Keywords

1 Introduction

Cities are sites of institutional innovation, norm setting, and material production. They are where the majority of the world’s population live (United Nations, 2018). Across Sub-Saharan Africa, rapid population growth and geographic expansion only emphasises cities’ importance. Countries whose populations were primarily rural a generation ago now see the burgeoning of capital and secondary cities (Lucas, 2021). While cultural heterogeneity has always been a norm in African cities (O’Connor, 1983), the pace and nature of growth has added levels of difference. Language, class, race, and religion are part of this story. So too are people’s position in spatio-temporal circuits linking them to families, friends, and at multiple sites and in multiple potential futures. Some remain locally oriented, dedicated to building lives in situ; others live on the margins, impoverishing themselves, intentionally disconnected from people and institutions to build a future life elsewhere while remaining deeply connected to multiple sites where they have family, friends, or business interests. Sometimes they imagine lives in futures they cannot yet name but have only ideas of a place where life offers a future less beset by economic and physical precarity (see Franck, 2021), where they can become more than they are.

These diverse orientations and trajectories generate multiple political valences. While some seek political inclusion and recognition, others shy away from it. The diversity this engenders layers multiple, determined, and open-ended geographic and temporal orientations atop class, ethnicity, religion, and language. Differential histories of political mobilisation add further dimensions, with some residents seeking remedies through public institutions and others indifferent to or fearful of them.

The proliferation of mayoral forums to address issues of migration reflect the importance of understanding urban policymaking and the politics associated with mobility and diversity (see Lacroix, 2022; Bälz & Aki-Sawyerr, 2021). Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 sets ‘inclusive cities’ as a goal for those seeking to address the socio-political challenges of urban growth in an era of austerity. Underlying the SDG and many other urban level initiatives are ontological, epistemological, and ethical premises warranting scrutiny. These include the very meaning of a city, the desirability of place-based inclusion, and what means and ends might be required to achieve it. Without providing definitive answers to those questions, this chapter provides a framework for how we might more accurately and ethically consider mobility and cities in an era of economic and environmental precarity, ongoing mobility, and institutional frailty and fragmentation.

This chapter outlines these concerns as a way of charting research at the intersection of urbanism, mobility, and the management of diversity. Levying targeted data collected in 2021 across three African cities and an existing corpus of work on African mobility and urban governance, this chapter forwards three primary points. First, while recognising the potential importance of state actors in diversity management, the normative biases associated with state sovereignty lead to analytically overprivileging the state. Urban spaces often present amalgams of regulatory systems working at different spatial scales and moral registers. That should be the analytical starting point. Second, capturing the actors involved in managing mobility and diversity within cities is critical, but the sociality of cities is not spatially bound. The diversity of spatial and temporal orientations at work in cities mean people are part of moral and material economies that shape their relationship to space, institutions, and each other. With this in mind, the chapter offers a third challenge to the normative presumption of inclusion, highlighting not only its elusiveness but the potential hazards it poses for urban residents’ life projects.

I ultimately argue for an approach to urban policymaking that conceptualises the urban not as a singular, bounded space, but as a series of constellations and corridors: sites linked to each other within and beyond the city through multiple institutional, economic, and moral economies. Such an approach not only reveals the horizonal intersections of multiple policy spaces but gives cause to reconsider the almost universal call for localised inclusion, visibility, and representation.

2 Data and Approach

This is a largely conceptual and exploratory chapter that draws on almost two decades of research on mobility and urban governance in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere to surface issues and open exploratory space. It begins with work done in collaboration with the South African Local Government Association to understand municipal preparedness to address questions of mobility in the country’s cities. This project brought together a generalised statistical analysis and extensive interviews with municipal authorities and civil society organisations to identify the policy and institutional challenges facing decentralised municipal government (see Landau et al., 2013). It was later extended to include additional municipalities in South Africa and Botswana (see Mapitsa & Landau, 2019) and then to Kenya and Uganda where we explored municipal and civil society responses to migration and displacement in Nairobi and Kampala (see Kihato & Landau, 2016). The statistical data cited here stems from a survey conducted March–April 2021 in Accra (Ghana), Nairobi (Kenya), and Johannesburg (South Africa). As national and regional nodes for economic and human circulation, they are ideal sites for exploring the governance of urban space in an era of mass mobility. Reflecting patterns seen elsewhere in African cities, each has a relatively young population and receives migrants from across their respective countries, the regions, and further beyond. As indicated in Table 2.1, data were collected from over 1600 people distributed almost evenly across nine specific research sites – three in each city. The sampling took place in some of the most diverse neighbourhoods within each of these cities. In Ghana and South Africa we used census data to identify areas with notably high levels of recent in-migrants. In Nairobi we selected areas based on local expertise. In each site, we included a mix of long-term residents, domestic migrants, and international migrants.

