Arrival or Return? Temporality and Materiality of Transit Sites in Overlapping Displacement Context in Border Cities of the Lake Chad Basin Region

Since over a decade of conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin region, different measures have been adopted to regulate the mobility of displaced persons in border cities. Mubi—like other transit sites—is both a place of care and control, of incentivization and eviction and of inclusion and exclusion. To nuance these contradictions, I argue that we might have to pay attention to arrival practices in transit sites, particularly the encounter with infrastructures, which are intertwined and profoundly co-constitutive of the displaced persons’ realities. In transit sites, arrival is practised and lived temporally and relationally among the displaced persons, despite the conditions of exile and immobility. Urban infrastructures (such as marketplaces, transit camps and living rooms) transform and enact the strategy adopted by the displaced persons to navigate daily life and to ‘move on’ from conditions of exile and confinement. Moving on, in this sense, is a strategy to overcome the disruption of the temporality of arrival practices from the Nigerian state regulation of mobility through incentivization and encampment policies. I demonstrate that both incentivization and encampment aim towards a common goal, which is to render displaced persons invisible in urban centres while becoming a raw material for capital production. The regulation enables a new form of unplanned spaces to emerge that are hyper-visible and super-precarious at the urban margins. This paper calls for a critical perspective on humanitarian urbanism in the Global South.

Secondary Cities in West Africa: Urbanity, Power, and Aspirations

This article claims space for secondary cities in urban studies. It criticizes that scientists tend to study urban life in metropolises and, hence, do not represent urban life in its full diversity. In reality, the majority of the worlds’ urban dwellers live in secondary cities; therefore, research on urbanity should reflect this fact. The article argues against simple approaches to secondary cities, such as defining them based on a single quantitative variable like population size. It rather proposes that anthropological research has a unique potential to reveal the urban dwellers’ relational and situational perceptions of, and perspectives towards, secondary cities. The paper puts this approach into practice by examining two West African secondary cities: Kankan in Guinea and Bouaké in Côte d’Ivoire.

Mediating Knowledge Co-Production for Inclusive Governance and Delivery of Food, Water and Energy Services in African Cities

Rising rates of urbanisation in Africa, without attendant improvements in critical infrastructure, have occasioned gaps in the provision of basic services in cities across the continent. Different systems and scales of service delivery — decentralised and centralised, public and private — coexist and often compete in urban spaces but rarely connect in ways that ensure the needs of the poorest are met. Our paper interrogates the value of transdisciplinary research for bringing actors in these systems together to co-produce knowledge for inclusive and sustainable outcomes. Drawing on empirical data from two complementary projects in four African cities, we demonstrate the possibilities for facilitating this kind of knowledge co-production among system actors in the food, water and energy domains. We show, through a comparative approach, elements of the co-production process that enable more responsive engagement by traditionally detached policy actors. From our findings, we generate a framework that local researchers serving as ‘knowledge intermediaries’ can use to stimulate research-policy-society interactions aimed at fostering sustainable and inclusive service delivery across Africa. By synthesising the findings from local case studies into a widely applicable framework, our analysis informs both the theory and practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research in the African context where the imperative to bridge gaps in methodological innovation and service delivery is high.

First-Class but not for Long: Heterogeneous Infrastructure and Water Bricolage in Accra’s Kiosk Compounds

This paper explores the micro-geographies of water access in the context of a first-class residential neighborhood of Accra served by the city’s networked infrastructure. We focus our analyses on how water is accessed and supplied to six kiosk compounds—privately owned, walled plots of land provisionally inhabited by urban dwellers living in kiosk-like structures with the (tacit) knowledge of the plot-owners. We document how kiosk inhabitants access pipe-born water, despite not being directly connected to the city’s network, through diverse configurations of actors, practices, and material set ups. Our findings suggest more attention should be paid to the micro-geographies of water distribution in networked neighborhoods as this contributes to more nuanced understandings of the uneven and diverse ways through which water is distributed in the context of Accra’s incremental urbanization. To analyze this diversity, we suggest combining the heuristic of heterogenous infrastructure configurations with the concept of water bricolage and using the plot as a unit of analysis.