Politics and the Urban Frontier

Front matter

OXFORD

POLITICS AND THE URBAN FRONTIER

CRITICAL FRONTIERS OF THEORY, RESEARCH, AND POLICY IN INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Part I Urban Tectonics

1. East Africa and the politics of late urbanization Introduction 1.1 The peripheral frontier 1.2 Late urbanization 1.3 Cities in a world of regions 1.4 Scaling the politics of urban development 1.5 Structure of the argument 1.6 Organization of the book

2. Transformation and divergence: Explaining contemporary urban development trajectories Introduction 2.1 Causal force and urban change 2.2 The distribution of associational power 2.3 The pursuit of social legitimacy 2.4 Modalities of political informality 2.5 Legacies and practices of infrastructural reach 2.6 A level-abstracted view of the politics of urban transformation

Part II Urban Foundations

3. The making of urban territory Introduction 3.1 Land, territory, and property in the making of urban East Africa 3.2 Precolonial dynamics and the emergence of land regimes 3.3 The colonial encounter and urban territorialization 3.4 Independence and revolution 3.5 Land and urban territory under the new rebel statesmen 3.6 Conclusions: Land regimes, urban territory, and violent transitions

X CONTENTS

Introduction 4.1 The early foundations of a regional trading economy 4.2 Limits to economic transformation in the imperial period 4.3 From high hopes to crisis 4.4 East Africa’s development labs 4.5 Conclusions: Towards a contemporary urban political economy

Part III Urban Currents

5.3 The African ‘infrastructure gap’ as a twenty-first-century priority

5.4 China and the Ethiopian urban ‘renaissance’: The light railway in Addis Ababa

5.5 Kigali’s tourist infrastructures of regional ambition

5.6 The ‘world’s most expensive road’: The Kampala-Entebbe Expressway

5.7 The comparative politics of urban mega-infrastructure

6.2 East African propertyscapes: Landlords, bubbles, and skeletons 6.3 The politics of mass housing

. Working the city: Vendors, ‘untouchables; and street fugitives Introduction

7.1 Informality and urban life

7.2 The marketplace: Urban politics etched in economic space 7.3 The street economy: Forbearance, hunting, and hustle

. The politics of noise and silence: Negotiation, mobilization, refusal

8.2 The evolution of urban political cultures

8.3 Kampala: Normalizing noise

8.5 Addis Ababa: The politics of total mobilization 8.6 Conclusions

94 94 96 100 111 118

135 135 137 142 151

153 157

161 165

168 168 169 175 183 194

201 201 202 205 216 231

CONTENTS Xi

Part IV Conclusions

9. Politics and the urban frontier 269 9.1 Capital in the time and place of late urbanization 269 9.2 Associational and infrastructural power 271 9.3 The politics of urban legitimation 274 9.4 Practicing infrastructure 276 9.5 Political informality and registers of dissent 278

9.6 Territory, property, and social contracts on the global urban frontier 280

Bibliography 284 Index 327

1.1. 1:2;

JE 5.2.

List of Figures

Percentage of population living in urban areas

Annual rate of change in percentage of population living in urban areas, by region Annual rate of urban population growth 1980-2020

African population density spike map

Colonial Kampala and Mengo, with boundary of Kampala municipality indicated

1951 Kampala residential plan

Buganda’s Bulange, with statue of Kabaka Mutebi II in the foreground Kigali city centre and surrounding hilly terrain

East Africa railways and harbours traffic density map, 1953

The original railway from Addis Ababa to Djibouti

Labour migration into Buganda in the colonial period

1936 Guidi and Valle plan for Addis Ababa

Contemporary Addis Ababa street plan

Local enterprise in Kampala

Infrastructural repair in Kampala

Flooding in Kampala

Typical newspaper headlines about the state of Kampala, 2009-2010 Four-legged construction workers in Addis Ababa

Launch of Nyarugenge Master Plan in Kigali, 2009

Addis Ababa LRT after construction

Kigali Convention Centre just before completion

Poli Lotus International Centre, Addis Ababa

High-end residential property under development, Kigali.

