Urban Translocality – Embedding State Housing into People’s Long-term Housing Strategies

Abstract

Migration and mobility, related translocal and flexible livelihoods strategies have shaped Africa’s urban spaces since pre-colonial times, blurring the lines between the rural and the urban. In fact, large parts of urbanising Africa are marked by uncertainty, unsettlement, provisionality, yet also rhythms and routines that hardly adhere to ontological premises of spatial fixity that dominate Western urban theory and thought (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004; Simone et al. 2023). A prominent exception is the concept of translocality that has sought to make sense of diversified livelihoods that stretch over multiple locations. With regards to urban Africa, however, translocality has remained too often bound to a dualist premise of rural-to-urban migration. In this paper, I suggest to extend the concept to account for multi-local and -temporal patterns of urban inhabitation that have emerged in connection to state-led housing programmes. Exemplarily, I relate to three African capital regions, namely Addis Ababa, Gauteng, and Rabat-Salé, to show how low-income households respond to increasing intra-urban displacement threats by a ‘translocalisation’ of long-term, inter-generational housing strategies. While aiming to sustain urban inhabitation amidst rapidly changing, uncertain urban space, households establish and maintain translocal intra-urban housing arrangements that fit the unpredictability of African urban life. Quite paradoxically, such translocal arrangements of urban inhabitation are speculative, provisional, and strongly interact with diversified livelihoods that pass beyond urban and national boundaries. Yet, they tend to build around the ambition to protect a contested urban core to which the household attaches strong feeling of urban belonging.