DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice


 
 
 ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) urbanism is usually initiated by community members using a grassroots approach to change urban areas. Community planning involves making decisions about urban areas. This paper examines topics regarding DIY urbanism and community planning. Community engagement, neoliberalism and municipal support are key influences of DIY urbanism related to planning. DIY urbanism impacts the planner’s role as well as the relationships between planners, communities and municipalities. Three Canadian examples of DIY urbanism are introduced, including the Urban Repair Squad, PARK(ing) Day, and CITYlab. Discussion focuses on the opportunities and potential challenges of DIY urbanism for planners to consider. Potential challenges include public safety and municipal liability. Recommendations for planners regarding DIY urbanism are provided. DIY urbanism can be beneficial if planners work collaboratively and focus on small scale, low cost improvements.
 
 

A growing body of literature has been explicitly concerned with a range of microspatial practices that are currently reshaping urban spaces under the valuable denominator of “DIY urbanism.” However, there is still much work to be done if we are to take into consideration DIY urbanism's primary source and output: the commons. As such, Spanish DIY collectives have taken an explicit interest in building and reclaiming the urban commonwealth through participatory DIY interventionism. Therefore, this article assesses Spanish DIY urbanism through the lens of the commons and asks how the vocabulary of the latter might help us to further understand the DIY practice. In so doing, DIY urbanism will be put forward as “a field of possibilities” through three key features that inform commons theorizing: threshold spatiality, value, and legitimacy.

Lefebvre’s “right to the city” concept is often used to describe how individuals are challenging late capitalism and neoliberal development by appropriating urban space for collective use. While some argue that DIY urbanism can be framed as a right to the city, others dismiss its political potential. However, dominant interpretations of right to the city do not engage with Lefebvre’s interest in the body and affect, themes that resonate with both Gibson-Graham’s politics of becoming as well as DIY urbanism. By identifying these linkages, this essay constructs an alternative, vital reading of Lefebvre’s right to the city in order to explore the radical potential of DIY urbanism. It grounds this theoretical framework in an ethnographic case study of DIY projects enacted between 2012 and 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas. The essay then discusses the importance of highlighting the micropolitics of everyday urban life in order to identify and nurture their postcapitalist possibilities.

This chapter outlines a specific framework for the creation of critical playable cities. This framework combines three different concepts: DIY urbanism, critical design and urban gamification which are seen as complementary to each other. Cities are complex systems. Various actors often explicitly or implicitly harmonize or collide to shape the landscape of a city and its future. In the past decades, there has been an increased interest in activating citizens as vital actors in shaping urban life. This has taken place through various practical works and research around the paradigms of Playable Cities, DIY Urbanism and Gamification amongst other paradigms. Urban gamification—that is, using play and playfulness to alter our perception of and interactions with city spaces—is specifically emerging as one of the main strategies to activate citizens. Urban gamification alone, however, risks to be disconnected from the urban fabric and its communities. In this chapter we argue that combining it with the grassroot approach of DIY urbanism and the thought-provoking techniques of critical design creates a unique, multi-dimensional approach to designing urban experiences. This chapter, then, aims to explore how play can be used by citizens as a mean for critical reflection and practical re-appropriation of public urban spaces.

In this commentary, I explore what an artists’ process offers to city-making: how urban experimentation can open up hopeful, surprising, and imaginative urban encounters and futures. By doing so, I imagine a future for geographical thought and praxis lying partly in the interesting places where they overlap with artistic practice. I ground this thinking on the unstable surface found in the years immediately following the 2010–11 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was into a wasteland of post-earthquake demolition that ‘ordinary citizens’ started to insert creative interventions (known in the literature as do-it-yourself, or DIY, urbanism). I explore how an understanding of creative ‘flow’ helped me untangle what was particular and unique about the uprising of DIY urbanism in post-earthquake Christchurch. From the ‘doing’ of creative practitioners in the city during this time emerged a different and new energy: an imaginative, hopeful, open-ended feeling of the possibilities hidden behind the facade of grey rubble. In particular, I examine how existing work in the geohumanities around hope and temporalities resonates with DIY urbanism and consider what artistic practices may have to offer geographical thought and praxis.

Book review: <i>DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice</i> by Stephen Marr and Patience Mususa (eds) MarrStephen and MususaPatience (eds), <i>DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice</i> , London: Zed Books, 2024; 235 pp., £29.95(paperback), ISBN: 9781786999061

"The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy & Inequality in DIY Urbanism." Journal of the American Planning Association, 88(4), pp. 598–599

Handbook on the Geographies of Energy. Cheltenham/Northampton: Edward Elgar</H1> The spatiality of energy systems and the multiple ways of conceptualizing them are the focus of energy geography. Within this rapidly expanding field of scholarship, the Handbook on the Geographies of Energy in Edward Elgar's Handbook series represents an important collection of 37 chapters which have been carefully compiled by Barry D.

Book Review: The Help–Yourself City: Legitimacy &amp; Inequality in DIY Urbanism

The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism

Across Africa, protracted economic crises and enduring class stratification have impacted a majority of the continent’s city-dwellers, meaning that urban residents are forced to draw on their own resources and skills, often adopting experimental approaches to sustaining access to services and livelihoods. This 'do-it-yourself' urbanism has generally been appraised through a developmental lens, in which case studies are understood in isolation. In this book, a comparative and cross-regional approach seeks to analyze this phenomenon across the continent, and to gain an understanding of the dynamics of DIY urbanism in a range of cities where urban residents experience economic distress and marginalization. Does DIY urbanism present a form of resistance, or merely an acquiescence, to the inequalities that make it necessary? And what prospect is there for a radical politics to come out of this grassroots organization, to make cities work better for their poorest, and most marginalised, residents?

This article examines the role of cultural events in Rotterdam’s urban sustainability transition by looking at the festival Rotterdamse Dakendagen [Rotterdam’s Rooftop Days]. During this week-long festival, rooftops are used by citizens and cultural groups to activate urban spaces as places of learning, exchange, and DIY urbanism, thus broadening the scope of rooftops as places for cultural sustainability. Drawing on empirical material collected via qualitative interviews, policy document analysis, and five months of participant observation, we identify three aspects that inform urban sustainability transitions via culture: (1) the (re)activation of rooftops via cultural programming, (2) institution-building that is mindful of festivals’ continuously temporary nature, and (3) the limited material, yet wide-ranging immaterial effects of urban cultural festivals that have accelerated the Rotterdam’s urban (cultural) politics of sustainability. In sum, the article argues that culture plays an important role in any investigation of urban sustainability transitions and should be considered with more conceptual nuance in the future.

ABSTRACTClimate-related phenomena historically have had an impact on the lives of urban dwellers of Luanda and Maputo. Recently, however, urban expansion and congestion of different sorts, aggravated by climate change impacts, call for renewed responses on the part of residents. Rising sea levels and harder impacts of flooding are the most disturbing issues in the two coastal capitals, demanding both institutional responses and strategies of urban residents, particularly the most vulnerable. Based on qualitative data collected in Luanda and Maputo, this article describes how urban residents aim to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change and by doing so, shape the cities they live in and their environment.

This special issue of the Journal of Urbanism tackles a question of ongoing pertinence for cities and urbanists everywhere: what are the rights, expectations, and responsibilities of the public as ...

Book Review DIY urbanism in Africa: politics and practice by Stephen Marr and Patience Mususa, London, Zed Books and Bloomsbury, 2023, 256 pp., £58.50 (hb), ISBN 9781786999061