RSSB marketing for expropriated city-centre plots in CBD1

Proportion of Mailo land and proportion of informal housing in different areas of Kampala A peripheral condominium settlement from the air, Addis Ababa

Nakasero market, Kampala

184 187 209

LIST OF FIGURES

7.2. A street hawker, Kampala 7.3. Aman sweeps streets on the outskirts of Kigali during Umuganda

7.4. A hawker in Kigali walks through the rubble of a demolished informal settlement xiii

218 223

Esk Dodoma *Zanzibar o 200 400 Kilometers Taneanyik (legislative capital) Sa UU ee * oe Morogoro Dar es Salaam o : 200 : 400 Miles

DR.OG. yi

Map of East Africa

Source: adapted by the author from https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/africa/txu-oclc-417699531- horn_of_africa_2009.jpg; courtesy of University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Impressions

Kampala 2009

Its February and I’m sitting in KFC just off Kampala Road, the main drag that separates Nakasero, the colonially planned government zone, from the throbbing commercial heart of Uganda’s capital. Opposite me is the city’s former acting chief town planner. By his account, he was forced out of office (an office in which he was already ‘acting’ after the previous incumbent was pushed out) for trying too hard to do his job. He looks exhausted. He’s been out of work as a planner since 2006. No one is much interested in his expertise. With resignation he tells me about how his job was impossible: the more he tried to ensure land use regulations were implemented and planning taken seriously, the more resistance he faced. Inspecting new developments around the city was often rendered impossible by private security guards blocking construction sites, with guns. Attempts to pursue official processes invariably had the same outcome: “Somewhere some politician will come and say, “you leave that to me, I'll handle it.” And that’s the end of it ... you'll never get to stop it now.

Later that day, I find myself at the office of the city’s former town clerk. He is more determined; he lays out to me his recipe for addressing the city’s growing infrastructural decay, crippling congestion, and environmental degradation. Divorce management of the city from politics. Disband the council—bring in the technicians. No local democracy. ‘Give me a year without politicians and I could turn this city around:

In September, after weeks of haunting the shabby corridors of Kampala City Council, Pm talking to an officer responsible for markets and trade. The city’s marketplaces have been in turmoil for several years, as politicians mobilize rival factions of vendors, riots flare up, and wealthy tycoons wield cash and influence to acquire title deeds to marketplace land in hope of lucrative redevelopment. I’ve been talking to the vendors in several markets about it, and about the lack of support and engagement the feel they get from the council. Today, as I discuss with the trade officer the challenges that she faces in trying to restore order in the markets, she repeatedly uses the same forlorn phrase: “We are on the low bargaining side?

Kigali, February 2010 Tm in a café in a large commercial block off the main roundabout in Nyarugenge, the commercial centre of Kigali. With me is a senior journalist at one of Rwanda’s

XVi IMPRESSIONS opposition newspapers, which constantly fight harassment and threats of closure. He tells me about attempts on his life and shows me the scars. He points out the government agents sipping Coke and watching us, unsubtly, at a table nearby but out of earshot. Before we end our meeting, in which he recounts a host of grievances against the government, he tells me that there are many good things about what it is doing. There is development in some ways, he says. And security. When I ask him his thoughts about the Kigali Conceptual Master Plan, published with great fanfare a couple of years earlier, he says that it is a good thing, in itself. But the manner in which it is being implemented—rapidly and inflexibly, like some kind of development weapon—is a problem. “The way the plan is moving, poor people are being eliminated from this city? A few months later, he is forced into exile and moves to Kampala.