Table 2.1 Sample size by city and sex
Full size table

Together these data provide unique, contemporary insights into the nature of urbanisation, institutional engagement, regulation, and translocalism within African cities. Their experiences, alluding to more than what is detailed in this chapter, speak to the normality of multiple diversities associated with urban mobility. They also provide insight into the urban estuaries or gateway zones that characterise some of the most rapidly expanding cities in the world.

The account presented here is by no means definitive, nor is it intended to be. Rather, it is primarily an illustrative, constructive critique of the analytical and normative shortcomings within much urban policy analysis. I present it here not to advocate for African exceptionalism or to argue that cities across the Global South cannot be compared alongside cities in other regions. Quite to the contrary, while each city and country have distinctive histories and characters, African cities amplify and illustrate many of the trends now beginning to appear elsewhere: economic and environmental precaritisation, translocality, and the notable absence of public institutions from social, economic, and political life (cf. Bhan, 2019; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012). This latter point generates forms of ‘do-it-yourself’ urbanisation and urban life. Without muscular state institutions or hegemonic social ones, people are able to trade, house, and engage on terms of their own making (Randolph & Storper, 2023). This level of informality does not mean infinite flexibility or anarchy, but instead points to the importance of unwritten rules that produce conflictive or convivial relations among urban residents.

3 Analysing Beyond the Urban Edge

3.1 The State on the Margins of Urban Life

Urban theory and approaches to policy analysis is often informed by the Euro-American experience, where cities are sites of political and economic incorporation. Urban regimes incorporate markets, state, and civil society actors – although not always easily – to regulate each other and urban populations. For historical and contemporary reasons, African cities primarily reflect urbanism of a different kind. Although the continent has a long history of urbanism associated with trade and pre-colonial political formations, the continent’s primary cities are almost new. Whether designed as sites of colonial extraction (e.g. Johannesburg, Lubumbashi) or trade and transit (e.g. Nairobi, Kinshasa), the continent’s cities were typically planned and constructed for limited, carefully regulated populations (see Freund, 2001; Lamprakos, 1992). Even in the post-colonial period, many countries maintained strong anti-urbanisation agendas designed to maintain Africans as a primarily rural, agricultural people with space in the city allocated to those needed by government or the limited presence there.

Municipal governments were simply not prepared or willing to engage with the rapid urbanisation that has occurred over the past two decades. Some feared doing so would only accelerate urban growth, but whatever their actions, they have done little to slow urbanisation. Across the developing world, the total built-up area of less-developed countries quadrupled between 2000 and 2015 (Pesaresi et al., 2016). Secondary cities in Sub-Saharan Africa doubled their populations in that period and their de facto geographic boundaries grew even more rapidly than their populations. Primary cities, like those discussed here, have also expanded spatially – if less dramatically – as their populations grow from natural increase and in-migration. These rates are akin to industrial European cities 150 years ago and more recent ones in globalising, industrialising Asia. But African cities have only limited industry, trade, and opportunities for secure livelihoods. Some of this is connected to limited states, although greater public intervention has not always generated more equitable or prosperous cities. Regardless, cities continue to offer limited possibilities amidst precarity. Some find fortune there, but most do not (see also Friesen et al., 2019; Lamson-Hall et al., 2018; Kihato & Muyeba, 2015).

