with supplementary material from Ghana. This gives the book substantial continental breadth, encompassing cases in East, Southern and West Africa respectively, as well as highly divergent precolonial, colonial and postcolonial experiences. Yet the decision to base this study primarily on South Africa and Ethiopia also reflects a deliberate choice to focus on countries where there have been particularly notable large-scale policy initiatives that have transformed urban peripheries, either deliberately (as in Ethiopia and in some South African cases) or largely as a side effect of efforts to overcome urban spatial legacies (as in post-apartheid South Africa). Rather than this making these two countries exceptional, we argue that substantial amounts of investment in urban peripheries – paired with significant neglect of others – represent the experience of many African cities writ large, or ahead of time. The state investment and private speculation on the urban fringe that these cases present therefore offer a lens on processes that are unfolding, albeit at varying paces, across the continent. Moreover, choosing these cases allows for exploration of urban peripheral dynamics beyond those that dominate the existing literature, which are centred on processes of incremental change, auto-construction and informality. These things exist in our cases, certainly; but we also emphasise the need to see peripheries as places of (sometimes massive) state investment, grandiose speculative endeavours as well as inherited governmental obligations. If urban peripheries are where African futures are being made, then such futures are unfolding particularly vividly and variously in Ethiopia and South Africa.

The book makes a number of key contributions. First, it provides a significant conceptual contribution, by tying together a body of literature focusing on urban peripheries (including that examining the peri-urban, frontiers, suburbanisms, etc.) and exploring the analytical value of these in relation to African cities. It offers a fresh conceptual framing of African peripheries in the form of five logics of the periphery which are used to structure and interpret much of the subsequent analysis.

Second, the book makes an important empirical contribution, by analysing and engaging with a substantive body of fresh empirical data and through the inclusion of authors researching African peripheries. As such, it helps to address the paucity of data and debate on peripheral spaces within African cities, given the more common focus on the central districts of large cities or the tendency to explore distinct urban processes, such as housing, informal development, transport or the politics of land. The book offers the reader understanding and knowledge of spaces, processes and experiences of urban peripheries at multiple scales (namely national, city-region, neighbourhood/settlement and house), and it uses a mix of visual, numerical and qualitative data to reveal key findings.

Third, the book offers an important example and exercise in urban comparison, both within city-regions and countries and between different countries. This intellectual and methodological approach advances wider calls (see Robinson, 2016, 2022) for comparative urbanism which supports ‘a more global urban analysis’, given that African contexts are still under-represented in comparative discussions. It is primarily focused on comparisons between Ethiopia and South Africa, and across cases within these contexts, but includes a contribution from a scholar working in Ghana. Comparison is facilitated by the conceptual framework and methodological approach detailed below and is used to contrast wider structural processes shaping urban peripheries as well as to note similarities and differences in residents’ experiences of these urban changes.

Fourth, the book illustrates the intellectual and methodological value of adopting an everyday lens to understand processes of urban transformation in African cities, relevant to cities globally. It makes a strong case for the benefits of privileging residents’ voices, understanding their perspectives and concerns, and using these to really interrogate wider narratives of urban change and illustrate how growth, investment, decline and infrastructural change actually translate on the ground. Through this methodological approach the book reveals how what appear to be concrete urban outcomes are experienced in highly diverse ways, as well as embodying deep tensions, contradictions and openness to change. This challenges conceptualisations and categorisations of places and practices which often seek fixed labels and interpretations, and we argue that a more fluid and textured analysis is required.

Finally, the book speaks to urban actors, policymakers, government officials, planners, community organisations and those working to shape urban transformation in city peripheries at multiple scales. It reveals how state and other interventions have unintended consequences, how legacies of historical policy choices play out decades after implementation and how policy disjunctures and contestations at local levels impact on residents, commonly the urban poor. The book details examples of successful or meaningful urban practices including governance arrangements, neighbourhood scale designs and micro-infrastructures which positively shape everyday life. It also points to the absence of policy or infrastructural interventions which could significantly alter residents’ lives for the better and examines the consequences of these absences for urban lives that increasingly play out in the periphery.

Locating the book: existing conceptualisations of urban peripheries

A growing literature has emerged to capture and explain urban transformations occurring on city edges. Propelled in part by studies showing the significance of urban expansion in urban spatial change (Angel et al., 2011, 2016) and their diversity, drivers and dynamics, new literatures on suburbanisation (Keil, 2018; Keil and Wu, 2022), peri-urbanisation (Follman, 2022; Follman et al., 2022), ‘peripheral urbanisation’ (Caldeira, 2017) and new cities (Van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018; Cote-Roy and Moser, 2019) have emerged to understand processes of change. Recent initiatives to reconceptualise and provide new vocabularies for ‘planetary urbanisation’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015) have also been generative in exploring forms of urban peripheral growth (Schmid et al., 2018; Howe, 2022; Sawyer et al., 2021).

Earlier conceptualisations of urban peripheries focused on their location on the edge, either in the classic form of the late-twentieth-century Euro-American suburb (e.g. Schnore, 1957; Fishman, 1989) or as places transitioning from rural to urban on the city’s ‘fringe’ (Pryor, 1968). While distant from economic cores, these spaces were often seen as providing developers with strategic opportunities to maximise profits (Henderson and Mitra, 1996). Processes of change might occur incrementally or through larger developments, enabled by the lower cost and availability of land. Hence the urban periphery was inevitably seen as a moving edge.

With regard to Africa and the Global South more generally, the broad concept of ‘peri-urbanisation’ has been important in exploring this urban-rural interface and the associated changes in land uses and livelihoods (Simon, 2020). Follman (2022) argues that the term ‘peri-urban’ has been used loosely and taken on different dimensions in Global North and Global South contexts, with the former exploring the mix of urban and rural uses and the latter emphasising unplanned, informal, illegal and incremental growth on the urban edge. Within the literature on peri-urbanisation, considerable attention has been given to the way tenurial systems shape these processes of urban spatial change, especially in African cities where customary forms of tenure are prevalent (Mbiba and Huchzermeyer, 2002). Ghana, where customary tenure reaches deep into cities, has been a particular focus (Gough and Yankson, 2000).

While earlier literature emphasised that these less regulated spaces provided cheaper housing for the urban poor, and urban access for rural migrants (Simon, 2004), more recent studies point to the growth of middle-class housing in urban peripheries (Mercer, 2017), including in some contexts on traditional authority lands (Bartels, 2019/20), patterns also evident in the South African context (Mbatha and Mchunu, 2016). Research on Ghana shows the intricate relationships between the state and traditional leaders in land development and how commodification of customary land is enabling large-scale property development there and leading to exclusion of those who might once have had usufructuary rights to land (Aakateba, 2019; Anane, 2021). In the face of these changes, authors are exploring more complex conceptualisations of peri-urbanisation, encapsulating a more diverse set of processes which often produce substantial precarity on the periphery even as they also enhance infrastructural connectivity (Kanai and Schindler, 2022).

As Follman (2022) argues in a review of the peri-urbanisation literature, existing conceptualisations of the peri-urban tend to focus on one of three vectors. The first involves territorial dimensions (such as distinct planning processes and boundary issues), the second functional ones (such as flows and interactions between rural and urban spheres) and the third transitional dimensions (such as the process of urban growth and the fluid/‘frontier’ nature of these places). In fact, Follman argues, it is difficult to distinguish the process of ‘peri-urbanisation’ from the process of urbanisation itself, people tending to adopt the former term when they want to focus on the specific spatial dynamics of places ‘beyond city limits’ and because they want to highlight some of the contingent and fluid ways in which urbanisation occurs in the Global South specifically (Follman, 2022).

When we move beyond the term ‘peri-urban’ to think about the ‘urban periphery’ more broadly, we are also confronted with a range of social, economic and political questions associated with peripheries and peripherality. These include the issue of social class. The growth of middle-class housing and major developments on the periphery present challenges to literature equating geographic peripherality with poverty and economic marginality. Mosiane and Gotz’s (2022) work on Gauteng further argues that places that might have been born out of displacement and marginalisation on the urban edge can nevertheless become spaces of ‘displaced urbanism’ with levels of entrepreneurial ‘bottom-up’ dynamism. A simple core–periphery binary is also questioned by Peberdy (2017) and Pieterse (2019) who note the deep poverty and social marginality in central cities within Gauteng and the complex multidirectional patterns of movement and living within the polycentric region. These critiques are important in avoiding simplistic assumptions about the spatial periphery, who lives there and why. Yet, given that geographically peripheral areas are so complex and often rapidly changing, we need to go further to understand the places themselves and the diverse lived experiences there.

Like Peberdy (2017), who draws on Wallerstein’s conception of periphery as social and political rather than spatial, Caldeira sees peripheral urbanisation as ‘a way of producing space’ (2017: 4), equating it with auto-construction that unfolds ‘transversally in relation to official logics, and amidst political contestations’. This can involve dynamism, entrepreneurialism and collective action, including on urban edges but not only there. Caldeira’s account is important in focusing on one of the significant processes through which urban areas grow and change, but it does not tell us specifically about processes on the spatial periphery and their multifaceted dynamics. As we argue in this book, notwithstanding the importance of social and political peripheralisation and how this affects the production of urban space, it is important not to lose sight of the specific dimensions of geographic peripherality within cities and city-regions, which have profound and concrete effects on the lives of people in the urban outskirts.

While several of these conceptions focus largely on incremental growth, literatures emanating initially from the USA in the 1990s pointed to the emergence of major new economic centralities on the urban edge (Garreau, 1991) and the growth of new forms of residential and mixed-use estates (including gated communities), much of it driven by the private sector or through public–private partnerships. These processes are also evident in the Global South, including in Africa and on customary land, and are increasingly documented in the peri-urbanisation literature as well, with attempts to expand the concept to include these processes. The ‘Global Suburbanisms’ project from 2009 set out to explore the many forms of non-central growth now emerging, expanding the concept of ‘suburban’ beyond its North American middle-class/mid-twentieth-century associations (Keil, 2018). A key focus has been the physical growth at scale of residential neighbourhoods across diverse urban localities worldwide, as well as the transformation of existing suburban space (Güney et al., 2019), emphasising differentiation among and within suburban spaces. Ren (2021) examines the growing body of global suburban studies and identifies through analyses of urban peripheral India, Latin America and China how infrastructure failure, transforming governance and popular resistance reveal a broadened politics of suburbs and facilitate a broadened, international and comparative approach to urban peripheries.

Taking an African focus, the review of Bloch et al. (2022: 306) for the Global Suburbanisms project¹ highlighted city peripheries as places ‘where the constant movement of urban frontiers is not merely extending the existing city but creating new configurations and spaces for different urbanisms’. This challenges the idea of an ever-expanding ‘edge’. They go on to emphasise that ‘older areas … reveal very rapid changes of people and buildings, and activities’, while at the same time ‘new centralities have emerged, since both peripheral expansion and redevelopments in older areas destabilised former centralities as they remade patterns of urban life and movement’. Bloch (2015) pointed to growth of the middle class and economic expansion underpinning new forms of urban development on the periphery – trends echoed by Mercer (2017, 2020). The relevance of ‘suburbanism’ in African contexts has been debated (Bloch et al., 2022). Andreasen et al. (2017) and Mercer (2017) embrace the term ‘suburb’ in the context of Dar es Salaam, arguing that it better describes households moving from the centre to the periphery to build housing incrementally than peri-urbanisation does. Writing about Lagos, Sawyer (2014), on the other hand, argues that suburb has little meaning for households on the periphery, where forms of ‘piecemeal urbanisation’ are occurring that bear little resemblance to the idea of the suburb. Karaman et al. (2020) argue that these and similar processes across the world are better described by the concept of ‘plotting urbanism’. The process of ‘plotting’ refers to the commodification and subdivision of land plots to create constantly adapting spatial arrangements rooted in territorial compromise and conflict. This is not exclusive to urban peripheries, but often dominates within them. By contrast, Buire (2014) finds that urban peripheries are providing new ‘orderly’ suburban lifestyles and homeownership in large, new, state-led apartment developments some twenty–thirty kilometres from Luanda. Across diverse forms of state-sponsored housing in Southern African urban peripheries, including in Maputo (Melo, 2017), Durban and Johannesburg (Charlton and Meth, 2017), there are complex resident experiences that reflect the ‘everyday realities’ of establishing lives in new edge localities (Lemanski et al., 2017). While these studies suggest that different forms of housing and lifestyles are emerging in urban peripheries, they are all associated with very long commutes exacerbated by poor infrastructure, suggesting that being spatially peripheral produces distinctive experiences of the urban.

Importantly, it is also now widely recognised that the geographic peripheries of cities are not necessarily places of gradual and piecemeal change but also sites of sometimes dramatic renewal and city ‘visioning’, including on the part of central and local states. Indeed, a key aspect of contemporary urban peripheries is the extent to which these areas are ‘outside exclusive state control but at the same time … reflect state developmental intention’ (Wu and Keil, 2022: n.p.). Recent literature points to the growth of ‘new cities’ (mainly satellites) in Africa (e.g. Van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018; Cote-Roy and Moser, 2019). Linked to ‘the assumption that African markets are poised for unprecedented growth’ (Cote-Roy and Moser, 2019: 2359), new cities are being promoted by both private developers in search of profitable real estate markets (Van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018) and entrepreneurial states seeking to attract investment by re-imaging their cities (Cote-Roy and Moser, 2019). In practice, most developments are large, upmarket, residential schemes, despite claims that they will be inclusionary and multifunctional (Cote-Roy and Moser, 2019). In contrast to previous ‘new town’ approaches, contemporary forms are more often residential (sometimes coupled with special economic zones (SEZs)), driven by private developers or through partnerships (Harrison and Todes, 2017). Even where ‘new cities’ are not a feature, ideas of ‘infrastructure-led development’ have become increasingly important to the logic of urban expansion and interconnection (Schindler and Kanai, 2021), often transforming previously peripheral locations directly or speculatively through ‘promises of connectivity’ (Kanai and Schindler, 2019).

While much discourse around new cities emphasises economic growth and modernisation, the history of satellites as places of failed growth, decline or economic instability needs to be noted (Kanai and Schindler, 2019). More generally, much of the literature on urban peripheries emphasises new growth, or the consolidation of rural or informal settlements that might have emerged incrementally. There is less work on the transformation of large existing housing estates and ‘townships’ on the urban edge, which emerged in the context of earlier histories (but see Lemanski et al., 2017; Güney et al., 2019). Previous urban edge development is important in South Africa, given apartheid histories, but not unique to it. The spatial inheritance of urban peripheries, and how this can relate to decline as well as growth, is thus significant. As Follman (2022) argues, along with attention to ‘the not-yet-urban’ (which is implied in peri-urbanisation discourses), we need also to consider places that might have long been urban, and even those that could be considered ‘not-urban-any more’.

Recent research on peri-urbanisation, suburbanism and urban peripheries has generated considerable debate and new conceptualisations of the extensive processes of change occurring. Researchers have proposed extending concepts of peripheralisation, with even the Global Suburbanisms project ultimately turning away from the idea of the suburb. In the case of China, for example, they argue that ‘the urban periphery, with its salient feature of heterogeneity, is becoming a more meaningful category’ (Wu and Keil, 2022: n.p.). In the project’s final edited collection, peripheral change is framed not as suburbanism but as ‘a form of planetary and extended urbanization … that is sensitive to historical temporality and geographical contingencies’ (Wu and Keil, 2022: 12). The ‘planetary urbanisation’ concept itself, and associated projects drawing on the Lefebvrian idea of ‘extended urbanisation’, generated diverse concepts to think about specific forms of urban transformation on the periphery. These range from the ‘plotting urbanism’ discussed above (Karaman et al., 2020) to ‘bypass urbanism’ (Sawyer et al., 2021), ‘toehold’ and ‘aspirational’ urbanisation (Howe, 2022) and more. This surge in literature on diverse urban peripheries around the world, and how they might be better described, demonstrates Wu and Keil’s point that we live in a world of ‘variegated forms of peripheral urbanization’ (Wu and Keil, 2022: 29), which are likely to continue to evolve, posing challenges for dominant understandings of urban form.

Our work contributes to this growing scholarship to inform grounded, contextualised understandings of peripheral urban change. We conceptualise urban peripheries in a way that is both spatial and deliberately broad: as geographical edges of cities or city-regions that may have their own internal centralities and margins, may be ‘new’, ‘old’, rich or poor and can have varied histories as rural or urban spaces – but crucially are perceived by residents as being in some sense remote and having limited accessibility to a primary ‘core’ or relevant urban hubs. This breadth allows us to unpack the varying logics that shape different kinds of periphery and to differentiate the overall concept from other associated concepts in the literature. Thus, the periphery can encompass spaces at much greater distances from traditional ‘cores’ than are associated with the term ‘suburb’, including places at the edge of city-regions beyond reasonable commuting distance, and sometimes infrastructurally disconnected from the urban core rather than contiguous. However, peripheries are not necessarily marginal in that they may themselves be economic hubs and spaces of new centralities (Mabin et al., 2013; Keil, 2018). Nor are they necessarily frontiers in the sense of being spaces imagined as previously vacant, in which the state seeks to establish new territorial authority and socio-spatial reordering (Simone, 2011; Rasmussen and Lund, 2017; McGregor and Chatiza, 2019). In short, an urban periphery may be a suburb, marginal or frontier space, but equally might be none of these – or all of them.