Kigali, December 2011

I heard that a delegation from Kampala—bureaucrats, planners, and engineers from the new Kampala Capital City Authority—are in town, and asked if I could join their tour of the city. Among them is Jennifer Musisi, the presidentiallyappointed executive director of the new Authority, which earlier that year replaced Kampala City Council. She has her own vehicle and the rest of us follow along rather more raucously in a minibus, as the group from Kampala marvel at the Rwandan capital. One of the visitors from Kampala who works on drains is getting very excited about the design of Kigali’s drainage channels. There is much discussion about the lack of encroachment by developers on road reserves and the removal of properties from the wetlands. The Ugandans can’t understand how the government here can afford to relocate a bunch of industries from Kigali’s existing industrial area to the new planned industrial zone in the peripheries. “Where does your government get the money to move people like that?’ Perhaps they haven’t yet realized how small the industrial zone is, or how relatively little the government pays to compulsorily acquire land.

Ugandan delegates appear perplexed by the large expanses of green, unpeopled lawn scattered across the city: “What is this—beautification?’ ‘They should have benches and let people sit—it’s public money!’ says someone else. We drive by some luxurious-looking real estate. Many of the owners of these don’t live here, explains someone from the Kigali delegation. “Holiday homes!’

When we reach ‘CBD1’—the area adjacent to Nyarugenge where a large informal settlement has been razed to make way for the new central business district envisaged in the Master Plan—we disembark. Musisi steps out, resplendent in a sharp blue suit and sunglasses. As we gaze down the empty hillside, around us new roads are being carved across the huge expanse of cleared earth. We are told about fibreoptic cables being fitted. More questions about expropriation. When we get to Batsinda, an area of new low-cost housing designed to accommodate people

IMPRESSIONS xvii relocated from CBD1, one of the Ugandans looks confused about whether this is a fair swap. ‘But the value of land in the city centre is worth much more than the land here, and these houses are cheap—how does that work?’ Later, when discussing the issue of compliance to urban rules and regulations, one of the delegates from Kigali just casually says, ‘this is how we have to control our people:

At the next stop, which is another vast expanse of land cleared for the free-trade zone and planned new industrial park, Musisi says, ‘we would need a big space to do something like this. But they have sold it all off?

The following week, I’m back in Kampala and so is Musisi. I manage to interview her. She tells me about the progress she has made so far since the new unelected Authority took control earlier in the year, and the obstacles. “We need to establish the credibility of the institution, she says. “Without credibility we cannot have enforcement: The politicians are a challenge, she says, but you can do many things without them. She is relaxed about the death threats she gets almost daily, particularly in relation to her efforts to wrest control of public transport away from the mafia-like association currently controlling it. ‘It’s part of the job:

Addis Ababa, September 2014

It is my first visit to Ethiopia. The impression made by the city was deep and immediate, following the drive from the airport, where domineering over the road on both sides were a succession of vast half-finished tower blocks, grey hulking skeletons with scraps of tattered tarpaulin strewn across from top to bottom. Each day of walking its streets reveals new dystopic cityscapes. I’m attempting to head west on foot along Haile Gebre Selassie Avenue; down the middle runs the gargantuan concrete stripe of the near-completed Chinese-built light railway, while on either side are piles of macerated paving, in the shadow of further brooding cages of steel and cement. Although this is one of the main thoroughfares through the city, there is virtually no commercial activity and barely anyone on the road, either cars or pedestrians, as it has been rendered inaccessible to the former and non-functional for the latter. This whole part of the city centre feels not so much like an urban place as an abandoned speculative metropolis, looking neither actually futuristic due the variously cheap or half-finished structures, nor like a decaying city of the past.

As I make my way towards Meskel Square and traffic picks up, I get stuck under the light railway, wandering tentatively beside its colossal concrete legs with no sense of whether I am on legitimate pedestrian or vehicular territory. I chat with some street youths keen to practice their English. “This city is like Baghdad after being bombed, right?’ said one of them. ‘But it means we're growing up, said the other. His friend shakes his head vigorously in disagreement. Earlier in the year, the government had brutally suppressed student protests in Oromia, the region xviii IMPRESSIONS surrounding the city, over the proposed expansion of the city boundaries deep into Oromo farmland.

