Abstract
Senegal has a long tradition of the collective management of public space via community cleaning. Since the explosion of the popular ecology movement Set Setal (meaning clean and be clean in Wolof) in the early 1990s, ‘set’ or hygienic aesthetics have been central to the construction and control of urban space and deployed to include and enfold but also expel citizens. In January 2020 the Senegalese President Macky Sall called on the population to join him in ‘Cleaning Days’, bypassing ‘set’ practices. Cleaning Day was met with a response ranging from indifference to anger and open conflict. In this article I use Cleaning Day as a lens to analyse the production and reception of set aesthetics in a time of ‘emergence’. Focusing on the power of subaltern practice to resist the encroachment of a state in search of meaningful symbols, I challenge the idea that contemporary urban aesthetics is geared towards the creation of a perceived continuity of interests organised around an aspiration to a global urban standard.
Highlights
Senegal has a long tradition of the collective management of public space via community cleaning
An obvious but important point to make about emergence is that even if proponents and architects of emergence-oriented politics do attempt to occupy the symbolic ground of Set Setal, that occupancy will not be sufficient to shut down the imaginative and creative energies of Senegalese, or to stop them using an idiom of cleanliness to express and contest the right to the city
As people begin to apply set theory to ‘emergence’ and to chip away at its high sheen faxcade, it can feel as if Senegalese are trapped in a repetition in which values of civility and the power to create and define the meaning of public space and the norms of governance are claimed by the state, reclaimed by citizens, arrogated, appropriated, cited, fought over and contested, while the material organisation and status of the urban space continues to fall short of the expectations of those who seek to transform it
Summary
Senegal has a long tradition of the collective management of public space via community cleaning. After considering the production of knowledge about Set Setal, its ambiguity and capacity for attaching itself to a range of political movements and ideologies, I return to ‘Cleaning Day’ and examine what the instructive failure of this sanitary spectacle can tell us about urban aesthetics in a time of ‘emergence’ and the prospective success or failure of emergence itself in capturing imaginations and conjuring tangible futures.
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