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Toponymy, Pioneership, and the Politics of Ethnic Hierarchies in the Spatial Organization of British Colonial Nairobi
No full textToponyms, along with other urban symbols, were used as a tool of control over space in many African countries during the colonial period. This strategy was epitomized by the British, who applied it in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya from the late 1800s. This paper shows that toponymy in colonial Nairobi was an imposition of British political references, urban nomenclature, as well as the replication of a British spatial idyll on the urban landscape of Nairobi. In early colonial Nairobi, the population was mainly composed of three main groups: British, Asians, and Africans. Although the Africans formed the bulk of the population, they were the least represented, socially, economically and politically. Ironically, he British, who were the least in population held the political and economic power, and they applied it vigorously in shaping the identity of the city. The Asians were neither as powerful as the British, nor were they considered to be at the low level of the native Africans. This was the deliberate hierarchical structure that was instituted by the colonial government, where the level of urban citizenship depended on ethnic affiliation. Consequently, this structure was reflected in the toponymy and spatial organization of the newly founded city with little consideration to its pre-colonial status. Streets, buildings and other spaces such as parks were predominantly named after the British monarchy, colonial administrators, settler farmers, and businessmen, as well as prominent Asian personalities. In this paper, historical references such as maps, letter correspondences, monographs, and newspaper archives have been used as evidence to prove that toponyms in colonial Nairobi were the spatial signifiers that reflected the political, ideological and ethnic hierarchies and inequalities of the time.</p
Janus-faced mobility, sense of road-as-place and Indigenous Bedouin-Jewish settlers relationships
No full textAs any other locality a road is a place with sense of road as place among people experiencing it. Roads in peripheral areas are a scarce social resource over which people compete. When a periphery is an internal ethnic frontier, competition between the local/Indigenous people and the settlers over accessibility/connectivity afforded by a road reflects not only hegemonic cultural and identity differences but also contradicting spatiality temporality and dimensionality related to sense of road as place. These mobility-related differences are a neglected area of ethnic relationships. We analyze Indigenous Bedouin's and Jewish settlers’ sense of Road 31 as place in Israel as an infrastructure for understanding ethnic relationships resulting from co-using it. We surface relationships at various times scales and spatial dimensions revealing the contrasting and dynamic dimensionality of mobility, accessibility regimes, and informal mobility emanating from both cultural and political ethnic relationships.</p
A Hygienic City-Nation: Space, Community, and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta
No full textCalcutta, the centre of British imperial power in India, figures in scholarship as the locus of colonialism and the hotbed of anti-colonial nationalist movements. Yet, historians have largely ignored how the city shaped these movements. A Hygienic City-Nation is the first academic work that examines everyday urban formations in the colonial city that informed the broad global forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urbanism, and were, in turn, shaped by them. Drawing on previously unexplored archives of the Calcutta Improvement Trust and neighbourhood clubs, the author uncovers hidden stories of the city at the everyday level of neighbourhoods or paras, where kinship-like ties, caste, religion, and ethnicity constituted new urban modernity. Ghosh focuses on an emergent discourse on Hindu spatial hygiene that powered nationalist pedagogic efforts to train city dwellers in conduct fit for the city-nation. In such pedagogic efforts, upper-caste Bengalis were pitted against the lower-caste working poor and featured as ideal inhabitants of the city: the citizen.</p
Reconstituting the Cultural Geography in Zimbabwe: Place Renaming in Zimbabwe’s ‘New Dispensation’
No full textRegime changes and power transfers usually engender an extensive reordering of the cultural geography. Incoming political regimes usually reconfigure commemorative landscapes to symbolically dismantle icons and landmarks of the previous political regimes and herald their arrival on the political scene. The new regime in Zimbabwe that assumes power in November 2017 reconstituted the commemorative space according to its sociopolitical logics, commemorative priorities, and assumptions of power. This article uses the textual approach to the politics of place naming to interrogate the varied ways the Mnangagwa regime used to reinscribe the cultural landscape producing a new memorial landscape in the aftermath of the upstaging of Robert Mugabe in November 2017. The new regime symbolically constructed the imaginative national geography in a relational manner that differed from the one instituted by the Mugabe regime. The main observation in this article is that place renaming is not merely as a reflection of, but also integral to, the politics of ‘transformation’ in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. The new place names are saturated with messages that indicate official versions that prescribe new rules on the reading of the past. The new toponymic order symbolically replaced the Mugabe political hegemony with the Mnangagwa one, increased the visibility of women, commemorated a new set of heroes, including those that had suffered systematic exclusion in nationalist discourses, and renamed ‘unusual’ places that the previous regime never considered in the process of recasting the cultural geography. The memorial project involved a highly politicised nomination process that served the interests of the ruling political elites. It is, therefore, problematic that most critical enquiries into this phase in the Zimbabwean political landscape have not focussed on these cultural transformations.</p
Urban analysis: reading the elements and layers of Asian cities, a case study of Banda Aceh-Indonesia
No full textAsian cities often experience complex urban problems, mainly due to weak regulations to respond to the changes. There is a need to answer these problems. Using Banda Aceh as the case, this study examines the transformation of the city form through reading the urban elements and layers from historical chronological order focuses on the inner city and its surrounded areas. The aim is to identify the physical and non-physical primary elements and the ordinary layers of the city, as well as analyze the symbolical, sociological, historical, morphological layers and their transformation from time to time. Historical and typo-morphological methodology were used by comparing maps and building styles supported with photographs collected through a series of field observation and from literature. The analysis was divided into pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, and post-tsunami disaster periods. Findings from this study shows that there are three main factors that contribute to the transformation of Banda Aceh: the past international trading activities, colonialism, and the tsunami. This study provides a reference for urban designers and planners to understand the complexity of the urban form of the Asian cities which can also be utilized by policy-makers to control regulations for urban development, particularly in Asia.</p