Kigali, January 2015

I’m catching up with a foreign investor who runs a small firm in Kigali. Were talking about his efforts to buy and develop a piece of land into apartments, which he’s been trying to do since I first met him here in 2009. A short while back he managed finally to buy a plot, in one of Kigali’s lush and elevated peripheries. In the Master Plan, the area was first zoned for hotels—specifically hotels with a 700-room capacity, to the amusement of many. The zoning was changed to allow residential development, and he purchased a plot, for which he paid a small fortune. But something has gone very wrong. Officers in Kigali’s Singapore-inspired ‘one stop shop’ for investors, located high up in Kigali City Tower, are now telling him the area is zoned as forestry only. They told him it was too steep for building. “Bullshit; he says. ‘It’s a gold mine—there will be Rwandese houses up there in six months, belonging to someone ‘high up. After repeated complaints he has been given assurances that his plot will be re-zoned back to residential. But on his latest visit they tell him it is being held as forestry. ‘It’s had four zone changes in two years, and two in two days!’ he laments. He tells me that he told them, ‘I thought you guys wanted development and investment!’ Later that year, in November, he’s still waiting for the promised re-zoning, but says his trust has run dry. The moment it’s re-zoned he'll sell it off immediately.

The following day I’m talking to a woman in the Ministry of Infrastructure, who is working on housing policy. She and her colleagues have been in Ethiopia, doing a detailed study of the condominium housing scheme there—one of the continent’s leading examples of mass-scale state-provided urban housing. ‘In Rwanda, we'll have to modify slightly, she says. She explains that here they don’t have all these government-owned small and medium enterprises. Local construction sector capacity is very weak. But also, while the programme is publicly financed in Ethiopia, partly through forced savings schemes, here the expectation is that it will be financed by private developers. I think about my investor from yesterday. The intention is that the housing will be affordable, says the housing specialist, but for this there will need to be good incentives in place. You can say that again.

The next day, I’m talking to an engineer about why almost nothing has been built on CBD1, despite infrastructure being in place for years now. The government has stepped in and bought a few plots. ‘It was a bit ambitious; he says. The plots were too big, and hugely expensive. He says he told them at the time. When asked about the rationale for the size, he defers to the Master Plan. “But its OK, because tomorrow as the demand rises, the land will be there and it will get used?

Kampala, May 2018 Someone who used to work for the Kampala Capital City Authority is reflecting on how things have changed since we first met in 2014. Back then, it really

IMPRESSIONS Xix seemed as though a major culture change was under way following the takeover by the new Authority in 2011. The marginalized planners, engineers, and environmentalists were suddenly in demand; waste collection had increased by 80 per cent in six months; revenue collection doubled in just a few years. ‘I’m being consulted on everything, it feels good!’ said another acquaintance in 2014, previously marginalized as an environmental specialist. “Now, the law is the law!’

It doesn’t feel so much like that in May 2018. Most of the people at KCCA are all ‘in on the rot; one contact tells me. KCCA has become part of the machine. It’s just like the previous City Council if you scratch the surface. ‘It’s all about Jennifer, and she doesn’t really have a grip on it?

During a return visit in October, someone hands me a newspaper. Jennifer Musisi has resigned, in a twenty-one-page letter detailing her achievements and then explaining in detail the impossibility of reconciling ‘competing interests between political decisions and the strategic plans of the KCCA technical team} The plan to take politics out of the city, and to squash a political problem with a technocratic solution, has apparently failed. Even Musisi, who seemed so unassailable a few years back, found herself on the ‘low bargaining side’

Addis Ababa, June 2019

The atmosphere in Ethiopia is febrile, following a spate of political killings, alleged attempted coup, and total internet shutdown for over a week. Over the multiple visits I have made since 2014, the political situation had transformed, following years of protests in Oromia and a change of regime at the centre in 2018. A new law on expropriation and compensation, stimulated by the turmoil in Oromia and successive controversies over large-scale displacement for the government’s housing programme, has been in the making for several years. It has still not materialized. Meanwhile, the government is set to stop rolling out its housing settlements in the contested urban peripheries.

