Informal Urban Africa

Household food security in African cities has received increasing academic and policy attention in the past decade as the continent rapidly urbanizes. The African Food Security Urban Network has played a leading role in producing empirical research on the extent of household food insecurity and on its causal factors, but to date it has produced little longitudinal data. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the results of household food security surveys conducted in low-income neighbourhoods in Harare, Zimbabwe in 2008 and 2012. The analytical focus is on the changes that took place from the " crisis " situation in 2008, when the formal sector economy virtually ceased to function, to the situation in 2012 after new economic policies and a political detente had led to economic stabilization. The results show an overall improvement in food security but with important qualifications, such as the continued importance of non-monetized and informal food sources, continued problems with access to basic services and infrastructure, and the accrual of food security gains mostly among wealthier households.

Despite of his relatively low population, Libreville, the capital of Gabon, as well as the equatorial sub-Saharan Africa's biggest towns, is threatening the tropical forest environment. The city form shaped by his dwellers - also migrants from the forests hinterlands settlements - is evolving against the natural environment survival. This making of the city that involves informally are almost oriented by this migrants territorial link, as the reiteration of their cultural know how. But this reiteration - a territorial displacement of an identity - are the response to the needs origined by the Modern City. In fact, due to the necessity to integrate the web of the informal economy, the city dwellers are informally stretching the urban shape, creating "urban villages", emblematic "outposts of the modernity" - despite their traditional reliance - in the city's forest hinterlands. It is the result of the mobility in urban space as the major consequence of the search of self reliance. In term of community relationships and settlement's collective space, mobility questions the role of the space dislocation and the relativization of spatial identity and its lessons for sustainble Planning practice.

The Forest-City hypothesis take place in order to consider the inputs of an etnographic approach into urban territory morphology and directions for the observation of informal settlements making.

The third world cities are generally characterized by the important role of the informal settlements. It belies the higher impact onto space and urban territory of the populations self-help and search of social sustainbility. So, how could that trusts with sustainble Planning pratice, in these urban contexts ?

Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi's harshest geographies are tasked not only with intervening for 'justice' but also with (re)establishing care and emotion in landscapes devastated by both colonial and neoliberal divestments and violence. When they act to demand and bridge actions to ensure, for example, water, sanitation and an end to extrajudicial killings, they take on multiple material and affective roles in these neighborhoods. This article argues that as they seek to comfort families, protest the county administration and report violations, amongst other daily interventions, they target not just the reinstatement of basic rights, but also the reinsertion of care and emotion in environments where a normalized (and militarized) precarity has denied the legitimacy of these sentiments. The goal here is not only to ask 'whatever happened to empathy?', but, above all, to attend to how it is actively discouraged in particular situations and sites, and how activists are then tasked with incorporating intentional emotional and care labors in their everyday material and discursive practices in order to restore empathy in and for their neighborhoods. This article is informed by over a decade of fieldwork in Mathare 'slum,' as well as interviews and participant observation with activists from a cross section of poor urban settlements in the city of Nairobi.

The City of Cairo experienced a major shift in its urban planning attitude and practice since the mid
1970s which mostly validated elements of economic planning while neutralizing its social aspects. This
ad hoc approach escalated conflict in planning politics over the control of space between tiers of the
planning institution and the locals leading to rigorous planning actions among major stakeholders such
as eviction and control of spaces. The article examines how institutional claims over space reassembled
alternative definitions of quality of life in one of Cairo's oldest quarters, and how ambitious planning
schemes were mostly driven by entrepreneurial rather than societal. Based on first-hand interviews and
visuals, the article aims to reveal the local's struggle to survive such interventions with attention to their
daily negotiations in place.

Cet article aborde les questions de la propriété et de la citoyenneté à travers le prisme de la fourniture de services publics et d’infrastructures dans les zones d’habitat informel en périphérie de Niamey, la capitale du Niger. Il analyse les dynamiques de la propriété et les demandes de services publics et explore ainsi le lien intime entre le lieu, la matérialité et l’articulation des dimensions de citoyenneté et d’appartenance à la ville. La fourniture de services publics est ainsi appréhendée comme une arène politique au sein de laquelle sont négociées quotidiennement les relations entre les résidents et les autorités locales et nationales. Cet article démontre que, dans un contexte d’insécurité relative aux droits fonciers, les mobilisations locales pour la fourniture de services publics et d’équipements sont un moyen de revendiquer des droits sur le foncier urbain et ainsi, plus largement, d’aspirer à l’intégration dans la communauté politique de la ville. Il montre également que ces mobilisations sont la source de processus d’institutionnalisation dans un contexte où l’État brille par son absence en ce qui concerne les investissements, l’infrastructure et la planification urbaine.

This article approaches property and citizenship through a focus on the provision of public services and infrastructure in informal urban settlements at the periphery of Niamey, the capital of Niger. In documenting property dynamics and claims to public services, it sets out to explore the intimate connection between place, materiality and the articulation of citizenship and belonging to the city. Public service provision is thus approached as a political arena in which relations between residents and local and national authorities are negotiated on a day-to-day basis. It is argued that in a context of insecure land rights local mobilizations for the provision public services and amenities are a way of staking claims to urban land and to inclusion into the wider urban political community. These mobilizations are also shown to be the source of institutional processes in a situation where the state as manifested in investments, infrastructure and urban plans is otherwise absent.