Changing Cities: Climate, Youth, and Land Markets in Urban Areas
insecurity that interventions based on Western logics of the law and markets attempt to eliminate that enable the urban poor to be role players in extralegal markets. Rather than streamlining and universalizing the way claims are made, interventions to improve the functioning of land markets and address urban poverty should recast the politics of informality and identity as an opportunity for the urban poor to use various forms of capital and association to incrementally and progressively build pathways to urban citizenship. In this process, one should seek to develop tools that support locally contingent negotiation processes and diverse modalities of rights-claiming as a means by which to build more inclusive markets.
INTRODUCTION: THE EMERGING AFRICAN CITY
What does the apparent ungovernability, yet on-going survival, of cities like Lagos and Kinshasa… say about the future of urban governance? Here, what we may know conventionally as legality and illegality…. The formal and the informal and movement and home are brought into proximity and produce a highly ambiguous sense of space. These ambiguities do occasion intense struggles over which identities have legitimate access to and rights over specific resources and place. —AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come With nearly half of the world population residing in cities, we have undeniably become an urban species. The “everyday practice” and lived experience of urbanism produce new modalities of social, economic, and political interaction, which work to reconfigure and reconstruct the physical space and urban institutions (Pieterse 2006). However, urbanization processes and their material manifestations in African cities challenge the dominant theories of planning, economics, sociology, and other disciplines concerned with urban development (Myers 2011). Although urbanization processes around the world create dependency on urban markets in order to meet the basic need of human settlement, for the majority of urban Africans, | 120 |