As this review of the literature has shown – and Keil and Wu (2022) have recently argued – most of the current and recent literature on urban peripheries focuses on questions of land, infrastructure and (to a lesser extent) governance. The latter issue is certainly an area for further exploration because of both the significant role of regions and regional administrations in governing large urban conurbations (Keil et al., 2016) and because of the often complex boundary issues associated with the spilling of metropolitan areas beyond municipal and city borders (Beall et al., 2015; Cirolia, 2020; Goodfellow and Mukwaya, 2021). As Horn (2022) notes with respect to La Paz, Bolivia, it is often not state absence that defines development in the urban periphery but the lack of clarity around boundaries and consequent ‘hyper-regulation’ by multiple scales of authority. But even aside from these formal governance challenges, it is often far from clear who the key actors are in governing urban peripheries, and when collaboration or collusion among these actors tips into conflict and contestation. The presence of state agendas in urban peripheries, alongside a significant absence of state authority in many cases, produces ‘intertwined modalities of governance’ (Wu and Keil, 2022) that require further analysis.

Our book contributes to unpacking these dimensions of the periphery, while also expanding on a dimension that is sidelined in much of the above literature: the everyday lived experience of living and working in African urban peripheries. We turn now to detail the methodologies informing our embrace of the everyday as a critical lens into African peripheries, before outlining our conceptual framework which structures much, but not all, of our analyses in subsequent chapters.

Our book’s methodology: using a lived experience comparative urban approach

A lived experience approach, where on-the-ground experiences of places and of urban change are centrally positioned within data collection, analysis and interpretation, underpins the entirety of this book. Indeed the conceptual framework of this text is derived from a foundational grounded analysis approach, where our varying logics emerged through an engagement with the stories and accounts of residents living in peripheral spaces of African cities. This intellectual and methodological appreciation of lived experiences has substantial traction within geography, urban studies and planning. Work in these disciplines is frequently inspired by urban anthropology (De Boeck and Plissart, 2004; Ross, 2010; Bank, 2011) and sociological studies (Mosoetsa, 2011) which observe how people work, live, move, consume, eat, sleep, parent (Meth, 2013), love and die in different places. In contrast, much research of the urban, especially studies informing meta-scale urban interventions, often establishes quantitative outcomes through a reliance on survey instruments. Elsewhere, we have argued against the paucity of understanding of the social outcomes and lived experiences of major infrastructural interventions, as well as more micro-scaled material transformations (see Charlton, 2018b; Goodfellow and Huang, 2021; Meth et al., 2022). These interventions are powerful drivers of change at the local scale and can include state-provided housing, investments in transport and the provision of sanitation facilities in informal settlements, among others. We’ve examined how state housing directly shapes livelihood challenges, capacities to move and travel, experiences of safety and identity, which themselves are structured by gendered differences impacting on relations of power, and violence (Meth and Charlton, 2016; Charlton and Meth, 2017). In this book we advance these insights into the lived experiences of key drivers of urban change through an explicitly grounded approach, resting on strong research collaboration, case study urban comparison and engagement with residents and other key urban actors. The book’s arguments draw on a methodological logic where differentiated everyday experiences of urban change are examined comparatively.

Lived experiences through case studies

All the chapters in this book draw on a case study approach to understand urban change and the lived experiences thereof in the African urban peripheries. Chapter 7 focuses on the city of Accra and draws on four distinct case studies, namely Oyibi, Abokobi, Achiaman and Oshiyie, using a qualitative methodology to examine peri-urban land markets and land transaction practices therein. Methodological detail and case descriptions are presented within the chapter (and see Figure 7.1 which shows their location within Greater Accra beyond the Accra Metropolis boundary). The cases reveal that landownership is predominantly customary but also includes religious institutions and individual families. All other chapters draw on data generated through the Living the Peripheries project, which adopted a comparative and multinodal case study approach. Seven case study areas across three city-regions (Addis Ababa, Gauteng and eThekwini) were selected, containing distinct nodes. Each node was characterised differently but commonly included varied housing forms, revealing different classes of residents with diverse histories of urban presence and experience. See Table 0.1 for a summary of all the cases.

Although the Living the Peripheries project eschewed strictly uniform criteria for case selection, location within a geographic periphery, where some form of investment (broadly defined) had occurred, was a key criterion. Case selection included areas of decline, including those of historic investment and current collapse. The seven cases are not necessarily comparable in terms of the geographic areas they cover, their population numbers, etc.; rather, they are variously multinodal, capturing a diversity of lives on the periphery.

Diversity of everyday life is not unique to urban peripheries, and neither is the variety of urban change evident therein. However, what is specific to urban peripheries is that these trajectories of growth, decline and mixed settlement are accompanied by geographic distance from urban cores, presenting challenges and also opportunities commonly associated with poorly serviced land which is cheaper and less dense. This chapter, and indeed the entire book, asserts the benefits of analysing urban change at the scale of the periphery through a lived experience perspective, and it is to these particular urban scales and cases that the chapter now turns.

Five cases in total were located within urban South Africa. In Gauteng province three distinct cases (see Figure 0.1) were examined. The Lufhereng/Protea Glen/Waterworks case consists of three different settlements located to the west of Soweto, Johannesburg, on and just beyond the municipal boundary. Lufhereng is a state-subsidised ‘mega-human settlement’ of mixed-income (including ‘RDP’)² housing located on formerly agricultural land. It was planned for around 20,000 households, and initial phases primarily accommodated beneficiaries from nearby informal settlements. Protea Glen is a lower- to middle-income private sector development with a shopping mall, and Waterworks was an informal settlement marked for relocation to the neighbouring municipality (at the time of the research) and then subsequently demolished. Despite reflecting state and private sector investment, this periphery is distant from the priority growth areas of the municipality, and plans to develop here surfaced city versus provincial governance tensions and competing planning visions (see Charlton, 2017, and Chapter 2).

Ekangala/Rethabiseng/Dark City forms the second Gauteng case, located near the eastern boundary of Tshwane municipality and the town of Bronkhorstspruit. These settlements are a direct product of the apartheid plan to achieve ‘white only’ urban settlements elsewhere, serving as relocation sites for black people moved into what were then remote locations. The case study site incorporates Ekandustria, established through associated apartheid industrial decentralisation policies (see Chapters 1 and 2), which despite declining remains an economically significant industrial park. Established and more recent RDP properties are abundant in this case alongside private housing forms, and it includes the informal settlement of Phumekaya.

Winterveld is the third Gauteng case, predominantly located in northern Tshwane although also crossing a boundary into the north-west province. This is a sprawling and often poorly serviced site, again a function of apartheid homeland (or Bantustan) policies of forced relocation which produced displaced urbanisation, targeting and peopling peripheral locations. This case includes Checkers, which is a sparsely populated area in the north, and the Madibeng Hills informal settlement located just over the provincial border. A key feature of this case study is the dominance of larger plots, many of which have been illegally subdivided. RDP housing again dominates, alongside informal properties.

Figure 0.1Gauteng case studies (source: copyright with the authors)

Two further cases were located in eThekwini municipality, South Africa (formerly Durban; see Figure 0.2). The northern eThekwini case is located just south of the King Shaka airport and close to the city’s growing economic node of Umhlanga/Gateway. This particular case illustrates the idea of relative geographic peripherality owing to its proximate positioning, while the friction of distance persists. The multinodal case includes Hammonds Farm, a recent two-storey RDP housing settlement built on former farmland; the consolidated state housing area of Waterloo; the informal settlements of Canelands/Coniston; and parts of the older commercial and service centre of Verulam. The areas of Molweni and Crestholme form the second eThekwini case. These are located far to the west of the city-region. Peri-urban Molweni dominates the case study in population numbers and scale and includes a mixture of traditional authority land with traditionally constructed houses, frequently on larger plots enabled by tenurial arrangements, as well as some RDP housing and rental row housing. Crestholme is nearby: this wealthy settlement consists of private and gated properties on substantial plots afforded by relatively lower land prices targeting upper and middle classes. The area contains a recently built shopping mall, also the focus of looting in 2021 (see Chapter 11).