Many of Africa’s urban spaces are made by people’s efforts to do so, often with little direct engagement with municipal authorities. Although some celebrate the evident creativity and self-reliance (cf. Finn, 2014), it generates a level of disconnection, informality, and ongoing mobility (or churn) that has significant implications for people’s lives and policy analysis. While urban policy around land-use or trade is, for example, undeniably important (see Kihato & Royston, 2013), many of the neighbourhoods in which people live are ‘Brown Areas’ (O’Donnell, 2004) or what Scott (2009) might term ‘ungoverned spaces.’ Yet O’Donnell’s and Scott’s perspectives – like many policy analyses – are potentially misleading as they create analytical dichotomies between state and non-state forms of governance and policy. While urban regime theory recognises the role of private sector and civil society organisations in determining rules, such approaches often defer to the state as a locus of policymaking. Alternatively, states are seen as ‘captured’ – the executive committee of big business or others. Yet few speak about urban policy and governance in the presence of frail or intentionally absent state institutions – both traits seen widely across Sub-Saharan cities. Under these conditions, forms of horizontally and socially enacted ‘policies’ become central in shaping people’s lives.

My work in South Africa and Kenya finds that those with the most de facto power in regulating urban spaces are often not municipal officials but self- or community-appointed leaders. While their authority may be officially (or unofficially) endorsed by state agents, their actions are often extra-legal (see Misago & Landau, 2022; Misago, 2019). In parts of Cape Town, for example, efforts to prevent anti-immigrant conflict have resulted in a spatial segregation of foreign-owned business and limitations on their numbers. While there is no legal basis for such divides, they have now become normalised, almost congealing to create something Stone (1989, 1993) might recognise as an urban regime or system for governing diversity. Elsewhere, forms of gangsterism and protection rackets have established themselves in ways that produce regimes controlling entrance and residence that rely on relatively stable, if emergent and informal, collaborations and contests among various social, economic, and political actors. Yet, as Davis (2011), Tilly (1985), and Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York, 2002) all note, these often include mafias or mafia-like organisations working at multiple scales (see also Misago, 2019; Ansell & Gash, 2009; also, Alcantara & Nelles, 2014, p. 183). Even when they rely less on violence, the basis of authority and influence is often economic or social, not political (see Landau, 2015).

There is perhaps no better illustration of how millions live beyond the realm of formal law and policy than in considering the protections (or lack thereof) immigrants and refugees achieve in African cities. In research conducted in the mid-2000s in Johannesburg, Maputo, Lubumbashi, and Nairobi, legal status did little for those living in informal settlements, townships, or densely populated inner-city areas (see Landau & Duponchel, 2011). This was in part because almost all services were provided through markets and local level patronage, not states. Moreover, even the police operated on logics only loosely – if at all – structured by law. Instead, it was people’s social connections with neighbours, family members, and service providers that most influenced substantive outcomes. As such, when people seek to find ways in a city, it is not municipal offices or officials that are their most important connections, but the people who live around them or others who might make them visible to hostile actors (see Landau et al., 2016; Vidal, 2010; Hornberger, 2011).

Municipal and national policy texts or implementation remain relevant as they clearly provide a general tableau in which other forms of governance exist. But for significant portions of the urban populations, it is other, often ‘informal’ regulatory regimes that matter most. As discussed, these may take the form of local protection rackets that determine who can build, live, or move through a city. Or it may be private property developers or private security operators who effectively regulate interactions and mobility or provide services including water, education, and housing (see Landau, 2015). These may be embedded in regimes involving state actors and formal policy, but they too may effectively operate beneath or in parallel to such systems. Recognising this asks analysts to reconsider the meaning of regimes and opens the possibility for multiple, potentially highly spatialised regimes that alternatively include and exclude officials as the locus of action and importance.

3.2 Translocality and Scale

Having discussed the relative (ir)relevance of formal institutions and policy in managing Africa’s urban diversity, I now turn to the spatial basis of urban policy analysis. Underlying such analyses are definitions – sometimes explicit, sometimes not – of ‘city’ or ‘urban’. Shifting to the latter recognises the limitations of solely concentrating on municipal authorities, formal governing processes, or geographically delimited and homogenised spaces. Instead, I seriously engage Boudreau’s (Boudreau, 2016) provocation that ‘the urban’ is not simply a site, but rather a condition shaped by multiple societal issues that intersect in ways that are generative, performative, and potentially transformative. Making sense of urban governance and socio-economic outcomes amidst mobility and informality demands urban policy analysis extend beyond formal urban governments to include policies and practices shaping urban space – whatever their geographic or institutional origins. This is both a liberating and confounding position. At one level, it erodes straightforward comparative frameworks. What is the unit of analysis if cities are not legally defined jurisdictions? And how does one compare?Footnote 1 Indeed, such fluid boundaries risk becoming an unwieldy study of everything (see, for example, Brenner & Schmid, 2015). This, in turn, ceases to be fundamentally about what is distinctly ‘urban’ or the city (see Roy, 2016). In some instances – for example in understanding global labour or supply chains – the complete erosion of place-bound analysis enables scholars to see the truly planetary nature of participation processes. What is perhaps more useful for understanding diversity management is a perspective that recognises the cultural and economic specificity of place but demands a more permeable and heterogenous epistemology to avoid being blindered from significant forms of regulation and policy processes at work in a given site. As McFarlane (2011, p. 664) notes, ‘a new relational perspective on cities means that it is impossible to understand cities as territories prior to their engagements with other places’.

