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- Author: Paula Meth x
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This chapter 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.
This chapter locates diverse forms of housing found in seven South African case study sites on the urban edges of Gauteng and eThekwini relative to a historical view of urban policy. It contextualises 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.
This chapter examines transport and mobility in the urban peripheries of South Africa and Ethiopia through an analysis of existing forms of transportation and argues that the urban peripheries produce particular challenges around cost, time and infrastructure tied to the histories and logics of the varying peripheries. It 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.
The edges of cities are increasingly understood as places of dynamism and change, but there is little research on African urban peripheries and the nature of building, growth, investment and decline that is shaping them. This multi-authored monograph examines African urban peripheries through a dual focus on the logics driving the transformation of these spaces and the experience of living through these changes. As well as exploring the generic dynamics of peripheral change across the continent, it provides rich qualitative insights into the specificity and distinctiveness of a range of peripheral locations. Using substantial comparative empirical data from city-regions in Ethiopia, South Africa and Ghana, in conversation with research in other African contexts, it provides a cogent analysis of spatial transformations and everyday life on the African city periphery. It argues that urban peripheries are formed through five distinct but interconnected logics that capture the complexities of periphery formation and changes therein. However, it illustrates that to fully understand the nature of change in urban peripheries, we need to situate these logics in relation to the varied lived experiences of people living there. Developed within a framework of comparative urbanism, the book considers multiple issues, including economic and infrastructural transitions, political practices, social outcomes and differences, and spatial and material changes. In order to bring the realities of ‘living the periphery’ to life, the book foregrounds the voices of residents throughout, supported by visual images.
This chapter introduces the book, locating it within literature on urban peripheries, noting its insights but also limitations, particularly its ability to engage with the complexities of urban change as narrated by residents in these spaces. The book then details the methodological approach which combines an analysis of drivers of change with an understanding of lived experiences using mixed methods (social surveys, diaries, interviews) and the adoption of a comparative urbanism approach, drawing on both genetic and generative tactics informing our case study analyses and conceptual framings. We provide an understanding of African peripheries through a focus on three case study city-regions – Gauteng and eThekwini in South Africa and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia – and seven urban peripheral areas within these. We introduce the Accra cases used within the chapter on Ghana, where the urbanisation of land under traditional tenure systems and the conflict and politics of land are examined. Next, we outline five logics of urban peripheral development (speculative; vanguard; auto-constructed; transitioning; inherited), which we developed inductively through our research and which unpack the urban periphery concept in new ways. The value of these lies in their recognition of how logics of peripheral development can co-exist, hybridise and bleed into each other to differing degrees in specific places and at different temporal junctures. Importantly, our five logics also facilitate conceptual as well as substantive comparison across and within our seven cases and arguably beyond into other African peripheral contexts. Finally, the chapter outlines the structure of the book to follow.
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 here at the start of this chapter, but primarily it returns to our conceptual framework and our five logics of African urban peripheries to consider their value and limitations. Finally, the chapter considers the policy implications, very generally, of some of the arguments and evidence presented in this text.
The social processes, differentiations and experiences of living in African urban peripheries is explored in this chapter through a focus on Ethiopia and South Africa. It 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. The chapter 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.
This chapter 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. It 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’.
This chapter examines the operationalising of research focused on understanding how transformation in the spatial peripheries of South African cities and an Ethiopian city is shaped, governed and experienced. We discuss both intellectual and methodological challenges and insights of undertaking the research which has at its core a desire to understand the dynamics and drivers of change and the ‘lived experiences’ of residents living on the peripheries of cities, using a mixed qualitative methods approach. We reflect upon and propose conceptualisations concerning terms such as periphery, ‘drivers of change’ and what or whose lived experiences are captured or can be known. In doing so we point to preliminary findings and consider issues of comparability and differentials in data depth and coverage. The chapter concludes by highlighting the richness of researching the peripheries.