Governance: Rethinking Paradigms and Urban Research Approach for Sub-Saharan African Urbanism

Abstract

To address the enormous challenges of management and rebalancing of the massive “urbanization of poverty” widespread in many countries of the Global South and particularly in the African continent, international multi-later organizations such as the World Bank and UN-Agencies have long since introduced the notion of governance—reformulated as good governance—as a sort of “magic formula” to tame unplanned and informal urban growth and enable a more prosperous, equitable, and sustainable urban development. The practical application of this new mode of urban government that has been so successful in Western cities—although still debated—has encountered and still encounters many obstacles in contexts where the government, especially at the local level, is weak and poorly equipped, formal resources are very limited, and informal processes predominate. The essay tries to reconstruct this problematic framework, especially with reference to sub-Saharan Africa, drawing on the growing studies on the specificity of African urbanism, which strongly support the need for a “place-based innovation” of planning and urban governance based on specific knowledge production and rooted in a new theory and praxis of urban research in that context. In the end, the case of the action-research “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!” is argued as a valuable contribution to this perspective.