Figure 0.2eThekwini case studies (source: copyright with the authors)

Two multinodal cases were selected in the city-region of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (see Figure 0.3). Yeka Abado/Legetafo is located in the north-east of the city. It straddles the federal border with Oromia and is predominantly characterised by a substantial new settlement of state-subsidised condominium housing. Around 18,000 housing units are located on former farmland. Unlike the RDP housing units in South Africa, these condominiums are not distributed for free, despite subsidies. Their financial arrangements relate to their distinct housing typologies: the majority are ‘20/80’ condos (where a 20 per cent deposit is needed, with the remaining 80 per cent taken as a bank loan), while the remainder are ‘10/90’ condos (with only a 10 per cent deposit needed), which are much smaller units targeting low-income and displaced households (see UN-Habitat, 2011; Ejigu, 2012; Planel and Bridonneau, 2017; Kassahun and Bishu, 2018). The case study area includes some informal housing areas, displaced farmer settlements and very wealthy, upmarket gated communities – including the substantial CCD Homes estate which is located in the neighbouring Legetafo area to the east of the city border.

Tulu Dimtu is the second Addis Ababa case and is located in the south-east of the city. The area also straddles the border with Oromia. Tulu Dimtu encompasses a substantial area of new condominium houses (10,000 units, all of which are the 20/80 type) again built on former farmland. The condo development is bifurcated by a major arterial road. The case includes informal housing and an expansive area of cooperative housing: multistorey, multi-household units developed by residents collaboratively in small groups through a government-sponsored scheme. Although not part of the case, various industrial parks, including a significant Chinese-owned establishment close to the town of Duken, lie just beyond the municipal border. These are within relatively easy reach of Tulu Dimtu, although this case represents significant geographic isolation from the centre of Addis more generally (see Chapter 9).

Figure 0.3Addis Ababa case studies (source: copyright with the authors)

Methods of data collection and urban comparison

All the cases discussed in this book drew on a mixed-methods approach dominated by the collection of qualitative data in order to undergird an understanding of the lived experiences of urban change in African peripheries. In the four cases within Accra (discussed in detail in Chapter 7), interviews with various actors (e.g. land sellers and house builders) and observations (including of court hearings) were employed to discern the proliferation of actors in the rapidly changing land market and their experiences thereof. Within South Africa and Ethiopia, data collection included initial stakeholder and community workshops to support case study selection and topic focus. These were followed by soliciting around fifty diaries from residents in each case (achieving about 350 in total). Residents were invited to write over a two-week period about their everyday lives in their peripheral settlement, including offering observations on changes or challenges they’d witnessed or experienced over time. A smaller number of residents provided photographs to illustrate issues shared in their diaries, with a few even submitting videos. The research team used these materials to structure subsequent interviews with all participating residents to deepen our understanding of their lived experiences. Interviews were conducted in the local language and translated into English transcripts. As was the case in Accra, Ghana, in both South Africa and Ethiopia, key stakeholders were interviewed, including developers, community leaders, political leaders and planners, to enhance analyses of urban change in the peripheries. Note that quotations from these diaries and interviews used later in the book are all rendered verbatim. Quotes are frequently translations, and we have sought to maintain the integrity of how data was received from research assistants by not tidying up the phrasing significantly.

In the South African and Ethiopian cases, qualitative findings were supported by surveys generating quantitative data. Two hundred surveys were carried out with residents in each case study area, capturing the varying nodes of each case, producing 1,400 surveys in total. Surveys explored residents’ movement histories and household composition, employment, quality of housing and services. Our wider analyses were also informed by available statistics and maps, and visual insights through professionally produced images of all the cases by Mark Lewis, a Johannesburg-based photographer.

Our practices of comparison were dynamic and iterative. The book’s comparative approach was informed by Robinson’s (2016) tactics of ‘genetic’ and conceptually ‘generative’ comparison. Our genetic tactics were alert to ‘the strongly interconnected genesis of often repeated urban phenomena’ (Robinson, 2016: 6) and examined interconnected but differentiated (2016: 18) historical processes, drivers of change and everyday experiences within and across our cases. Alongside this, we employed conceptually generative tactics, namely the choice of ‘cases with shared features to generate and revise concepts’ (2016: 6), to bring the specificities of cases with their similarities and differences into conversation. These generative tactics were marshalled explicitly to facilitate conceptual innovation.

Opportunities for genetic and ‘generative comparison’ of all the material analysed within this book were achieved through engaged and collaborative scholarship. Dr Asafo’s work on Ghana was an integral component to the overarching Living the Peripheries project, offering a critical intra-African point of comparison. Ghanaian trends, particularly in relation to landownership and state interventions, were read alongside events in South Africa and Ethiopia through multiple conference presentations, seminars and doctoral exchanges with researchers from the University of Sheffield and Wits University. At the same time, the South African and Ethiopian findings themselves were compared and conceptualised through numerous project team meetings where data and findings were interrogated, multiple joint presentations delivered and writing tasks (Meth et al., 2021b) and targeted stakeholder engagement events completed. The work was further enriched through two exhibitions of photographs commissioned to support our study. These all served to ‘provoke and enrich’ (Robinson, 2016: 18) our analyses and to underscore the comparative insights, which were frequently visually arresting in their contrasts. These multiple collaborative practices facilitated ongoing comparative discussions on the epistemologies of the peripheries, informing our strategies for interpreting disparities between our quantitative and qualitative data, our disciplinary positions shaping data interpretation and navigating the subtle differences between written and orally narrated accounts of living the peripheries. It was through all these collaborative moments that multiscalar comparisons and divergences were identified, where analytical trends were contested, thrown out, revised and negotiated, where theoretical interconnections were advanced and where we co-produced the conceptual framework detailed subsequently, which informs the wider analyses of this book (see Figure 0.4, one such collaborative moment where our ‘conceptual breakthrough’ occurred).

Figure 0.4Living the Peripheries team working at Mangwa, South Africa (source: Paula Meth, 2018)

The urban periphery as a spatial phenomenon: one concept, five logics

In our discussion of existing conceptualisations of African peripheries above, this book explicitly embeds our understanding of peripheries in terms of geographic particularities understood in part through the lived experiences thereof. We recognise that ‘being peripheral’ is subjectively experienced and determined, and not necessarily tied to spatial coordinates. However, this book specifically examines the geographic fringes of cities, while not pre-conceiving these spaces as necessarily politically, economically or culturally peripheral within the wider city-region. We recognise that these fringe spaces include key sites of power, wealth and prestige. Emphasising the geographic qualities of urban peripheries invariably means emphasising distance. The cases discussed in this book, including in Accra, are largely located on the urban edges of cities or city-regions, and accessibility, visibility (particularly by the state) and mobility are central concerns in all areas. However, although all of the cases are distant in commuting terms from a primary urban core, we understand their ‘location’ in relative terms, taking into account other urban hubs, ‘new centralities’ and actual and desired destinations, as well as what these distances mean in terms of lived experience. We see these geographic elements of urban peripherality as producing particular urban expressions, and we consciously note the implications of these geographies throughout the book. These speak to our wider claim regarding the empirical and theoretical value of studying urban peripheries, as processes and lived experiences are intimately shaped by the geography of peripheral living. Urban peripheries are therefore relational spaces. This is not just about how people perceive their relationship to ‘the city’; there are relational qualities evident at multiple scales. Even within one peripheral area, strongly contrasting neighbourhoods or settlements exist (e.g. wealthy gated estates versus impoverished informal housing) which draw their identities in contradistinction with one another. Moreover, differentiation and relationality also occur between streets and individual plots with varying access to transportation and services, or histories of landownership (evidenced so clearly in the analysis of Accra), which prove to be important axes of inequality.

This book employs our conceptualisation of urban peripheries outlined in Meth et al. (2021a) (detailed below) which explicitly builds from the spatial, but together with conceptualising peripheral areas of cities also seeks to incorporate and understand urban processes and practices and urban experiences of different parts of the city. We briefly outline our intellectual journey informing our conceptualisation of urban peripheries, but before doing so we note that this conceptualisation is not the only conceptual ‘show on the road’ employed in our book. Given the breadth and complexity of this book, with examinations ranging from histories of planning and urban investment to governance, land, housing, transport, conflict, social relations, retail and urban infrastructure, it invariably draws on a wider scholarship informing the lived experiences of urban change in African peripheries. We have taken the choice to detail these wider conceptual debates in particular chapters rather than summarise them here or draw any out for particular distinction. Suffice to say, as we outline our journey towards our dominant conceptual framework now, we acknowledge the significance of multiple other concepts which have proved productive in our interpretation and analysis.

Through collaborative and generative comparison, we mapped out common features across all peripheries (i.e. what makes the urban periphery relevant and meaningful as a generic concept) as well as the factors which differentiate peripheral spaces from each other (see Meth et al., 2021a). These commonalities and differentiating features of urban peripheries are summarised in Table 0.2. This practice facilitated sense-making of the paradox of peripheries being so diverse and yet still a coherent and distinct spatial category for analysis. Some of the individual features identified as common are obviously present in other urban (or rural) areas that we might not consider urban peripheries, but together they are constitutive of urban peripheries. Meanwhile, the binary opposites we identify (some of which co-exist in the same spaces) illustrate the spectrum of variation within and between urban peripheries.

Drawing on our data and analyses, we then identified five ‘logics’, which each refer to specific sets of practices, processes and experiences associated with urban peripheral spaces. The logics are not all-encompassing or absolute; neither are they hierarchical or exclusive. Instead, they operate in hybrid and overlapping ways: any one case study area may have one or more logics applied to it. These logics operate as interpretive tools for making sense of urban periphery experiences and processes of change. The logics can be thought of as corresponding to ‘quintessential types’ of urban periphery, none of which exist in pure form anywhere, but which serve as useful heuristics for interrogating the dynamics of changing spaces at the urban fringe. Temporality is a key element of these logics, as our conceptualisation attends to change over time and offers ways of making sense of changes to urban space.

We conceptualise our five logics as follows: i) the speculative periphery; ii) the vanguard periphery; iii) the auto-constructed periphery; iv) the transitioning periphery; and v) the inherited periphery. We now discuss each of these in turn.

The speculative periphery

This logic describes processes of speculation adopted by urban actors in relation to peripheral areas (including homeowners) and speaks to the more general trend of ‘speculative urbanism’, which is manifesting in particularly stark ways in parts of Africa and Asia (Goldman, 2011; Goodfellow, 2017a, 2022; Gillespie, 2020). Investment is multiscalar and commonly undertaken by customary landowners, private developers or small or large institutions (such as estate agents, as is evident in Accra), sometimes in partnership with the state as co-developer (and/or significant funder of underlying infrastructure). A critical point is that the range of actors engaging in speculation is diverse and diversifying. As argued in Chapter 8 in relation to Accra, new groups of actors, including landguards, estate agents and various associations, have joined customary leaders and landowning families in practices generating profit from peripherally located land. Speculation and investment can also occur in a more abstract manner through urban planning policy and visions for urban change. Commonly, the purpose of these practices is profit generation through investment into land purchasing or leasing, and building construction or acting as intermediaries to prepare land (e.g. resolving its ownership and tenurial claims) to enhance its profitability, as in Accra. The outcomes in built form vary significantly and may include the division of plots of land, incrementally constructed individual houses which may include on-site rental properties, small or substantial housing estates, commercial properties, light or heavy industry, agribusiness, retail facilities (particularly shopping malls) as well as multiuse developments and new cities. Investors originate from diverse contexts – local, national and international.

The logic of speculation in urban peripheries bears witness to the common perception of the availability of relatively cheap land in large parcels and the idea that access to such land might be quicker (or gained through clan connection or social networks) and less obstructed by planning, NIMBYism or historical ownership claims. Or, as is the case in Accra, although ownership is frequently contested, the presence of often aggressive landguards serves to facilitate speculation through multiple land sales. The varied use of farmland for urban expansion across multiple cases evidences at times both the profit-seeking practices of powerful large-scale farm owners alongside the weakness of poorer farmers to contest land expropriation, and also the pressure on customary landowners to release land to alleviate housing shortages but also generate profit. Equally important is the expectation that demand will grow in these areas and therefore land will increase in value, often radically, as seen in the Greater Accra region. This can be heightened by related processes of urban expansion or nearby planned or actual developments (Shatkin, 2016). Whether such increases actually materialise is variable and uncertain. Being situated on or adjacent to administrative boundaries can contribute to these benefits, facilitating different regimes of municipal taxation and planning. Land on the periphery may fall beyond municipalities’ planning visions or just over the boundary with adjacent municipal authorities who have different plans or more limited capacities, potentially rendering them more open to investor-controlled development, such was the case historically in northern eThekwini (Todes, 2014a). Boundaries may produce opportunities for profit as relative access to the urban core alongside differential planning controls can prove attractive, as with our Legetafo case of high-end luxury housing across the border of north-eastern Addis. Indeed, the speculative periphery may also be associated with different governance regimes, where large developments, including gated estates and new cities, are managed and regulated wholly or partially outside of (weak) municipal systems (Van Noorlos and Kloosterboer, 2018). While land speculation is clearly a pervasive feature of urban development across the world, it is these specific dynamics of land pricing, anticipated demand, boundary effects and overlapping governance regimes that give the speculative periphery a distinct logic.

The speculative periphery also references changes in urban power relations, as investments generate power for institutions (such as developer conglomerates or partnerships) and often cement power for particular governance structures (e.g. municipalities, national government) through the promise of tax revenue and onward investment chains. Yet speculative practices can also undermine the capacities of weaker governance structures who wish to manage urban change according to shared principles (e.g. sustainability or inclusive planning) or whose institutional capacity to deliver basic services such as water can be weakened by speculative landowners. Bureaucratic institutions may lack the capacity to challenge both investors and politicians around speculative intentions and decisions. For example, the economic development of northern eThekwini occurred following national, provincial and private sector pressure, despite significant limitations in its sanitation infrastructure and its defiance of the municipality’s plans for containing city growth (Sim et al., 2016).

The logic of the speculative periphery is also evidenced through small-scale speculative practices, including those managed by individuals or small organisations who target peripheries for their profit-making potential or whose presence within the peripheries places them in prime positions for speculation or profit generation. These varied actions can be both problematic and productive for residents living in these spaces and for residents urgently trying to find affordable housing within cities, particularly where weak political control by the state (at varying scales) renders certain areas more prone to predatory speculative initiatives. In this book we document various examples of such activities. In Accra the practices of landguards working to secure income through controlling or illegally selling parcels of land, or via offering protection of contested land, reveal how violence and intimidation are employed to achieve these ends. Their actions can benefit potential land buyers, or existing house builders, but the rise in multiple land sales and contestation over ownership suggests these speculative practices are deeply unsettling for urban periphery dwellers. Within South Africa, in both Winterveld and Ekangala there is evidence of local ‘big men’ who control whole areas and provide housing and access to electricity. This offers a significant service and resource to residents unable to access formal housing, or who live off the national grid, but is accompanied by complex power relations which shape a climate of fear and dependence. These kinds of practices can also contribute to dynamic urban change as the provision of informal housing and electrification can transform a barren uninhabited space into a relatively dense settlement. Similarly, we discuss in this book evidence of small-scale speculation occurring through the sale or rental of government-provided housing in both South Africa and Ethiopia. In Lufhereng, Johannesburg, for example, adverts in the secondary market of state-subsidised housing emphasised rental possibilities. Meanwhile, in the peripheries of Addis Ababa an extremely vibrant market in (often illegal) resale of condominium housing units is a key site of speculation, particularly with the periodic announcement of new condominium projects shaking up the housing market. Despite the benefits that some actors reap from speculation in the peripheries, these benefits are highly selective: those lacking the skills to work in new enterprises or resources to hold on to or acquire land or housing often find themselves on the sharp end of speculation-driven change.

The vanguard periphery

The vanguard periphery is a logic in which major investments led or facilitated by the state – often in the form of mass housing, infrastructure, a large-scale industrial or commercial venture or some other flagship investment – are undertaken by way of stimulating the broader development of an urban periphery. These may not in themselves be profit-making or directly motivated by economic gain, sometimes instead constituting political projects to gain support among key urban groups or project a particular image on the national, regional or global stage. Both apartheid and post-apartheid housing projects on the urban periphery might be seen in this way. However, vanguard investments often pave the way for the logic of the speculative periphery described above, such as the continued expansion of private housing developments in Protea Glen (Butcher, 2016). As Shatkin (2016) notes with respect to Asian megacities, the state often makes strategic investments in peri-urban infrastructure to stimulate the monetisation of land. In other cases vanguard projects on the periphery are smaller and more experimental in nature, effectively using the periphery as a testing ground for new ideas and practices. In yet others vanguard investments can follow speculative practices that have demonstrated the value or significance of a particular area or site. The intertwining of vanguard, speculative and other logics can therefore happen in a variety of ways.

Included in this categorisation are practices of urban policy experimentation which may reflect multiscalar or national state ambition or commitment. These may be bound up with election promises or constitutional obligations. In our study, examples include new forms of state housing, particularly those that experimented with mixed, integrated forms of housing and design, such as Lufhereng in Johannesburg. In this case new low-income housing designs were implemented in close proximity to middle-income dwellings in order to produce a more textured neighbourhood as well as overcome the monotony associated with previous state housing developments. In Addis Ababa the construction of differently financed (and hence differently sized and designed) condominiums on the periphery aims to provide a varied housing offer to the city’s residents, but also to perform a vanguard function by stimulating new private developments in the surrounding area and new urban economic hubs.

