The Politics of Detailed Urban Planning
Institutional Change and Urban Rentiership in Madagascar
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7472567 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fanny Voélin (0009-0004-4018-6951, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 162-187 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Development and Change (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0012-155X • E-ISSN: 1467-7660 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/dech.70043 |
| OpenAlex | W7117471612 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 36 |
This article employs a political settlements approach to explore the formal and informal institutional dynamics that underpin contemporary rentier capitalism in urban Africa through the case of Antananarivo, Madagascar. It examines how Malagasy ruling elites created opportunities for land‐based rent seeking by establishing new institutional arrangements. Specifically, it traces the rise and decline during the 2010s of detailed urban planning, a planning instrument elaborated through public–private partnerships between the Malagasy state and large‐scale corporate landowners in Antananarivo. The article argues that public–private partnerships in detailed urban planning served as a strategy for ruling elites to give an appearance of legality to the informal practices that drive land‐use changes and real estate construction in the city. This strategy effectively facilitated land investments and created rent opportunities while allowing ruling elites to act with reference to the law, which was crucial to their political survival given the risks of an overt violation of formal rules under Madagascar's competitive and unstable authoritarianism. Yet detailed urban plans were sidelined when they no longer aligned with presidential priorities. By bridging debates on rentier capitalism and political settlements in urban geography, the article offers a lens for analysing the fine‐grained institutional dynamics through which rentier logics play out across contexts
Capitalism · Human settlement · Informal settlements · Institutional change · Politics · Principle of legality · Real estate · State (computer science · Urban planning · Economic Zones and Regional Development · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Urban and Rural Development Challenges
The Politics of African Industrial Policy
Investigating the Political Economy of Social Protection Expansion in Africa
The persistence and rise of master planning in urban Africa
Competitive Authoritarianism
Political settlements and the analysis of institutions
From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism
Introduction. Gestions urbaines en mutation
Ethnographies of entrepreneurs, business associations and rentier capitalism in Africa
Countering threats, stabilising politics and selling hope
Towards an epistemology for conjunctural inter-urban comparison
Finance, infrastructure and urban capital
Madagascar’s Fluid Party System
The curious case of domestic capitalists in Africa
Road Corridors as Real Estate Frontiers
Knowledge/Seizure
Real Estate in Global Cities
Democratic Experiments in Africa
Puzzle and Paradox
Urbanization without guarantees
Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States
Studying political settlements in Africa
Taxing property in a neo-developmental state
Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City
Territorializing Power
Urban Fortunes and Skeleton Cityscapes
Introduction
Access Orders and the 'New' New Institutional Economics of Development
Seeing Political Settlements through the City
Violence and War in Agrarian Perspective
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |