Reconfiguring and Reterritorialising Malawi's Garden City: The Role of Sovereign, Local and National Actors

Abstract

African cities continue to witness an upsurge of Chinese large-scale urban developments, including sovereign investments, as a defining feature shaping and transforming urban Africa. In the context of weak, incapacitated, fragmented and dysfunctional master planning approach in most cities of the global South, Malawi inclusive, what are the fundamental processes and mechanisms shaping urban developments including large-scale sovereign urban developments and how do these sovereign developments and actors shape the urban form and territories? Using selected cases of Chinese sovereign investments drawn from Lilongwe City, the paper argues that contrary to the widely held understanding of the primacy of master planning in shaping urban space, the JICA master plan is only one mechanism shaping the territorial vision of the city of Lilongwe. In this regard, planning and development as it relates to sovereign investments is a negotiated process involving multiple actors, that is, sovereign actors traversing with national and local actors in a process characterized by mutual adjustments albeit with varying motivations and interests. Consequently, the emergent urban form and territory in Lilongwe city, is a product of this negotiated process and that the outcomes and impacts of this resultant urban form are variegated, mixed and quite often unexpected.