Building God's City: The Political Economy of Prayer Camps in Nigeria

The proliferation of religious spaces is a relatively recent development in Nigeria. Nowadays there are more than a hundred religious camps belonging to different religious groups in the country. The most popular of these camps, the Redemption Camp of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, is located 42 kilometres outside of Lagos and measures several thousand acres. Although initially not designed as such, developments in and around Lagos have compelled the managers of the Redemption Camp to present it as an urban alternative to the city of Lagos, which is generally deemed chaotic. The prestige of this camp and its activities have led to expansive urban development that involves the creation of numerous residential estates stretching from Lagos to beyond the Redemption Camp. Based on a recent ethnographic study of the Redemption Camp, this article argues that the process of urban expansion in and around Lagos is propelled by an aggressive form of religious revival that transcends the borders between economics, spirituality and territorial conquest. This article thus illustrates how church‐driven, religio‐urban developments follow a different logic of city making than often presumed by theorists of African cities, who generally neglect the religious forces that inform urban transformations in Africa.     

Representational Approaches Matter

This paper raises the question of how ethical issues arising out of social inequities involving international business in developing countries can be represented, and articulates a conceptual framework that identifies and maps four different approaches to representing or making sense of such issues. A fieldwork-based case study on the child labor issue in Pakistan’s soccer ball industry illustrates the argument that representational practices do matter, and that when representational approaches go awry, they end up savaging the well-being of the poor in the developing world. Farzad Rafi Khan holds a Ph.D. in Management from McGill University. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Suleman Dawood School of Business, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.     

Sister Communities: Rejecting Labels of Informality and Peripherality in Vanuatu

Some labels have dire consequences. This article takes issue with the labels commonly used to describe the physical and social location of communities living on the edge of Port Vila, Vanuatu—labels that position communities for eviction by entrenching tropes of informality and peripherality into how they are seen and represented. Such terms include informal, settlement, informal settlement, squatter and peri-urban. Based on interviews with around 100 people and two years of ethnographic engagement with urban communities in Port Vila, Vanuatu, I critique the language of policy against the lived experience of those at the urban edge. I use Bourdieu's articulation of power as an accumulation of symbolic capital that enables one to speak the world into being. I conclude that the language of policies and plans is reflective of a dominant discourse in urban studies and international aid, and non-reflective of the experience and identities of people living at the urban edge. My interviewees and interlocutors maintain their identities as sister communities—as places grounded in the formality of customary tenure, and as part of the city rather than outside it.     

Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality

This article introduces the concept of popular urbanization to describe a specific urbanization process based on collective initiatives, self-organization and the activities of inhabitants. We understand popular urbanization as an urban strategy through which an urban territory is produced, transformed and appropriated by the people. This concept results from a theoretically guided and empirically grounded comparison of Mexico City, Istanbul and Lagos. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, we bring urbanization processes in these urban regions into conversation with each other through a multidimensional theoretical framework inspired by Henri Lefebvre focusing on material interaction, territorial regulation, and everyday experience. In this way, popular urbanization emerged as a distinct urbanization process, which we identified in all three contexts. While this process is often subsumed under the broader concept of ‘urban informality’, we suggest that it may be helpful to distinguish popular urbanization as primarily led by the people, while commodification and state agencies play minor roles. As popular urbanization unfolds in diverse ways dependent upon the wider urban context, specific political constellations and actions, it results in a variety of spatial outcomes and temporal trajectories. This is therefore a revisable and open concept. In proposing the concept of popular urbanization for further examination, we seek to contribute to the collective development of a decentered vocabulary of urbanization.     

The Real Estate Frontier

Africa's major cities are experiencing dramatic transformation as a result of growing real estate investment. This article explores whether existing theories can explain the dynamics of urban redevelopment in an African context, and how African cases can inform new theorizations of real estate driven urban transformation. Examining the utility of theories of gentrification and speculative urbanism for understanding urban redevelopment in Accra, Ghana, it argues that urban redevelopment in this city has been shaped by its particular (post)colonial history of state land acquisition and urban planning. Rather than simply identifying empirical variation on established theories, however, the article draws on recent research on commodity frontiers to propose an original theorization of urban redevelopment in Accra in terms of the production of a ‘real estate frontier’. This real estate frontier is characterized by the incremental and contested commodification of state land to enable the growth of the real estate sector in the city. The article concludes by calling for a comparative research agenda to better understand real estate frontiers globally.     

Toward The Networked City? Translating Technological ideals and Planning Models in Water and Sanitation Systems in Dar es Salaam

One of the most influential ideals for constructing and managing cities and infrastructures worldwide is that of the ‘networked city'. This ideal refers to the technological design and morphology of cities integrated and ordered by infrastructure networks and to a specific model in the operation, use and planning of infrastructures. Engineers, planners and public health officials have aspired to align with this circulating ideal of urban modernity, hygiene and rationalization of nature in (re)producing cities worldwide. Like many cities in the global South, Dar es Salaam cannot be characterized by universal access to centralized water and sewerage networks. While formal institutions, planning documents and strategies reflect significations, as well as organizational and planning models of a networked city, its urban environments are shaped by hybrid arrangements manifesting unequal access to water and sanitation services. We build on postcolonial critique in urban studies and science and technology studies to inquire into this contradiction by addressing the translation of the ideal of the networked city in Dar es Salaam. Our objective is to uncover the negotiations over the translation of this hegemonic model, and to delineate the scope of creativity in reinventing alternative urban modernities that defy simplistic notions of technology transfer.     

Greening Displacements,Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity,Slum Clearance,and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

In Indian cities, informal ‘slum’ settlements have long been targeted for removal as an environmental improvement strategy, despite their relatively low impact. Slum clearance has escalated with the combination of speculative development and environmental change, creating uneven precarity throughout Mumbai's neighborhoods. State agents play a direct role in slum evictions, but they do not act unilaterally. Diverse lower‐income and middle‐class residents seeking better living conditions have sometimes converged in their embrace of slum clearances and resettlements that advance elite development interests. In other moments, the dispossessing effects of market‐based and elite‐biased slum rehabilitation have fomented contestation. This article analyzes how differently situated groups emerge as ‘environmental subjects’ that embrace or contest improvement projects. It suggests three dimensions of subject formation: governing logics and discourses of urban environmental improvement, the territorial politics of informality, and differentiated embodied experiences of precarity and dispossession. Environmental subject formation is explored through two interventions that entail slum clearance—mangrove and green space conservation and an urban transport infrastructure project. Findings suggest that the connection between displacement and improvement cannot be explained through theories of environmental gentrification but require attention to the simultaneously inclusive and dispossessing regimes of postcolonial development.     

Contesting the Indian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local

This symposium brings together three empirical studies and one conceptual overview examining the politics of redevelopment in contemporary Indian cities. Collectively these articles seek to redress the relative dearth of concerted attention to the institutional, economic and socio‐spatial changes that are shifting the terrain of urban politics in post‐liberalization India.