Provisioning the Counter-City: Alternative imaginaries of urban futures from Harare, Zimbabwe

Abstract

Drawing from critical urbanists, this article conceptualizes provisionality—flexible, improvisational, and adaptable practices, as an ethos and practice that holds utility and possibility for alternatively understanding cities in ways that counter conventional modernist imaginaries of urban life and spaces. By attending to how cities are rather than how they “should be,” this article offers a conceptual and analytic counter to re-animate, re-imagine, and re-world cities beyond conventional and modernist frames. Using ethnographic observations supplemented by 22 semi-structured interviews, I trace how Hararians' provisional approaches to surviving political and economic precarity reveal collaborative networks and transgressive cross-border economic communities. I argue that the relationalities and spatialities of people's interdependent and provisional arrangements reveal economic circumventions, social collaborations, and spatial transgressions, across and beyond the city that push back against static modernist renderings of the urban. This reading of the counter-city examines the ephemeral, emergent, and cross-cutting forms of sociality within them, positioning urban spaces as frontiers of inter-dependent experimentation, fluid mutuality, and collaboration.