We are visiting one of the condominium settlements on the very edge of the city for a focus group discussion, and to feed back findings from a research project. Many things about living in these far-flung settlements have improved, the residents tell us—even since our last visit there a year before. Once drab and brutal looking, social and commercial life is starting to thrive. Transport services are much improved. But electricity and water are still highly unreliable, the cost of living is increasing, and along with this so is crime and insecurity. Since the construction itself stopped, employment is a huge problem and it still takes hours to commute into the city proper. There are only three types of work available here, one man says: driving an auto-rickshaw, driving a mule cart, or being a broker for renters in the settlement’s constantly churning rental market. This is certainly a city on the move, but perhaps not in the ways envisaged from above.

PART I URBAN TECTONICS l

This book offers an explanation of differential trajectories of urban change within one particular region of the world in the early twenty-first century. For those of us who are fascinated by cities—seizing opportunities to walk their streets and squares, cram into their public transport systems, hear their cacophony of sounds and wonder at the power and capital behind their structures—comparison is often a default mode of thinking, either explicitly or implicitly. Differences between cities often strike us as mere curiosities handed down by history. Yet similarities and differences in urban form and function, and the varying ways that control over cities is organized and contested, offer powerful lenses onto socio-economic and political change. Understanding drivers of urban similarity and difference matters intrinsically in terms of our understanding and theorization of such change, but also instrumentally because there is a widespread desire by policymakers, politicians, investors, and communities to effect change on cities.

Human attempts to change cities, and to control them politically, frequently take as their reference point cities elsewhere; sometimes in far-flung regions of the world, sometimes just across a border. The planners, investors, traders, engineers, governors, and residents quoted in the ‘impressions’ preceding this chapter were seeking to effect urban change, whether purely in their own interests or in pursuit of some larger stated goal. They often took comparisons to and connections with other cities as reference points, but always found themselves constrained by the realities of their own urban context. These cities could not be shaped in line with some preconceived vision, let alone be intentionally moulded to more closely resemble one another, beyond surface-level material forms. Efforts to effect change were often as much about national power play as city-level priorities, and political agendas often existed in tension with the internationally sanctioned urban imaginaries circulating in the world of policy and planning.

The idea that African cities have some intrinsic character is spurious, implying a unified history when in fact they have been shaped by heterogeneous global and regional influences (Fourchard 2011). This book unravels the forces that matter when we want not just to interpret contemporary urban life but explain how the conditions of urban life came to be as they are in specific places, and why these

Politics and the Urban Frontier. Tom Goodfellow, Oxford University Press. © Tom Goodfellow (2022). DOI: 10.1093/0s0/9780198853107.003.0001 conditions converge and diverge between cities, with important implications for economic development and social justice. It does so by examining the paths of urban development and change among a set of countries in East Africa: the least urbanized but most rapidly urbanizing region in the world. The book argues that this region is not only a geographical terrain of great urban dynamism and diversity, but because of its unique position within the broad arc of global urbanization is the place to which we should look if we want to understand the potentiality and peril of our urban future as a species.

Focusing on three of the region’s countries—Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda— the book is relentlessly comparative. These countries share many remarkable trajectories in terms of late urbanization, ancient histories of state-building and modern histories of conflict followed by significant economic growth. In the year 2000, the start of the period on which most of this book focuses, these three countries had virtually identical levels of urbanization: around 15 per cent of the total population lived in cities and towns. They were among the ten least urbanized countries in the world.’ Yet, as the impressions shared at the start of this chapter have indicated and the book will explore in detail, the forms of urban development in each case and how these have evolved over the two decades since are starkly different in many important ways.