These substantial investments by the state are assumed to be generative in that their purpose is to attract and produce new developments in time: for example, new housing estates will draw in small businesses and services. Temporality and the fulfilment of a future vision is a key aspect of their existence (Meth et al., 2022). In Lufhereng, planning and delivery of state housing was accompanied by investment into infrastructure to underpin housing for purchase by lower-middle-income residents: together, these diverse dwelling types and income groups would help stimulate new local production of goods such as steel windows and cupboards, the accompanying economic plan assumed (Charlton, 2017). In Addis Ababa the design of condominiums with around 10 per cent of ground floor space designated for retail meant that businesses were quite quickly attracted to these new sites of high-density residence. Moreover, in Tulu Dimtu particularly, condominiums have been sited deliberately far from the urbanised part of the city (with open farmland in between) but strategically close to emerging industrial corridors. The intention is that the space between city and periphery will be ‘filled in’ over time in response to this vanguard investment (Goodfellow et al., 2018).

The vanguard periphery, like all our categorisations, must not be viewed in isolation or as a bounded spatial intervention. Rather, it constitutes a logic that reflects, facilitates or responds to concurrent urban changes occurring elsewhere in the city, such as inner-city regeneration, gentrification or land use change. In Addis Ababa, condominiums on the city edge are a response to efforts to ‘renew’ central Addis Ababa and formalise the city more generally (Abebe and Hasselberg, 2015; Haddis, 2019) and are thus linked to displacement and relocation. Tied to this are efforts to densify the city and to maximise and capture land value. Meanwhile, Hammonds Farm in eThekwini is a significant state investment carried out partly in response to the demands of a private landowner to the north of the city, whose land (Ocean Drive Inn) was illegally occupied by informal residents for many years. Her desire to develop her land in view of other recent investments nearby meant that the state was obliged to step in and rehouse residents on former farmland designated for residential development.

As with the selective benefits of speculative development, vanguard investments similarly benefit particular individuals and not others, or have contradictory impacts. Residents in Tulu Dimtu suffer a lack of transport provision, with overcrowded and slow services the norm. This directly affects their daily routines and capacity to engage in trading or work, attend school or access services (Belihu et al., 2018; Meth et al., 2022). In Hammonds Farm, very few residents own cars and depend on informal taxis to access work and services. Despite being reasonably well located in relation to the newish northern economic hub of Umhlanga/Gateway, residents feel spatially isolated, particularly from employment opportunities (Meth and Buthelezi, 2017; Houghton, 2018). Long-running tensions between taxi and bus companies make travel costly. In this case wider infrastructural provision has failed to meet the significant housing provision.

Vanguard practices may also include those with explicit political intent tied to opportunities associated with borders or boundaries, or to disputes over territory or governance. In contrast to the speculative logic identified above, in these cases the primary motivation may be political (e.g. to control land, access voters, establish power bases and political allies, reduce power blocs or overcome conflict) rather than simply as a profit-generating operation (Kinfu et al., 2019; McGregor and Chatiza, 2019). Some of the investments in condominiums in Addis Ababa may be viewed in this way in the context of the government’s desire to regain urban support after losing almost all parliamentary seats in the capital after 2005 (Di Nunzio, 2014; Planel and Bridonneau, 2017). However, the approach to vanguard investments in the periphery of Addis Ababa has changed in recent years. Following the attempt to implement the Addis Ababa and Surrounding Oromia Special Zone Integrated Master Plan in 2014, major social unrest erupted in Oromia, ultimately contributing to the regime change in 2018 (Mohamed et al., 2020) and fostering a much more cautious approach to the periphery.

Sometimes vanguard investments clash with other state logics (e.g. between spheres or tiers of government), and vanguardism may evidence contestation, competing policies or disagreements relating to spatial strategy. The Lufhereng example illustrates this tension in multiple ways: the development of this site was contrary to the City planners’ view of it as ‘outside’ of the desirable and developable city edge, but the City fell in line with the province to support the project, with housing delivery and other imperatives overruling locally derived planning principles (Charlton, 2017). Furthermore, Lufhereng’s peripheral location means that it is problematic for poor people who live marginalised lives, unable to easily access services and employment (Williams et al., 2021). Thus, residents’ experiences of vanguard peripheries may be as relatively isolated, slow-to-consolidate places lacking facilities, jobs or other economic opportunity, in contrast to the grand ambitions behind them. In South Africa these kinds of spatial practices are possible in part because welfare payments and social support enable people to try to survive there.

The auto-constructed periphery

This third logic partly draws on Caldeira’s (2017) conceptualisation, identifying the significant role of unauthorised development in shaping the spatial form and lived experiences of many peripheries. It also bears resemblance to the concept of Schmid et al. of ‘popular urbanisation’, which describes ‘the material transformation of the urban territory with strong participation of the inhabitants’ (2018: 35). This logic involves informal efforts to produce and occupy space, largely (but not exclusively) enacted by the urban poor, many of whom are migrants from other countries, cities, neighbourhoods or rural hinterlands who are seeking to secure an urban footing. This logic is also productive for understanding some of the ways in which land and affordable housing is secured and incrementally constructed by individual house builders in urban peripheries, including those occupied by the working poor or the middle classes. The acquisition of this land outside of the formal planning channels underscores its ‘auto-constructed’ nature. The auto-constructed periphery incorporates multiple forms of accessing water, electricity or power, alongside the construction of innovative forms of housing, and structures for retail.

Again, these built forms can occur in central areas as well as peripheries, as evident in many cities and as Caldeira’s conceptualisation demonstrates. However, the combination of auto-construction and peripheral location poses distinct challenges for accessing work, services and broader urban life. This book examines (to varying extents) some of the distinctive challenges of living in these auto-constructed peripheries (in Ethiopia, South Africa and Ghana) compared with other built forms. The combination of distance from an urban metropolis, extreme poverty and very poor access to infrastructure and services worked to produce highly precarious lives. Within South Africa the case of the Canelands/Coniston informal settlements in northern eThekwini illustrate efforts by urban residents to set up home in spaces that are relatively well located adjacent to an industrial park but which lack individual piped water, electrification or formal housing. The site has unsurfaced tracks and is built among dense vegetation. This auto-constructed periphery is critical in providing a relatively low-cost option to residents to potentially gain an income from being located ‘near’ to the city and to survive on meagre wages by walking to avoid transport costs (Houghton and Todes, 2019). Within Accra the self-building of houses on the urban periphery speaks to the exceptional demand for affordable housing. Yet financial limitations and the drain of resources through landguardism often mean housing is constructed very slowly or is built in compromised form (Asafo, 2022). Owners also struggle with poor access to employment opportunities and limited or absent infrastructure.

Noted already in relation to incremental housing construction, the auto-constructed periphery can have particular temporalities associated with its spaces and practices. For some these can be experienced as spaces of temporariness, particularly where there are threats of eviction or change owing to external pressures on the land or the enforcement of particular planning policies. In Waterworks (near Lufhereng) in Johannesburg, residents have been rehoused elsewhere to make way for private sector investment, despite long years of occupation. In many parts of the Addis periphery including our case of Yeka Abado, the character of auto-constructed settlements has transformed as they have had to incorporate (or found themselves adjacent to) settlements of farmers displaced from the land on which the condominiums were built (Belihu et al., 2018). Temporalities also vary in relation to the time it takes for informal spaces to receive services or to be granted legal title. In Winterveld in northern Gauteng, some residents experienced significant delays in accessing any form of security (services/titles) over decades.

More positively, auto-constructed spaces can also represent hope, opportunity and possibility, with residents expressing expectations for future investment, and can include more middle-income forms of housing. Auto-constructed spaces can be central to reducing pressure on housing affordability in rapidly expanding urban spaces. Clearly, the logic of auto-construction incorporates wealthier forms of investment (overlapping our speculative logic detailed earlier) which may ignore planning conventions, environmental concerns or building bylaws. Finally, this logic also points to forms of opportunistic governance by ‘strongmen’ who use the informal allocation of land and services to build power, as noted above in relation to Winterveld and Ekangala.

The transitioning periphery

Our fourth logic is that of the ‘transitioning periphery’, used to capture more incremental consolidation and change. Key here is change in land use or evidence of parallel land uses and socio-spatial arrangements from rural and agricultural to, or alongside, more urban uses, including formal residential, institutional or retail. Transitioning areas commonly have long histories of settlement (for varied reasons), and ensuing changes may also speak to processes of formalisation, or indeed those of decline and loss. In several African contexts the establishment of middle-class houses alongside significant densification on land previously or still managed by traditional or customary authorities is an important process (Asafo, 2020; Bartels, 2019/20; Mbatha and Mchunu, 2016; Sim et al., 2018), including in all of the Ghanaian Accra cases, and Molweni in eThekwini, South Africa, discussed in this book.

