Our new book, DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice originated in a series of conversations between the editors that identified intriguing points of overlap between the consequences of deindustrialization in Detroit and the privatization of the mining industry in the Zambian Copperbelt. In both instances, the diminished public provision of social services and infrastructures resulted in urban residents attempting to fill the gaps created by limited state capacity through practices of self-provisioning.
Drawing on case studies from across the Continent, the interdisciplinary volume furthers this dialogue by highlighting the new forms of associational life that arise(s) in order to address service and infrastructural gaps and assessing the democratic potentialities and constraints engendered by DIY urbanism.
The book makes a broad case for the utility of DIY urbanism as a methodological tool and analytical lens. It further advocates for the need to situate localized political and infrastructural practices in comparative, even cross-regional, perspective. Here we discuss three key take-aways from the book in turn.
Why DIY Urbanism?
There are a multitude of conceptually-adjacent terminologies in widespread use today upon which we might have built: informal urbanism, tactical urbanism, insurgent urbanism, or underground urbanism to name but a few. Such perspectives tend to emphasize more discrete, intermittent activities undertaken by individuals that are often understood as acts of resistance or rebellious appropriations of space by those without, or who are contesting, power. “Occupy” movements of a decade ago, for instance.
At the same time, even when DIY Urbanism is specifically invoked, analyses often foreground their aesthetic aspects. In which, DIY urbanism, for example, becomes about treating the city as an art installation in a way that romanticizes both the practices and practitioners. As in, for instance, pre-bankruptcy Detroit and the fetishization of urban exploration – criticized as “ruin porn” – amidst post-industrial urban decay.
The book approaches DIY urbanism differently. Our conceptualization invites a way to think about how people – who are often, but not always, living in precarious situations; these could range from pervasive spatial, socio-economic, infrastructural, or resource insecurities. These precarities are set against the backdrop of a State that is only partially or unevenly present, or in which it might be incapable or unwilling to provide services. The questions the concept helps to answer are twofold. First, how do individuals or communities living amidst these circumstances navigate, endure, and survive them? Second, how do people mitigate risk and (attempt to) solve problems?
Our use of DIY Urbanism thus seeks to accomplish a few things. First, it offers a way to understand the myriad and sustained ways urban residents in Africa make and manage their cities outside official or more formalized bureaucratic institutional channels. Second, conceived as a sort of urban tinkering, DIY Urbanism emphasizes the expertise and skills required of “regular” people to navigate conditions of resource-scarcity, and to assess and mitigate risk as best as possible. A consequential implication here is that residents of African cities have a grounded “everyday expertise” that is often not included – beyond perfunctory “participatory” consulting by planners and bureaucrats – in technocratic processes, but should be.
Third, the term emphasizes a political dimension that sees DIY urbanism as entangled with the State, rather than always happening in opposition or parallel to it.
The book thus raises the question for future research that asks how can States learn from and best support what is already happening on the ground in cities across the Continent and beyond? Lastly, by foregrounding the political dimensions of DIY urbanism, our conceptualization acknowledges that DIY practices are not only and always relegated to the marginalized and powerless members of an urban population, but rather, urban elites are often able to leverage their position to make and manage cities to their own benefit.
This means that some forms of DIY Urbanism become legitimated and authorized, while others are penalized and suppressed. Thus, our perspective accounts for the significant power imbalances that drive municipal governance and urban societies.
DIY Urbanism in Comparative Perspective
A prominent through-line of the book is the importance of intra-regional and cross-regional comparison and conversation. That is, the book is focused on dynamics present and propelling cities in Africa, but, the lessons and implications of the book possess a relevance to other urban settings across the globe. There is much to be learned from understanding DIY urbanism in Africa, even in urban localities with vastly different spatial, historical, political or structural contexts.
Three takeaways are particularly important.
First, there is a social justice component to consider. Often, analyses of DIY practices remain very much embedded in the places in which they occur: this neighborhood, that community. What this project demonstrates, however, is that often people residing in widely divergent circumstances daily grapple with the same challenges, ranging from infrastructure deficiencies and decay, accessing water and energy resources, or coping with urban flooding and extreme weather events.
Working in Detroit and sub-Saharan Africa, we can attest to the fact that community-led solar power device charging stations you might find in poorer neighborhoods don’t look that different – and are designed to mitigate similar infrastructural deficits and the socio-economic inequalities.
Putting communities in conversation with one another thus offers a way to trade insights and experiences, but also, becomes a way to build a scaffolding – we term them “Platforms for Solidarity” – that might generate more transformative structural change or that challenge entrenched inequities that make DIY urbanism often necessary.
At the same time, this isn’t to say that DIY urbanism is a panacea to solve these kinds of societal challenges. It is not. Nor is it always optimal as a problem-solving strategy. Cross-regional conversations demonstrate the limitations of these practices. DIY responses to climate challenges for example, in Africa, the post-industrial urban American Heartland, and elsewhere are reactions to policies and decisions oftentimes located quite far away.
They are also often a reflection of a State that defers its roles and responsibilities to individuals and communities to address themselves, while it tries to assert a managerial role. In contexts of protracted crisis, where self-provisioning becomes the default organizational mode of society, the State’s role comes into contestation with those who begin to question its legitimacy when it cannot meet its obligations.
DIY urbanism, grounded and unfolding in a particular space and context, is necessarily only going to be able to react to problems with a global reach, not “solve” them. Thus, these cross-regional conversations also show us the importance of the State in supporting and incubating these activities to make them more effective, proactive, responsive to community needs, and durable. Of course, such assistance becomes an immense challenge in this era of diminished institutional legitimacy, hollowed out public institutions, and the corrosion of democratic norms across the globe.
The book highlights how DIY urbanism is only going to be as good as the quality, transparency, and democratic inclinations of the institutions around them.
Lastly, if we are to consider, then, what DIY urbanism in Africa, as a complex of strategies and tactics for risk assessment and crisis management, might offer urban policymakers and practitioners in locations in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, we would argue its value is this: crisis preparedness and management is not solely – or even mostly – a technical and technocratic suite of problems to solve. Instead, the lens of DIY urbanism in Africa raises important questions that can help recalibrate what is being done, for example in Sweden, to prepare for when the war or crisis comes.
Learning the right lessons
What is the role of trust and social capital between citizens, as well as institutions, to make preparedness work? What skills and expertise(s) are necessary to manage and minimize risk during a prolonged crisis? How to account for the fact that some members of society are going to be better equipped to prepare for a crisis? This is not to say that these lessons are 1-to-1 transferable, nor easily learned, but the kinds of cross-regional conversations initiated in DIY Urbanism in Africa open a space in which it is possible to learn from what is being done elsewhere and to achieve an understanding of the kinds of expertise that are necessary – beyond prepping a box of supplies – to manage a longer-term crisis situation.
Stephen Marr is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University.
Patience Mususa is Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden.