Comparative urban research has flourished in recent years, building particularly on the theoretical and methodological provocations of Robinson (2006; 2011; 2016). To compare is to enable ways of seeing that interrogate difference while also exploring resemblances, and experiencing uncanny concurrences of the two. Yet herein also lies the danger of comparison, which entails the risk of collapsing analysis into polarities and binaries. In order to unsettle the binarizing tendencies of comparing two things, this book opts for three. To compare three, rather than two, means keeping constant watch over easy polarities or received assumptions about what count as salient similarities and differences.

Close comparison also enables something else important that is of particular relevance to the fields of urban studies and development studies, between which this book finds its roots. Much recent research on urban development and change is ‘split along lines of numerical or ethnographic reasoning’ (Amin & Thrift 2017: 156). What is seen as important is either the identification of broad cross-country trends, or the description of embodied experiences of everyday urban life. Essential though these forms of understanding cities are, there is much that lies between. Neither numerical nor ethnographic reasoning can fully encompass the ‘diversification of urban forms and outcomes’ which demand that we take ‘a differentiated view on the dynamics of urbanisation’ (Schmid et al. 2018: 20). Offering an in-depth comparison of three cities, while embedding them in national, regional and global dynamics, this book advances approaches to urban research between the

1! World Bank data available at: https://databank.worldbank.org/reports.aspx? source=2&series= SPURB.TOTL.IN.ZS&country=#, accessed 3 December 2020.

INTRODUCTION 5 poles of the numerical and ethnographic, in pursuit of better understanding these differentiated dynamics of urbanization.

This goal requires not only comparison but attention to analytical scale, and a commitment to interdisciplinary thinking. It requires pushing beyond generic approaches to global capitalist urban restructuring that dominate the metanarratives of urban studies and development studies. This is sorely needed, because dominant paradigms even in the critical and heterodox traditions within these interdisciplinary fields are inadequate to explain different pathways of urban development. While comparative political economy is flourishing in both fields, extant analytical frameworks actually offer limited engagement with politics as a driver of change at the urban scale, and are beset with enduring problems relating to analytical scale itself—including both ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002) in development studies and ‘methodological cityism’ (Angleo & Wachsmuth 2015) in urban studies.

The book responds to two main concerns regarding our ability to analyse the drivers of urban change and, consequently, to better understand the prospects for urban economic development and social justice. The first and most obvious relates to the political naivety of prominent urban policy agendas, and the attendant assumption that any city can pursue a given package of strategies and achieve similar outcomes. The fact that urban development is back on the global development agenda, following significant activism over decades, is laudable (Parnell 2016). Both UN-HABITAT’s ‘New Urban Agenda’ and Sustainable Development Goal No. 11 on making ‘cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ are packed with noble goals. Yet the circulating policy discourses of the entrepreneurial city, creative city, ‘smart’ city, and above all ‘global’ and ‘world class’ city remain among the strongest currencies used by national and city governments pursuing investment in a ruthlessly competitive global context (Acuto 2022). These ideas are questionable in themselves (Peck 2005; Robinson 2006; Pratt 2011; Marvin etal. 2015; Vanolo 2014). The main point here, however, is that they involve underlying assumptions that cities are economic and technological projects to be managed rather that terrains of political negotiation and contestation (Guma & Monstadt 2021). The quest for transferrable models of urban development will always fail without a deep and sustained engagement with urban politics.