Transitioning peripheries often involve the co-existence of multiple systems of landownership and regulation, echoing the concept of Karaman et al. of ‘plotting urbanism’, in which the allocation and changing use of land proceeds through incremental land commodification in contexts characterised by ‘overlapping modes of territorial regulation, land tenure and property rights’ (2020: 1122), with the four case studies in Greater Accra a classic example. The transitioning peripheries can point to a proliferation of actors involved in land protection, sales and purchase (see Chapter 8 on Accra) where multiple and contested ownership rights emerge including outside of formal planning and registration institutions. Our concept of the ‘transitioning periphery’ also highlights specific dynamics of the densification of the built environment in geographic peripheries. These include associated reductions in plot sizes, including where owners are forced to divide plots to overcome ownership disputes (Asafo, 2020), and a growth in housing (often more formal in character but not necessarily in terms of titling) alongside a rising presence of retail facilities. These transitions are commonly characterised by the introduction of services and infrastructure which transform space through dedication to bulk services, electrical facilities, bus shelters and pavements. Yet infrastructural transitions can also be more individualised with a growth in individual homeowners sinking boreholes or acquiring generators on newly acquired plots of land. Road and transport investments influence access to employment opportunities and retail spaces, particularly malls, as these develop. These transitions relate to differentiated socio-cultural and economic change which residents experience as significant; for example, in Molweni and Waterloo in eThekwini, the arrival of supermarkets and a shopping mall fundamentally altered residents’ spatial-temporal realities (Charlton, 2018a). Yet, despite changes in land use, access to land for agricultural purposes (e.g. for growing food) remains critical, as is evident across multiple cases. The availability of land in transitioning peripheries also sees rising pressures on land for subdivision and provision of rental accommodation.

This logic also highlights continuity and gradual forms of change. For example, a township settlement may be undergoing less dramatic change than in the case of vanguard or speculative logics, through investments in institutional facilities, roadworks or small-scale housing interventions. Such areas are better seen as consolidating or transitioning rather than transforming. Waterloo in Northern eThekwini illustrates this as it has shifted from a housing estate to a more textured and mature ‘township’. Other forms of transition may include areas of state housing that experience second waves of beneficiaries, the inflow of tenants and new forms of occupation and investment. Again, the temporal aspect comes to the fore, as areas developing through a ‘transitioning’ logic may have previously been ‘vanguard’ spaces but over time have been reshaped in more incremental and less planned ways. Changes can include varying degrees of ‘informalisation’ of older or more recent formally delivered neighbourhoods through unauthorised construction and land uses, significant particularly in South African low- and mixed-income housing developments but also in some Addis Ababa condominiums. While these transitions are not specific to geographically edge developments, they can be significantly present there and may be influenced by mobility costs, distance and weaker governance or urban management, in addition to other factors. We thus see this logic in broad terms, reflecting not just rural to urban changes but other forms of transitions – and rather than representing a singular transition from one form to another, a characteristic of this logic may be the sense of a periphery in constant transition. The gradual filling of retail units in the Addis condominium developments is an example of transition afforded by earlier vanguard housing investment and relative dislocation from alternative sources of consumption.

Transitions also refer to changing or hybrid forms of governance stretching across traditional leadership to democratically elected municipal structures or to the arrival of other actors shaping everyday decision-making (as in Accra’s changing governance of land markets). Changing governance may also involve party political changes which then impact on peripheral spaces by either blocking or promoting particular visions of change. In Addis Ababa, for example, the establishment of committee structures in condominium developments facilitates small-scale transitions in local representation, managing urban gardens and controlling crime. Yeka Abado provides an example of a relatively ‘matured’ peripheral transition, partly facilitated by local governance changes (Goodfellow et al., 2018). For residents, the transitioning periphery can account for minor but significant adaptations over time which make residents feel that change is underway or that their demands as citizens are being heard. In Accra the collapsing authority of customary landowners in shaping land allocation (see Chapter 7) illustrates how control, governance and profiting from transitioning peripheral spaces in the fringes of Accra is rapidly evolving, with authority secured through violence and intimidation in many cases but also through strong social networks in others. In Molweni, South Africa, residents clearly articulated their sense of shifting from living rural lives to those more akin to township dwellers as a result of progressive investments in roads, housing, electricity and transport. Here a surprising coherent partnership emerged between co-existing traditional authorities and the relatively strong eThekwini municipality. However, residents living in the traditional authority-governed area identified numerous deficiencies as a result of different funding mechanisms and their seeming exclusion from wider beneficial municipal policies (Meth et al., 2021a; see also Sim et al., 2018). This illustrates the challenges for municipalities managing urban–rural divisions in transitioning areas.

The inherited periphery

Our fifth and final logic is that of the inherited periphery. Areas typified by this logic often exist as spaces of obligation for the national and local state and are a function of specific histories through which political practices at multiple scales attempted to mould areas and people. Such spaces are often now the victims of failed policy initiatives. Our case of Winterveld, in northern Tshwane, historically produced through apartheid’s violent forced relocation programme, endures as a site of tragedy requiring state attention in order to combat very high levels of poverty, high crime rates and economic failure. Ironically, many of these places have had significant state investment in the post-apartheid South Africa context, underpinning their population (but not economic) growth, and there may be initiatives to revitalise old state-supported industrial spaces, such as Ekandustria in our Ekangala case. For many weak authorities, these kinds of spaces exert a significant pressure on both their budgets and capacity. This logic extends to colonial practices elsewhere, or other faltering vanguard-like interventions which leave a troubled legacy.

These inherited spaces often show evidence of decline (commonly in economic terms) or they reveal an inability to progress in different ways, including in relation to levels of basic infrastructure, the extent and type of investment and employment opportunities. In these areas the range of opportunities for work may be narrow as well as highly vulnerable, and prone to change if structural and local factors unfold in particular ways. Wage levels may be depressed or work irregular. This was strongly evident in Ekangala where deindustrialisation has significantly impacted on residents’ lives. Industries that previously received some state subsidy under apartheid now stand abandoned, and unemployed residents describe their perpetual frustrations with seeking work in an increasingly competitive and limited pond (Houghton and Todes, 2019).

Many residents experience spatial marginalisation compounded by weak, expensive and unreliable transport. Relative distance from urban cores is critical here, as is evident in Winterveld, a sparsely populated settlement far from most economic hubs. Residents frequently express negative emotions: they feel neglected, trapped and marginalised, pointing to years of stasis with little hope of improvement. They describe their loss of faith in the state to deliver on election promises, and they struggle to see pathways out of poverty. Importantly, the term ‘inherited periphery’ does not label the residents in these spaces or their actions as problematic or intrinsically marginal but instead speaks to the historical origins of the areas’ marginality and the consequences of this, including the trend towards declining levels of service or employment. It is worth noting that even major ‘vanguard’ investments in key sites on the urban periphery can become part of the ‘inherited periphery’ at later points in time, particularly if the surrounding areas do not develop in the ways intended. In theory, therefore, sites such as Tulu Dimtu in Addis Ababa could become the inherited peripheries of the future if further investment in critical infrastructure fails to materialise and the nearby industrial activities fail to generate sufficient economic activity and jobs. Tied to the troubled sentiments expressed by residents in existing inherited peripheries is the overwhelming experience of boredom, signalling a lack of disposable income, development and entertainment opportunities, and the prevalence of poverty and immobility (Mukwedeya, 2018). For some residents, however, these qualities of desolation are matched by perceptions of peacefulness, fresh air, tradition and quiet. These ‘boring’ spaces are therefore not necessarily perceived in unidimensional ways, and geographic marginalisation may be accompanied by a rarer urban quality – that of space.

Weak governance institutions may be present in such areas, including traditional authorities within hybrid governance systems who complain of neglect, under-funding and sometimes significant hardship compared to neighbouring municipalities. Finally, inherited peripheries may be dominated by the ‘informal strongman’ mentioned earlier. These individuals can yield significant power locally and can prove highly effective at delivering key resources, including housing, electricity and employment. However, residents’ narratives reveal high incidences of dependence on such individuals, alongside intimidation and violence, often unhindered by the state, as strongmen operate beyond their vision.

