Enclaving: Patterns of Global Futures in Three African Cities

Crucially, the patterns of urbanization in African metropoles are widely regarded as forerunners of urban futures on a global scale. Fuelled by transnational capital and as visions of the city to come, Accra, Johannesburg and Maputo comprise truly global spaces for experimentation with non-unitary and non-centrally planned urban forms.

A central part of such experimentation, relates to enclaving, such as gated communities, private cities, informal settlements or economic zones as spaces of exception. Integrating the notion of African developments as prefiguring or, indeed, being materializations of urban futures that will thereafter be realized in Euro-American contexts, this project is devoted to mapping, comparing and probing the nature of urban futures and the intensely metropolitan nature of its enactment across the continent.

The project is composed of two sub-projects that are being investigated in each of the three cities.

Sub-Project 1. Financing investigates new forms of investment in and financing housing developments, by studying the ways in which private corporate investors intervene in the management of urban inequality, focusing on the various sites for planned, emergent and ongoing housing development in and beyond the field sites.

Sub-Project 2. Inhabiting investigates new forms of sociality, by studying how upwardly mobile and established middle-class urbanites conceive of and reproduce the logic of enclaving in their intimate and family lives. SP2 thus explores new forms of securing differentiated urban domains, by also focusing on the interaction and new forms of gated and non-gated construction of sociality that emerge within urban spaces.