Such permeability can be accomplished without abandoning a focus on specific geographic sites. This can be done by understanding cities themselves as constellations of interconnected sites embedded in translocal and trans-scalar webs of circulation and regulation. Some speak of this as assemblages or systems of systems, although our focus here is somewhat more concrete. Making sense of urban spaces means tracking connections up, down, and out. The ‘up’– linking urban policy to ‘higher’ levels of government – is already common in urban policy analysis. This typically takes the form of analytical ‘stacking’, where municipal responses are seen to challenge, follow, transform, or otherwise engage policy frameworks forged at the supra-city level. Such an approach has been productively employed by Ambrosini (2021), Bauder (2017), de Graauw (2021), van Ostaijen and Scholten (2018), and Martínez-Ariño (2018), among others. Where cities are expressly responsible for realising international or national policy goals, this is clearly an appropriate starting point although these connections are more dialogical than unilinear. It is not simply about implementation or ‘urbanising’ national or international norms and provisions. Instead, policy formation is often mutually constitutive. As cities assert their independence and mayors or other officials mobilise international attention alongside national leaders, formal policy shifts at multiple levels may be driven from ‘below’. Mayoral dialogues and interventions to support cities to address migration issues and help shape immigration and naturalisation policies illustrate this potential.Footnote 2

Recognising how municipalities are multiply connected to other levels of government is a powerful first step in garnering insight into factors shaping urban space but is not enough alone (cf. O’Toole. 2011). There is need to drill down to the hyper-local: the sub-urban areas that can serve as points in a constellation or archipelago of connected, yet nonetheless distinctive sites within cities or spread across continents. We need not just to take cities seriously (as this volume argues), but to initiate one’s analysis at the level of the neighbourhood, an enclave as small as a street, a street corner, or even a building. This allows Quayson (2014) to offer a vivid account of Oxford Street, Accra’s highly globalised but remarkably local shopping mecca. Or Tayob (2018) to reveal the translocal connections reshaping Minneapolis’s economies and spaces. Looking at Oxford Street in Accra or Johannesburg’s Diepsloot (see Harber, 2014), or any number of other urban estuaries, reveals the range of actors and logics alluded to above (see for example, Zack & Landau, 2021; Hall, 2021). Some are effectively self-regulating islands; others work in ways envisioned by public policy. Many offer hybrid regimes where local actors claiming multiple forms of authorities interact to create vastly different (but potentially connected) governing regimes. Diepsloot, for example, is a poor and largely informal area housing close to 140,000 people. It is remarkably violent and only occasionally patrolled by the police. Yet it is effectively conjoined with Dainfern, a wealthy, walled neighbourhood within walking distance that relies on it for labour. There too the police are largely absent, replaced instead by private security under control of the homeowners’ association (see Murray, 2020). The two are materially and socially connected, and both governed largely ‘outside’ the state. The variations in these spaces could not be starker, but neither can be understood alone. Paller’s (2019) work on Accra offers less dramatic contrasts, but nonetheless illustrates how the gradual incorporation of different peoples and authority systems generates significantly divergent if geographically proximate policy environments in ways that are both distinct and connected within and beyond urban space (see also Bhan, 2019; Roy, 2016).

Material circulations, evidently and importantly, imbricate multiple geographic spaces (see Buechler, 2008). But as our world is not materialistically determined, there is value in ‘socialising’ these material circuits. The 2021 survey, for example, found that close to two-thirds of migrants (domestic and international) across the sample reported having household members living in another city, town, or village. In Johannesburg, more than half (56%) of people who were born in the city still had family living elsewhere. In many instances, households are effectively translocal: most urbanites with family outside the city regularly send money to them and many receive information, food, or other forms of support. While these connections appear to have weakened somewhat during the Covid-19 health emergency, they remain remarkably strong across all three sites. Moreover, more than half of domestic migrants (53%) in Accra indicated that if they have surplus, they invest outside the city. The percentage was lower in Nairobi and Johannesburg, where there are clearly significant numbers of people extracting urban resources (or attempting to) to build lives elsewhere. When asked where people would like to buy land or a home, only about half of those surveyed indicated they would like to buy where they are. When asked where they hoped to retire, the majority of respondents across the survey imagined a life elsewhere – typically in their communities of origin. While such return may ultimately prove untenable, they remain oriented in mobile temporalities, never fully invested in the urban. While the usufruct nature of migrant lives may be relatively universal, their concentration in cities changes the very character of those sites. In neighbourhoods where few people are from, who is it that is then investing in the place where they live?

Social and material connections mean that the regulation of urban space – what people do, where they spend, how they interact – is conditioned by possibilities and policies elsewhere. These may include tax codes or rural land use and zoning laws. It may also relate to the informal forms of social regulation that pressure people to provide resources, return ‘home’, or seek status in spaces other than where they reside (see Kankonde, 2010). This is particularly acute in migrant-rich neighbourhoods or gateway zones where the majority or large plurality are recent arrivals who are effectively on their way elsewhere (see Saunders, 2012). In such sites, multiple forms of pressures and policies may rub uncomfortably against each other, with some shaped by local concerns while others seek to build lives elsewhere (cf. Thomaz, 2021).

While the literature on transnationalism does well at capturing the multiple social worlds that people occupy, what is emerging across much of Africa are urban spaces (or sites within them) that are effectively translocal or multiply local. This is no longer about city and home: it is migrants working in spaces they know and those they can only imagine. For some it is about building a future in one place while preparing for a life in multiple, possible, others. Potts (2011) argues that this reflects a form of partial urbanisation, where urban life becomes inseparable from lives elsewhere in ways that demand a simultaneous, multi-sited analysis (see Turner, 2015; Mbembe & Nuttall, 2004). I suggest there is value in going beyond the kind of dyadic approach outlined by Potts (2011) and other transnational scholars. Rather, people in a given site – a gateway zone within a municipality, for example – are constantly negotiating formal and social regulation at multiple scales and from multiple sites within and beyond the city: where they live, where they work, where they intend to go, and where they come from (see Dzingirai et al., 2014; Potts, 2011). Even in the most economically marginal neighbourhoods, residents are part of continental and global constellations, interconnected through material exchange, social recognition, moral disciplines, and future imaginations (cf. Soja, 1996). These more archipelagic forms of membership create constellations of economies and institutions both fragile and fragmented and connections more dispersed that demand new forms of multi-sited urban policy analysis.

3.3 Inclusion as Metric

My final challenge is to how scholars epistemically and ethically mobilise ideas of inclusion and participation. At a normative level, scholars often align with the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal’s call to build ‘inclusive cities’ or older refrains to ensure all residents have a ‘right to the city’. Even when not explicitly stated, norms of representation, visibility, and local investment often serve as means of evaluating the effectiveness, structure, and morality of urban diversity management. For some this is largely about economics: access to work, basic services, and possibilities for upward mobility. For others, it is about political inclusion: consultation and the ability of all urban residents to shape the municipal policies affecting them. The understanding of inclusion informing most policy approaches –from Urban Vision plans to the Sustainable Development Goals – draw inspiration from industrial cities in North America and, to some extent, Latin America. Henry Lefebvre’s famous demand that workers have rights to the city is premised on their contributions to building its infrastructure and wealth (see Purcell, 2016). Moreover, it presumes an ideal of urban ownership, if not of land, then of the city’s future. For him, for the drafters of the SDGs, or the forces behind Habitat III’s demand for urban inclusion are ideals of localised belonging; of representation and visibility; of recognition and status where you are. They work from an ethics of inclusion that presumes people wish to remain. Yet models of place bound by incorporation, assimilation, or integration are no longer adequate as either an empirical or ethical guide (see Bakewell & Landau, 2018). As people build translocal lives – often governed by processes beyond formal institutions – local, state, or social recognition and ownership may cease to be the goal. For some, it may be something they actively avoid.

The translocalism and informality described above give cause to question the desirability of inclusion that is so often a metric for ‘urban success’. Indeed, one must not presume the desirability for urban solidarity and place-bound membership for those living in estuaries or translocal constellations, or for those who see the state as either inherently oppressive or irrelevant. Instead, political participation and inclusion – like the economic and social lives described above – becomes something that is often temporally and spatially dispersed: nodes and networks spanning space and time (see Vivet et al., 2013, p. 78). People shun local engagement while supporting political parties and processes elsewhere. They attend churches, go to community meetings, or help repatriate corpses to maintain their status in villages they otherwise visit only now and then, while they actively resist forging binding connections with their urban neighbours and institutions. Apart from Pentecostal churches that often encourage members to distance themselves from non-parishioners, the migrant respondents in our survey belong to few associations; find little value in attending government meetings; and express remarkably low levels of trust in ‘locals’. Many are deeply suspicious of people from their own countries or communities of origin, fearing that close connections with them will result in additional demands or serve as a surveillance function, potentially embarrassing them to people back home (Cazarin, 2018; Kankonde, 2010; Landau & Freemantle, 2016).

This helps explain why across the cities in our survey, one not only sees low levels of civic engagement, but only faint or partial desire for it. To be sure, there are other reasons for this limited orientation – preliminary analysis suggests activism at home is correlated with urban activism – but it nonetheless discourages engagement with formal political structures. This applies even among those who have spent extended periods (or were born) in the city. In Accra, 75% of the locally-born said they would not attend an official, local planning meeting if given the opportunity. That figure was close to 80% for domestic migrants and even higher for those from other countries. Those in Nairobi and Johannesburg were slightly more inclined to attend, but only just. Meantime, similar percentages report interest in attending a political rally, party meeting, or community group. While voting remains high on people’s agenda, other forms of inclusion and local representation do not.

Rather than an analysis measuring ‘inclusion’ or ‘participation’ in localised or dichotomous terms, this too must be respatialised. After all, what looks like exclusion and political marginalisation in one neighbourhood may be part of a strategy for status and influence elsewhere. A worker in Johannesburg, for example, may continue to live in a backyard shack or single, rented room for decades. While he registers in urban data collection as indigent, his urban self-denial allows him to buy land, cattle, and status within the community whose respect he desires. Hiding urban wealth is also a way to shelter one from the redistributed demands of kin and colleagues, allowing individuals or families to accumulate the resources required for onward movement. Recognising these constellations of belonging and inclusion means explicitly recognising that people seek varied forms of recognition and membership in multiple places. This may create alternative urban cartographies with disconnections between neighbours and municipal institutions, but vibrant conduits between a Nairobi street corner and a village in Somalia and a mosque in Minnesota. It may connect a small shop in Johannesburg to a political party in Kinshasa or a farmer’s cooperative or chamber of commerce in Mozambique. As much as supply chains and commuting corridors, these forms of participation shape urban policy outcomes and interactions.

Pentecostalism, one of Africa’s most muscular social forces, is perhaps the greatest driver of belonging across corridors and constellations (see Kankonde & Núñez, 2016; Wilhelm-Solomon et al., 2016; Landau, 2014) While relatively few people in our three-city sample attended public meetings or party events, almost all were part (and contributed money to) of religious organisations. Large numbers of the churches build on their strong connections to institutions in Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, and the United States, and many of them are increasingly political. However, their preaching is often extraterritorial, overtly denying the legitimacy of state laws while speaking of the dangers of local connections. Both the state and the sullied are enemies of salvation. If our concern is with the actors shaping urban space and governance, surely these are among the most significant (see Maclean & Esiebo, 2017). Indeed, as they pray, parishioners draw on variegated liturgical language to make demands on cities while locating themselves in an ephemeral, superior, and unrooted condition in which they can escape localised social and political obligations.

