Critical perspectives on actors and relationality in African urban property development
Convenors: Sarita Pillay Gonzalez (University of the Witwatersrand), Inken Oldsen-thor Straten (University of Sheffield)
Discussant: Siân Butcher (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Track: Critical Engagements
Keywords: Urban Property Development, Relationality, Urban Comparisons
Friday October 25, 9:00–10:30, PG Seminar Room, John Moffat Building
SESSION 4
CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACTORS AND RELATIONALITY IN AFRICAN PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT
This session critically engages with contemporary urban property development across Africa. There is an emerging interest in South Africa in the practices and motivations of property developers, including the relationships between developers and other actors, often the local state (Ballard & Butcher, 2020; Ballard & Harrison, 2020; Mosselson, 2020; Todes & Robinson, 2020). In West Africa, novel work is exploring an array of actors, relationships and material flows in the making of ‘concrete cities’ (Choplin, 2023; Ablo & Bertelsen, 2022). In other instances, scholarship is attempting to identify and analyse how external investors, themselves from emerging economies, operate cross-continentally in ‘new city building’ (Moser et al., 2021). This recent critical and empirically-grounded literature considers a variety of relationships and diversity of actors and interests in urban property development (Ballard & Butcher, 2020).
We suggest this recent critical urban development literature offers a starting point to re-think actors and relationships in property development and to open a critical conversation about urban property development between regions and countries in Africa. This session seeks to critically (re)think urban property development and learn from urban comparisons. Questions that we would like to discuss in this session are:
- How is urban property development negotiated and contested across Africa?
- How do different relationships and actors shape urban property development?
- What can we learn through bringing different cases from across the continent into conversation with one another?
Presentations
Developers and ‘Green’ property? New Forms of Elite Accumulation
Through textual analysis and interviews with developers, state authorities, and financial institutions, the paper unpacks elite power in the making of green property development. It shows the weakening of public entities by private governance systems, and the production of exclusionary ‘green’ spaces to legitimize new forms of elite accumulation.
New housing vacancy in Yaoundé and Douala: a case of real estate market failure in the Cameroonian context?
Despite the high demand for housing in Cameroon’s cities, the creation of a new supply of real estate by property developers does not seem to be meeting the inhabitants needs. Indeed, the formation and regulation of the real estate market is determined first and foremost by the relationship between developers and the neo-patrimonial regime.
Neoliberal urban restructuring and customary land regimes: the foundation of Ghana’s new cities
Expanding the literature on new city developments in Africa, this paper employs an institutional perspective of neoliberal restructuring of land regimes in Ghana. This framing explores how top-down land reforms and bottom-up responses lay the foundation for Ghana’s new city developments, new forms of urban politics, and exacerbate inequality.
Negotiating property development in Johannesburg: Re-thinking the developer-planner relationship
This presentation is about negotiations of two property development projects in Johannesburg. It discusses particular actors and relationships that emerged within these negotiations to re-think the developer-planner relationship. The focus of this talk is on municipal planners, local consultants, and their relationships in Johannesburg.
Investing in Volatility: Infrastructure design approaches in contexts of lucrative instability
Private property is operating opportunistically and in structurally violent ways in South Africa’s townships – developing a new forms of extraction. Carefully observed, we are simultaneously witnessing new forms of investment that can yield radical ways to re-imagine our most volatile neighborhoods through inventive property practices.