The second concern this book addresses relates to academic trends in critical urban and development studies, and their limited utility for comparative analysis of urban change. This critique speaks to different threads of contemporary theorization in different ways. First, it addresses the general abdication of causality evident in dominant post-structuralist paradigms for interpreting the urban condition, notwithstanding the rich insights of this literature into the composition of urban life (Bennett 2010; Farias & Bender 2012; McFarlane 2011a). Such approaches can illuminate how particular urban policy agendas unravel through the socio-material conditions assembled ‘at concrete sites of urban practice’

(Farias & Bender 2010: 2), but they rarely interrogate the wider causal dynamics that generate these concrete sites or drive the differential adoption of policy agendas. This aspect of the book’s critique is developed in Chapter 2.

A further aspect of the academic critique speaks more directly to the tradition within which this book itself is associated: the political economy of urban development. This literature is still dominated by frameworks that place neoliberalism at their analytical core in ways that—even while highlighting the ‘variegated’ nature of neoliberal restructuring (Brenner et al. 2010; Peck 2015)—are limiting for the analysis of urban socio-economic and spatial evolution. The literature on neoliberal urbanism (He & Wu 2009; Peck et al. 2009a; Peck et al. 2013), municipal neoliberalism (Goldfrank & Schrank 2009; Karaman 2013), speculative urbanism (Goldman 2011; Goldman & Narayan 2021), urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 1989; MacLeod 2002) and ‘world city entrepreneurialism’ (Golubchikov 2010) has surged, and for good reason. The adoption of market-driven approaches to economic restructuring has produced a ‘luster of recurring features, tendential characteristics, and family resemblances’ in urban policies worldwide (Peck et al. 2010: 104). Recognizing the diversity of outcomes of these policies, the ‘neoliberal urbanism argument examines how this one-size-fits-all model of urban policy ‘lands’ in contextually specific regulatory and institutional landscapes, and suggests that the uneven development emerging from this is an integral facet of the neoliberalization process itself (Peck et al. 2009; Brenner et al. 2010; Sager 2011).

This acknowledgement of neoliberalism as necessarily variegated and ‘alwaysincomplete’ is important, yet still seeks to encompass political economy explanations within the neoliberal meta-narrative (Peck 2015). The way in which this prism has dominated analyses of diverse urban pathways obscures many of the political dynamics that shape urban agendas and their implementation. Differences in urban capitalist penetration and market processes are cast as variegated impacts of neoliberalization, rather than outcomes of politics in which neoliberalism plays only a partial role. By internalizing variegation within its analytical ambit, the urban neoliberalism framing itself risks itself becoming a one-size-fits-all explanation for divergent trajectories among cities, to the exclusion of explanations beyond neoliberalism. Its underlying assumption is that all governments are essentially trying to do the same thing, with varying regulatory-institutional structures producing different outcomes (Peck et al. 2009; Brenner et al. 2010). However, as well as neoliberalism ‘landing’ in different regulatory landscapes we also need to take seriously the other urban political agendas and ideological projects which exist outside or in tension with neoliberalism, and which it is not helpful to subsume analytically within it. Not all governments and salient political actors are trying to produce the same kinds of city, even if their lip service to globalist neoliberal emblems suggests otherwise.

Emphasizing the need to look ‘beyond neoliberalism’ in theorizing cities— particularly in the global South—is not new (Ong 2006; Parnell & Robinson

THE PERIPHERAL FRONTIER 7

2012; Baptista 2013). Yet the point emphasized in this book is not that theories of neoliberalization lack relevance to cities in the global South—clearly neoliberal policy approaches have swept across Africa in the decades since structural adjustment (Harrison 2010; Wiegratz 2016; Wiegratz et al. 2018)—or to suggest a ‘post-neoliberal’ perspective (Parnell & Robinson 2012). Nor is it to rehearse the critique levelled at Brenner and others that their approach to urbanization is too ‘capital-centric’ (see e.g. McCarthy 2005; Farías 2011; Gillespie 2016; Hartman 2020); indeed, capital is fundamental to the narrative of this book. The point is to emphasize that the focus on urban neoliberalism and its institutional-regulatory filters has thinned the attention given to the politics of capital accumulation and distribution in specific urban places and times.