The forms of participation (and self-exclusion) we see emerging across many African cities are connected to urban residents’ multiple and often translocal economic, social, and political aspirations. Rather than seeking strong, localised relations and influence, some – by choice or necessity – orient their participation elsewhere. This is does not justify the active exclusion of populations by political or economic elites, but it raises important analytical questions for policy analysis. Accepting that urban political participation and local recognition is not a normative goal for all (and may counter emic understandings of urban ‘success’) frees us to treat it as both a subject for empirical inquiry and a potentially powerful heuristic. As scholars seek means of comparing and contrasting urbanism (Robinson, 2016), finding ways of comparing the nature and geographic scale of participation becomes a way of reading the city. Doing this effectively means opening the form and scale of participatory forms and recognising the role ‘stateness’ and translocality play in shaping urban space. As such, scholars will benefit from considering categories or continua of participation that can provide more nuance and comparative leverage. Seeking a means of assessing participation at multiple geographic scales, individual or collective projects, and residential environments holds the promise of a broader comparative account of urban policymaking.

As Kaufmann and Sydney (2020, p. 1) argue, a core element of many urban policy analyses is to understand ‘how institutions hinder or encourage participation’. In the cases described here, I advocate an agnostic approach to this question. Rather than promote participation as a normative good, participation and other forms of social connection become means of characterising cities rather than judging them. Such a perspective does not take as its goal facilitating participation or identifying local level ‘democratic deficits’. Rather, it looks at forms of participation and, importantly, the desire and geographic basis for it as means to understand political and policy processes. In this regard, formal meetings – consultations with political parties, policing forums, participatory budgeting consultations and the like – become just one way in which citizenship is expressed and participation practiced. These must be considered alongside substantive interactions with non-state actors and with leaders (formal and informal) outside the city’s geographic boundaries. This furthers others’ observations about multi-level policymaking, but again in ways that do not centre state policy as the ‘dependent variable’. It extends the efforts to ‘see like a city’ which usefully positions urban government within a diverse and multi-local ecosystem. It goes a step further in asking scholars to see urban policy as an outcome of processes that may have little to do with direct city government action or are taking shape precisely because city officials are deliberately absent, administratively under-resourced, or effectively kept away from neighbourhoods and policies through the actions of developers, gangsters, and others. Most importantly, by decentring the focus on local authorities, it makes space for the multiple system of political and social authority that intersect (but is not contained) within cities or urban boundaries. All are part of managing diversity when viewed within an urban frame.

In summary, Sub-Saharan Africa presents cities with ill-defined boundaries where people both struggle for and actively resist inclusion. Some seek status where they are but are stymied by economic structures that work against them. Others pursue a kind of distanciated deferral in which they seek recognition and futures elsewhere in continental or trans-continental constellations. For them, visibility, group membership, political participation, cross-cutting social ties – the forms of inclusion scholars and activists almost universally celebrate – become forms of entrapment. Rather than rights to the city, which is effectively a right of ownership, many want what I’ve termed ‘usufruct rights.’ They are helping turn parts of cities into ‘nowherevilles’ – a place where almost no one is from and almost no one wants to belong.

4 Concluding Remarks: Translocality, Informality, and Urban Diversity Management

This chapter calls for ways of assessing urban diversity management – and urban governance more broadly – in slightly more expansive ways.

First, while recognising that scholars of urban regimes often analytically include non-state actors (e.g. business, civil society organisations), they unduly privilege state institutions as the locus of advocacy and the ultimate standard-bearer of urban policy. While states remain important actors, the range of alternative modes of local and translocal regulation at work in African cities often mean states are only of secondary, practical concern. Even if cities and ports are among the few sites where Sub-Saharan states have exercised centralised control (see Herbst, 2000; Leonard & Straus, 2003), they are often amalgams of regulatory systems working at different spatial scales and moral registers: what Holston and Appadurai (1996) refer to as honeycombs of jurisdiction and regulation. Like cities elsewhere in the Global South, urban populations’ demographic dynamism often outstrips the capacity or interests of state regulators (see Harms, 2016; Simone, 2017; Buechler, 2008; Auerbach et al., 2018; Ren, 2018; Caldeira, 2017; Landau, 2006; Bank, 2011).

Second, that understanding urban governance and policy requires a distinctly translocal perspective that not only considers global supply chains and international institutions (public and private), but often less visible material and moral circuits of exchange. As people increasingly move into and through primary and secondary urban centres, they may spend most of their time in a city while their political and moral engagements remain in sites well beyond the limits of urban policymakers. This results in a form of translocal ‘do-it-yourself’ urbanism that blurs the geographical and institutional boundaries underlying conceptions of the urban and urban politics (see Myers, 2021; Turner, 2015; Mains, 2011; Jeffrey, 2010; Katz, 2004).

