Social construction of peri-urban places and alternative planning in Zanzibar
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6026128 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Garth Myers (0000-0001-5370-2389, corresponding author), G A Myers |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 109 |
| Issue | 437 |
| Pages | 575-595 |
| Publication date | 2010-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | African Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0001-9909 • E-ISSN: 1468-2621 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/afraf/adq044 |
| OpenAlex | W2019313373 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
Increasingly, scholarship on urban Africa has focused on the social construction of place in informal neighbourhoods. In this approach, researchers often highlight the fluidity, contingency, or creativity of the urban poor majority. Efforts to remake planning processes to work with or be driven by these informal everyday place-making strategies can be quite inspiring. Yet I question whether these ideas as put into practice in cities can be anything more than survival strategies of the abject poor. Historical-geographical roots and social relations with the state make each informal neighbourhood a particular case, and these factors have significant influence on people's capacity to make new, alternative statements with their urban places, or to create alternatives that might be replicated. This essay is based mainly around fieldwork in 2006–8 in Zanzibar's peri-urban West District shehia (locations) of Mwera and Welezo, including assessment of the built environments, interviews, archival work, and participant observation. I document ways in which these neighbourhoods are, despite newness, rooted in history and geography, and how residents' peri-urban everyday place making depends upon their relationships with the state. The internal heterogeneity of place making and social positioning proves difficult to contend with or deploy for alternative planning
Contingency · Everyday life · Neighbourhood (mathematics · Participant observation · Political science · Public relations · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Urban planning · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · Urban and Rural Development Challenges
Discursive constructions underlie and exacerbate the vulnerability of informal urban communities to the impacts of climate change
Evaluation of the EIA process in Zanzibar
Urban Planning in Post-Apartheid South African Cities
Balanced Urban Development
A century of urban planning for Zanzibar’s other side, 1923–2023
Towards Situated Analyses of Uneven Peri‐Urbanisation
The liminality of open space and rhythms of the everyday in Jallah Town, Monrovia, Liberia
Hybrid governance and disaster management in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Monrovia, Liberia, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
The Coproduction of Peri-Urban Space
La matérialité de la reconnaissance
Ambivalent inheritance
The Consolidation Of 'Traditional Villages' In Pikine, Senegal
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,8 |
| Citation span | 2011 - 2023 (13) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |