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For the City Yet to Come
Changing African Life in Four Cities
By A. M. Simone Duke University Press
Copyright © 2004 A. M. Simone
All right reserved. ISBN: 9780822334347
Chapter One
The Informal The Projet de Ville in Pikine, Senegal
In the first four chapters of this volume I present a series of case studies that attempt to show how urban actors endeavor to maintain a sense of local cohesion while seeking opportunities-for livelihood, cooperation, and access-at a scale beyond their immediate local environment. While these capacities and practices often appear to be ephemeral, there may be nothing that is ephemeral about what they do. It may be difficult to say for sure that this is what is happening, this is who is doing what, or these are the boundaries between what it is and what it is not. But what I hope to show in these cases is that very concrete assumptions, practices, and arrangements are at work.
Individual actors may not be entirely cognizant of what their own contributions may be to these social formations, and certainly no one is operating in a way where the whole story is clear. Still, local actors find various ways of welding constraint and possibility, convention andextravagance, and the "traditional" and the "modern" into a social mobilization that both unleashes the hidden possibilities of the "tried and true" and, at the same time, "tames" the dangers of the unknown.
The case materials presented here concern sites and processes through which very different urban quarters try to work out a means of maximizing resources and opportunities. At the same time, they try to solve actual or potential conflict situations generated by differences in capacities that often derive from such efforts. These efforts do not emerge autonomously as some free-floating, mobile form of social action that hangs over communities or operates outside established modalities of getting things done. Rather, these responses emerge from a recombination of contingent relationships among bodies, spaces, signs, infrastructure, and other urban materials and provide tentative links between different ways of life and different kinds of actors. They try to propel forward local economic, social, or political action rather than trying to stabilize particular social structures. Yet, at the same time, they often find new arenas for the commonly accepted ways of doing things, and thus lend stability to important values and practices through enabling them to function in different ways. Each case will make use of a loosely drawn conceptual notion as a means of provisionally tying together the various scales, events, locales, and practices that are the elements of each case.
The case, then, does not serve to illustrate a specific conceptual notion. Rather, a specific notion is employed as a means of focusing attention on a process of interconnection in the gaps between clearly designated and defined urban institutions, spaces, and actions. Thus, the notion of the informal will highlight the heterogeneity of social collaborations that coincide with a major urban redevelopment project in Pikine, a large suburb of Dakar, Senegal. The invisible will be used to outline the diffuse yet forceful mechanisms of collective resistance to the wide-scale introduction of specific rationalities of development in Winterveld, a fringe urban area of Pretoria in South Africa. The spectral refers to both the symbolic status of certain showpiece development efforts in Douala, Cameroon, as well as the space of remaking relationships of social power and the lingering sense of incompletion that haunts the way in which the city is visualized or imagined by its residents. Movement, as applied to a brief case study of diverse African actors in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, is used to foreground a particular valorization of mobility at work in efforts to respatialize not only livelihood but the salience of long-term urban institutions.
A more comprehensive analysis of the particular scenarios and practices depicted in these cases would, of course, have to consider specific historical antecedents, geographical positions, and political environments. The objective here is simply to provide some indication of the breadth and diversity of efforts that certain African localities make to access or create wider arenas within which to operate. At times, an elaborate game of dissimulation is involved. Seemingly parochial spaces can mask wide-ranging collaborations among diverse actors both within and outside a locality. In other instances, many different networks and positions have to be engaged and manipulated so that a given set of individuals, households, and groups can continue to live together as a "community."
The case materials presented here stem largely from work I did for the African NGO Habitat Caucus. The caucus, made up of urban development NGOs in fifteen major African cities, works collectively to establish context-specific platforms of dialogue between local community associations and municipal governments within a select number of neighborhoods within each city. These platforms serve as a basis in which to negotiate specific partnership arrangements in terms of local planning, administration, and service delivery.
My work in all of these situations was to assess what local community, and broadly developmental, associations were doing, especially those involved in various forms of income generation, urban services, or advocacy. In most cases, these associations were tied to established NGOs, both local and foreign. A major part of this assessment was to examine what participants in these associations understood about local economies. Particularly important points of concentration were how residents actually produced livelihoods, gained access to opportunities, spent income, and organized local production and social support. As part of this process, focus groups were established and both structured interviews and free-floating discussions were done. In addition, specific informants were tracked as they moved around during their daily lives.
All of these caucus-affiliated associations faced significant hurdles. There were problems of funding, managerial capacity, power sharing, and decision making, and most particularly the pulls of participants to other activities. The discussions and deliberations that took place within these associations were spirited and thoughtful. The collaborative experiments in environmental management, housing construction, and microenterprise, for example, were usually innovative and sustainable. Yet, it always seemed that resolving problems, looking for important resources, and, in sum, doing the real work to make something happen, was "referred" somewhere else or took place somewhere else.
These case materials are the result of moving away from these more formally organized community associations in order to identify various instances of where that "somewhere else" actually was. In the process of engaging these associations over an extended period of time, it became clear that there were other, more provisional and ephemeral, forms of association and collective activity that association members also participated in and that seemingly had a greater impact on their life. The case materials are thus firsthand reports of scenarios and events in which I have participated and witnessed.
The narrative on Douala does not so much concern a specific quarter but rather is an example, drawn from the work of a Habitat Caucus affiliate, of the ways in which image making can become an important and highly contested aspect of urban development. The sketch on the reappropriation of Sufi institutions as a means of dealing with conflicts in Jidda comes from my many years of affiliation and work with African-based Islamic welfare associations and the information gained from this participation.
simply because it is easier or cheaper to provide certain services informally.
Structural adjustment, globalization, political change, and trade liberalization have come together to extend and intensify unconventional crossborder trade throughout the continent. Substantial amounts of capital and capacity are often deployed to find alternative ways and circuits to move raw materials and process consumables. This trade brings together a melange of characters, including well-off businesspersons, soldiers, militias, middlemen of various nationalities, and petty traders. Unconventional trade is at its greatest in states where chronic political crisis has undermined regulatory systems or where formal institutions function and retain some level of authority primarily through their participation in such unconventional trade.
The informal sector has grown enormously since 1980. As recently as 1990 it absorbed at least half the workforce in many African cities, a figure that is thought to be substantially larger today. In part, this growth reflects the precipitous decline of employment in the public sector and the relative underdevelopment of formalization in the private economy. For example, in Angola public service and state enterprise employment absorbed half of Luanda's working population; while in Kenya, public sector employment increased steadily in the 1980s only to dramatically reverse itself early in the next decade. The internal and external constraints on Africa's capacity to integrate itself into globalized production strategies and financial markets have effectively informalized much of the continent's overall urban economy.
While many informal sector entrants value the relative independence and flexibility incumbent in this sector, increasing numbers of informal sector workers are actually engaged in highly dependent relationships with more formally organized economic operators. Some of these relationships can be consistently lucrative. This is the case primarily for entrepreneurs who have moved earnings from other activities, most often agricultural production, into investments in land, facilities, and machinery used to attain subcontracting orders from the formal sector. Through such subcontracting or equipment leasing relationships, informal sector workers often are caught in highly exploitative relationships. Services are delivered or products produced at prices set by others as a means to access materials and markets otherwise unavailable. The expansion of the informal sector in many African cities has largely been in the area of such subcontracting relationships. For example, women doing piecework at home saves larger firms the costs of maintaining a formal labor force.
The relationships to formality are also varied. Some enterprises simply are not aware of the frequently complex web of regulations applicable to even the most minimal of economic activities. Others try to maximize profit by deliberately avoiding regulations. In many African cities there are specific regulations for where business can be conducted, under what circumstances, and when and how, as well as rules for specific sectors of activity, from transportation to food sales. Regulations are often accompanied by specific financial requirements-for example, licensing fees, taxes, penalties, investments in proper facilities, and compliance standards. One study found that the revenue of microenterprises would be reduced by nearly half if all regulations were adhered to. An informal sector is thus partially elaborated because of the excess and inappropriateness of regulations that persist in the absence of systematic and realistic ways of assessing domestic economies.
The dynamism of the informal sector is of course contingent on macroeconomic considerations. National policies regarding trade liberalization are particularly salient for African cities because they open the way for the supply of cheaper imports. However, these opportunities are constrained in countries that experience repeated devaluation of their national currencies. Policies aimed at attracting foreign direct investment affect interest and taxation rates available to the formal sector, either by providing or attentuating a particular competitive advantage to this sector.
Policies regarding land and infrastructure use, allocation of raw materials, access to markets and production facilities, and costs of capital also affect informal sector capacities. For the most part, these policies are usually tailored to the needs and advantages of formal enterprises. With the formal sector as the primary object of policy interventions, participation in the informal sector usually remains on the survivalist level despite the aspirations of participants. Opportunities and platforms for expanded investment or accelerated rates of return are limited. Without consistent sources of supply to meet increasing demand, or without the ability to reasonably predict how informal firms will operate in shifting policy and economic environments, there are few resources to invest in developing new facilities, product lines, or capacities.
The informal sector is also a by-product of changing social dynamics. Even in societies that have been able to consistently provide primary, secondary, and tertiary education to a larger proportion of their population, there is little intergenerational job mobility. Educated youth struggle simply to maintain the occupational levels of their less educated parents. Large measures of social equity have been attained in many countries in the area of education, but historical privileges and class status still largely dictate access to formal employment. The informal sector thus acts as a repository for those with skills but without opportunity. At times, the skills possessed by certain individuals are not suited to the kinds of livelihoods traditionally possible within the informal sector, because educational systems still are primarily oriented to producing functionaries for public bureaucracies. These skills are then deployed in terms of finding various ways of providing a broad range of formal services informally.
The Interaction of the Informal Economy and Social Identity
The informal sector is also a domain of particular articulations and reciprocity between social identity and economic activity. Economic activity is particularized and secured through the mobilization or reformation of specific social identities. At the same time, economic activities reproduce or change the status and development of specific identities. Such interactions between economic activity and identity take place at the level of households, communities, and ethnic and national collectives.
For example, small-scale entrepreneurial activities in Nairobi have largely been differentiated on the basis of gendered access to land. Women urban traders must generate savings through selling their own produce or that of women who have some form of access to agricultural production. In a survey conducted in Nairobi markets, only 2.5 percent of the 1,018 traders surveyed owned land, and 63.6 percent of them, including a large number of unmarried women, had no access to land. Fragile marriages compound the problem because matrimony is a common method for accessing land. Still, retailing can in some contexts involve women in a "food-enriched" environment. In these environments women are better able to provide adequate nutrition to their children than if they were only involved in subsistence or commercial farming. As one study shows, women commercial farmers in western Cameroon have the tendency to simply sell off higher-value crops, while retaining lower-value ones for family use.
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Excerpted from For the City Yet to Come by A. M. Simone Copyright © 2004 by A. M. Simone. Excerpted by permission.
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