Silence and Voice in Nigeria's Hybrid Urban Water Markets: Implications for Local Governance of Public Goods

This article highlights how the governance of the water sector affects the strategies and tactics urban residents use to gain improved access to water for household consumption in cities with limited networked infrastructure. A framework of exit, voice and loyalty (EVL) is used to characterize the actions household decision makers take in neighborhoods across metropolitan areas. In Nigeria, Lagos and Benin City are rapidly growing metropolitan regions with urban water markets competing with a state‐run utility. Scholars have documented informality and hybridity between state and non‐state actors, but there is less understanding of variables associated with citizen behavior in urban water markets across different types of households and communities. This article places Nigeria in the context of African mobilization around water provision, using interviews, observation and findings from fieldwork, household interviews and surveys undertaken between 2008 and 2015 to show how access to water is shaped by the interplay between state and non‐state sources of water. This access is filtered through differently regulated service providers and the perceived authority of each actor involved in water delivery, which can lead to what I call structural silence. Findings show the need for a grounded understanding of factors influencing voice and participation in local governance.     

Sovereignty Beyond the State: Exception and Informality in a Western European City

Bridging debates on urban sovereignty and urban informality, this paper argues that relationships between sovereignty and informality may not reside exclusively in the way the sovereign state decides to allow or forbid informality, but also in the way sovereignty is distributed among a range of state and non‐state actors. Drawing upon fieldwork on the early‐2010s management of displaced Romanian Romani families in two emergency camps in the city of Montreuil (France), the paper shows how the NGO responsible for managing one camp acted as sovereign power, allowing a number of informal activities to thrive within its confines. By contrast, inside the other camp, managed by another NGO that resolutely implemented state directives, only formal activities took place. Building on Dean's (2010) concept of ‘disaggregated sovereignty’, the paper mobilizes this disjuncture as a case for critically examining how the ‘state of exception’ takes shape beyond the state's grip. A subtext running throughout is the parallel between the very first camps for civilians in nineteenth‐century colonized territories and these twenty‐first‐century camps for Roma in Europe—both elicited a state of exception partially predicated on camp dwellers’ perceived ethnic/racial homogeneity.     

Recovering Sociology from the Trash Heap: Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local Representation in Lagos

This article excavates the debate that unfolded during the 1980s between Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu to shed light on the theoretical divide that still cuts across the field of urban studies today. Looking at contemporary Rancièrian scholarship through a Bourdieusian lens, it points to their main theoretical shortcomings and reasserts the value of relational, field‐based and empirically grounded approaches to urban politics. At the same time, this article engages seriously Rancière's critique of Bourdieu's failure to account for space in order to question the territoriality inherent to the notion of field. We put this theoretical discussion to the test of Lagos's garbage. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Lagos from 2015 to 2016, we propose analyzing the process of spatialization of the field of local representation by looking at the ways solid waste—here conceived as a political opportunity—is mobilized by different actors. We argue that the deployment of a waste infrastructure in Lagos is congruent with a relative disinvestment in practices of territorial control that reshapes the structure of local representation, reconfiguring the ‘stage’ on which politics is played out in the Nigerian metropolis.     

基于可持续发展的中国城市治理体系:理论阐释与行动分析

良好的城市治理是实现城市可持续发展的关键.基于可持续发展的中国城市治理.其目标体系、组织体系、过程体系、制度体系、绩效体系都有别于现行的城市管理.建设符合城市可持续发展要求的中国城市治理体系,必须对现有的城市管理模式进行大幅度的变革.这种变革需要从表层的组织结构、体制、政策和深层的文化、理念等多方面着手.在理念上确立和体制上保证政府自身首先以可持续发展为行动导向,以有效的"强政府"代替全能的"小政府",推动非政府组织发展,激发和扩大公众参与,创新政策以激励城市的可持续发展等,都是建设可持续发展的城市治理体系的重要路径.     

Who's Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?

Recent assertions of urban theory have dismissed the value of postcolonial critique in urban studies. This essay draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate key flaws in such theoretical formulations. In doing so, it returns to the puzzle of how and why studying urbanism in the global South might matter for the reconceptualization of critical urban theory. Instead of a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation, the essay foregrounds forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization. What is at stake, the essay concludes, is a culture of theory, one that in its Eurocentrism tends to foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy. A concern with the relationship between place, knowledge and power—a key insight of postcolonial critique—might make possible new practices of theory in urban studies.     

从企业治理概念看城市的治理结构

随着经济全球一体化进程的加快 ,城市治理结构正经历着向企业家式治理模式的转变。本文通过对企业治理与管理的分析 ,认为城市治理应参照企业治理结构模式 ,建立起有中国特色的城市治理结构。