Displaced and Extended Urbanization

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

We are pleased to welcome Jennifer Robinson for this session, during which she will present her ongoing research on processes of displaced and extended urbanization in Africa, with a particular focus on case studies from South Africa and Malawi.

"African urban areas are not only growing through new arrivals and intensification of slum areas, but are spreading rapidly through extensive middle class housing developments. In addition, communal forms of land tenure and long traditions of circular migration allow the rapid growth and densification of areas distant from major urban concentrations. This paper will explore two case studies. The emergence of a new urban area in Bushbuckridge Municipality, Mpumalanga in South Africa, several hundred kilometres from the main urban centre of Johannesburg, is arguably the result of extensive labour migration for over a century which has forged spatially extended households, cultures and economies. House improvements and construction have expanded rapidly on traditional authority land over the last decade through investments by residents, returning migrants, extended family members and newcomers. In addition to noteworthy investments in shopping malls, new concentrations of population and economic activity (including extensive construction-related businesses) mean that the area is taking on the appearance of an urbanising territory, with potentially some agglomeration effects. The paper will compare this with new housing developments on mixed tenure land on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi, and draw some conclusions about the wider understandings of contemporary (extended) urbanisation trends."

Jennifer Robinson is professor of Human Geography at University College London. She is author of Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022). Her ERC funded research focused on the transnational circuits shaping large scale urban developments in three African contexts (Accra, Ghana; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Lilongwe, Malawi) and informs her book project on Transcalar Urban Development Politics.