Introduction: Historiographic Traditions, Grid-Plan Cultures and Africa
No full textIn Western (Eurocentric) research traditions of urban and planning histories, sub-Saharan Africa is generally denied an urban past, an urban settlement-design culture, and especially an indigenous practice of grid-planning. It is against this state of research that indigenous grid-pattern settlements in Senegal are analyzed in this book. The book demonstrates that urban grid-planning emerged independently in Senegal, before European colonization, while also shifting the discussion from morphological essentialism regarding the genealogy of the grid towards a more interactive, poly-centric and processual approach of “entangled histories.” This introductory chapter brings to the fore the sensitivities inherited in African Studies as developed against the background of the historiographic tendencies that characterize Islamic Studies, World History, (Global) Urban Studies and the current literature on grid planning. The chapter provides a critical overview of the assumptions about Africa in the various scholarly disciplines directly related to the book, giving special attention to global North-South perspectives. Through a focus on grid plan literature, the chapter calls for the enduring need to de-Eurocentralize global urban history. Proceeding towards a more inclusive, integrative and polycentric urban history would contribute to the “worldling” of grid plan legacies. The book’s rationale and structure are also presented here, including its methodological approach and a note on sources of data and cartographic analysis.</p
Personal Memory, the Scaffolded Mind, and Cognitive Change in the Neolithic
No full text‘The Çatalhöyük evidence as a whole’, write Hodder and Pels, ‘gives many indications that, indeed, people began to link themselves to specific pasts, by burying pots, tools, humans and hunting trophies in ways that indicate particular memories rather than a generic reference to a group’ (2010, 182). Hodder draws on his multidisciplinary team’s impressive studies of a wide range of artifacts and practices – household symbols, pit-digging, burial, figurines, tools, decoration, and more – to argue that forms of remembering emerged or consolidated at Çatalhöyük that were neither merely routinized and habitual, nor merely traditional and generic, and that took as their objects neither repeated activities nor widespread factual knowledge. Rather, the new forms of social memory being constructed at Çatalhöyük were ‘conscious, specific, and commemorative’, as household groups ‘began to make specific connections between the present and the past’ (Hodder & Cessford 2004, 35; Hodder 2006, 143).</p
What is the value of built heritage conservation? Assessing spillover effects of conserving historic sites in Singapore
No full textQuantifying the economic benefits of built heritage facilitates the formulation and assessment of conservation policies and programs. There is however a lack of empirical research about the economic value of built heritage in Asian cities. This lack is problematic, given the rapid pace of demolition and redevelopment of historic landscapes in Asian cities. This study seeks to reduce the current gap in built heritage research by examining whether real estate premiums are generated by the designation of buildings as ‘conserved’ in Singapore, a city-state in South East Asia. Using 20 years of housing transaction data, and controlling for building, neighborhood and year fixed effects, we found that conservation designation had a positive impact on average sale prices per square meter of built area that was largest at residential locations between 800 m to 1.6 km from the conserved site. Findings also suggest that lower-cost public housing resale units gained a substantially smaller premium compared to private housing units. While our findings suggest an economic justification for building conservation programs in Asian cities, they also raise questions about such programs potential impact on neighborhood gentrification, and the need for appropriate taxation policies to ensure horizontal equity between property owners.
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From urban congestion to political confinement: collecting waste, channelling politics in Lagos
No full textLooking at the formalization of solid waste management in Lagos, Nigeria, this paper seeks to re-embed the concept of informality within institutional structures of political confinement, as well as in the situations in which exit is negotiated from the waste infrastructure. It examines how waste congestion in the West African metropolis has translated into a higher degree of political confinement and the occlusion of exit strategies in the waste sector. Through an empirical study of the city’s state-recognized and alternative waste channels, it looks at the new political instruments deployed in order to secure impermeable waste channels managed by state-recognized actors. Such instruments have had a stark impact on the control of the waste sector as well as on that of monetary flows extracted from the management and situational mobilization of solid waste. The intrusion of institutional boundaries in the waste sector has pushed workers to renegotiate their positions amid new constraints, mobilizing new discourses to negotiate the tolerance of their activities. While leaks in the waste infrastructure are negotiated on an ad hoc basis, the limitations imposed by the Lagos state on exit strategies have triggered political instability and demand the development of new forms of political mobilization.</p
Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary
No full textThis article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non‐privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. The article explicates two attributes of non‐privatized land—fungibility and combinatoriality—that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro‐poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self that is hegemonic in more propertied settings. Fungibility, it shows, externalizes supportive economies of production and reproduction into surrounding neighborhoods by shifting the boundaries and terms of usufruct without cadastral oversight or regulation. Combinatoriality—a hybrid formulation of combined territories and combined territorialities—describes overlapping forms of access to land or demarcations of legitimate land use, either competitive or reciprocal. Together, these two attributes of non‐privatized land systems produce a propinquity requirement for economic production, or a social density and liveliness more limited in privatized land markets. Through a diagnostic analogy with the simple reproduction squeeze characteristic of subsistence agrarian settings, it charts how an urban spatial reproduction squeeze—felt globally in dense, rising‐rent environments across the global North and South—generates subsistence needs that mixed‐tenure environments are uniquely capable of fulfilling and that can provide inspiration for radical housing struggles elsewhere.</p