Abstract
Abstract Urban renewal is central to ‘world-class’ city aspirations on the African continent: demolitions and evictions exemplify the power of the state to restructure urban space, prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity. The ubiquity of world-class city-making has been taken by urban studies scholars as evidence of African leaders’ converging on a unitary aspirational urban imaginary. This article contends that the concept of world class should instead be understood as a key terrain on which African governments’ distinctive and diverse ideational ambitions are expressed. In Oyo State, southwest Nigeria, vernacular political traditions—in this case Yoruba cultural nationalism centred on the ideas of Obafemi Awolowo—were deployed by the state governor to legitimize urban renewal. Drawing on the Yoruba notion that elitism can be ‘generalized’, the cultivation of globalized urban forms was not only a project of becoming ever more homogenously ‘international’ but a historically grounded aspiration to become ever more essentially Yoruba. Thus, beyond commonalities across the discourses used to legitimize neoliberal urban development—world class, international and global—these universal sounding imaginaries may at the same time express much more particularistic political projects.
Highlights
Theorizing urban renewal in AfricaUrban renewal exemplifies the power of the state to ‘restructure urban space’,22 prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity.[23]
Urban renewal is central to ‘world-class’ city aspirations on the African continent: demolitions and evictions exemplify the power of the state to restructure urban space, prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity
The ideas of elites as a social and discursive category has historically been intertwined with notions of enlightenment and modernization, both in southwest Nigeria and African politics more generally.[80]
Summary
Urban renewal exemplifies the power of the state to ‘restructure urban space’,22 prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity.[23]. Common to most if not all urban renewal projects is the accusation of elitism and that they fuel exclusion of the poor from urban space.[45] as Melly argues, leaders often celebrate the costs of urban renewal, framing shared sacrifice as a form of inclusion in national development.[46] Whilst earlier work focussed on resistance to top-down renewal policies,[47] scholars increasingly attend to ‘people’s acquiescence to their displacement by modern developments’[48] and their efforts to claim inclusion in these world-class visions.[49] The literature has largely focussed on the ways in which leaders and citizens have navigated inclusion in the same ‘globally recognisable’[50] universal categories discussed above, exemplified by Durban based street-traders’ call for ‘World Class Cities for All’[51] and the identification of unemployed men in Cairo with UN-sponsored discourses of neoliberal entrepreneurship.[52] The second contribution of this article is to raise the possibility that inclusion in world-class visions is legitimized as a matter of assimilation into global norms, but as the expression of much more localized and bounded political identities As such it responds to Susan Parnell and Jennifer Robinson’s call to open up ‘a greater range of theoretical initiatives to interpret processes of urbanization’.53
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