Surviving Self-Reliance: City-Making and Displacement Urbanism in Arua, North-Western Uganda

Abstract

This presentation explores contradictions between notions of the self-reliant refugee in urban Uganda and the lived reality of urban survival. Examining observational and interview data collected from 2022 to 2024 in the West Nile region of Uganda, this presentation argues that individualistic notions of economic independence, which proliferate in policy discourses, fundamentally misconstrue the infrastructures of survival that sustain life in the urban arena. Where self-reliance is suggestive of a fixed state, South Sudanese people, in particular, position themselves between the city and the camp to mitigate the uneven material deprivations across both spaces. Far from displaying a town-settlement or rural-urban dichotomy, the city and the settlement remain intimately connected through the movement of people and resources. This approach allows for repositioning uneven spatial lenses and draws out the role of the camp in city-making. City residents situate themselves in flexible socio-material relations across various spaces generating patterns of regional movement that are in continuous dialogue with the economic, social and material infrastructures of the city. In turn, South Sudanese refugees have become deeply implicated in producing and sustaining the economic life of the city. As well as intense mobility, in the highly monetized setting of the city, South Sudanese people draw on disperse and highly heterogeneous networks to survive. This has profound impacts on the cosmopolitan trajectory of the nascent city, itself borne of historical migrations. Through this data, Arua city emerges as a space of constant negotiation embroiled in far-flung networks of relations and movement or ‘survival infrastructures’.