Designing a ‘vibrant, attractive and sustainable city’: feminist approaches to beautification in Kampala, Uganda

Abstract

Beauty, as an aesthetic ideal and intrinsically power-laden paradigm, is central to urban development projects. Yet there remains limited critical work that interrogates the colonial underpinnings, violent outcomes, and negotiations of beauty politics in urban beautification programs. In our article, we approach urban beautification campaigns in downtown Kampala, Uganda via an explicitly African, and Black feminist analytic of beauty. Specifically, we center the experiences of women market vendors as they navigate city greening initiatives and development plans which promise to ‘transform’ Kampala and re-brand it once again as the ‘Garden City of Africa’. We argue that pairing urban beautification and Black and African scholarship around beauty offers generative insights as it understands such spatial programs as always embodied, contested, and inseparable from intersectional power hierarchies. In turn, we take seriously and carefully examine discourses around beautification: by tracing its colonial and gendered foundations and its visceral impacts as it is internalized and renegotiated by low-income women operating in downtown markets in Kampala. As such, our focus on beauty situates beautification as a disciplining and displacing practice and as mentally and physically violent. Finally, it reveals how women try to envision their own beautiful Kampala.