the implications of surging resource economies on urban life in East Africa
A three day workshop
@ Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen, Germany)
27-29 October, 2016
Convenors: Léonie S. Newhouse & AbdouMaliq Simone
The East African corridor that spans the Indian Ocean from Somalia to South Africa is in the process of being radically re-shaped, as it becomes one of the world’s new epicenters for investment in resource extraction, corporate agriculture and infrastructure development. The accelerated infusion of material and financial investment is posed to reshape not just economies, but also the cultural imaginaries, everyday meanings and practical socialities of urban life in the region. Some of these imaginaries are concretized through infrastructural drives including the development of new intermodal transport systems and the restructuring of urban space. Other imaginaries mobilize memories of historical trade regimes in order to emphasize the potential of the region as substantial node in the enhancement of the Indian Ocean as an economic powerhouse. In this conference we probe the ongoing transformations in the East African corridor, as they relate to circulations and crossings—between hinterlands and urban centers, as well as within a rising Indian Ocean economy.
As noted, the Indian Ocean littoral has been the object of increasing volumes of inward investment, occurring across different temporalities and scales. It is not yet clear, however, how the distinct nations making up the corridor, fraught with the difficult colonial inheritances and postcolonial conflicts, might effectuate new consolidations. The speed at which changes in land use and ownership, the infusion of infrastructural investment, and the remaking of both primary and secondary cities intersect are spurring new forms of internecine conflict, urban inequality, and population displacement. Likewise, the reformatting of policy and legal frameworks taking place in the region’s primary urban centers—Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, and Maputo—has allowed financial flows to be directed into remaking large tracts of existing urban built environments, ready for appropriation. Yet these new, high-end sub-cities are also often oriented to a variety of elsewheres—toward new resource frontiers to consolidate and new burgeoning markets ready for capture as the next generation of Africans leapfrog into the future. As such, these investments signal not only a re-writing of the city, but of the relations that connect urban life to its material, social and imaginary hinterlands. In many respects new mega-size plantation and company town systems are instantiated that will substantially disrupt local ecologies and livelihoods, contributing to overall environmental depletion and dramatic socio-cultural transformations.
How do such rapid transformations intersect with enduring problems of underdevelopment, shrinking volumes of arable land, a highly mobile population composed of both speculative sojourners and political refugees, high rates of unemployment and reliance upon makeshift economies? As the region becomes the locus of new formations of investment that draw it further within Asian financial, technical, and cultural circuits how will specific national and local interests mediate this enfolding? What are the critical institutions and mechanisms leveraging these transformations, and what cultural contestations underlie them? What kinds of cosmopolitan imaginaries—in terms of anticipatory cultural, esthetic and bodily practices—do they elicit?
As a plurality of fault lines and alliances emerge in efforts to shape the disposition of resources, how do the region’s cities recompose social and economic arrangements? As the region’s cities are increasingly imagined as the nexus for substantially expanded transnational interchanges, what kinds of complexions are likely to ensue? Do there exist incipient modalities of urban development that do not simply mirror standardized formats but rather emerge from long-honed practices of inhabitation on the part of the region’s urban majority?