Book structure and key arguments

The book turns next to Chapter 1 which discusses visions of the urban periphery in South Africa and Ethiopia and how these have influenced development in our case studies. In the context of international policy debates over appropriate spatial policy, it draws on empirical material from key informant interviews and documentary analysis to demonstrate the complex ways in which urban spatial policy and implementation are shaped by (shifting) politics, institutions, agencies and actors. Although urban peripheries may be considered in spatial policy, little attention is given to their diversity, their dynamism and to the everyday lives of residents, which emerge in other chapters.

Focusing on Ethiopia and South Africa, Chapter 2 explores the dynamics and drivers of investment and economic change on urban peripheries in the case studies, focusing on areas where there has been significant private and public investment at some point. Taking each country in turn, it presents some of the general policy trends and frameworks shaping investment in each national context, and some of the ways in which these are experienced, before considering the city-regions and case study areas that are the particular focus of this book. Using empirical evidence, it highlights the diverse trajectories of these places, key actors and agencies and some of the specific major investment projects that have been shaping our case study peripheries. It adds substance to concepts of speculative, vanguard and inherited peripheries in relation to the case studies.

Chapter 3 explores lived experiences of access to work and livelihoods on the urban peripheries of South Africa and Ethiopia, relating these to the varying logics of peripheries. It contributes to debates on the extent to which new growth on the edge is likely to be associated with poor access to employment and a reliance on commuting, at least for the urban poor. It considers the extent to which major infrastructure and economic investment in vanguard and speculative peripheries result in better access to employment and economic opportunity, and the types of jobs and livelihoods generated in these and other areas. It suggests that while there may be higher levels of employment and more opportunities in economically dynamic areas, jobs available can be short term or inaccessible to the poor. Despite differences across areas, there is a significant reliance on commuting, diverse local livelihood strategies, social grants (in South Africa) and (often politically mediated) public works programmes, none of which are adequate to meet the challenge of secure livelihoods on the urban edge.

Chapter 4 uses data from key informant interviews, and resident diaries and interviews, to examine the varied governance structures shaping the peripheries in both South Africa and Ethiopia. It opens with a discussion of key conceptual framings relevant to understanding governance trends in urban peripheries and moves to review the multiscalar institutional bodies, administrative structures, local committees and key figures including ward leaders and ‘strongmen’ operating in, and responsible for, the peripheral spaces in city-regions. Within this review the chapter offers brief reflections on hybridity, the limitations of the state and the role of the private sector shaping decision-making. The chapter turns to an analysis of borders and boundaries as central to particular governance contestations and analyses state–citizen relations using the insights drawn from the book’s overarching ‘lived experiences’ approach. Throughout the chapter, conceptualisations of the periphery, developed in the Introduction, are drawn on to analyse particular governance arrangements and practices, including new structures within vanguard peripheries, ‘transitioning peripheries’ possessing hybrid governance structures and auto-constructed peripheries where informalised mechanisms of leadership are evident, alongside weakened state structures which are obligated to serve ‘inherited peripheries’.

Chapter 5 examines the evolution and ‘lived experience’ consequences of housing policy in Ethiopia in recent decades, which was radically transformed by the introduction of the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP) from 2005. This was a major ‘vanguard’ investment aimed at transforming the economic and social character of the urban periphery. The chapter situates this programme in relation to broader developments in Ethiopian housing policy, including the cooperative housing programme that was initiated in the 1970s but continued into the twenty-first century. It then explores some of the tensions at the heart of the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP), which set out to produce ‘affordable’ housing at the same time as being part of an economic growth and homeownership agenda, leading to escalating prices and rents as well as mass displacement. The lived experience of housing of various kinds in our case study areas is then examined. The chapter concludes that, ultimately, the apparent promise of the ‘vanguard periphery’ in these areas was partly undermined by limitations in infrastructural capacity but also by the simultaneous creation of auto-constructed, speculative and potentially future ‘inherited’ peripheries.

Chapter 6 locates the diverse forms of housing in our South African cases relative to a historical view of urban policy, contextualising the origins and contemporary dynamics of inherited as well as more recent peripheral settlements. Experiences and perceptions from residents’ interviews and diaries explain their links to these areas and include expressions of hope and optimism as well as dejection with life there. The long shadow of apartheid colours but does not define people’s continued occupation of areas that were intentionally dislocated from urban centralities, while post-apartheid state housing, often peripherally located, surfaces complex relationships with speculative development and economic activity or its absence. The chapter discusses also the differing roles played by informal settlements and other forms of auto-construction in our study sites. The lens of peripheral logics illuminates people’s housing experiences and motivations, the pull of state and other housing-related investment, sometimes in contradictory ways, and the dynamism as well as sedimentation in this housing landscape.

An analysis of recent transitions in Accra’s peri-urban land market is the focus of Chapter 7. The chapter explores pressures on peripherally located land in the context of significant affordability issues in wider Accra, and the ways in which land originally owned and managed by customary authorities in the main is increasingly the focus and object of a proliferation of new actors in the city’s land market. Speaking to the speculative logic, the chapter distinguishes between primary land providers and delivery channels (including chiefs and family heads controlling customary land) and newer entrants including real estate companies, welfare associations, individuals, land agents and landguards. These ‘secondary’ land providers and intermediaries form part of the complex set of actors at the centre of rapidly rising land prices and stories of land-grabbing. Much of the housing being built is done so individually, outside of the formal land and planning mechanisms, and these changes to Accra’s peripheries directly reflect the transitioning and auto-constructed logics of African urban peripheries.

Chapter 8 examines transport and mobility in the urban peripheries of South Africa and Ethiopia through an analysis of existing forms of transportation and arguing that the urban peripheries produce particular challenges around cost, time and infrastructure tied to the histories and logics of the varying peripheries. The chapter discusses investments in road and rail infrastructure and considers the significance and limitations of walking for residents, impacted by often very significant geographic peripherality. Stuckness and immobility are key concepts underscoring the experiential realities for residents, and the chapter calls for a relational understanding of these concepts to situate peripheral locations relative to more centralised environments.

Chapter 9 establishes from the perspectives of residents living in Ethiopia and South Africa what infrastructure is evident, what is absent and what the significance of this is for residents. It uses this analysis of infrastructure to understand how places on the urban peripheries are produced from an infrastructural perspective, with a particular focus on the material public realm and the online realm. Initially, the chapter explores the interconnections between the varying logics of the periphery to illustrate how particular peripheries foster particular forms of infrastructural realities, recognising that these interconnections are also context-specific and inconsistent. The chapter then considers the significance of micro-infrastructure in urban peripheries and argues that despite investment in some macro-scale interventions, their impact on residents is contested. The widespread unevenness to the nature of infrastructure, including the significant challenges of infrastructural absences or failings, and how this is experienced on the ground forms the focus of the rest of the chapter. Where relevant, the connections between the forms of investment and governance shaping infrastructural interventions or failings are detailed in order to provide some explanation for the unevenness identified across the cases.

Chapter 10 explores the social processes, differentiations and experiences of living in African urban peripheries through a focus on Ethiopia and South Africa. The chapter examines various facets of difference including gender, age and tenancy status, as well as explores the experiences of boredom and the dominance of crime and violence. It argues that urban peripheries are highly differentiated and that constructions of boredom are relational. Crime and violence are highly significant, particularly in the South African case study areas. Fundamentally, the chapter examines how urban change shapes social processes, and it evidences that African urban peripheries are highly differentiated spaces.

Chapter 11 focuses mainly on vanguard peripheries in Ethiopia and South Africa and draws on often spontaneous accounts in diaries and interviews of people’s experiences of food and related retail in state-led housing developments. In South Africa the presence or absence of powerful supermarket chains feature prominently in our respondents’ daily lives and imaginaries, including for crucial services and experiences they offer beyond grocery sales, but smaller shops are little encouraged in the residential neighbourhoods, although informal micro-enterprises emerge nevertheless. In Ethiopia, where large private supermarkets do not dominate as in South Africa, shops are encouraged on the ground floors of condominiums along key roads, assisting with mixed-use vibrancy and local purchasing for residents, although they also desire access to bigger markets which require travel elsewhere. In both contexts access to choice, diversity and cheaper goods can often only be found elsewhere or in the vicinity years after housing has been occupied. In the meantime residents’ narratives make clear that the initial approach to facilitating retail opportunities in vanguard developments can significantly shape everyday lives.

The book’s conclusions are briefly presented in the last chapter. Given that each chapter offers its own concluding reflections, this chapter returns to the question of urban comparison within African peripheries and considers the value of comparison for advancing understanding in these complex urban spaces. It briefly addresses the book’s contribution to core literatures detailed at the start of this chapter, but primarily it returns to our conceptual framework and our five logics of African urban peripheries to consider its value and limitations. Finally, the chapter considers the policy implications, very generally, of some of the arguments and evidence presented in this text.