Third, there is need to challenge approaches explicitly or implicitly assessing cities through a focus on inclusion and popular participation. Take, for example, UN Sustainable Development Goals number 11: to ‘make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’.Footnote 3 Underlying this is a normative pronouncement that provides a series of comparative analytical metrics that resonate strongly with much research on urban policymaking. This chapter asks whether a focus on inclusion and local, state-centred participation effectively enables scholars to understand the politics and priorities of urban spaces and populations. This is not to advocate for economic, social, and political marginalisation, but rather to recognise that due to histories of ‘stateness’ (Dyson, 2009) and scepticism of official interventions, many urban residents have little interest in participating in official policy. Moreover, those seeking to build lives may actively avoid engagements to remain effectively ‘uncaptured’ (cf. Kihato & Landau, 2006; Hyden, 1980).

Doing so requires a dual recalibration. The first is to shift beyond the localised trifecta of business, civil society, and state that tends to position government as the locus of mobilisation and influence. As work on xenophobic violence in South Africa (and violence elsewhere) suggests, the state often disengages from the de facto regulation of peoples, processes, and places. These become sites for experiments in governmental form (see Iskander & Landau, 2022). The general irrelevance of state policy in many people’s lives further suggests the value of coding as regulators and policymakers as actors that may have little engagement or make little reference to official policies or institutions. The second is a recalibration of scale. While scholars have long recognised the need to see municipalities as ‘nested’ within state and national bodies, there is an increasing awareness that cities are connected horizontally. These connections are often as much social as material. The policies shaping lives in those sites – whether agricultural and land use policy, taxation and banking, even education and housing – affect how people live, engage, and mobilise in the cities in which they reside.

Urban policy analysis must adapt to this approach with a heightened focus on informality and a rescaled epistemology. This should recognise the spatio-temporalities of life in the city – what Lefebvre might call it’s polyrhythmicity – but also the multiple urban configurations produced through the mobility of people, goods, and ideas. There is a need to go beyond the stacking or nesting of urban policy in vertical relations with provincial, national, and global frameworks. This is invaluable, but a spatial approach considering corridors, catchments, and the constellations forged through material and socio-economic connections will better capture the multiple temporal and geographic policy spaces shaping contemporary cities. Work by Banerjee (2011) and others adopting a ‘transnational’ or ‘translocal’ perspective starts us on this process, but there is need to include constellations and not just connections that can help us build socialised, spatialised, and temporalised approaches that reveal what Johnson (2012) might term, ‘systems of systems’ but with specific focus on material and social forms entanglement.

There is also value in reconsidering how many of the normative foundations work as metrics for comparative policy analysis. It is, for example, still possible to use levels of civic participation, social cohesion, and representation as comparative metrics without proffering these as universal objectives: the Weberian distinction between ideal-types and normative ideals. Doing so allows us to assess what, for example, social cohesion and community do and should mean when people who live with multiple temporal and geographic trajectories share space. It may also help avoid efforts to make visible populations that might otherwise wish to remain invisible or to avoid the kind of ‘insurgent citizenship’ or ‘autoconstruction’ the literature often celebrates (see Thomaz, 2021; also, Holston, 2008; Caldeira, 2017). These are people who see cities as spaces of extraction, not belonging, and fear inclusion and incorporation as a threat to their longer-term projects.

In an era of informalised work and regulation, a focus on law and formal migration policy – even at multiple scales – is inadequate to explain social, economic, or developmental outcomes. Instead, we must understand the migration experience simultaneously across multiple geographic and temporal scales, both formal and social. At the very least, it requires a more substantive understanding of the multiple trajectories under which urban residents are living their lives and the spatial and temporal horizons informing them. This means new forms of research. It means new forms of engagement. Perhaps most importantly, it requires constant self-reflection on the societies we want versus the societies we are likely to get. Until we reconsider what we mean by justice, inclusion, and sustainability, scholars and planners risk building cities that only exacerbate the inequality and exclusion we seek to address. There will be those who suggest these observations do not apply beyond Africa’s rapidly transforming urban centres. Without fully denying these distinctions, it is worth remembering that even the cities where modern political analysis began – Frankfurt, Paris, New York, London – are increasingly looking like the kind of fragmented precarious spaces we see across Sub-Saharan Africa.